11/23/2012 Episode 9: Psychographics

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

Okay, I’m pulling out of my driveway! We all know what that means! It’s time for another Drive to Work.

Okay. So today, one of the questions I get asked a lot, because I do a lot of interviews, is what is my biggest contribution to Magic. Now, I’ve worked for seventeen years on Magic, ten of which I’ve been Head Designer, and so people want to know “What do I think is the biggest influence I’ve had on the game?”

And it’s a tough question to answer. Obviously I’ve done a lot. But the answer I give is the player psychographics, which you guys might know as Timmy, Johnny and Spike. So today, I was going to talk about where the player psychographics came from, and explain in a little more detail, because I feel like they’re not completely understood. I think people get the general gist of them, but I want to sort of talk a little more behind the scenes today.

So let’s start by saying “What are psychographics? And where do they come from?” Because one of the things I always said is that when I got to R&D, that R&D was very based on math. That most of the people who were working on it—Richard, Skaff, and Jim, all those people were math people. They had studied math. And that the game had a lot of math influence on the way it was created.  And I kind of brought psychology to the picture. One of my lines is that I kind of shifted R&D’s thought processes from math to psychology. And so let’s talk about sort of what psychographics mean and how they impact what we do.

Okay. So, for those that might not know, I went to college at Boston University. Specifically, Boston University’s College of Communication. And in the Communication, they broke up the school into three sections. Now I went to the Broadcast and Film section. That’s where we got to watch films and TV shows, and that was our class. There also was a journalism section, and finally there was an advertising and PR section.

Now, part of being in the school was until you declared a major and stuff, you had to take stuff from all three parts of the school. So I had to take classes in journalism. I had to take classes in advertising. And in advertising, I learned about a thing called a psychographic. What is a psychographic? Well, the idea is, if I’m going to sell you something, I need to understand why you need the thing.

Not just on a practical level, but sort of on a psychological level. Like what exactly is this product doing for you? Why do you want this product? And psychographics prove really important, if you’re trying to sell something to somebody, you need to understand “Well, why exactly do they want it?” And on a deeper level than “Oh, I’m selling food, well they get hungry sometimes.” It’s like “Well, why my food? Why this? Well, what does it do?” And a lot of it really dug deep into kind of what do humans need? What do they want?

And so one of the things that happened when I first got to Wizards, that I think in the back of my head, I was very interested in “Well, why do people play Magic?” Like, one of the jobs of a designer and a developer is we are trying to create fun. Now, that is a very—you know, what is fun? I mean, that’s tricky. Like, we’re trying to create an emotional response. Well, how do we create an emotional response? We have to understand the psychology.

So when I first got there, we understood—at the time we just called it the Tournament Player. We kind of got the mindset of “I play, I want to win, I’ll play with the best cards.” Kind of who we’d later go on to call Spike. But we kind of got a general sense of that person. That was the most obvious player.

Because you could go and see them in tournaments, and just they were very visible and understandable. And so in the early days, we understood the tournament player, as we called them. It’s funny, because Spike actually goes way beyond the tournaments, but at the time it’s like “Oh, there’s the tournament players.”

And I think in the back of our head we had the idea of “Oh, there’s the casual players.” But we didn’t really think in terms of psychology. And so during Tempest, I made a card. I don’t remember what card it was. But I made some card, and somebody in the meeting, maybe Mike or somebody said, “I don’t know. I don’t think that would ever be any good.”

And I said, “Well, you know, I think there’s a player out there. I’m going to call him Timmy. And you know what? When Timmy opens this pack, his eyes are going to bulge out, and he’s going to get really excited. And you know what? Timmy will be happy to put this in his deck. And when Timmy gets to cast it, he’ll be ecstatic. And when he gets to attack with it, he’ll be more ecstatic! And that this card isn’t for the tournament player, this card’s for Timmy.”

And then later on I did the same thing for Johnny. I said, “You know, I think there’s another player. I’m going to call him Johnny.” And then for a while it was Timmy, Johnny, and the tournament player, and then finally the Brand team said “Okay, look, we need a name for this guy, we’re going to call him Spike.” And so the Brand team actually named him Spike.

So I want to walk through what really Timmy, Johnny, and Spike mean, though. So from a psychological standpoint, I’m going to start with Spike. I normally start with Timmy. But I’m going to start with Spike. Because in some ways, Spike is the first one we identified.

