Bartle’s Player Types: The Complete Guide (And Why Four Isn’t Enough)
Bartle’s Player Types is a 1996 taxonomy by Richard Bartle, co-creator of the first Multi-User Dungeon (MUD1, 1978)…
Work with Yu-kai
The Blog
Ideas on motivation, behavior & design.
Deep dives on the psychology behind why people do what they do — from Yu-kai Chou, creator of the Octalysis Framework. Pick the topic that matters to you.
Kimi AI Cheated Me Out of $200 — How Kimi AI Misled Me Before I Paid
I asked Kimi AI a direct question before paying, got a specific answer, spent $200, and then discovered…
Flow Theory: Csikszentmihalyi’s 9 Components of the Zone
Flow Theory is a psychological framework developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi proposing that people reach their highest levels of…
Gene Resilience: Why Your Ethnicity Changes the Health Rulebook
This is Part 2 of a data analysis covering 159 countries and 7,853 individual Americans. Part 1 showed…
Real Life Game Skill (Warlock): The Lich Pact — How I Slept 3.5 Hours a Day for 2 Years and What It Cost Me
In 2011, my CTO Stephen Johnson had been stuck on a database architecture problem all day. The rest…
The Framework Analyzer: How to Score Any Framework on Quality, Depth, and Elegance
Yu-kai Chou introduces the Framework Analyzer, a scoring system that judges any model by Utility, Depth, and Elegance…
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: The Complete Guide (And Why It’s Not Enough)
Maslow's pyramid is psychology's most famous framework — and it's wrong about almost everything except the bottom two…