W. Eric Martin: Timmy, Johnny, and Spike

In the mid-1990s I was consumed with Magic the Gathering and played little else. I had started working in a game store in San Francisco in 1991, and by the end of 1992 I was responsible for the fantasy gaming section in the rear of the store. I ordered role-playing guides, modules, lead miniatures, paint for miniatures, and many other niche items available through Berkeley Game Distributors. While I pushed some products (mostly Avalon Hill titles like Adel Verpflichtet and Blind Justice) into the mainstream part of the store, most of what I ordered remained in the back section where it was fodder for shoplifters.

Despite being responsible for ordering, reordering and special orders, I didn’t have hands-on experience with most of the product. I doubled the stock of miniatures and took more care to carry a wider variety of figures, yet never got the lead out when I played. I made elaborate wall displays of Games Workshop titles like Blood Bowl and Space Marine and took in war games that other stores in our chain had failed to sell, yet never tried any of these games myself. And I ordered the first starter decks of Magic the Gathering without having a clue as to what they were. Those two (Alpha) decks came and went in the same day, and my reorder was ignored because the game was already out of stock with the distributor. When we finally got another shipment of 15 (Beta) starters, awareness of the game had already built to such a degree that they also sold out in a day—mostly to other employees.

By the time Unlimited rolled around, I had watched others playing this collectible card game (CCG) on their work breaks and eagerly bought cards of my own. Then I bought more. And still more. I built deck after deck, tweaking them endlessly, playing with coworkers and strangers in cafes, stores and apartments. I slid down the money pit that so many others have experienced.

As the years passed, I weaned myself from competitive play (which I had competed in only at the state level) and played only in booster drafts and at prerelease tournaments. I was never serious enough to be really good, but I could play decently enough that the pros in the Massachusetts and Rhode Island area would be willing to have me draft with them. (Perhaps I was merely easy prey...)

Once I discovered Eurogames in the early 21st century, I played Magic only in the thrice yearly prerelease tournaments and soon decided that spending $25 on 100+ cards and four hour-long matches (with lots of waiting time in between each match) was a crummy choice compared to a cool board game that I could play repeatedly for years to come.

Despite no longer playing Magic, I still read the design and development columns each week on MagictheGathering.com. I love reading about the design process and learning what goes into creating the cards, the interactions, the dynamic changes in the playing environment, and the broad worldview approach to the game. Mark Rosewater, the author of the “Making Magic” design column since its inception in 2002 and Head Designer of Magic the Gathering, has clearly thought about the game to a degree far beyond anyone else, perhaps even more than Magic creator Richard Garfield, and he always presents an interesting perspective on different aspects of the game.

In one of Rosewater’s most popular columns—”Timmy, Johnny, and Spike,” which appeared in March 2002—he introduced three psychographic profiles of Magic players, that is, three sets of traits that broadly identify why certain people are attracted to Magic, learn the game, and continue to play it. He updated the profiles in a 2006 column called ”Timmy, Johnny, and Spike Revisited” and gave more details about these profiles. Here’s a short look at the three profiles:

• Timmy—He wants to experience something. Timmy wants things to happen in the game. Better still, he wants to make things happen. He’s going to include cards with big dramatic effects and win or lose he’s going to have fun. If there’s a new way to play the game, he wants to try it and see how it feels compared to all the other formats he knows. He wants to create stories that he can tell to others.

• Johnny—He wants to express something. Johnny likes to explore the parts of the game and see how they fit together. He doesn’t want to play with the cards or deck that everyone else plays. He wants to take a card that others find useless and show that he can win a game with it. Even if he loses ten other games first, that single win will demonstrate that not everyone else knows as much about the game as they think they do.

• Spike—He wants to prove something. Spike wants to win the game, the match, the tournament. He wants to be the best, so he’ll research what others are playing and learn how to beat those decks. He’ll compare cards and adjust his deck in minute ways that other players wouldn’t be able to appreciate. He’ll study the rules to learn how to use the timing of card effects to his advantage.

These profile descriptions are broad, and Rosewater includes sub-groups and hybrids in his Revisited article, along with more details about each. Each article starts with a quiz to help you determine which profile you match, but if you’re not familiar with the cards mentioned, much less Magic itself, don’t bother taking the quiz.

The test identifies my profile as Johnny/Timmy, but if I had to guess, I’d say that the percentages are 60% Johnny, 30% Timmy and 10% Spike. I prefer to design my own decks, often featuring cards that others dismiss as confusing, pointless or stupid. I view each game as a test; my win percentage doesn’t matter as much as my ability to make my deck do whatever funky thing it is that I want to do. If it doesn’t work consistently, I’ll tweak the deck to make it better; if it doesn’t work because I make mistakes while playing it, I get frustrated and try to train myself to avoid making the same mistakes again. (This is the Spike element.)

