Gaming is a fun (and sometimes frustrating) hobby that attracts all sorts of different people from a multitude of backgrounds. Some gamers play a little here and there, maybe a few times a week or less, and are perfectly content. Others play games practically 24/7 and become pros almost overnight with whatever game they’re currently obsessed, I mean, currently focused on. And yet others might boot up that one game they like every few weeks just to get a quick fix and then not look at the game for several more weeks. Some of us fine gamers here at Gaming Respawn decided to share exactly what types of gamers we are. Perhaps we’ll find we have more in common with each other than we thought. Or perhaps one of us will have such strange and confounding gaming tendencies that we’ll be ostracized from the rest of the team out of pure disgust (I jest, of course). Join us in “Gaming Respawn’s What Type of Gamer Are You?” and see if you share any of our gaming quirks. Kicking us off is Peter, who suddenly thought of this topic probably during his third or fourth playthrough of God of War or Stellar Blade.
Peter Keen
There are a lot of ways to sit and play video games. A lot of this is defined by the life we lead. You may only have the odd half an hour here or there to sit down or maybe all day. Each person’s situation is different. That can affect how we approach playing games. If you don’t have much time, you want to maximize your enjoyment and can’t stand mediocrity.
I used to most definitely be a “flitter” because of this. I’d constantly flit between games, trying each for a little bit, never really completing many games at all. It’s only when I saw that my gaming shelf was stacked with half-finished games that I realized I needed to be a bit more persistent. So, I then became a “loyalist”. I’d put a game in and not take it out until I’d finished it.
This worked for a while, especially if the game I was sticking with was great, but if it wasn’t, I’d get fidgety and then rush the game to the end. So, I then devised what I call a “duelist” system, where I’d alternate between two games and only those two games until I finished them. That could be a single-player game I’m enjoying with a multiplayer game, or two single-player games.
Playing games this way really helped me complete a lot of previously unfinished games as by not focusing on one solitary game all the time, only every other day, meant I had a thirst to get back to it. So, I would push through both games.
The thing is, I’d love to find that one game, even now, that I could just put in and stay on. It would cost me a lot less, but I still haven’t found it. My daughter, for example, basically lives on just three games: Sky: Children of the Light, Hatsune Miku: Project Diva, and Roblox. I wish I could, even now, find my ONE game. The search continues!
Tasha Quinn
I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about the type of gamer I am, and if I’m being honest, I still don’t really know how to answer the question – mainly because I don’t think I fit any specific gamer archetype. I definitely have a preference for single-player games, particularly RPGs and adventure titles with strong narratives. When I’m gaming, I want to immerse myself in the lore and story.
Competitive multiplayer games just don’t interest me – they never have, and I doubt they ever will. When I do venture into online gaming, it’s usually with a small group of friends and tends to be cooperative rather than competitive. I don’t finish every game I start – I have a tendency to get distracted when a shiny new release comes along – but I think I’ve been getting better at that lately. I usually have a few games on the go at once, typically one on my PC or PlayStation and another on my handheld console, so I can dip in depending on my mood and how much time I have.
Gaming is my hobby, and I work full-time, so I’d say I’m a pretty casual gamer. I like a bit of challenge, but I don’t want to spend the few hours I have after work fighting the same super-hard boss over and over again. I love the feeling when I finally beat that boss, but I just don’t have the time or patience to deal with consistently hardcore gameplay.
Daniel Garcia-Montes
When I first started my gaming journey playing on the Sega Genesis and Game Boy, I quite frankly sucked. I’d play whatever caught my interest and pretty much never beat any of the games I played and would just mindlessly button-mash through everything. I mostly enjoyed the Sonic the Hedgehog and Earthworm Jim games, but the first game I officially beat was Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins. When the original PlayStation came along and absolutely blew me away, I moved on to titles like Crash Bandicoot, Twisted Metal, and Mortal Kombat 3 (good lord, I really sucked at that game), just playing whatever seemed fun and cool. It wasn’t until I played Tenchu: Stealth Assassins and Metal Gear Solid that my interest in gaming became more…“refined”, I should say.
It was those games that got me interested in gaming, and by extension movies and shows, as an interactive storytelling medium. I began to mostly focus on games that had cinematic or immersive qualities to them with engaging narratives. But I also enjoy games that just have kickass gameplay, typically open-world adventure games, RPGs, action games, and a sprinkle of first-person shooters and stealth games. Aside from Metal Gear Solid, some of my favorite games and series that I got into throughout the years include Devil May Cry, God of War, Prince of Persia, Onimusha, Ninja Gaiden, Mass Effect, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor/War, The Witcher 3, Ghost of Tsushima, and the Insomniac Spider-Man games. Others I really enjoyed include Skyrim, Dragon’s Dogma, Doom, Infamous, and the Batman Arkham games. I don’t care for sports games, racing games, survival games, real-time strategy games, or visual novel games. I even avoid fighting games nowadays, even though I enjoyed some of those once upon a time, like Tekken 3 and Dragon Ball Z: Budokai.
