Stumbled across an old article about Magic player types. The writer is a Magic designer who uses the marketing technique of psychographics. Interesting. He wrote:

In one of my advertising classes, I stumbled onto a neat little tool called a psychographic profile. The idea of a psychographic profile is that by isolating different personality traits and behaviors you can understand what motivates a particular type of person to act in a certain way. In advertising, psychographic profiles are used to understand what motivates people to buy a particular item versus another. But the field of psychographics has advanced over the years and is now used to help in all sorts of fields. Why not game design?

Which are three different distinct types:, the social Timmy, the ‘look at my special deck’-Johnny and the powergamer/ analyst Spike. A good read. I’m sure we can translate it to wargamers: social types, look-at-my-shiny-painting-types and tactical players/rule analysts. Which type or subtype are you? Read the full blog here.