When the original Timmy, Johnny, and Spike article appeared, for instance, I was spending much of my Magic time trying to make a functional Egg deck. The deck relied on a series of cards in the Odyssey series, such as Mossfire Egg, that let you spend two mana (the unit of currency, which comes in five flavors and an unflavored version) to get two mana and a card while putting the Egg in your graveyard (discard pile). You could then spend this mana in another Egg for another two mana and a card, and so on. Other cards in the deck would create effects based on the number of identical cards in your graveyard, so the more Eggs you piled in, the bigger the effects. For the most part the deck worked like a sputtering engine, but occasionally the pistons kept cranking and I’d feel like a gifted mechanic who had revived a mysterious robot from the future.

So what does all this have to do with board games? Although the psychographic profiles were written to classify players of Magic the Gathering, I realized that they work equally well with game players in general. What’s more, the profile group you fall into is probably a fair indicator of the type of games that you enjoy. Let’s look at the profiles again, this time in terms of board games:

• Timmy—He wants to experience something. Timmy wants things to happen in the game. Better still, he wants to make things happen. His games of choice will frequently have a grand scale and give him the chance to do great things. Sometimes he’ll fail miserably, but even the failures will be interesting because of the way that the game plays out. The playing experience itself and the story created by the experience is what’s important.

  The games will likely include multiple luck elements because this element of uncertainty is part of the story-telling process. Timmy doesn’t know what’s going to happen next in the game, and neither does anyone else. Timmy is creating the game’s story, together with the other players, through their actions. Similarly, he prefers games with a strong thematic setting. When he tells the story of the game to other players, he isn’t detailing the rolls of the dice and the text on the cards so much as the enfolding of battles and the history of the characters within the game.

• Johnny—He wants to express something. Johnny likes to explore the parts of the game and see how they fit together. He’s interested in the mechanisms that drive the games and not the world in which they’re set. The thematic element is mere window dressing, after all, and doesn’t affect how the mechanisms of the game interact. He wants to see how his actions and the actions of his opponents affect the game systems and learn how to manipulate those systems to his advantage.

  The games Johnny chooses might have elements of chance, but they’ll likely have minor effects on the game as a whole. These chance elements must be factored into Johnny’s understanding of how the machine functions, but he can adjust the inputs or take corrective action to work towards the desired end goal. Johnny is creating the game’s outcome, together with the other players, through his actions, and he knows that each member of the group is manipulating the game’s system for his own ends.

• Spike—He wants to prove something. Spike wants to win the game, the match, the tournament. He sees the other players as obstacles, something to be overcome on the way to victory, and with this opposition already in place, he wants as little interference as possible from the game itself. The game is a battleground location, and he doesn’t want the location itself to become a factor in the game.

  As such, Spike prefers a game with as few chance elements as possible. He knows that he can outthink his opponents on a level playing field, so he wants to take the opportunity to do so. Even better, he wants to play games that are subtlely or even not-so-subtlely complex. He wants to learn the nuances of play and exceptions in the rules in order to use those to his advantage during the game. He’s not looking for an unfair advantage; he just wants to find an advantage where no one else will look. Spike isn’t adverse to all chance elements, mind you, and where they exist, he’ll know the odds and use them to maximize his ability to win.

This is my first take on broadening the Magic psychographic profiles to the entirety of board games, but I think it’s a pretty nice fit. You can classify expansive American-style games like Descent as Timmy games, mechanical European-style games like Taj Mahal as Johnny games, and bare bones abstract or Asian-style games as Spike games. You can find hybrid titles as well, such as Monopoly, which straddles the line of Timmy and Spike due to its high reliance on die-rolling and chance cards which are balanced by its skill-based trading, limited resources (houses) that allow cool tricks and non-shuffled decks (after the first pass-through) that reward memorization. Ticket to Ride fits the Johnny/Spike category since players can try to game the system with their ticket strategies or focus on the percentages of card draws to determine which plays are best turn by turn.

A final important element to draw out of Rosewater’s discussion of player profiles is that there is no right way to play Magic, and by extension board games. Spike may ridicule Timmy for playing with expensive inefficient cards, and Johnny may mock Spike for playing a Net deck and not developing a deck that expresses his personality, and Timmy may shake his head at Johnny’s efforts to find a use for a creature that stays in play only if you have no cards in hand—but Timmy and Johnny and Spike are all bringing different desires to the table and trying to satisfy them as best as possible. What is fun for one player won’t necessarily be the same things that are fun for someone else.

