Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1228: Timmy and Tammy

Episode Date: March 28, 2025

This episode is part one of a three-part series walking through the three psychographics. I start today with exploring the psychological analysis of Timmy and Tammy. ...

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Starting point is 00:00:00 I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work Okay, so today I'm in the past. I have done podcasts talking about the psychographics Timmy Tammy Johnny Jenny and spike But I thought that there was enough nuance there that each one of them deserved their own podcasts And so what I'm going to do is a series of three podcasts where I'm gonna dive in deep. I'm gonna talk about subgroups and I'm gonna really get into what those psychographics are
Starting point is 00:00:32 and specifically how each of them function. I'm just gonna go in depth, that's the plan. So today I'm gonna start with Timmy and Tammy. The reason I chose to start with that is that was the very first psychographic that I named. So let me do a real quick recap of what the psychographics are and then I'll tell the origin story of Timmy and Tammy and get into who Timmy and Tammy are and why they play. Okay, so I went to school at Boston University's College of Communications and I studied at
Starting point is 00:01:03 a time what was called broadcast and film, which is basically movies and TV. But when you go to the College of Communications, you have to take classes in all the different things. So one of the areas that you could focus on was journalism, and another was advertising and public relations. So I had to take some advertising classes, and in the advertising class I learned of this interesting tool called the psychographic and the basic idea is let's
Starting point is 00:01:29 say you are selling something you're making an ad and you want to sell a product well it's really important that you understand the so-called the psychological motivation the psychological motivation that's hard to say on the psychological motivation of the person that you're trying to sell your product to. Okay, I'm selling them product X. Well, why? Not just what are they needed for from a pure physical sense, but like why do they need
Starting point is 00:01:58 it? Psychologically, why do they need it? And that's pretty important to understanding how advertising works. A lot of advertising is recognizing here's the need that this fulfills and that we advertise to the importance of that need. Anyway, when I first got to Wizards, most of the people in R&D were what I would call math people,
Starting point is 00:02:17 meaning they studied STEM related things and they were very analytical. I came from a background of A, words, but B, psychology. My mom is retired now, but my mom is a psychologist. And I've always been very fascinated by how people think, by psychology. In fact, on my short list of careers that I was looking at, I considered being a psychologist.
Starting point is 00:02:41 It was on my short list. But anyway, so one of the things that happened very early on was I really wanted, we were in a meeting and we were, there's this card we were making. I don't remember what it was. It was a big creature that had a big effect and was expensive or something. And there was some complaints about it. I guess. I think the idea was that this just isn't viable in tournaments And I said I go look guys there. There's a player out there
Starting point is 00:03:10 Let's call him Timmy This card will make Timmy's day this card when he plays it will be Timmy's dream You know, there's a player out there that that's gonna love this card And so the reason I named Timmy I would later add on the initial names were just male, but I added on the female versions later on for Tammy. The reason that I gave a name to the psychographic is I wanted to personify who that person was. And one of the things I've learned as a word person is having words associated with concepts allows people to talk about the concepts. So naming the psychographics just meant
Starting point is 00:03:49 that now in R&D lingo and it's obviously spread to all magic, the lingo is out there. People can use that. You can explain something about yourself or I can talk about what kind of card I'm designing. So the psychographics did a lot and one of my, like I said, people ask me all the time, like, what's my biggest influence on magic? And I obviously had a lot of influences. But one of the things that I think was really important is just this idea of getting magic on board of who are we designing for? What do they want? How do we make cards that give them what they want? This is the idea of imbuing psychology into design in a way
Starting point is 00:04:25 that wasn't really there. Um, it's something that I'm very proud of. Anyway, so what the idea today is, so I wrote an article many years ago, um, called, um, Timmy, Johnny and spike where I first explained the psychographics. This was, uh, when I back in like 2002, when I first started writing my making magic article. And then many years later, although many years ago from now, I wrote Timmy, Johnny and Spike revisited where I really went into getting better sense of who they were. And for the first time I made subcategories. I'm using the subcategories today.
