I’ve become intrigued recently with the possibility of a ‘bromance novel,’ an epic adventure story packed with camaraderie and bustling with tales of teeth-grinding late-night Xbox 360 marathons, sniper-like displays of pinpoint party beer-pong prowess, expert wingsmanship like geese in V-formation – but who would be my object of affection? We have ourselves some options. If we were in the ‘States, of course, the answer would be easy: no ‘bro is more ‘bro-fic than Cody Peck, the man, the mystery, Stealer of Giant Inflatable Polar-Bears, Entrancer of Elderly Ladies, Ignorer of Virtually All Chronometric Devices. Here in Malaysia, though, I’m torn. Behind door number one stands Johan Jamal, the Human Megaphone, whose mighty bellows reverberate so loudly you can actually see those little translucent ripple-effects you thought were the stuff of Saturday cartoons. Or do we go with Nazri ‘Tech’ Ishak, a.k.a. Batman, who extricated me from a stolen-wallet situation with the deft efficiency of a Secret Service agent, whose car has always been available and whose chats have always entertained. Flanking those two are 2002 Scottish National Champion Nik Nadzru Iskandar, proud owner of what has got to be the only cowboy hat owned by a male in all of Malaysia, and Rizal Hamzah, who for lack of more creative metaphors has got to be one of the sharpest, most polished, on-top-of-his-game-and-oh-yeah-also-life human beings on the planet. I’m torn.
In the end, though, one individual stands out most of all. I am perhaps biased, in that I have engaged in exponentially more bro-age with this phoenix-tattooed cigarette-huffing perpetually-hair-tousled copyrighter than with any of the other eligible bachelors. Half ragged-Borneo-headhunter, half culturally-refined pastry-baking Frenchie, Mr. Rudolph “Like the Reindeer, yeah, wow, nobody’s ever made that connection before, you’re kinda clever, what’s your name again?” Christopher La Faber wins the 2008 award for Object of Hypothetical Genre Fiction. Claps, yays, and confettis, all around now please.
I mention all of this only because Rudy is also a Creative, capitol C, yes I’d prefer it that way. An ad-man. Thinker. Whiskey on the job for inspiration. I’m at work, can’t talk, playing Nintendo Wii. And he means it. Rudy takes his creativity seriously, analytically, rarely branches far from the subject of how to think better, harder, and longer. It pays off. Not only is the man sick at his job, I find myself being drawn into a field I care about little and understand even less. Advertising, I mean. How to sell. How to brand. How to hook a customer. And once you get me interested, well – I mean, I can’t afford to do it badly!
In our frequent talks about thinking, executing, advertising, the conversation naturally veers to Magic. We both agree that there is tremendous room for expansion of the brand – not only in terms of penetration within its existing customer base, but more broadly with its definition of its base to begin with.
What sparked this article was an examination of the psychological framework that drives a person to become a Magic player. It’s inspired as much by these conversations as it is by a photo album Anna posted showing the entire Rhodes College Mock Trial team doing battle with one another across formats, little Magic-card collages framing yards-tall trophies, art gracing whiteboard in fluorescent sharpie, the brows of sharply-dressed brunettes furrowed over a Fact or Fiction. The phenomenon swept the team in a matter of weeks. But why? The entire community is served by people fostering and making possible these mini-epidemics, by the current player base thinking creatively about who might respond to a brief tutorial. More broadly, I hope this type of thinking might expand our conception of the existing definition of a ‘gamer,’ might incorporate elements that appeal to a more expansive array of competitive pursuits. Magic may never become properly mainstream – though that’s another argument, I suppose – but I do think the imagined ‘market’ that most people try to target is fundamentally flawed.
Communities
I’ve had the fortune, now, to be a part of three tremendously different communities of gamers over the last year: in Memphis, in Madison, and now in Malaysia. It’s provided a pretty thorough cross-section, I imagine, of the types of people that archetypically flock to competitive gaming. Each region tends to be populated with a certain type of person, for whatever reason, and in fact what provides hope to me that the ‘unexplored’ psychographic profile I intend to highlight in this article is a viable target for a marketing campaign is that its members occupy basically an entire region (namely, Memphis, and the South more generally). Here in Malaysia, we tend to have crossovers from fans of the typical fantasy/comic-book genre. The extent to which they’ve been drawn to Magic by virtue of their existing affinity for similar genres is unknown to me, of course. I wasn’t there when they started. But virtually every player with whom I’m familiar in KL also reads comic books, is a fan of fantasy and sci-fi, and is eagerly anticipating with both literal and figurative nail-biting the release of the film ‘The Watchmen.’ There is a significant video-gamer overlap, as well, one that was probably more prominent when the community as a whole was younger, but the overwhelming correlation seems to be a penchant for genre environments.
