Postcards From The Clipping Plane
Conveniently ignoring the serious side of videogame development
James Leach identifies the real demographic devs should target
Never have I seen such diligence. Such attention to detail. Such commitment to getting it right for every customer. I’m talking about a game-development company who invited me to partake in pre-game research a while ago. They were just setting out on the construction of a new game, after considerable past success, and were determined to build the best thing ever.
Normally I’m not called in until quite a lot of work has been done, but these people were different. They wanted my total involvement from the get-go, and I even dropped my curmudgeonly persona in order to get on board. And thus I was plunged into the seething world of demographics.
Usually, the games I work on are made for young adult males who like sport and shooting things. Right now you can see the typical gamer in your mind’s eye. Yep, that’s the fella. I can see him too. Wait. Who’s that next to him? Oh, he’s a got a girlfriend. OK. Let’s add a strong and sassy female character so she can play too. And with that we’ve hit the target audience, so let’s get coding.
It turns out that there’s more to it than that, though. A lot more. This company has spent a fortune on research and now it turns out I’m sharing it with you for the price of this magazine; if they find out, they’re going to nail me to a tree. Anyway, research (theirs, costly) indicates that the average age of gamers is 34. And although more males play on consoles and PC, far more females play games on mobiles and tablets, making them the biggest consumer group overall. Their average age is over 30, too.
While every gamer is different – apart, obviously, from twins, and my friend Steve – they fall into three groups. Casual, competitive and cooperative. Competitive types are the sort who’d consider gaming a hobby. They’d mention it if they were asked what they do in their spare time if they were on a game show. Cooperative players see games as an extension of social media. If everyone’s playing a new coal-mining sim, they want in because they see their friends swapping pit ponies and dynamite fuses on Facebook and want to share in that hot underground action. Casual gamers are the vast majority and those are the ones sitting in coffee shops, looking like they’re texting. What they’re actually doing is making sure the deepest shaft doesn’t flood before they hit a new seam.
The meeting where we discussed this identified many more subsets and offshoots of these groups, but a funny-looking bird landed on the window ledge and I got distracted so we’ll gloss over that. The takeaway from this, though, is that you ought to make games for competitive gamers and there are two good reasons why. Firstly – and this is the cynical reason – they’re the vocal ones. They’re also the reviewers and the experts. If you want any one group of people to like your product, aim for those who will tell everyone. And the second reason is that if you craft a game well enough for competitive players to enjoy, you’ve almost certainly made a good game for everyone.
Competitive gamers don’t need games to be tough or complicated. They need them to be involved and deep. Give the casual gamers a simpler way of doing things and they’re happy, though. But make sure that the best, most enjoyable experience only comes with a bit of dedication and thought. So while everyone is collecting random gems to get through the game, the core players are combining them into uber gems which unlock the mother of all daggers and the bullet-proof pelt. Oh, and while all the casual and competitive players are battling through the mountains towards the Haunted Hospital, let’s give everyone a zoo back at home and the ability to collect and swap cute animals with each other. So you’re happy now too, cooperative guys.
Or, there’s a different way. We leave the link to the demographics people and come up with a game idea we love. We discuss it, not in terms of who we’re specifically targeting, but in terms of how much we want to play it. Us: paunchy, bearded game devs with unused mountain bikes in our sheds. We talk about what we love and we turn our passion into reality. We trust that inside our heads, we know what people want from games because we’re probably the most avid gamers of all, and we’ve been doing it for a long time. Think of the most inspiring geniuses in the industry and what links them is a vision of the end product and the drive to make it.
Is making games this latter way more risky? Probably. But it’s far more fun.
We trust that inside our heads, we know what people want from games because we’re the most avid gamers of them all