Community

see also "Split Second"

(mechanics that look awesome at first glance to Timmy, but actually just restrict something you can normally do, giving Spike the challenge of finding a workaround)

Dec 16, 2010 -- 9:59PM, notthephonz wrote:

You know, I've always felt that the description of Timmy as the player "who wants to experience something" was rather vague.  Isn't it the point of the psychographics to indicate what kind of experience each type of player wants?  Johnny wants the experience of self-expression and Spike wants the experience of dominating his opponents.  According to Kelly Digges's article, Timmy encompasses at least four different motivations: power gaming, social gaming, diversity gaming, and adrenalin gaming.  I'm having trouble coming up with a common factor that describes these four motivations without also applying to Johnny and Spike.

"An emotional thrill"; easy.  Johnny and Spike are intellectual archetypes (though Spike also has a strong visceral component which could be regarded as emotional depending on how you view it); Timmy is all about how the game makes him feel.  As Tom wisely says, Timmy wouldn't play Magic if he wanted to avoid thinking, but he's not in it TO think per se; that's a means to an end, and the end is to see something awesome happen.

Dec 16, 2010 -- 10:38PM, SnowFire wrote:

"but it adds invisibly to the deep fractal texture of the game that keeps him playing year after year."

OBJECTION.  What does fractal even mean here?!  Sigh.  I realize we aren't all math geeks here, but we've all read Jurassic Park, right?  Fractal does not just mean "complex!"  You...  can sort of say that Magic is fractal because many simple effects combine to create weird and unknown situations, and similar starting hands can result in dramatically different play from game to game or something, but... ack.  Let's go with that.  At least that makes a modicum of sense.

In truth I'm really posting here more to vent about an old article (it was either Savor the Flavor or a Feature Article) that introduced Scars of Mirrodin, and talked about how both the Mirrans and Phyrexians were artifact-loving blue / blue-black types with "fractally complex designs" or something for their machines.  Which was far more rage-inducing, as fractals = chaos, and nature, so if fractals have a home it's in Green / Red.  Nobody designs a television or a robot like a fractal; the shore of the sea or the motion of the stock market over time is more what fractals are about, where seemingly random motions combine to make something cool.

So.  Uh.  Fractals are awesome!  Please reference them!  Please try to do so in a way that's relevant to fractal-like events, though!  Rant over.

Fractals do NOT mean chaos; quite the opposite.  A fractal is a mathematical pattern which continually repeats itself on larger and larger scales; it's practically the definition of order.  A Mandelbrot image may look chaotic to us, and has often been used to portray chaos in comic books and the like, but that's just the work of our perspective.  Fractals are indeed extremely fitting for Mirrodin; I think it was stated in the original M-block books that Karn designed Argentum with a mathematically perfect fractal landscape.

Dec 16, 2010 -- 11:14PM, willpell wrote:

Fractals do NOT mean chaos; quite the opposite.  A fractal is a mathematical pattern which continually repeats itself on larger and larger scales; it's practically the definition of order.  A Mandelbrot image may look chaotic to us, and has often been used to portray chaos in comic books and the like, but that's just the work of our perspective.  Fractals are indeed extremely fitting for Mirrodin; I think it was stated in the original M-block books that Karn designed Argentum with a mathematically perfect fractal landscape.

Right, self-similarity is the key element of a fractal, which can reasonably be interpreted as a type of order.  That said, the best fractal Magic card is Green: Chameleon Colossus !

Dec 16, 2010 -- 11:16PM, notthephonz wrote:

Here is a pre-emptive disclaimer: I identify as a Johnny/Spike, but pretty much all my friends are Timmies.  I'm particularly interested in getting an accurate definition for Timmy because I want to understand my friends' motivations better.

Then ask your friends.  They are individuals first and Timmies second; they can describe their motivations better than I or Mark Rosewater can.

That's the thing; from Spike's perspective, victory is an emotional thrill.

That's the "visceral" I mentioned; I regard primal drives like the urge to dominate a rival as being distinct from emotions, but this is admittedly dubious of me.

That's why I feel that saying Timmy is after an "experience" or an "emotional thrill" is vague.  All of the psychographics want to see something awesome happen, it's just that they have different ideas of what constitutes awesome.  I'm looking for some kind of way to describe Timmy's awesomeness that doesn't apply to Johnny or Spike.

Well don't believe the people who say it's always about big creatures, because that's just one manifestation.  "Fun" is more accurate, but subject to the same definitional fiddliness as "awesome".  I don't enjoy being unable to play a card I like because it's not good enough to compete, therefore I'm more Timmy and less Spike than someone who just uses whatever works.

It's frustrating to always be told by my Timmy friends that I'm taking the game too seriously and not having fun.  Sometimes I worry that they're right.  The intimacy of reading an opponent is the emotional thrill that I'm looking for, but I'm not quite sure it's the same thing my friends mean when they talk about "fun."  And to make things worse, I often lose sight of being competitive and instead become obsessed with defeating the opponent.

Yeah, you're definitely no Timmy based on that description.  Maybe not a Spike either exactly, based on the last sentence; my old pal Losenas called himself a Spike and repeatedly emphasized that he wasn't into winning at any cost, but into testing himself to improve his play.  But Timmy doesn't want to take the game seriously; he wants to relax, bash with giant monsters, play spells that flip a coin or otherwise do something unpredictable, eat chips and laugh at jokes, and generally hang out and have a good time.  Investing the weight of a win/lose dilemma into something that's "just a game" is not one of his interests; he probably plays the game to get away from that level of pressure.

Regarding the intellectualness of Timmy compared to the other psychographics--when I looked back at Kelly's article, I glanced at the discussion thread.

Keep in mind Kelly is not the original or final definer of the psychographics.  The closest thing to a definitive authority is MaRo, although even he is prone to a certain degree of self-blindness, much to the dismay of players who think he's typing them wrong.  Read all the articles dedicated to figuring out what the psychographics are, believe half of what you read, and above all remember that your friends are people and people are freaking' complex.  Any system that divides them into three boxes is going to be imperfect and then some.