Madison, by contrast, tends to draw Gamers. I want to emphasize, of course, that elements from the last segment tend to be present as well. It’s not like no one reads comic books. But the unifying thread that tends to tie the community together is their eagerness to game, and to do it across virtually every medium. I’ve discussed social gaming at length with more than one person, and in any given shop you’re likely to find people Racing for the Galaxy, Settling Catan, chopping heads in Guillotine, and potentially even scattering monochrome confetti over a Goh board. I have wracked my brain over bocce ball (Kowal might be the nut teammate). I have devised competitive forms of catch. I mean, this is the community where an organized multi-vehicular race across the city with legal constraints as a mere afterthought is not only possible, but routine. Obviously, this kind of community manifests itself within the Magic scene in different ways, across different levels of competitiveness and different levels of continued interest (you’re going to find more total Pro Points earned out of Madison than Malaysia, for example). But you’re going to have to appeal to that community in a very different way than you’re going to target the type of community that exists here. Again, there is overlap of course. Basically everyone thinks that Nicol Bolas or Progenitus are awesome. But you’re not going to get Sam Black with, for example, something like Unmake*. You’re going to have to work harder than that.
At first I didn’t think the Memphis community was particularly unique – but bear in mind that’s where I’ve lived my entire life, so I didn’t have any real frame of reference. When I moved to Madison, I recognized elements from the community there that presented in Memphis, also, but thought they could exist within the same category. Now, though, I recognize that there are enough differences between this archetype and the rest that they merit their own examination.
First, I’m going to highlight a conversation I had with the aforementioned Cody Peck, who has just recently leapt back into the game more or less full-speed-ahead**, just to give you some firsthand evidence of the type of appeal we’re looking for. “You want the tourney crowd,” he said, “because it’s marketable to other groups – people who play chess, people who play poker. Less fantasy and more mind. Magic has so much depth, and so many layers, and it’s all focused around WINNING [caps his] which is the most desirable part about it for me. I loved practicing basketball because I was always getting better, and therefore had a better chance of winning. If there is no point in winning because it’s ‘just fun,’ then I lose interest. I don’t play ‘Candy Land’ for a reason. Magic is like a sport, because you have to keep getting better, and it’s been around a long time, and it’s not going anywhere. Unlike something like World of Warcraft, which has been really successful, but not as successful as football, basketball, baseball, or even chess. There’s a reason to improve at it.”
I’m not highlighting what he said to give validity to the assertions, necessarily, but rather to show what this type of player is looking for. The desires Cody expresses here, the reasons he gives to play Magic, I feel are pretty typical of your average Memphis player. In fact, the sports analogies are very apt in another respect: almost every single one of the prominent Memphis gamers either played in competitive sports at the high-school or college level, or currently works in a relatively-competitive performance-related industry (academia, law, etc). Furthermore, many of us are extremely apt social gamers – we love throwing parties, hosting events, expanding networks, and all the rest. These are born, I feel, from the same genesis as what drives Madison to play all kinds of proper games. The difference, I think, are the avenues through which that desire manifests itself. Whether through lack of interest or through simple lack of exposure, your typical Memphis gamer chooses to ‘game’ at life.
I don’t mean that to imply anything grandiose. I simply mean that the avenues through which people typically express the tendency to game are broadened substantially within the Memphis community. When I say the “tendency to game,” I mean whatever psychological framework exists in people that makes them want badly to maximize their own performance within a given set of rules. And this is my thesis, I suppose: it’s important to realize these motivations, because it works both ways.
