Gaming offers a diverse array of formats and content, ranging from narrative-driven Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) to casual games across a variety of genres. Games can promote a number of psychological and social benefits. While previous research has focused upon players’ motivations for gaming as they relate, for example, to hazardous patterns of MMORPG play, much less is known about how players’ choices of genre and gaming benefits reflect psychological factors and broader social value and political factors. Trait hostility is an acknowledged risk factor for hazardous MMORPG play and so-called gaming addiction. Here, using large-sample survey data, I demonstrate that hostility is highest amongst players selecting combat-oriented roles but lowest amongst those selecting narrative/puzzle-oriented roles. At the same time, players high in trait hostility report the strongest skills benefits and positive transfer from online to offline relationships. This indicates a paradox in that hostility can be associated with hazardous play but at the same time strong experiences of gaming benefits, indicative of compensatory processes in gaming behaviours. Further, players selecting combat-oriented roles report the most socially and economically conservative political ideology, while players selecting narrative/puzzle-oriented roles report the most liberal ideology. Players of all roles generally express prosocial values. Libertarians report the strongest benefits but the most socially and economically liberal players, and individualists, the least benefits. This indicates, for the first time, that player choices and their experienced benefits are linked to political ideology. MMORPG environments are virtual worlds in which individuals have greater personal and economic freedom. Possibly, the combination of socially liberal and economically neoliberal views (i.e. as ‘the freer the market, the freer the people’) promotes greater experienced benefits from play. By contrast, in surveys of casual players, I show that this playerbase is apparently not highly differentiated, at least in terms of frequency of play of specific genres. These data show that players expressing high levels of identified regulation report greater transfer of useful skills from casual games to their offline lives, whilst players high in external motivation tend to play a wider selection of casual game genres, possibly allowing access to a greater variety of rewards. Playing multiplayer games and placing greater personal importance on gaming are both associated with higher levels of integrated regulation, suggesting that MMO play promotes identity formation through becoming part of a community via participation in clans/guilds and the formation of trust and close friendships through shared experiences. These data also suggest that casual games, or their players, represent a distinct sub-realm of gaming in which behavioural representation and attentional focus are unimportant factors. Behaviour identification in terms of actions or goals did not relate to enjoyment of a simple laboratory clicker game. Possibly, in games where time-investment is low, enjoyment does not depend upon their operant structures engaging representations of actions and goals, as much as their acquisitive aspects such as collecting points, or loose narrative bases. Collectively, my findings highlight the importance of a holistic approach to gaming research which considers the benefits gaming can promote.