Starting point is 00:05:01 I don't think these subcategories are necessarily the definitive be-all. They give examples of ways to divide this up and there's probably other subcategories that I might get to. So this is not meant to be the definitive listing of everything. Okay. So one of the things to understand in general, like I said, the psychic graphics are based on what do you psychologically get out of playing Magic? Why do you play Magic? What does Magic do for you? And one of the things to understand in general is, and there's nothing wrong with this, people are motivated internally, meaning there's something about doing something that they internally get.
Starting point is 00:05:49 Now, um, with gaming, there's a, but there's a bunch of different things that games can do. Uh, one of the big things is sort of what I'll call vicarious living. The idea is that a game is a safe space where you can experience things that maybe are hard to experience or scary to experience or you know that you get to experience things that you don't normally get to experience. And you get to do it in a safe space like the idea I've talked a lot but the idea of games is sort of a mental challenge and that it allows you to take skills and learn from
Starting point is 00:06:24 them in a context that is safe. and that it allows you to take skills and learn from them in a context that is safe. But one of the biggest things about games in general is that people like to experience things. Timmy and Tammy, they play magic because there's something they want to experience. What that thing is can vary, as you'll see today, can vary from Timmy and Tammy to other Timmy's and Tammy's
Starting point is 00:06:46 but the idea essentially is that there's something that is really important to them that they want to feel. Okay so let's start with what we call the power gamers which is the the most stereotypical of the Timmy's and Tammy's. The idea now the game of, you are a planeswalker. You are summoning mighty creatures and powerful spells and using ancient artifacts. It's like you are doing something than the real world you don't do. You know, you don't get to,
Starting point is 00:07:18 like there is a certain sort of a little power fantasy in magic that you are this powerful wizard that you have, you know mighty forces at your fingertips and there's something just super fun about that and and so the idea that I can do something where I'm I'm capturing something that I really enjoy and I'm doing something that probably it's hard to do in real life I can summon a mighty dragon. I don't get to do that. There aren't dragons. It's not I can't actually summon a dragon. Neither can I summon things nor are there dragons. But you know in the world of magic I can. I have the abilities at my fingertips and so a lot of what the power gamer wants is the ability to do grandiose things. To do big
Starting point is 00:08:02 powerful things. To do things that just say, hey, look at me, look at what I am doing. Now, one of the things to explain that's important is there are different levels of things that you can experience. There are sort of like, there are things that you get to experience all the time, there are things you can experience some of the time,
Starting point is 00:08:22 and there's things you experience rarely, right? And in Magic, the on some level, the power gamer enjoys all those, but different, different power gamers will function in different areas. Some of them might just be, you know, it's, and one of the things to understand is it's not just making something big. That is what some people want to do. Some people like just casting a giant thing is very fun for them. But it might just be, I want to play as many tokens as possible. I want to have a giant board of tokens.
Starting point is 00:08:53 Like I want to do something that to me is impressive. Ideally for a lot of power gamers, it's kind of cool that it's impressive, not just to you, but impressive to other people as well. That depends. Some power gamers are more inward looking, some are more outward looking. But the idea essentially is there's something
Starting point is 00:09:13 you want to accomplish that seems like a mighty feat. That's really what the power gamer is up for, is that they're like, okay, I have built my deck to do something, maybe multiple somethings, but I I have built my deck to do something, maybe multiple somethings, but I have something that I wanna do and that I want to experience doing it. The simplest low level is just like,
Starting point is 00:09:34 there's a giant creature on my deck and I wanna get to the point where I can cast the giant creature. I wanna do the giant spell. But I wanna explain that it's beyond just that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they do. And there's definitely people who are like, oh, look at me. I got a giant dragon. But there are also people that I want to get as many zombies on the on the board as I can.
Starting point is 00:09:52 You know, I want I want to do something that so I talk a lot about narrative equity. And the idea of narrative equity is the idea that stories have internal value, that stories have internal value. That if I do something and that something produces a story, I've gained a tangible thing. That I walked away from the game with something that I now bring to my life, which is I now can tell this story about this experience. And I think in a lot of ways the power gamers are very much very oriented in that idea of I want to do something so that there's I can remember maybe I want to tell others maybe I don't but I want to create a moment that to me is this powerful moment.
