Do Demographics & Psychographics Matter in Design?
Yes.
It started with a simple question from my sister (as these things often do). Who is your ideal gamer? I honestly hadn’t given it much thought. I figured that I could put my game out into the world; the people who like it would like it, and they would tell their friends about it, who would then tell their friends about it. I figured that facebook’s algorithm would do the heavy ad lifting, and that I could rely on our newly commissioned artwork to catch peoples' eye.
In some sense I was right. If you create the things that you love, there will be other people out there who will love them too.
But, I was also being lazy. There are 120,000 board games on Board Game Geek. They run the gamut from loud party games, to quiet crunchy puzzles; from print and plays to big-box-miniature experiences. Player preferences are varied. Backgrounds are diverse.
I thought that since my game is about squirrels, none of this really mattered.
But, as often happens, I fell down the rabbit hole anyway. And, I am walking away with a bit of a deeper perspective. On some level I was already familiar with a lot of the concepts I am about to share – I am a long time follower of Mark Rosewater and so knew about player archetypes, I’ve read posts and articles about inclusivity in media. But, there is still a lot that I learned; a lot that I still need to learn, some questions I hope to answer, and some hard questions that I don’t have an answer for.
So, let’s dive in. This is organized in four parts:
Player psychographics and archetypes – what people like in a board game
Demographics – who plays board games
How demographics inform psychographics
My takeaways – implications for board game design and publication
As always, I am figuring all this out as I go, so buckle up, and shoot me an e-mail with any thoughts, concerns, and further reading.
Player Preference Clusters & Psychographics
In 2002 Mark Rosewater (head designer of Magic: The Gathering) introduced the idea of player archetypes into the public domain (the idea of player archetypes had been around internally at Wizards of the Coast since at least the mid-late 1990s). The overarching idea is that player motivations vary and tend to cluster:
Timmy/Tammy: Whether it is casting big fat creatures, tinkering with interesting decks, or forcing their opponents’ hand, Timmy/Tammy is after the visceral experience of playing more than the competitive element.
Social gamers: thrive on the social aspect of the game.
Power gamers: want to cast big game altering effects.
Diversity gamers: look for varied decks and formats.
Adrenaline gamers: are gamblers at heart who like unpredictable outcomes and chance.
Griefers: derive pleasure from preventing other players from having fun/executing their plans.
Johnny/Jenny: use the game as a form of creative expression. Yes they want to win, but they want to win in style, on their own terms.
Combo players: searches for unusual, difficult or hard to assemble combos.
Offbeat designers: pushes the deck design envelope to the extreme trying to build a coherent deck under difficult constraints.
Deck artists: use the game as a form of expression. Their decks might represent a specific tribe, or broad cultural theme.
Doer of the undoable: tries to achieve the unachievable through gameplay.
Spike: likes to win, and thrives on the challenge of outsmarting, out-thinking and out-maneuvering their opponent.
Innovators: try and create the next dominant strategy.
Tuners: like tuning and tweaking, and optimizing strategies (min/maxers).
Analysts: focus on beating the meta game and overall environment.
Nuts & Bolts: focus on perfecting their own gameplay.
It is important to keep in mind, that most players are hybrids of two or more archetypes. Beyond that, even within the psychographics there are meaningful variations in player motivations. A Johnny who enjoys playing a specific theme (elves, or dragons), might not enjoy complicated combos. Despite that these offer good signposts for design.
Wizards of the Coast separately delineate player aesthetic profiles as:
Mel: who value the mechanical elegance and interaction within a game.
Vorthos: who value flavor – art, lore, world building and storytelling.
It is unclear to me how much of Wizards of the Coast’s player profiles were driven by statistical analysis, versus experience and intuition.
Quantic Foundry is a data driven marketing consulting firm for the gaming industry. While their focus appears to be mostly on video games, they have a survey with 90,000 participants in which they look at board game player preferences. They identify four clusterings of player preferences.
It is worth checking out their survey and full explanation of terms.
There are a number of feasible methods for constructing these groupings – and without the underlying data it is impossible for us to know how strong the clustered relationships are and how much lower the incidence is of non-clustered pairs.
For instance, the Conflict + Social Manipulation pair is unintuitive to me. In my experience, games often pair high player Conflict with a heavy focus on Strategy – Chess for instance has no Social Manipulation or hidden information, but is high in both Strategy and Conflict (players directly destroy opposing pieces).