So what is Spike? Well, the idea is that people want—I talk about Spike wanting to prove himself. And what that means is that to each person, the game fulfills some psychological need. And I believe for Spikes, that psychological need is that people need to be able to prove themselves. That it’s very important to say “Hey, this is who I am as a person. This is what I am capable of.” And so the way you tend to prove yourself is you tend to find some area where you excel. And then you can show people, “Look, I excel in this area.”

And it’s a way for people to find self-worth because everybody kind of wants to feel special in some way. And so I think the Spikes—look, the game is a means by which they get to prove themselves. And what that means is that they can say, “Look. I’m able to look at this and in some way find mastery in it.” Now the funny thing is, Spikes don’t have to necessarily just win. That’s the most common kind of Spike. But the mindset that we’re talking about for Spike is, “I use the game as a benchmark to demonstrate what I am capable of.”

Now, you can be a Spike in collecting. You can be a Spike in story. You can be a Spike in whatever aspect you want, the key is you need to dominate in that area and show “Look what I can do. Look how I’m able to excel in this area.” Now, for most Spikes, that is understanding the game. But even then, by the way, there are Spikes who excel at building decks. Spikes that excel at making decks better. There are Spikes that excel at understanding the metagame. There are Spikes that excel at gameplay. And that each Spike finds some area that is important to them.

And that probably there might be multiple areas, but when you cut to the bone, there’s something the player says, “This is where I’m going to try to prove I can excel.” I know a lot of players do that with drafting. “I’m going to be the best drafter possible.” There’s people that do that with deckbuilding. There’s people that do it with metagame-calling. Or just understanding the history of the game. I mean, different Spikes try to excel in different ways. But the important thing is that there’s a means by which they can excel.

 

So, what does that mean for us, the designers? What that means is that Spike loves best a card that says, “Hey, with skill, this card becomes better.” So cards that use resources, for example, tend to be very Spike-friendly. “I can trade Resource Y for Resource Z. Well, when do I want to do that?” Spikes also like modal cards. Cards that give you choices. Because the better you understand the choices, the better you can play. Spikes tend to like stuff like Fact or Fiction where there’s decision-making to be made, and there’s errors that can be made, so the better player will better make the decision.

Spikes also tend to like synergy. They tend to like things which if you understand how to combine things, there’s more power that comes from that. But the key to Spikes and understanding Spikes is, look. Each one of us as an individual, as a person, has a need to prove that we’re doing something (???). We have some function. We matter in some way. And that is what the Spikes are doing. That they’re finding some way to tap into “Hey, look what I can do.” And understand that different Spikes will do that in different ways, and part of being a designer and designing for Spike is understanding that and giving a lot of resources for that.

So one of the questions is, “How about New World Order? Is New World Order undermining that? Not undermining--is that stopping us from serving what we need to do for the Spikes? And the answer is no in my mind, because a lot of what we’re doing is making things plainer and simple to understand. We are not trying to undercut the strategy of the game, we’re not trying to undercut the synergy of the game, we’re not trying to undercut just understanding how to use the tools better.

What we’re trying to do is make it cleaner, and what we don’t want to have happen, the kind of Spike that we’re not happy with, is the one that says, “I understand the rules better, and I am going to abuse them in ways that you don’t understand, and that’s how I will prove my dominance.” Kind of rules-lawyering or system-exploiting. I mean, those kind of Spikes, yes, we’re going after, because we want the game to be about playing and we want everybody to understand the game.

We want the Spikes who try to—maybe they understand how to use the game better, they understand the strategy better. There’s plenty of ways to get really good at Magic. Magic has tons of decisions. So it’s not like we’re taking away the ability to prove yourself. We’re not. I mean, Magic is a complicated, complex game, and I mean we’re trying to make it easier to grasp the understanding of it, but we’re in no way trying to make the strategy easier.

Because it’s not going to be. You know. Here’s a game in which you have thousands of cards and you pick sixty. That’s a complex game. And the decision-making in every game is very complex. You make a lot of decisions every game. And so that is not something that is going to be leaving.