Starting point is 00:10:37 And like I said what that moment is you know that will vary from from player to player it depends a lot on what is the cool thing. The one thing I will stress is that the power gamer kinds of wants to do something that is a challenge to do. It's not it's not just like I want to play a spell. Well, yeah, every game you play a spell. I want to do something that there's a chance I can't do it. Like one of the things for the power gamer is that I am trying to do something
Starting point is 00:11:03 that's exciting because it isn't necessarily easy, you know, and that there's a lot of, okay, I have this big thing I want to do. I'm going to build my deck to get there and I want to experience that moment. And the, the power gamer understands Timmy and Tammy in general understand that, Hey, not every game necessarily is going to do what they want. Although there are Timmy's and Tammy's are like, want a low-level thing and I every time I play magic I'll make sure that low-level thing happens. There are those Timmy and Tammy's
Starting point is 00:11:30 But there's also a lot of things I want this thing to happen that I know doesn't normally happen So I got to make it happen and a lot of the power gamers are very into I want to I want to have the dream We talk a lot about when I come up designing mythic rares. I talk about how the idea of a dream is important. There's this thing called magical Christmas land. When players first look at a magic card, they imagine by what scenario is this the best card it could ever be. And on some level, magical Christmas land is is where the power gamer lives. I can imagine the most amazing circumstance where this is true. I will make that happen.
Starting point is 00:12:10 I will make Magical Christmas Land happen. So anyway, that is the power gamer. That they want to really experience the visceral thrill of doing something that they know is a challenge, but they know that they're capable of. Okay, next is the social gamers. So one of the things I really want to stress about Timmy and Tammy is when I say they want to experience something that something isn't the same for all Timmy's and Tammy's. They want to experience something
Starting point is 00:12:39 because there's something that really excites them and or I should also stress most of the time when I'm talking about experiencing something I am talking about something that brings them joy and happiness it doesn't have to they're different players that enjoy other emotions I'll get to that in a second so it's not always happiness but in general in general the idea that I want to experience something that I the reason I want to experience is it brings me happiness to experience it. The idea of a social gamer is, you know, it's really fun about playing Magic, playing with other people. And what I want to do is create a moment that we talk about.
Starting point is 00:13:18 But the moment I want to create is a bonding moment. I want to create a moment where I'm sharing something with other players, where the thing that I do is not just a private look what I did, I want to do something that I say look what we did. I mean there's a lot of different avenues of this. A common social gamer might be what we call the group hug player in multiplayer. And what a group hug player does is, I do a lot of things that help everybody. The idea being, well, you don't wanna get rid of me,
Starting point is 00:13:52 I'm good for you, I'm helping you. And there's something very much that's fun about, I'm gonna do things and I'm gonna help enable other people, or I'm gonna, I enjoy the politics of it because maybe I team up with somebody. Like the idea is that what's really exciting for the social gamer is that there's a moment or more where it's about what they and one or more other people did. That it's about the interconnection with other people. That the thing they want to experience is interpersonal bonding. You know that the, the, the stories they want to create are about, Oh, Oh my goodness, Joey and I did this or Sally and I did this.
Starting point is 00:14:33 Like there's you and somebody else. So you and everybody, maybe some fun thing happened. And there's a lot of fun stories I like to share where the joy of the story isn't even necessarily what happened in the game. I mean, that is part of it, but it's more how outside the game what happened with it. You know, there's a lot of fun stories that it's about interconnecting with other people. And the social game very, very much is about highlighting that, maximizing that, making sure that they understand how can I set up my deck such in a way that I get to connect with people. And like I said
Starting point is 00:15:12 there's levels, there's definitely a low level version of social gamer where it's like look maybe outside of magic I don't get as much social interaction as I want. So my goal when I sit down play magic is I'm going get as much social interaction as I want. So my goal when I sit down and play Magic is I'm gonna maximize my social interaction. I'm gonna do every single thing I can just to have a little bit more social interaction versus someone who's like, I wanna do something so grandiose that involves all of us
Starting point is 00:15:36 that we'll all be talking about this five years from now. That's all that whole extreme is the social gamer. The social gamer, like I said, the motivation is feeling something, but the thing they need to feel has to do with interconnectivity with other people. Maybe we laugh about something. Maybe we we work together. Maybe we some weird thing happened, but it happened to all of us. You know, that's the idea. Okay, next up is the diversity gamer. So magic is a game with lots of pieces. Right now I think there's like 29,000 pieces.