This makes sense if you think about it. Take, for example, a lawyer. Your corporate infinite-hour-day desk-sitting type, or even a litigator. The standard rationale might be that someone who spends that much time with neurons firing doesn’t want to spend their time off doing more thinking and more brain-wracking, instead wanting that time off to be, well, time off. In my experience, though, that’s not how it works at all. The same desires that fueled that choice of career path existed in all likelihood before that person ever made the choice to go to law school. They liked to figure things out, be correct, succeed. And that doesn’t change just because someone leaves work at five (or six or nine) o’clock. What Magic offers is an alternative outlet for those similar desires, and I think we really need to capitalize on that. A similar rationale applies to current-or-former athletes, maybe even more so. Unless someone is really good, he or she probably does not intend to make a living off their sport – or even if they do, not everyone’s going to get there. More often, people play sports to satisfy some sort of competitive hunger. But the reality is that after that person graduates the stable and consistent athletic structures of high school and college, it’s much more difficult to satiate that drive. Semi-competitive adult leagues exists, of course, for a whole variety of things, but it’s not as omnipresent or socially rewarding as it is when it’s integrated into your everyday environment. Yet those competitive urges continue to linger. Magic has such a perfect opportunity to spread in that situation. Not only can you compete on a more widespread and in many ways more legitimate scale, you can actually make money for it. Or, even more marketably: ever wanted to travel***?
The thing to realize is that traditional pro-gamer advertising is actively not appealing to this group of people, largely because of gamer-stigma. They are socially competitive for the same reasons they are professionally, academically, or athletically competitive, and while I have written about how ridiculous buying into gamer-stigma is in the past, it’s a burden you don’t want to have to fight to overcome. Particularly when this market possesses more mainstream appeal to, for example, a parent who is trying to decide whether it’s okay for their child to take up this game with the weird pictures. Poker has successfully penetrated the mainstream, in part, because it manages to successfully avoid the insanely boring/nerdy ‘real life’ of many of its supposed stars. Part of the reason, I think, that I never really felt self-conscious about playing Magic is that it wasn’t weird, for example, to host a “draught draft draft****” in the middle of a bar. Or to have my ‘Magic friends’ at parties with my friends from other avenues of life. Because, in many ways, the groups aren’t really, fundamentally dichotomized. I like driven, successful people, however they enter into my life.
The point, then, is this: I think Magic would be well-served by an advertising campaign, or a broader shift in tone, directed at people for whom competition is a regular part of their daily experience. This drive for competition finds a ready outlet in even non-competitive Magic. I have met Magic players that are army snipers, prom kings, Division I athletes, members of successful hip-hop acts, DJs, doctors, lawyers, bankers, captains of their cheerleading squad in high school (and no, not dudes), programmers, poker-players, painters, and sure, literal thirty-year-old unemployed males who literally live in their parents’ literal basement. What I’m increasingly realizing is that ‘potential Magic-player’ is too broad of a category to really be able to construct conceptions about who fits, identity-wise, into that box. Rather, it’s an interest¬-based, and even beyond that a motivation-based, psychographic, and we should start exploring the possibilities that such a conception enables.
Zac
* Unmake, to me, is one of the most successful cards that Wizards has ever designed. It’s extremely cool, flavorful, and evocative. It’s tournament-playable and allows mono-White to do something, categorically, that it hasn’t been able to do in a very long time. But it does all of this without actually being particularly good, in the scope of things. Or maybe I should rephrase that: it seems a whole lot better than it actually is. This means you get to generate all kind of cool points and sell a whole lot of cards – at common, no less, so the ‘wow factor’ is pretty frequent – without having to creep power or bend the poles of formats beyond acceptability.
** And just to reaffirm the viability of this seemingly-small community, I’ll point out that FNMs at “Tall Mike” Rodieck’s store draw 30-40 people on average. Tall Mike is a master on the level of Madison maestro Steve Port, so that’s a draw no doubt, but this is still a pretty good turnout for a city with several different game stores. And Magic in Memphis has been spread more or less word-of-mouth by a very small community of players, with virtually no top-down input whatsoever! But, crucially, the community in Memphis also consists of what Cody dubbed ‘competent-looking’ people, which to me is also great marketing for the game. This is also, incidentally, one of the reasons I advocate putting Martin Juza in front of the camera whenever possible. He’s funny, he’s good, he always has a huge grin on his face, and he’s always presentable. Your first thought is “I could chill with this guy.” And having talked to some of the journalists covering Worlds in Memphis, you want this type of image to run alongside your column.
*** This is one of the reasons that I thought ‘Play the Game, See the World’ was so effective.
**** I may have mentioned this before, but: you assign two captains to draft, playground-kickball-style, a 3v3 team. You then booster-or-cube-draft. Losing team buys winning team drinks for the night. Then continue with a good night out at the pub as normal.