Okay. Let’s get to Timmy. Actually, no no no, let’s get to Johnny. We’ll save Timmy for the end. So Johnny—another important part of just humanity is that one of the other ways people help create identity is by showing what they can do. One way to get an identity is by proving something, by showing dominance in something, but another way is by being creative. Is by having an artistic element, of sort of producing or creating something. All humans need to make art on some level. All humans need to have some creative process. Because there’s something about “Look what I did.”

It’s funny because one of the things you understand about psychology is look at little kids. Little kids are human beings without the filtering that education and civilization comes on them. That kids have this need to show you their picture. “Look what I did.” Just like kids have a need to say they won. Show what they’ve done. They want to show their dominance in something or they want to show what they’re capable of doing. And just like a little kid has to show you their painting, their little crayon drawing, humans need to do that. That you as a human need to sort of say “Hey, look what I can do. Look how I can express myself.”

And Johnnies are the one for which the game is a means of expressing themselves. Well, how do they do that? There’s a bunch of different ways. The biggest way is deckbuilding. Because one of the things I talk about in the game in general of Magic is that in most games, the game exists. And you just play with the game. The game is what the game is. Monopoly is Monopoly. But Magic, you come into it and you get to shape the game. You are a game designer in that when I play, I get to craft the kind of game I want to play.

And when other people play against me, they see what I’ve done. What I’ve crafted. And a big part of the social element of Magic is seeing the other person’s deck. And when you see something you’re impressed by, you tend to say “Wow. That’s really neat. I really like that.” And you tend to express to other people that you’re impressed by their deck.

And that is a big part of what Johnnies want is that self-expression. Now be aware, there’s other means of self-expression. The tokens you use, or how you present yourself or your deck. There’s many ways to show creativity. I think deckbuilding’s the most obvious, so when we talk about Johnny we tend to get in there, but in general what Johnnies want is the idea of showing what they can do.

So how do you design for Johnnies? Well, the key to designing for Johnnies is open-endedness. A lot of modularity. Of things clicking together. And one of the things that’s funny is—I mean, I’m a Johnny. People don’t know that, but I’m a hardcore Johnny.

So I tend to love to design with a very Johnny sensibility that I love open-ended things. I love making cards like “I’m not quite sure what you’ll do with this, but I know you can do a lot.” I love what I call Swiss Army Cards, where “Wow, this card can do all sorts of different things.” And to me it’s a lot of fun when you make a card and people go, “Ooh, what am I going to do with this?”

And a lot of the Johnny cards that are the most Johnny are kind of like “Here’s a challenge. See what you can do with this.” And those are the two biggest kind of Johnny cards. One is the utility knife cards where it does a lot of different things, and you’ve got to figure out what to do with it, and the other is the kind of challenge card, of “Here’s a weird thing. Can you make a deck with this? What can you do with this?”

And I think in the heart of hearts, Johnnies are very much about wanting to show you the crayon drawing. On a gut level. And like I said with all of these, with Spikes, with Johnnies, with Timmies, all of this is human nature. Everything I’ve talked about is in every human. Every human has a need to prove dominance. Every human has a need to express themselves. Every human needs visceral thrills. I’ll get to it in a second. But all those are things humans need. All I’m talking about is “What does Magic bring for you? Which basic need are you looking for in Magic?”

And note, some people look for more than one. It’s why there’s hybrid, you know, it’s why there’s Timmy/Johnnies and Johnny/Spikes. That it’s not like it’s necessarily pure. And I would argue that all three of these things I’m talking about, all people have some level, it’s just what do you most look for in the game?

Okay. So we get to Timmies. Well, another part of the human experience is this need to experience something. That you’re on this Earth, and you’re like “Well, why am I here?” A big sort of philosophical question is “What am I doing? What is my purpose?”

 And one of the things that humans come to realize very quickly on is that there’s a lot of purpose of experience. There’s a lot of purpose in being. In doing something. Why do people jump off bridges with bungee cords or jump out of planes or do all sorts of—white water raft, or… because there is something about having a visceral thrill that feels good. You know.

For example, our body has chemicals that when you do certain things, create pleasure for you. And that one of them is adrenaline. That there is a rush of adrenaline. And that part of the Timmy experience is saying, “I want to experience these experiences. These chemicals. These emotions. I want to experience things.” And there are a lot of different ways to experience stuff. We tend to get off on the giant creatures, like I think each psychographic has its stereotype, right?

