The game that I think of as being closest to what I want in a video game would be [Sid Meier's] Civilization VI. For me, it hits the sweet spot of the simulation complexity and the ability to grow an empire, to have a plan in your head, to try to understand the system parameters, to optimize for it, and then to just go and build your empire. I think that's what makes me happiest in terms of gaming.—Nick Yee

The co-founder and analytics lead of Quantic Foundry, Nick Yee, wants an empire. In an IRL context, this means positioning the company he co-founded for growth at the intersection of video game analytics and market research. More specifically, the eleven-year-old consultancy, which is based in Sunnyvale, California, brings social science and data science together to analyze what motivates gamers’ behaviors.

Yee was a guest on Player Driven podcast back in February. What follows is partially a summary of that discussion and a partial reframe of what Quantic Foundry does, how it does it, and a what it has planned in 2026.

“When we started Quantic Foundry,” Yee told Player Driven host Greg Posner and me in our podcast two months ago, “we were really interested in this piece of gaming motivations. How are gamers different from each other? Are there different kinds of gamers? What’s the best way to understand and survey and assess those differences?”

“It was kind of like applying a personality psychology lens on top of gamer motivations,” he explained. “That was the starting mission of Quantic Foundry.”

“From that we’ve developed a Gamer Motivation Model. Today, we have over two million gamers who’ve come through and taken our gamer motivation profile. We’ve developed this model with twelve distinct motivations.”

“We’re kind of assessing how much gamers care about teamwork and competition or strategic thinking and planning,” Yee continued. “And we do this at a large scale. We can compare not only gamers against each other but gaming audiences against other gaming audiences, so from a consumer insights perspective.”

An overview of Quantic Foundry’s Gamer Motivation Model, which includes six pairs of behavioral motivations, courtesy of the company.

The Gamer Motivation Model (GMM) was initially released in 2015 and it has grown to become the heart and soul of Quantic Foundry’s business.

As Yee described the consultancy at a high-level, he took a detour into a story that further illuminated the psychology-based motivations that his company tracks, and the types of insights that development studios and publishers can expect from such endeavors.

“We were helping a client understand idle clicker games,” Yee explained to Posner and me. “I can talk about them in public because we’ve blogged about this.”

For the record, idle clickers (aka incremental games) are a subgenre of video games that is focused on simple, repetitive actions that generate in-game resources. These are used to upgrade items and abilities that, in turn, produce more resources. These accumulation and upgrade loops keep escalating from there indefinitely—often at an exponential rate in terms of the time/resource commitments required to advance.

Codename Entertainment “have a game, they have several idle clicker games, like one that’s set in the D&D space,” Yee said.

The studio’s Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms debuted in 2018 on multiple platforms and “uses an RPG [role-playing game] formula but with the idle mechanic,” he clarified.

“We were helping them understand RPG gamers as a whole and one of the things that was interesting to us, too, was when we’re looking into and doing segmentations of RPG gamers it was very clear that, historically, RPGs kind of bundle together two groups of gamers that are kind of very different.”

“There’s more story-inclined players of RPGs,” Yee said, referring to a motivation noted in the figure above. “They care about that grandeur, that grand setting.”

“But there’s always been also this other part of RPG players who were the optimizing min-maxers, who were just trying to optimize their character, and that was most important to them.”

Min-maxing is a strategy some gamers use, both in RPGs and beyond, which involves optimizing a character’s (or a related system’s) strongest attributes while minimizing its weak points, which tends to produce an in-game performance gain.

“One of the things we helped them understand,” Yee elaborated, “was that the people who were playing idle clickers, like Idle Champions, they weren’t actually casual gamers even though the game looks really casual.”

“They’re the people who were always playing RPGs because it was closest to what they wanted, even though it was bundled with story, which they didn’t like, but it was the only kind of game genre that was consistently offering completion plus power, this persistent min-maxing grind.”

“For Codename, the best place for them to find new players for the game was actually in traditional RPGs, like these core RPG gamers who were very completion-power focused.”

An interesting insight there, especially in relation to marketing strategies.

“The thing that we call RPG, that genre was this kind of weird historical accident that brought together a story with strategy and completion and power. But there’s actually distinct player types kind of living within that same space.”

