I can agree with most of what you wrote in this post, I’d just like to point out that the very first sentence of the Massively interview gives the setting, he sprung the interview on an unprepared Bartle at a game dev conference. He really was in a setting with industry designers. Indie designers, too, those who (but I might be projecting stuff onto him here) may actually be in the best position to create games which break out of the mold.

Granted, he didn’t adapt for Massively’s audience, but send me to a good conference on the future of IP storage for a couple of days then interview me about my views on the storage market, and I would probably not immediately give Fibre Channel storage its proper place in the industry. He’s no god, he’s a teacher and a consultant, and he questions the designers’ motives and the reasons behind their decisions. And the answers aren’t right or wrong or good or bad either. It’s the thought process which is interesting and the reason which lead to a specific decision rather than a different one which is worth exploring, and these elements are probably worth more to the one questioned than the one doing the asking.

I’m no designer by any stretch of the imagination, but I can fully empathize with this working method. Before moving to training, I’ve been a technical consultant for most of my professional life. And while I saw many of my peers being really good at selling great solutions to their customers based on their know-how and expertise, my own work approach was to get my clients to pick my solutions not because I told them the best but because I gave them as much information as possible that they could fully measure what consequence their choices had. It isn’t a better or worse approach than the other one. It was mine, and at the end of the day, I made no less money than my peers.

You can either give your answers to people, or you can give them questions. Both tools work. Bartle is definitely someone who uses the second one to make a living, and as he stated elsewhere, if he only gets people to choose, in full conscience and after having evaluated it all, to do the exact contrary of everything he said, he will consider it a job well done.

Does this make me a Bartle fanboi? Probably. I’ve been very fond of the Socratic method long before I became a trainer, and, for that matter, long before I ever heard of Bartle.