Starting point is 00:16:10 So one of the things, and one of the things I should point out is the things that I'm saying here are not limited just to magic. That the idea of a power gamer wanting to do something impressive in the real world exists. The social gamer wanting to do something social in the real world exists. The social gamer wanting to do something social in the real world exists. The diversity gamer is about the idea that I want to experience as much as I can. What's fun for me of magic is not that I do the same thing again and again. In fact, the exact opposite. I want to keep doing different things. I want to experience something I've never experienced before. I want to, you know, like a lot of times the diversity gamers like I I build the new deck every time we play or
Starting point is 00:16:48 I'm constantly Changing my deck because I want to do things that I've never done before and the idea of the diversity gamer is It's the the idea of the variety of just seeing things or doing things or having things happen That is unique in the moment the stories that the diversity player wants to tell the diversity gamer is This thing you won't believe this thing happened and so a lot of diversity gaming is more about playing along the edges of Trying to do things that no one else has done
Starting point is 00:17:22 Playing with cards that no one has played with, maybe finding combinations that no one's found before, but doing something that just generates a new experience. And like I said, magic, the combinatorics of magic play really well into this. When I say there's 29,000 cards, like the, I've told this story, but it hits this point. When Magic Online first came out
Starting point is 00:17:47 The magic online marketing people came to R&D because we were full of math people and said hey We'd like to know how many different decks you can make based on the cards available to magic online when it came out And be aware this was many years ago way less than 29,000 cards It was something like 12,000 cards or something And so the question was with like I like 12,000 cards. How many different 60 card combinations can you make? And the answer we had to give them was that number is larger than the atoms in the universe It's a very very very large number I mean
Starting point is 00:18:24 extraordinarily large number and the universe is a very, very, very large number. I mean, extraordinarily large number. And the idea is once you start mixing and matching the combinatorics, and that was with 12,000 cards, now we're up to 29,000 cards, meaning there's no way, if you said, if you said I am going to every day, not every day, every hour that I'm awake of every day, make a brand new deck that has never been played before by me and play a different deck.
Starting point is 00:18:51 And I took, I took immortal serum so that I never died. It would take you, you could, I mean, there's not enough time, probably. Probably the earth would blow up before you get there. There's just a lot of opportunities. So I mean, the diversity of gamers,, like look, there's so much there. There's so much to play, so much to do. Diversity gamers are the one in sort of commander who like, I'm going to try to play with commanders that I've never seen anybody play before.
Starting point is 00:19:18 I'm going to put cards in my deck that I haven't seen people play before. You know, I'm going to, I'm going to milk magic for all it's worth. I'm going to find all the cool and different things you can do. And that is what the diversity gamer really thrives on, is the idea that, and it's not even just playing cards that no one's played before,
Starting point is 00:19:39 it's also playing cards that have a high variety to them. Modal cards is a good example, right? Where, hey, normally I play the card or a lot of times I play the card and I do this, but what if I do that? You know? And there's just a lot of opportunities and they like to play with things where another good example of a fun diversity card might be something like a clone, right? Because every time you play a clone
Starting point is 00:20:06 and you copy another creature, odds are it'll be another, especially if you're really into copying your opponent's creatures, because your opponents will keep having different things. But anyway, that's really the take of the diversity gamer is it's all about the breadth of experience. Okay, the final one is what I call the adrenaline gamer.
Starting point is 00:20:25 And the idea there is that one of the fun of doing things is not knowing the outcome of what's going to happen. Is creating moments of great suspense. The low-hanging fruit of this might be things like coin flipping cards or die rolling cards or cards that do stuff on the top of the library. You know, the idea is I want to do things where I don't know the outcome. Also there's a lot of like rare red effects we do. They just create chaos because red is the color of chaos warp worlds and stuff.