Greg and I turned our attention back to the gamer motivation profile that Yee mentioned. We asked what his own personality test revealed about his motivations.

“I’m very much, like, high on strategy, completion, and power,” Yee answered, grinning. “I’m very much in the turn-based strategy, the tactical RPG space.”

The result: A long-term love affair with Civilization VI.

(Fyi, if you’d like to take or learn more about Quantic Foundry’s Gamer Motivation Profile, it’s here. Bonus: if you take their five-minute test, you’ll get a report that identifies your top gaming motivations, and they’ll identify your “gamer posse” and send a list of games you should enjoy.)

The data coming from these personality tests are the GMM’s fundamental building block. According to Quantic Foundry, about 80% of GMM profiles have resulted from sharing on social media. Those who take the test and agree to have their profile included in the database receive no financial (or other) reward for participating.

“You get a long, in-depth report of your gaming motivations,” Yee told us. “There’s a game recommender built in, so once you take the survey, we look for the one thousand other gamers in our two million large data set who are most similar to you…to help surface what games are most popular within your gaming posse. We’ve got algorithms for that.”

A housekeeping note before getting more into Yee’s background and Quantic Foundry’s empire building plans: vitally all the data points that follow were sourced from the global GMM. About half of these respondents hail from North American or Western European, which likely skews the results relative to a globally representative sample might show. Males are over 70% of the sample, moreover, and the mean age of respondents is in the mid-20s. Last, mobile gamers are underrepresented relative to PC and console gamers, given that mobile gamers are about 35% of the GMM sample and are well over half of all video game players, according to a multiple reports, including this one from AudienceNet.

Read on for more details and insights on:

• Quantic Foundry’s origins and its shifting early foci

• The mystery of the strategy genre’s falling interest…plus an SDT comparison

• The different motivations of GTAO and Fortnite players.

Oh, and one more housekeeping note. We’ve heard your feedback and taken it to heart: Most of you think our blogs are too long.

Someone famous once said—I think it was the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal who said it first, but its origins appear nebulous—or, more likely, wrote, “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”

I know I can get on a roll and wax verbose, loquacious…even garrulous.

Henceforth, I’ll break my Player Driven profiles/blogs into two parts, as you may have surmised from this one’s title! We’ll cover Quantic Foundry’s origins and its shifting early foci here. Next week, part 2 will delve into the latter pair of bullets above.

Lmk what you think of the shorter format and, if you haven’t already, sign up for our newsletter.

Quantic Foundry’s Roots: Winding Ways Toward the GMM

We often use the motivation framework when we're working with a particular client as kind of a tool to surface these relationships, of helping them understand specific user personas, how to optimize for particular player types.—Nick Yee

Early in our February discussion with Quantic Foundry’s co-founder and analytics lead, Nick Yee, Player Driven’s Greg Posner and I asked Yee about the company’s origins. We found the consultancy’s roots tangled…and deeply interesting.

In the mid- to late-2000s, Yee recalled, Blizzard Entertainment’s “World of Warcraft did something different. They had this thing called the Armory that released hundreds of behavioral log metrics for every character in the game, down to the level of how many virtual hugs each character had ever given.”

Shortly thereafter, he continued, “this researcher, Nic Ducheneaut, at Xerox Park, reached out and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got piles and piles of behavioral log data from World of Warcraft players that we’ve been collecting. Is that something you want to work on as a summer internship?’”

Yee took Ducheneaut up on the offer and, in time, the pair would co-found Quantic Foundry.

“We suddenly had access to large scale behavioral psychological data of gamers,” Yee elaborated. “So, we were doing studies looking at the social networks of guilds. Can you predict the long-term survival of a guild?”

“We did this two year federally-funded study. If you look at just how someone behaves, their character behaves, in World of Warcraft, can you use that to predict their gender, age, and personality traits?”

“It turned out you could,” Yee explained. “It turned out gender was the easiest to predict based on how someone behaved in World of Warcraft. So, from that, we spent a couple years together at Xerox Park.”

“We worked at Ubisoft, where we were leveraging these large-scale techniques of social science, applying it to large scale data to understand how gamers were different. We were doing segmentation studies on Ubisoft gamers and how that reflected in their behaviors. You know, bridging gaming motivations and design and marketing.”

