Mark Rosewater is an American game designer best known for being the head designer for the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering, a position he’s held since 2003. He writes a column called “Making Magic” where he gives a behind-the-scenes look on how Magic cards are made. Around 2002, he wrote an article titled “Timmy, Johnny, and Spike”, in which he explained three psychographic profiles that Wizards of the Coast uses when developing their products. If their goal is to make “something for everybody”, then these are the “everybodies” they have in mind.
(By the way, a psychographic profile is just a fancy term for saying “let’s apply statistics to our market research to put them into convenient groups.“)
A Timmy (or Tammy) is a player who wants to play socially or “for fun.” They like to use cards with big, impressive effects. They aren’t too worried about winning or losing. You can compare them to Bartle’s Socializers.
A Johnny/Jenny is a player who wants to build complex and creative decks as an exercise in self-expression. They want to use cards with unusual interactions or combos, or come up with ways to make “useless” cards work for them. They want to win, but only if they can win with style. You might compare these to Bartle’s Explorers, or at least the aspect that wants to analyze and manipulate game mechanics.
A Spike is a player motivated by the spirit of competition. They want to become a stronger player, prove how good they are, and outplay their opponents. They focus on trying to win by any means necessary (within the bounds of the game; Spikes aren’t usually cheaters), even if it means relying on decks or strategies developed by others. The push for victory is what gives them the most mental stimulation. You can compare Spikes to Bartle’s Killers.
As with all player classifications, individuals are too complex to fit completely into one of these boxes, but they can be helpful goalposts for design.
Where do Bartle’s Diamonds fit in? Well, the nature of Magic is that you play a game for ten minutes to an hour, then everything resets. There’s no way to accumulate points, complete quests, accrue new spells, and so on just from playing. This is a good example of how analyzing player types from looking at a single game might be misleading.
Over the years, this trio has been extended with a separate “aesthetic profile” to describe what a player appreciates about Magic even when they aren’t playing it. The first of these is Mel, a player who thinks cards with interesting rules interactions are beautiful, who might call things “elegant” or “well-designed” as a term of endearment. The second is Vorthos (first described by Magic artist Matt Cavotta), a player invested in the lore of the Magic world, someone who thinks a card with strong flavor and creative consistency is beautiful. These both roughly correspond to Bartle’s Explorer type, but I think that comparison just reveals that we need a larger vocabulary to talk about this stuff.
It’s good to be familiar with these terms Timmy/Tammy, Johnny/Jenny, and Spike because they often come up in discussions about multiplayer, competitive games. However, it’s important to remember that they are also the product of one company’s market research, rather than any peer-reviewed academic consensus, and the scope of their application may be as limited as “why this person buys Magic: The Gathering products”.
Further Reading
https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Player_type
https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/timmy-johnny-and-spike-2013-12-03
“against timmy, johnny, and spike”, one Magic player’s perspective against the common classifications. (2015) http://blog.killgold.fish/2015/10/against-timmy-johnny-and-spike.html