And that people want—I know the Power Gamer’s sort of Timmy stereotype. And people want to think of Timmy as just being “Oh, I just like big things, and I want to attack with big things.” And some Timmies like that. You know. I mean, there is some real excitement of just casting a giant creature or attacking with it or playing a spell that does major damage. There is a real visceral thrill that comes with that.

But there’s also a visceral thrill with just hanging with your friends and just bonding with them, and doing politics or just having an experience in which you’re really in the moment. You’re in the Zen. You’re in the flow. And that is very important for a lot of other players, and this is the Timmies. Where they’re like “I want to live, I want to experience things. I want to feel something.”

And that’s what the Timmy’s is. How do you make cards for Timmies? You just figure out the kind of stuff they like. Like, what creates visceral thrills? Part of it is creating giant things. Part of it is doing cool things. Part of it is like weird synergies that are just fun when they happen. Part of this is randomness. It’s not knowing what’s going to happen, and that there is great joy in just experiencing something and not knowing where it’s going to go.

One of these days I’ll do a podcast on randomness. I did an article on it. But one of the reasons we have coin-flipping, is there are people that are like “I want to play a card where I don’t know what’s going to happen.” We make a lot of wacky sort of red rare cards that like “Okay, chaos time. What’s going to happen?” And there’s players that really get off on that because it’s fun. There’s people that don’t want to know where the game’s going to go. And there’s other people who know completely where the games go, they want to make this crazy thing happen. And it’s just exciting and fun when they have this visceral thrill.

Okay, by the way, guys, all-time first on my drive to work, I need to get gas. So one of the things that I’ve decided about this podcast is, this podcast just takes as long as it just takes me to get to work. So if I have traffic, if I have a delay, if I have to get gas, that just means I get to talk more. So you guys get more content. So delays equal more content for you.

So let me just set up this gas going, and then we can talk more about Timmy, Johnny and Spike. But I want you to know—a lot of people seem to wonder how planned this is, it is not, I literally each day like “Okay.” Usually I do this on Monday. And I know ahead of time what my topic is going to be, but I kind of get here in the car and I’m like “Okay,” and I just start talking.

I’ve got to figure out whether you guys want more structure or not. Right now I’ve been kind of winging it. I’m curious to get feedback, obviously. I’m working way ahead, so as I do this podcast you guys haven’t even heard my first podcast yet. That’s how far ahead things have been, because it’s been taking longer to get my podcast started.

But once it (???), I will get a lot of feedback. And I’m very eager to hear what you guys have to say. So part of me doing this podcast is to try to give something to all of you and give you an experience of a podcast that’s something you don’t have before.

So anyway, I’ve talked about Spike and Johnny and Timmy, that each one at the core is trying to say “Hey. We as the designers are trying to make the game fun, how do you make the game fun? Well, we have to answer a basic emotional need.” If we do that, that’s where fun comes from. Fun comes from—like, of proving the dominance. Of expressing yourself. Of finding a visceral thrill. And that is what Timmy, Johnny and Spike are about.

So, let’s talk about Vorthos and Melvin. Because lots of people like to think of them as psychographic profiles. But they’re not. So why aren’t they? Because they’re not answering an emotional thing. It’s more talking about an aesthetic. Which is “When I play, what aspects of the game do I connect to?” And the reason this is a spectrum is that the Vorthos is saying, “Look. You know what I enjoy about the game? I enjoy the emotional aspect of the game.” Meaning that I want to experience the game emotionally. When I see a card and it sort of all fits together, that’s where I get my satisfaction. That’s where my aesthetic lies. I love the overall feel of the game.

Now the other end of the spectrum, the Melvin end, says, “You know what I enjoy? I enjoy intellectually observing this game. I enjoy sort of understanding it from a purely thought level.” And that both things are good, but different people get off on the game in different ways. And the aesthetic of the game that they appreciate is different.

The pure Vorthos is all about “Does it make sense flavorwise?” Because it’s like “What’s the essence of this?” And you show them a card that does something neat but it doesn’t hold together from a flavor standpoint, they’re like “Oh, well this just doesn’t tap into my aesthetic. I get it, I understand the game needs it, but this is not what makes it shine for me.”