Despite the limitations of not having the underlying data, the conclusions Quantic provides are still illuminating. Strategy driven gamers enjoy cognitive challenges. They tend to also enjoy Discovery (exploring rules sets and mechanics), and tend to be more competitively oriented (high Need to Win).
For reference here is my player preference chart.
I enjoy Conflict (direct player interaction), but dislike the political elements of games. I enjoy strategic puzzles, exploring mechanics (and designs), and am competitive. I enjoy immersion and good artwork. 98% of gamers enjoy party games more than me.
If we map my preferences onto the Wizards of the Coast player archetypes, I am a Spike, with a lesser leaning into being a Johnny. That is I am competitive, but also value expressing myself through gaming and exploring games strategically and thematically. This ties out with my personal experience with Magic: The Gathering, and broader board gaming preferences.
I will get more into potential applications of psychographics & demographics to design later (down below).
Demographics
Analog Games put out an excellent review of board game demographics and how they relate to gender, sex, and race. The long-short of it is that there is substantial over representation of white males in player demographics, art, game content, and among designers, and illustrators.
I am not going to open the can of worms here about why inclusivity is important – and why it makes the hobby healthier, and more vibrant. If you aren’t on board with that in 2021, then it is probably a choice, more than not having access to the right information. I unequivocally support board games companies using cultural consultants, and collaborating with own voices creators.
I think as creators we should make a concerted effort to be more inclusive in design and more honest about our limitations and internal biases. In 2016 Wizards of the Coast introduced the first black woman planeswalker (Magic the Gathering’s super-hero and super-villain main characters). Kaya is a certified badass with a mysterious past. She is roguish, can make herself partially incorporeal, and can even kill ghosts. She is awesome and beloved, not just by female POC gamers, but by the vast majority of magic card players more broadly.
To help with character design, WOTC hired Monique Jones, a POC entertainment journalist. Here is an excerpt from Kaya’s introductory story into the world of Magic: The Gathering:
Kaya lit a candle, yawned, and splashed her face with water from a basin. She rolled out the building plans and studied them one last time, humming an old ballad and unwinding the knots she’d put her hair in to sleep.
As a white male, I had no idea that many black women sleep with their hair in knots or twists to prevent tangling. The inclusion of that little detail not only made Kaya more relatable for an entire demographic, but made the world more real and vivid and honest for everyone who read the story. It is a great example of approaching the subject of inclusivity right, and is a humbling reminder that no matter our intentions if we are not part of a group then we are poorly equipped to write, create, and design characters within that group - without outside help. There is nothing wrong (and in fact a lot right) with finding the right people to help in that creative process.
Beyond characterization, Wizards of the Coast did a lot right in game design surrounding Kaya. They made her character mechanically unique, and on par in terms of power level with strong male and white characters. Instead of just making a character that a demographic can identify with, players can celebrate that character, through the lore and game mechanics.
When the cost of inclusivity is so low, and the benefits so high, it seems like a no brainer that we should design for inclusivity. But what responsibility do we have beyond design?
I have a few moral and ethical questions surrounding inclusivity that I think are worth thinking about and mentioning:
No matter our goals and aspirations for the industry, the current demographic skew of board game players is male and white. As publishers, what responsibility do we have in marketing to try and broaden the gamer demographic, versus marketing to the existing consumer base?
There are plenty of modern games that are problematic either white washing modern or historical settings or even glorifying colonialism. On the other hand, a lot of games are true to their historical and thematic context, but when taken in aggregate lead to an over-representation of whites. For instance, two of my favorite games are based in 1) an alternate history of Eastern Europe, and 2) a historical medieval European city. The games almost exclusively depict white characters. They are excellent games, and as far as I can tell, are true to their themes/historical context. While it isn’t an issue or problem with any individual game – the summation of games in these settings results in a lack of diversity and representation. This raises the question: to what extent as designers do we have a responsibility to seek out themes that can be more inclusive?
The Intersection of Demographics & Psychographics
I have a budding curiosity for the intersection of demographics and psychographics. Not just race and gender, but gamer preferences and behavior and how it correlates with psychographic profiles.
