As we grow older, we start to have strong preferences for certain types of play over others. Some things float your boat, others don’t.

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No one is a perfect example of a single play personality type; most of us are a mix of these categories. At different times and in different situations, people might find themselves playing in a mode that is different than their dominant type.

Stuart Brown M.D., Play

The eight personality types are:

• The Joker
• The Kinesthete
• The Explorer
• The Competitor
• The Director
• The Collector
• The Artist/Creator
• The Storyteller

Just purely from the titles, I had assumed my dominant play personality was the explorer, considering how I usually enjoy exploring different tastes through food and wine, and like to go on long walks and explore nooks and crannies in a new city.

But in doing those silly 2-minute online tests on play personalities (just google) and reading more into the description, I found myself to be more the storyteller:

For the storyteller, the imagination is the key to the kingdom of play. Storytellers are, of course, novelists, playwrights, cartoonists, and screenwriters, but they are also those whose greatest joy is reading those novels and watching those movies, people who make themselves part of the story, who experience the thoughts and emotions of characters in the story. Performers of all sorts are storytellers, creating an imaginative world through dance, acting, magic tricks, or lectures.

Because the realm of the storyteller is in the imagination, they can bring play to almost any activity. They may be playing a recreational game of tennis, but in their mind, each point is part of an exciting drama: “The pressure is really on Roger Federer now, he really has to make this point to save the set.” In contrast to the competitor, the storyteller’s main point of the game is to have an exciting match. Even cooking macaroni and cheese can be transformed through imagination into a worldwide telecast celebrity cook-off. Garrison Keillor and Bob Costa are two examples of natural-born storytellers.

Stuart Brown, M.D., Play