Don’t Boil the OCEAN

Around this timeframe, Yee and Ducheneaut attempted to apply insights from a long-standing personality trait model called OCEAN (or, alternatively, the five-factor model, or FFM) to their collection of video game player behavioral models. OCEAN’s “big 5” personality traits are: Openness to experience (adventurous or down-to-earth), Conscientiousness (discipled or flexible), Extraversion (social or reserved), Agreeableness (compassionate or guarded), and Neuroticism (nervous or calm).

If you’re interested, Wikipedia offers a deep dive on this personality trait model here.

For Yee and Ducheneaut, the bottom line was that this effort didn’t pan out. The strongest OCEAN trait predicted <5% of player behavior in World of Warcraft, according to Yee.

It was back to the drawing board: OCEAN wasn’t a good fit for the kind of predictive insights they sought to illuminate.

Discovering the Proteus Effect

“In that era, when I was running a lot of player surveys of MMO gamers, I was also a grad student at Stanford, and we had a VR [virtual reality] lab,” Yee told us. “This was way before, like, the Facebook metaverse version of mid-2010s.”

“This was around 2005. We had a VR lab with HMD’s [head-mounted displays]. We had a tracker in physical space, so you walk with an HMD and it would render in your HMD. It was a physically walkable space.”

“We were interested in thinking of ways to break reality in productive ways,” Yee continued. “In a traditional psych lab, you can’t make someone taller or more attractive on the fly in a very convenient way, but it’s easy to do that in a VR system.”

“So, we were running a lot of studies that were kind of putting people in bodies that were not their own to see what would happen. In what would end up being my dissertation line of studies, we looked at what happens when you put someone in a more attractive body versus an average-rated body.”

The basic process, Yee said, was to put participants “in VR, they look into a VR mirror, they walk around in a VR room, and then they interact with a virtual stranger.”

“What we found was that when you put someone in a more attractive avatar, within a few minutes, they’re willing to walk closer to a virtual stranger and they share more personal information about themselves with this virtual stranger than someone with an average attractiveness avatar.”

Hmmm…

“We tried the same thing with height. When you give someone a taller avatar…same thing: They see themselves in the mirror, they see a virtual stranger, they’re taller than the stranger, they walk around in the room. Within a few minutes, they bargain more aggressively in a monetary bargaining task. They negotiate more aggressively to their own favor than someone who’s in a in a shorter avatar.”

In the past twenty years it’s become its own field of research. There are studies that show when you give someone an Einstein avatar, they perform better on cognitive tests. If you give someone a more muscular or athletic avatar, they show better physical endurance during real world exercises.

Such findings became known in psychology as the Proteus effect.

“In 2019, a researcher who was also at Stanford at the time,” Yee elaborated, “ran a meta-analysis that analyzed 46 different studies. Experiments that have been conducted over the years, and found that it was a consistent effect. It’s larger than some other digital media effects examined in other meta-analyses.”

“It’s now taught in psychology textbooks.”

A pair of ChatGPT-based attempts to capture the Proteus effect visually…and notice the guy in the upper right has six fingers!

This was a heady time, Yee continued, because he and others were breaking new ground as they tried to make sense of the phenomenon “from a player perspective, a game design perspective, an academic perspective. I was running these player surveys of gamers for online games, but also running these studies in VR, and what it means to change people’s digital appearances and how that changes their behaviors and their attitudes.”

I interrupted Yee to ask if I’d correctly grasped that the Proteus effect is bidirectional. I mentioned that another recent Player Driven guest, James Au, seemed to imply that Proteus effect included people who’d spent multiple hours a day inhabiting avatars in VR as well as virtual worlds like Second Life, and eventually started to behave like their avatars in real-world settings.

“That’s right,” Yee answered. “In the many studies that have been done in the area, we found that the effect lingers after you log off, or after you take the HMD off.”

“I think there have been studies that replicated the bargaining effect, like, ten minutes afterwards in a face-to-face bargaining exercise,” he continued. “There’s this this question of, like, if someone is in a virtual world, in a particular virtual avatar for twenty hours a week, then there’s this constant reinforcement effect.”