The best data I could find on the topic comes from Quantic Foundry. Of the 90,035 gamers they surveyed (as of April 2017), 21% provided Board Game Geek user names. We can assume this is a subset of a more enfranchised player base with greater interest in exploring and comparing games.
The primary motivator among BGG gamers was Discovery, with an incidence of 2x the overall population:
Quantic had a number of other interesting takeaways surrounding player motivations by age and gender:
Younger gamers have a greater Need to Win motivation.
Female gamers have a higher relative preference for Social Fun [+10%], Accessibility [+8%], and Chance [+3%] (compared to males)
Male Gamers have a higher relative preference for Discovery [+7%], Conflict [+6%], and Strategy [+5%] (compared to females)
Non-Binary gamers have a higher relative preference for Immersion [+6% vs male / +7% vs female]
Both men and women have high Need to Win as a primary motivator:
Some anecdotal (and loose quantitative correlation) also shows gender based gaming preferences. For instance Stonemaier games saw a doubling of the portion of survey respondents that were women to 17.9% in the 2019 survey. Jamey Stegmaier posits that this was due to the popularity of their game Wingspan. From the publisher:
Last year, 9.6% of respondents were female, but this year that number nearly doubled to 17.9%. While there are various reasons this could be, my biggest guess is that Wingspan appears to be far more popular to women than our other games. For example, 30% of the members of the Wingspan Facebook group are women, compared to 9% in the Scythe group.
[Aside: I wonder how much this is due to mechanical preference versus thematic preference.]
I would be interested in better understanding some of these relationships. Quantic provides primary motivation, but doesn’t give us color on secondary and tertiary motivations. I would also be interested in better understanding consumer behavior and psychographics. Are immersion motivated gamers more likely to participate in big-box-miniature kick starters, or do they prefer roll and writes and rpgs? Do social fun motivated gamers have a different maximum price point than discovery gamers?
Applications to Design, Development & Publishing
I am not an established designer with a long track record of hit games – all of this is my casual reasoning and should be viewed through that lens. Come up with your own takeaways, and don’t take my advice as expert. With that said, these are my thoughts:
Design with intention: When designing game mechanics, or playtesting and tweaking rules it is important to imagine what player you are designing for. Pushing the game into a competitive cut throat space will appeal to a different player type than a crunchy cooperative puzzle.
Not all mechanic pairings are natural fits: While unusual pairings can work (Codenames is heavy on Strategy and a raucous Social game), some pairings are more natural fits.
Not every game is for every player: Player preferences implies that there are player aversions. It is ok if someone doesn’t like your design. And it is important to know where feedback is coming from. Playtest feedback from someone with your target preferences is a lot more meaningful than feedback from someone who not only hates your lightweight party game, but also hates all lightweight party games.
Signaling through design: Some games seem to intentionally eschew specific design elements – crunchy euros often have tan, plain artwork. This might be an intentional (or unintentional) signaling that the game is a heavy crunchy puzzle. By signaling a lower aesthetic/immersive level they imply higher focus on other preference areas.
Representation matters: We need to be conscious of representation throughout the conception and design process. Not every game needs a full cast of characters, but accurate and equitable representation should be something that all of us as designers think about.
Finding the right people: When you finish the Quantic survey it gives you the option to see games that similar preferenced gamers rate highly. This is an awesome tool and concept. Rather than just comparing mechanical elements, or thematic elements, we can look for gamers whose preferences align with what our games offer. I’ll be thinking a lot more about how to engage with people who have psychographics aligning with my designs.
There is a lot to unpack with all of this, and a lot more information that I wish I had access to. I’ll be putting together a survey for Reddit & Facebook, with the goal of digging a little deeper into some of these trends, particularly looking at the intersection of demographics and psychographics. Stay tuned for any interesting results.
Resources & Links
Qauntic Foundry: Board Game Preference Survey & Articles
Analog Games: Assessing Gender and Racial Representation in the Board Game Industry
Cardboard Republic - Gender Representation in Cover Art, Gamer Archetypes
Gil Hova: How Many Women…?
Isaac Childres: Frost Haven Update #80 - Cultural Consulting in Fantasy Games
Daily Worker Placement: Survey Results #1: Who Are We?
Meeple Mountain: Who’s at the Table? Board Game Players and Communities
Board Game Geek Blogpost by Oliver Kiley: Schools of Design and Their Core Priories
Monique Jones: Magic: The Gathering