Whereas someone like Melvin, they really get off on understanding the essence of what is going on. They very much want to appreciate the nuance of the design itself. Not necessarily of what the card represents in a larger context, but what it represents in the game. For example, sometimes as a designer I make a card that’s just doing something clever. It’s making use of the resources in a way that is neat. “Oh, wow, you’re using this kind of resource and this mechanic to do that. That’s a very interesting use of the resource.” And a Melvin, who approaches the game intellectually, is able to go “Wow. That aesthetic for me is very exciting. I love what you’re doing with the game as a game.”

Meanwhile, the Vorthos, they see something like Form of the Dragon, and they’re like “Oh, I get it. You are becoming a dragon. Oh my God, all these pieces come together, and get it? You’re a dragon.” And they really enjoy that. Okay? And so that is the spectrum we’re talking about with Vorthos and Melvin is kind of like “What is your aesthetic of the game? Where is your appreciation of the game?”

But, and this is why they’re not psychographics, your aesthetic has to do with what you look at for the game for how you appreciate the game. It doesn’t provide the emotional standpoint. And my example for there is, you can have a Timmy/Vorthos, a Johnny/Vorthos, or a Spike/Vorthos. Let me examine.

Okay. So the Spike/Vorthos wants to prove dominance, so what do they do? Oh, well they’re all about proving “In this area, I’m dominant. I am good.” So a Spike/Vorthos understands as much as he can about the flavor. About the story. That when he meets somebody else, he’s the dominant one. He understands this better than they understand it.

Now a Spike/Vorthos will read all the flavor text and learn all about it and study and do everything he can to try to get that edge to show that he understands story or flavor text better than others. A Timmy/Vorthos is someone who just gets off on the visceral thrill of the elements of it. They might get really into the art and spend a lot of time on the art and just enjoying the element that just really brings to them something that’s exciting and visceral. Now, the Johnny/Vorthos is the ones who want to show how they can express themselves through this feel. So for example, a very Johnny/Vorthos thing to do would be “I’m going to build my deck based on elves or based on the Wizard of Oz,” or something which I can say, “Oh look, I’m doing this thing.”

Like for example, I know a friend who had a Wizard of Oz deck, and he used the Shatter from Ice Age because that was the best illustration in the game of a tin woodsman. And it is, by the way. You can go look at it. But the idea is, they were using their knowledge of art and the flavor as a means by which to show their self-expression.

Now, let’s jump to the other side, the Melvin side. Well, Spike/Melvin, they want to know the rules. They want to know the inner workings of the game. They want to prove their dominance by understanding how things click together and how they work. Maybe there’s someone who’s constantly working on design boards. Maybe there’s somebody who’s a rules guru. They want to prove their dominance in the intellectual understanding of the game.

Likewise, a Johnny/Melvin is someone who wants to find combinations of how the mechanics click together. They’re the ones that say, “Aha, I figured out that this mechanic can work in this way, and I can click these things together and do something that has never been done before. Look, see what I’ve done?”

And likewise, Timmy’s trying to find visceral thrill in not necessarily the flavor of the game, but the mechanics of the game. Of for example, randomness or things in which “I’m going to make the game do crazy things. Look at all these crazy things that are going on! This is fun! I’m making crazy stuff happen.”

And so the Melvin/Vorthos, like I said, can be layered over the psychographics, it’s an aesthetic scale, and it’s important, the reason we have words for it is I’m a big believer in words. I mean, as a quick aside here, one of the other big things I’ve done, I’ve talked about my biggest contributions to R&D, and this is kind of tied into psychographics, is I believe that I’ve been very, very helpful in the vocabulary of talking about Magic.

Because whenever I see a concept that doesn’t have a name, I name it. And there’s a lot of concepts in Magic that have names because I said, “You know what? I want to talk about this, I’m going to name it.” And then I talk about it, and I put it in my column, and that once you name something, look, it has a name. And people can discuss it. And there’s great power in words.

I mean, people don’t understand I think sometimes the value in the power of words, because if you don’t have words for something, you can’t discuss it. You know. There’s a lot of things in our society that certain concepts can’t even be believed, or they’re hard to believe, because there aren’t the words to discuss those things. And I’ve tried very hard to take my ideas and the things I think are important in Magic, and identify them and give names to them. And that’s why—I mean, Timmy Johnny Spike kind of came along. I really just wanted to name these concepts that I wanted to understand.

