Support Players Don't Avoid Pressue, They Carry Games Differently To DPS Players

There is a familiar diagnosis applied to anyone who willingly locks in a support character. They cannot aim, they dislike pressure, and they want somebody else to carry them. Alternatively, they are the feminine role of the group – the mother or girlfriend – almost by default. Or, in certain games that have a known LGBTQ+ population, the bottom. I’ve been called all three in Final Fantasy 14 when healing through tough raids.

Neither stereotype tells us much about why somebody becomes a support main. Choosing to heal, shield, or enable teammates might look like avoiding individual responsibility, but support players often take responsibility for everyone simultaneously. Their performance is measured entirely by what they allow somebody else to accomplish. Rather than opting out of carrying, support mains pick a role where carrying is expressed through everybody else’s survival and success.

Support Offers A Different Kind Of Competence

One of the most useful frameworks for understanding player motivation is Self-Determination Theory – it proposes that we are drawn towards activities that satisfy psychological needs. In this case: autonomy and competence.

In a series of four studies applying the theory to games, psychologists Ryan, Rigby and Przybylski found that these needs predicted enjoyment and interest in continuing to play. Their multiplayer study found that autonomy and competence each made an independent contribution as well.

It is easy to see how dealing enormous damage satisfies competence. Numbers get bigger and enemies fall over. Support roles often provide subtler feedback, but they can still produce a strong feeling of effectiveness in the grand scheme of things.

An Overwatch 2 support tracks several health bars while positioning safely, identifying threats and deciding which teammate can still be saved. A Final Fantasy 14 healer anticipates scripted damage, plans mitigation, and works out when it is safe to attack. League of Legends supports influence the map through vision, crowd control and engagement decisions, often while surviving on fewer resources. While these aren’t the same challenges, they’re still challenges.

Support roles can also provide autonomy, despite the assumption that the role exists to follow someone else. Riot has previously discussed how different League roles express agency differently: an ADC might exert influence through positioning and sustained damage, while a support does so through vision and utility. Both affect who wins. One is simply less likely to appear in a clip montage.

Helping Is Not The Same As Being Altruistic

This does not mean support players are necessarily kinder people. Take me, for example: I’m a b*tch to my tanks who take avoidable damage too easily.

Psychology distinguishes prosocial behaviour – something that benefits another person (it really is just the opposite of antisocial behaviour) – from an altruistic motive. Healing a teammate is functionally prosocial, but the player might do so because they want to win, enjoy being indispensable, or like controlling the rhythm of a fight. They may appreciate the praise. They may simply think Mercy is fabulous. They’d be right, but they’d also be wrong, because Zenyatta is more fabulous.

Nick Yee’s influential study of around 3,000 MMO players identified achievement and immersion as broad families of motivation. Importantly, they were not mutually exclusive. Players interested in teamwork and helping others could also care intensely about optimisation, progression, and competition. A support main can therefore be highly competitive; their preferred unit of achievement is simply the team rather than the individual.

Are Support Mains Actually Different?

There is some direct evidence that role preferences are associated with personality, although the findings are much messier than ‘empaths pick healer’. A 2024 study of 3,220 League of Legends players connected support preference with a profile involving cognitive empathy, coalition-building, extraversion, and openness to experience. More unexpectedly, dominant leadership also appeared within that profile.

That finding challenges the idea of support as a passive role. Supports may be interested not only in caring for teammates, but in directing collective action. The person placing vision, initiating engagements and deciding who receives resources can exercise considerable leadership without becoming the team’s primary damage dealer.

Again, the explained variance was small, the measurements relied on self-report, and the study examined one game. It provides an intriguing pattern, not a personality test capable of diagnosing somebody from their champion history.

Games Shape The People Playing Them

Even the stereotypes surrounding a role can affect behaviour. A study tracking more than 1,000 World of Warcraft players found no significant difference between men and women in their amount of healing. Players using female avatars healed proportionally more than those using male avatars, though, suggesting that expectations attached to the character could influence how people played.

The support main is therefore neither born nor entirely self-created. They emerge from an interaction between motivation, personality, character design, social expectations and the particular pleasures a game attaches to helping.

The natural conclusion is obvious: some people want their skill represented by a kill count, whereas others want to spot the attack before it lands, keep five people alive through the impossible, and decide which heavily armed boyfriend gets to become the hero.

We all know the truth, though, don’t we, fellow supports? We’re the true heroes. Without us, the whole ship sinks.