“I think there’s this kind of positive feedback loop, right? Where someone chooses a particular avatar over and over again, it has that impact on their behavior and attitudes. And there’s an ongoing, persistent effect because of that.”

Somewhere in this maelstrom of digital-to-IRL psychological effects and research work, a lightbulb went off that would lead to today’s GMM.

Quantic Foundry Lays the Cornerstone of Its Would-be Empire

There’s this entire generation that’s growing up with gaming. But how do people’s gaming motivations change as they get older? Are men and women’s gaming motivations as different as people think they are? —Nick Yee

As noted early on, Quantic Foundry was established in 2015, the same year that its Gamer Motivation Model (GMM) debuted. Yee and Ducheneaut spent years turning over several (fun/interesting) stones prior to that point, but a business made a lot more sense once they’d decided on a model that could be expanded and extended over time. The GMM’s viral self-growing database, and its six pairs of gamer motivations has been the company’s calling card ever since.

What exactly do they do for clients though?

“Say you’re a designer and you’re trying to make a mashup of genre A and genre B,” Yee told us, throwing out an example. “What are the overlapping motivations between those genres? Which motivations are differentiated and polarizing? If we wanted to broaden the appeal of an established game genre, what motivations are the best bets to expand on?”

These are the types of questions Quantic Foundry was designed to answer.

“If we wanted to identify the distinct player types within a game,” Yee continued, “we can use the motivation framework to do that cluster analysis.”

“There’s the framework of the motivation model, and from that we do a lot of blog posts on general findings of demographic differences that gamers and designers are interested in, but we also work with game studios, game developers, on understanding who their target audience is, conducting player segmentation and so forth.”

Yee wasn’t done yet.

Quantic Foundry works “with marketing folks and consumer insight folks, and with designers but, like, outside of the playtest cycle. We might be helping them understand, ‘Hey, if I have a specific game concept vision of these particular motivations, who is our likely audience? What other motivations will they care about?’ We can look at a publisher’s portfolio and help them understand their coverage of the twelve motivations.”

“If they’re trying to grow their player base, what’s the lowest hanging fruit, in terms of motivations, that they’re not currently covering? We can compare them with a competitor and say, ‘Here’s where you’re strongest in terms of your motivation coverage, and here’s where your competitor’s strongest in their coverage.’”

Makes sense.

Yee offered one last example. They’d recently wrapped up a custom project involving an unspecified “live service shooter game. They’re thinking of how to optimize the next batch of potential new game features, how to grow their player base.”

“We ran their players through our survey,” Yee explained. “We tied in with backend KPI metrics. We were able to show them, ‘Here are the five distinct player types in your game. Here’s what drives them differently. Here are the other games that they’re currently playing. Here’s a segment that spends the most in your game. Here’s how you get more of them outside the game, using the social media discovery channels that they use.’”

This wasn’t an out-of-the-box GMM use case, mind you. This project used Quantic Foundry’s model but fed game-specific data and custom questions into it, then crunched the numbers.

“We did an initial, you know, test,” Yee continued. Work had to be done to translate various Quantic Foundry “mechanisms to their game jargon, and so we worked with their user research folks on that. On the behavioral metrics side, often times, with a lot of these game companies, they’ve got a data science team and they’ve got a lot of these metrics that are most important to them. Retention, spend, tenure, and so forth, already cleanly available.”

“What happened with this particular project, for example, was every player that they sent to us, they dynamically inserted the unique player ID into the survey URL. And so, they take the survey, we get the survey data, and then afterwards we go ask their data science team, ‘Hey, we have this batch of hashed unique player ID’s, can you send us their KPI’s?’ And then we’re doing the analysis of the gaming motivations. Why players are playing your game” and so forth.

That way they could answer questions like, “What other games are they playing? How do they usually discover” new games?

Good…interesting…questions.

Come back next week for part 2 of our profile of Nick Yee and Quantic Foundry! We’ll explore a whodunit involving waning interest in the strategy genre; compare/contrast the GMM to another approach to player psychology and motivations called Self-Determination Theory; and use the lens of the GMM to understand what makes Grand Theft Auto Online players different from Fortnite players.