Starting point is 00:21:00 And the adrenaline gamer really, I mean the, the adrenaline gamer is the same person that like, well jump out of an airplane or go bungee jumping. The idea that part of life is the thrill of life, you know, and that, you know, one of the things about games that is very good is games are a safe space. That if things go badly, I lose the game. That is the consequence, I lose the game.
Starting point is 00:21:29 And barring being in a giant tournament or something, fine, if you're on the pro tour, it could have larger impacts to your life. But most games, it doesn't, win or lose, my life doesn't change in any substantial way. And so the idea is I can set myself up and do things that are risky that I probably wouldn't do in normal life.
Starting point is 00:21:50 And one of the other things that's important is, like I said, part of the idea of games is that games let you sort of do things that you might not be willing to do or able to do in real life. And that there are just risks you can take. And there are a lot of, I've seen a lot of adrenaline gamers
Starting point is 00:22:07 that in real life are kind of quiet. You know, they are not risk takers in their life. But because they're not risk takers in their life, it's kind of fun to be risk takers in a game. That one of the neat things about a game is that you get to sort of vicariously do things that you normally wouldn't in a safe space. Once again, you know, if I take a risk and I fail at that risk, okay, well I lost the game. Nope, not a big deal. And so adrenaline gamers are definitely looking
Starting point is 00:22:37 to push the variance. One of the things that's really interesting is when we make unsets, one of the truisms of design is variance is a lot of fun, but if you get too high a variance, it starts cutting into skill. And the idea is we play Magic in tournaments, we want to make sure that there's a certain amount of skill in Magic. So for most premier sets, we're very careful about the amount of variance because we don't want like the Pro tour be decided on something like a coin flip right we want skill to matter um but in when i do unsets that's not about that no one's playing you know a high level tournament with an with an un card and so that's where i get a lot higher
Starting point is 00:23:17 variance um like one of my favorite cards um uh from unglued was elvish impersonator it was three in the green and then you roll two dice and the first dice is power and the second dice is toughness. That's a really exciting fun card. But it's something we probably wouldn't do in normal magic just because getting a six six for four mana is kind of too good. And the reason it's fine in the context of like an unset is, hey, the chance of that happening isn't real high. But in tournament play, we have to sort of cap, we have to cap high variance cards about how high the variance can get. So anyway, that
Starting point is 00:23:57 is what the adrenaline gamer likes. Okay, so before I wrap up, something I'm gonna do each of these is I'm gonna talk about designing for each of these four. So designing for power gamers, designing for social gamers, designing for diversity gamers, and designing for adrenaline gamers. Okay, we'll start with power gamers. Power gamers want big and splashy. No, big and splashy doesn't inherently just mean large. That's one thing. I mean, one of the ways to do big effects is to just, they cost a lot of mana
Starting point is 00:24:25 and they do something big. But it also can be something where it can be something that you have to build to run that's fine. But what they want is something big happens. And like I said, maybe they're making a lot of counters or a lot of tokens or getting a lot of cards in play, or maybe they're drawing a lot of cards. A lot of the idea is there's a goal of something that they want to do that isn't easy to do. That is not something that happens all the time and they want to sort of make that happen because the visceral thrill of it happening. Um, like one of my, uh, a very good example of a card. In fact, I experienced my Timmy moment,
Starting point is 00:25:03 my biggest Timmy moment ever in magic, uh, was what's the name of the card. In fact, I experienced my Timmy moment, my biggest Timmy moment ever in Magic was, what's the name of the card? So I was, we were, if you've heard the story, we were previewing cards at a world, at worlds, I think it was in Memphis. And I had, what was it? Chameleon Colossus. So it's a creature that you can activate to double its power and toughness. And for those who don't know the story, I ended up attacking with like a 26,000 26,000 creature that at the time was double lifelinked You can't double lifelink anymore, but and I gained like 55,000 life or something But the idea was that was a card where there's a dream it can double its power and toughness Well, I get enough mana. I can make about 26,000 26,000 creature
Starting point is 00:25:43 So a lot of what you want to do for the power gamer is make cards with the dream Oftentimes that dream involves mana. It doesn't always but man is the easiest lowest, you know but the idea is you want to make cards that something potentially really cool could happen and Ideally something cool that could happen that the player is making that could try to make happen I think if you get in things that are just high variance that you can't plan around is making that I could try to make happen. I think again, things that are just high variance that you can't plan around, you're getting a little more to the adrenaline gamer.