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Comments:

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And I think you’re right on the button (as is Mark Rosewater.) Indeed, the more recent digression in this area (in Magic gamer-type theory) - discussing the “Melvin” and “Vorthos” personas - is possibly even more relevant, as they are much more related to the thematic dichotomy (one considers it pretty much irrelevant, while the other demands almost simulationist accuracy.) What articles like this do is to remind us that any hobby likes to factionalise, almost by default, and to have fun being derogatory about members of other factions.  I guess we should count ourselves lucky that the worst our divisions are likely to get is with someone stuffing a plastic train up someone else’s nose… Posted by David Brain on May 29, 2007 at 05:11 AM | #

Nice extension, Eric.  I’m Johnny all the way. Posted by Larry Levy on May 29, 2007 at 10:03 AM | #

I’ve read the Melvin and Vorthos columns, but have only started thinking about expanding the profiles to gaming in general. Maybe I can bring them into the mix later. Larry, I’d argue that you’re more of a Johnny/Spike as you seem to prefer more deterministic games such as Through the Ages. Think of how much you dislike the endgame of Louis XIV with its resolution luck; that seems more like a Spike characteristic to me. Your issue with the master builder pull in Pillars of the Earth would also bother Spike. Posted by W. Eric Martin on May 29, 2007 at 11:01 AM | #

Hmm, the internet truely does run in “themes”.  My gaming group was discussing this same classification scheme (my first introduction to it) just last week… I find that in Magic: the Gathering, I’m mostly a Johnny with Timmy overtones (trying to do “festive” things, happy whenever they go off). In boardgames, I’m much more focused on winning the game and care more about the results (winning big, but less frequently does not attract me).  However, I do like a good theme and am not fond of abstracts.  I think I’m a strong Johnny with Spike overtones, trying to find creative ways to gain small advantages that will add up in the long term for a win.  (Surprisingly, I enjoy a bit of randomness in my games, but proportional to the game length...) In role-playing games, I’m nearly half Timmy half Johnny.  I’m out to do grand things, but I want to do it in my own personal ("festive") way… So, depending on the genre, I’m a “Johnny” with overtones of either Timmy or Spike. ---------------- I might disagree with you in terms of how randomness/luck is associated with the personalities.  I think theme would be more useful measurment for me… a theme would be far more important to a Timmy than a Spike.  And I could see a “Spike” personality enjoy a game of Risk, despite all the die-rolling… Posted by Matt J. Carlson on May 29, 2007 at 12:59 PM | #

Matt, theme and chance elements don’t have to be intertwined, although I did so in the profiles above. As David Brain mentions in his comment, Rosewater has recently written about Melvin and Vorthos, and those personality traits (in which theme plays prominently) are overlaid on the Timmy/Johnny/Spike profiles. Maybe I’ll be able to revisit the topic months down the road. Risk seems like another good Timmy/Spike game: Timmy from the theme of world domination, and Spike precisely because of the die-rolling and your ability to press the odds or back off based on your chances of success. Player elimination also seems like a Spike trait; even if you don’t win the game, which is always Spike’s goal, you can definitely rank yourself in terms of how you finish. Posted by W. Eric Martin on May 29, 2007 at 01:41 PM | #

Hmm, maybe.  Most of what I got from the description of Spike was his overriding desire to win.  It sounded a lot like the gamers who enter tournaments to pick up some “wood”.  That’s not me at all--I belong to the “try like hell to win, but forget who won five minutes after the game is over” school.  Still, it’s true I tend to prefer games without chance elements and I like more complex games.  The reason for these preferences are mostly mechanics oriented, but I can see where I’ve got a bit of Spike in me (can I say that online?). Posted by Larry Levy on May 29, 2007 at 02:14 PM | #

Hmm, I could see that (Spike only caring if he/she wins or not). I’m very into trying to play “optimally” and, while I like winning, will often care more about not making a “mistake” during a game.  Of course, this can be hard to evaluate in a longer, more complex game but that’s part of the fun of the downtime in the hobby - figuring out how to have played better so I can improve… So a brief summary might be? Spike - I care if I won or not Johnny - I care if I played well or not Timmy - I care if I had fun during the game or not (Admittedly, the Timmy one is a weak summary, as all three might claim to have had “fun”, but I think Timmy would be most likely to declare they’re having fun at a given point during the game, whereas Johnny and Spike need to complete the game to decide if it was fun...) Thoughts?  Is that how others see the 3 categories? Posted by Matt J. Carlson on May 29, 2007 at 11:51 PM | #

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