Now the important thing of understanding the psychographics, is I’ve talked a little bit about “What do you as a designer do with them?” But also I think from you the player end, I think there’s also value of understanding why you enjoy the game. The reason I shared the Timmy/Johnny/Spike with the audience wasn’t just to give you a behind-the-scenes, it was also like I wanted the audience to understand that there’s different kinds of players.

One of the biggest problems I find in the game is that two people who have completely different desires out of the game meet, and they don’t understand that, it can become very frustrating. I mean, let’s say one player really want to prove their dominance, and the other player really wants to express themselves. Well, the first guy’s like “This isn’t fun! I’m just rolling over him. He’s not even trying to build a good deck.” And the other guy’s like, “I did this awesome thing and he won’t even recognize I did this cool thing!”

And neither player’s happy. And that once you start to understand what kind of players are out there, I feel like that’s just gone a long way to making players get “Oh, not everybody’s like me.” In fact, one of the biggest problems I’ve come across with the player base is it’s hard for players to understand that the game is different things to different people. Because the game is what you experience it to be. To you, the game of Magic is that. That’s what it is. And it takes a while to get that somebody else might enjoy the game as much as you do, but for completely different reasons. The things you enjoy, they might dislike. The things you dislike, they might love.

And like one of the things about bad cards, right? I mean I’m sure I’ll do a podcast on bad cards. But one of the things at the crux of that whole thing is “Look. Not every card is for you. A card you might despise might make somebody else love the game. That that is the thing they love most about it.” You know.

And I know for example I’ll make Johnny cards, and we’ll do a—we do a rare poll at work. People that aren’t in R&D rate the cards, so we can get a sense of what the average player things about them. And I constantly have to go and save my Johnny cards, because they always score low. Because the Johnny card is—especially I’m talking about the rare enchantments that do something, like “What do you do with this?”

Because to everybody but the Johnny—and not all Johnnies, like the Johnny that likes the challenge of figuring out what to do with it? It is just a dumb card. “Why would I want to do that?” But the Challenge Johnny looks at it, and he goes, “Oh my God. What can I do with that? How do I use that?” And they’re excited, and literally one or two of those cards can make a set for them. But for the rest of the players, it’s absolute junk. Like, “Why are you wasting my pack with that junk?” And the reality is, every card is for somebody. Every card does something. You know.

And that somebody might be Limited. It might be a different format. There are all sorts of ways to play Magic. And why is Magic going to turn 20 next year? Because it is not really one game. It’s many games, all under one umbrella, and that all these people can enjoy the same game, and have enough bonding and understanding of the ruleset they can share, but this one game is many games.

And on some set, that is what the psychographics were trying to do. Both so internally we understood how we were building the sets, and how we were building the cards. Because one of the things I say all the time now is, I’ll look at a card and I’ll say “This card is meant for Spike, but you’ve designed it for Johnny. And so figure out what you want. Do you want a Johnny card or a Spike card?”

Because if you design the wrong thing, for example, we once had a coin-flipping card in which you flipped a coin and you ended up with two things, both of which were in the right circumstance decent. And I said, “What are you guys trying to do here? If you’re trying to do this card for Timmy, you want variance. He wants excitement. He doesn’t want two options that are really close, he wants ‘Wow, I could get this, or maybe I could get that. And ooh, this is good, and that’s not so good.” That makes a more visceral, exciting card.

Okay, that’s what Timmy wants. Spike, he likes options, he likes modular cards, but he wants to choose. He doesn’t want it randomly chosen for him. He wants to make the decision. So you took a card and said, “Well, we’ll make it part Timmy, part Spike,” and then Timmy doesn’t like it and Spike doesn’t like it. And understanding the psychographics allows you to sort of make sure you know who the card is for.

And then on the flip side, having the psychographics I think enhances the community because players start to understand “Oh, I can self-identify with what I want and what others want, and when I run into somebody I go ‘Oh, well, I’m a Spike, you’re a Johnny, I get why we’re not connecting here.’ And let’s see if I can understand what you want about the game.” And I really think that it’s done a lot to join the bonding of the player base.

So I feel like psychographics both help Design immensely, and Development, and have helped our community. So that is why it is my proudest accomplishment thus far in my time here in Magic.

But anyway, I’m here, and I hope you guys enjoy the extra-lengthy episode today, and it’s time to go make the Magic cards.