Starting point is 00:26:10 The power gamer says, okay, I wanna, I want cards that I can dream, but then I can build around the dream and I can try to make it happen. And the fun task for a power gamer is I wanna make this grandiose thing happen. So for design, we're designing for power gamers, you gotta make those grandiose things.
Starting point is 00:26:26 Some of that is making giant spells. Some of that is making things that just, in the right circumstance, will do really fun things. But, you know, for example, Alt-Win card. This is a very power gamer thing. Alt-Win says, okay, if you do something different from normal, you can win the game. And the idea of doing that, now some of that also tips
Starting point is 00:26:53 into Johnny and Jenny, we'll get to Johnny and Jenny in the Johnny and Jenny podcast. But the idea there is that we can build things that cards that have a dream that Timmies and Tammies can try to achieve. And so what we need to do is build in tasks that you can achieve. And there's lots of ways to do that.
Starting point is 00:27:14 But essentially, like I said, you wanna think magical Christmas land when you're doing power gamers, which is, oh my goodness, I wanna make cards that the dream of the card is huge, huge. That could be repeatable things that can stack. That could be things that, right, one of the things just with infinite mana,
Starting point is 00:27:35 you can do something nutty. It can be things where there just is a thing that can happen that's very memorable, but there's a lot of past of this, but that power gamer is building cards and designs that have the dream built into it. That does include as well as making really expensive. When you make really expensive, grandiose does big things. Like it's 12 mana, but oh my goodness, if you do this, all sorts of chaos happens.
Starting point is 00:28:00 Also not all, but a lot of the planeswalker ultimates, a lot of them have some of that dream in them. Ooh, imagine if you can make that happen. And usually those are the ones where you have to work toward it. You can't cast it the turn you cast the Planeswalker and you gotta do the plus from multiple turns to get there. That is a lot of power gamer appeal. Next, social gamers.
Starting point is 00:28:20 So social gamers very much thinking about how players interact with other players Sometimes it's as simple as making cards that allow you to interact with other players Something like gift from Bloomberg is a really good example of a neat mechanic where on the surface You know, it could just be an alternate cost but it has politics built into it Oh, well, maybe I give a gift to somebody because I want to help them. And a lot of the most fun social gamer cards, a lot of them are sort of designed for multiplayer. They're designed where maybe there's politics built into it, like voting cards or cards in which I get to pick another player and I get to interact with them in some way. Often cards in which I get to pick another player and I get to interact with them in some way. Often the cards in which I get to help another player.
Starting point is 00:29:07 A lot of the social gamer cards are about once again, maximizing the ability for somebody to get to interact with somebody else. And a lot of that also is just in templating. One of the things we've learned is one of the passes we always do on a set is, Hey, is there any way to slightly tweak templating to allow a card to have a function in multiplayer that's not disruptive in two player, for a premier set card, but something in which, oh, well if you happen to be playing this in multiplayer, there's another layer to it.
Starting point is 00:29:37 We like to find those kinds of cards. The Diversity Gamer, this one on some levels is the easiest. Make a lot of magic cards. I would say that the system helps a lot for the diversity gamer. The fact that we've made 29,000 cards. It does say when you're designing things, I like to make quirky offbeat things. Some of that is also for the Johnnys and Jennys of the world. is also for the Johnnys and Jennys of the world. But the idea of making things that are not so obvious, making things that do things but are a little weirder,
Starting point is 00:30:12 a lot of that is really what the diversity gamer loves, is things that don't draw attention right away, that make you go, oh, what's going on here? And like I said, there's overlaps, John and Jenny, but there's definitely a certain diversity gamer that we want to make cards. We want to make sure that some of our cards are quirkier. Some of our cards are less straightforward. Some of our cards do things that make you want to go, why would you want to do that? You know, and that the diversity gamer really wants to explore what other people leave.
