It was invented first, as a sort of thought exercise for designers, and everything that’s come after has been fleshing out and working backwards to try to justify it. While Rosewater will undoubtedly claim that market research has granted statistical validity to this psychographic model, it’s still working in the wrong direction. Why on earth is it so deceptive to assume that people who buy Magic also enjoy Magic? which would be fine, except we're talking about a card game, not a household cleaner. The point is why they buy what they buy psychographics can easily be used for things that people can’t really be said to “enjoy,” like toilet cleaner, fiber supplements, or Joy Division. This is not the point of a psychographic. The only counterexample I can think of is, like, some kid who's parents buy the cards for him? Is that really what you've been spending the last 800 words setting up for? As soon as “psychographic” attempts to describe anything other than the groups of people buying the product, it is not a psychographic. Since psychographics are, as he correctly states, descriptions of “why you need the thing,” that thing being sealed Magic product, descriptions of how people use the thing and which subsets of the thing they most like are different than why they are buying the thing. What distinction are you trying to make, here? Yes, another word for buyers of my game is players of my game. Psychographic profiles are portraits of the buyers of the good Rosewater invisibly tries to shift this to “player psychographics.” This next argument is a big one: Timmy, Johnny, and Spike are not actually psychographics. Yes, it's true, Rosewater hasn't kept up with the latest in psychology research since starting a job as the head designer of one of the most successful franchises on the planet. What I’m dancing around here is that Mark Rosewater has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about. Meaning: he’s taking a concept he remembers from over a decade earlier and importing it into Magic. The full TJS model was invented after that. In the origin story of Timmy, he talks about the creation of Verdant Force, which occured somewhere around 1996. The issues start to arise when we look at from where he gains the concept: he learned about it in one college class in 1985. Man, this guy just loves writing articles whose headlines could basically all just be: "Why I Am So Very Smart, Part XIV". Tl dr: Psychographics are supposed to help the Magic designers ensure that as many people as possible enjoy the game, and this article spends a lot of words to not actually cover why they don't help do that. You can't map the difference between a Johnny brain and a Spike brain. No, they're not rigorous scientific definitions. If a lot of players talk about themselves as Johnnies or Timmies, that means the psychographics are helpful. They're rough sketches designed to make it easier to talk about different groups of players. Throughout this whole article I couldn't shake the feeling that he desperately wanted to prove the psychographics flawed without considering why there were used in the first place. "It’s just more fun, in my view, to try my best and be genuinely challenged." is basically the battle cry of the spike. What? That's literally the definition of a spike. The most hilarious thing is to say that he's not a spike because he has fun being competitive and playing against other people who are being competitive. He seems totally opposed to the notion that perhaps the idea of Timmy started as a rough sketch and then changed over the years as more experience and more data filled out a more complete profile of that sort of player. The thrust of the Timmy argument seems to be "The definition now is different from the definition in 1996, therefore everything Mark Rosewater says is lies." He also seems convinced that this revision is totally unscientific. Second, the second half seems obsessed with proving that continual evolution of a concept is proof of inherent flaws rather than increased understanding over time. If you remove all the players from the equation, I think you'll find those people 'just cracking packs to sell them' stop doing that pretty damn quick. It is foolish to separate the act of purchasing from the act of using unless you wish to contend that most product goes unused. Who do you think they sell those singles to Mr. "Mostly people cracking packs to sell singles!" "Psychographics are about why people buy things, but MaRo is making it about players!" First thing, the odd decision to decide that these aren't real psychographics on the grounds that players of Magic are a wholly separate group from buyers of Magic:
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