The Psychographic Profile of your Ideal Consumer

We’re signing our first game (working title SIGIL) and as part of that process are working with a product developer. He does packaging, logo, and overall brand design with a pretty impressive client list. We’re bringing him on is to help us develop a cohesive vision for the game – that will flow through the artwork, graphic design, and how we present it to the world.

That is, we hope that by doing the vision work upfront, it will make the product more cohesive, and the process ultimately easier.

It’s a new experience for me, and in a lot of ways is eye opening. For the first time I’ve been asked to think about what the weight of a font signals to our consumers and a slew of questions about our demographic target: age, gender, family status, and blood type.

But, most importantly, I get to re-visit one of my favorite topics: gamer psychographics.

Psychographics

Psychographics or gamer motivations are what drive us to play board games - they are our player preferences. Some players are competitive, some are cooperative. Some value a deep level of immersion, some want to min-max a spreadsheet of stats.

Psychographics often cluster into player archetypes. In Magic the Gathering these are the Timmy/Tammys or social gamers, the Johnny/Jennys who are exploratory and creative in their gaming, and the Spikes who value winning at any cost.

Obviously, these aren’t clean delineations, and there is a lot more nuance to explore. If you want to delve deeper, I wrote an article exploring psychographics and gamer archetypes.

One of my favorite tools for thinking though psychographics is Quantic Foundry’s player motivation profiles tool.

Player Motivations

Quantic Foundry is one of the leading consulting firms in the board game and video game space. They do substantive research into demographics, player motivations, and all sorts of other cool stuff. After you take their survey, you get a cool chart like this.

My psychographic profile

It tells you how your motivations compare to others. For instance, my profile is super low on social manipulation. I tend to dislike diplomacy, and bluffing type games. Whereas I enjoy strategic depth, discovering new games and mechanics, immersion, and conflict.

Being Unscientific

I decided to re-take my player motivation profile imagining that I am the ideal consumer of our upcoming games: Nut Hunt, and SIGIL. That is, I tried to take the survey imagining that each of these games is the perfect game that completely aligns with my preferences.

Nut Hunt “Target Gamer” Profile

Nut Hunt is a light-hearted networks game (think Ticket to Ride), but with a fox that roams around the board causing general chaos. There is a material amount of strategy in it, but the strategic depth is sometimes along the lines of playing the odds, rather than making a deterministic move.

SIGIL “Target Gamer” Profile

SIGIL is a two player dueling game that feels like Go but with magic. While it has a real flavor, the mechanics are more abstract, it’s high in conflict, you’re jockeying for position, and maneuvering around your opponent. It’s the kind of game that I would expect competitive Magic: the Gathering Players, anyone who likes Onitama, Hive, or Chess to really enjoy.

Putting it all together

The exercise isn’t perfect. We all experience games differently, and our own preferences will show in how we experience a game. But, I think it is an interesting exercise that can help us better understand the underlying driving forces within our games, and allow us to better identify our ideal target audience. And maybe it will tell us something about our games, and ourselves that we hadn’t realized.

What tools do you use to better understand your target audience?