Starting point is 00:30:40 And so it's important making cards that we do want to embrace the weird and quirky kind of cards as well and the the adrenaline gamer that is just making high variance cards once again there's some challenge in premier sets and that we there's kind of a cap one of the things that we one of the things we've learned is the one thing that's the most acceptable to do variance with is top of library. Coins and dice really have this feel of randomness to them. And even though the top of the library is just as random or almost as random, you can manipulate top of your library.
Starting point is 00:31:22 So that also helps. But the idea that you sort of walk into a card game expecting, oh there's variance in the card draw. And because that's expected, that type of variance is more sort of accepted than other types of variance. And so there's a lot of trying to lean into the natural variance of the game and using that variance to help decide things. And there's a lot of fun mechanics for, like cascade is a really fun adrenaline mechanic. So anyway, that my friends is Timmy and Tammy. Like I said, the real important thing and the reason that Timmy and Tammy
Starting point is 00:32:06 interestingly was the first sort of identified psychographic is there's something really important to say, look, people are playing a game and part of the joy of playing a game is getting to experience things that either you don't normally experience or that is harder to experience than it would be in the context of a game. Or maybe it's experienced something that it's too frightful to experience in real life or it's, I mean, there's a lot of reasons that you look for it in the game, but you know, one of the core aspects of a game is the idea that it is, it's the simulation, right? It's something in which the stakes are low
Starting point is 00:32:46 so that I really allow myself to do things that I normally won't. Maybe it's because I can't, maybe it's because I'm afraid to, maybe it's because it's not safe. You know, there's lots of reasons, or maybe it's just, hey, I do do in the real world, but I want more of it, you know?
Starting point is 00:33:01 Or maybe it's hard in the real world, it's easier here. You know, maybe I find socializing something that's tricky for me and that in the context of a game Where there's the trappings of a game around it I just feel more comfortable and I'm more happy doing and there's a lot of that that a lot of the idea of the Timmy's and Tammy's is that the game can help people do something that they need from a, and this is why, why cyber graphics are so important. When I talk about the need to experience something that, that need to experience something brings something to them.
Starting point is 00:33:35 It fulfills something. It, it, I mean, a lot of times it makes them happy, but it goes deeper than that. You know what I'm saying? Like I've had a lot of people who write into me saying, hey look, I really had a hard time making friends and interacting with people. And magic made a social circle. And all of a sudden I made friends and I can interconnect with people.
Starting point is 00:33:55 And that a lot of the specialness of what games can do is that they can take areas that you might not be able to sort of master in real life or or just it's harder in real life and just makes it easier and gives you contextual reasons to do things and that's a big part of it and that a lot of game design is saying hey people who play games play games because there's something that brings to the table and something that it just people like I talk about all the time. I'm very big on emotions, right? That when I talk about design, that I want an emotional reaction.
Starting point is 00:34:33 What am I? What am I trying to make the player who's playing this feel? And an important part of that is the Timmy's and Tammy's that they are in it for the feel they are in it. I mean, all the psychographics want something and one of the through lines you'll see as I do this whole series is everybody gets something out of it. You know what I'm saying?
Starting point is 00:34:51 The reason you're psychologically attracted to something is there's something that you get, that you need. And for the Timmy's and Tammy's, it's feeling something, it's experiencing something, it's going through something that really adds to their life. And that is what the Timmy's and Tammy's do. And that's why we designed for the Timmy's and Tammy's is we wanna create those moments
Starting point is 00:35:12 and create those experiences and create those memories, those stories. That is what we're trying to do. So anyway guys, that is my Timmy and Tammy podcast. Like I said, I will be doing one on Johnny and Jenny and one on Spike. But anyway, I hope you enjoyed it, but I'm at work. So we all know what that means. That means that this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time
Starting point is 00:35:32 for me to be making magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye bye.

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