I can count on one hand the number of competitive online games I played back in the day (including Metal Gear Online, God of War Online, and Evolve), but now I strictly avoid multiplayer-focused games, they never hold my interest for longer than a few months, and I have no desire to interact with other people during my gaming sessions on top of my already exhausting interactions with them in the real world. I also stay away from games that have so-called “single-player campaigns” that still require an online connection to play. I refuse to waste my hard-earned cash on a game that I likely won’t be able to play 10 years from now once the servers inevitably go down, turning my useless game disc into nothing more than a coaster. Oh yeah, physical media for the win. I won’t buy a game digitally unless that’s the only medium it comes in. Assuming I’m still around in another 20 years and I’m in the mood to play Metal Gear Solid again…nothing will stop me from playing it on my, as of now, still functioning PS2 slim.
As for how many games I play at a time, I typically only play one game at a time given that I no longer have the “gaming stamina” I used to. In my 20s and for most of my 30s, I would sometimes jump between two games at once, and I think I vaguely remember playing three games at a time, but that could just be my memory playing tricks on me. But I almost always make it a point to complete every game in which I decide to invest my time, though there are a small handful of titles I didn’t fully complete during the PS1 and PS2 days. And while I wouldn’t call myself a hardcore gamer, I’m no super casual gamer either. I beat titles like the Nioh games, The First Berserker: Khazan, and even friggin’ Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, so I believe I’ve at least earned the title of “semi-hardcore gamer” or something. Though I pretty much always play games on the default “normal” difficulty and avoid the hard modes. I like to be challenged but not to the point where my gaming becomes a form of self-torture. Plus, it takes me out of the experience when the main hero of a game takes ages to empty out the health bars of even regular enemies and, in turn, gets himself/herself one-shot by those same enemies.
Finally, a former gaming quirk I had in my youth was to replay a whole game series if a new title in said series was about to release. Before Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain released back in 2015, for example, I went back to the first MGS and played through it and every other MGS game that came after that, including Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, as a way to “prepare” for the newest title. However, I tend not to do these whole “replay marathons” anymore, at least not as much as I used to. But before Ninja Gaiden 4 releases in October, I’ve pretty much decided to buy the Ninja Gaiden Master Collection for PS4 and play through all those games first. And I very well might replay Ghost of Tsushima before I get to Ghost of Yotei. We’ll see if I have the stamina (or time) for all that in the coming months.
Will Worrall
When it comes to the type of gamer I am, I have to admit to being something of an achievement-oriented gamer. I’m not exactly what you’d call a completionist, with the number of games I’ve 100%ed countable on a couple of hands, but I just enjoy something about achievements in games. They give you little areas to make extra jokes, they can help you to lead your players to areas that they might not have otherwise seen, and it can give you something extra to work towards once you’ve completed the main campaign.
That said, I also know that I’m a bit all over the place with the games I’m playing. In this past week alone, I’ve played four different games, and I only finished, like, two of them. I think that’s why I’m the sort of gamer who enjoys achievements without being the sort of gamer who commits to actually getting them all.
Beyond that, the key thing that draws me into a video game is the storyline. It can be a tangentially-conveyed story like that which you find in Dark Souls, or a classical narrative like Soul Reaver, but what I’m in gaming for is a good story that is well-told. I’ll even hold on in a game that is otherwise a nightmare if I’ve heard that it does something interesting with its storyline. That’s why I’ve committed myself to playing through the original Pathologic, even though I’ve heard it’s about as fun as kicking yourself in the butt over and over again.
That’s probably the hardest thing to nail down: my preferred genre. I’m a bit weird in that I don’t think there’s been a genre of video game that I haven’t tried and enjoyed at one time or another. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have many games I enjoy in certain genres, but even though I’m unlikely to bust out FIFA or PES, I’m still going to enjoy Super Mario Strikers and World Cup Italia ‘98. For me, the gaming genres are a smorgasbord of different things to try out, so I’ve never quite managed to stick with a handful that I’m overly fond of, outside of minor preferences.
Kyle Moffat
As the years have gone by, I have found myself transitioning in and out of gamer types. Thus, I initially found it difficult to define myself. In my teenage years, I was most certainly a more social gamer, enjoying what I called the ‘Big Four’ games in my friend group (Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto V and whatever Call of Duty or FIFA games were out). In recent years, however, I have prioritised other experiences from playing video games, although I still have a blast playing against my friends on annual renditions of some of the industry’s biggest franchises, coupled with titles such as Mario Kart 8 and Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout.
Since roughly 2021, the number of single-player games I have ventured through has undeniably increased. To name a few favourites: Resident Evil 4, Firewatch, Red Dead Redemption II and God of War: Ragnarök. I find myself today adoring the cinematic, intense experiences all these titles (and many others) have to offer. To get confirmation of the type of gamer I am, I took the Quantic Foundry’s quiz titled “The 9 Quantic Gamer Types” (which you should check out if you’re also intrigued in finding out). This emphasised my beliefs, discussing my enjoyment for highly curated narratives within games alongside my desire to interact with the world as the story progresses. In other words, I was titled a ‘Slayer’. As long as a game provides immersion, balance and an engaging narrative, I can almost guarantee I will enjoy it!
