In this post I will explore in detail my results from my recent survey on Video games and specifically genre and looking into campaign.
My research group were all within the same age bracket from 17-18 and had similar economic statuses as all were studying in the last year of sixth form. This age group was picked as it matches my target audience if I were to make an action adventure game. I got 14 Males and 6 females so when analysing I have to keep in mind that factor.
My first set of questions I created so that I could get an insight into the types of people my audience is without being prejudice being one myself and so some of the more basic questions allow me to review this. For example there is a very wide range in music genres varying from person to person and so this tells me that they all like music but have very different interests however in later questions I find out that some answers are heavily weighted telling me that there are some things that are enjoyed/ disliked by all. They all have high aspirations and want to venture far from where they are showing keen attitudes and outgoing natures when it comes to occupations which was interesting as i found that all of them have part time jobs as well. Furthermore, I can see that they are engrossed with technology as a large majority are on social media and technology but also social going out with friends as this takes up 70% of question 4s answers.
When it comes down to favourite games of all time and the last game that they played although there were games such as call of duty which is a popular FPS very conventional along with fifa coming up many times there was no real correlation showing that everyone has different preferences. However, the online section of a video game which also translates to the interactivity of the game is a clear winner in peoples faverouite parts of a game and I need to incorporate this in to mine as it really makes a game feel realistic and more of a group thing rather than just an isolated activity. 5 people which works out to 25% of people said that the climax was their best part and so I need to have a key turning point/ moment in my game that is spectacular ignorer to generate hype and keep people entertained.
One thing that I found out was from inferring this data. If you look at what games people are most looking forward to along with peoples favourite games then you can see that solid foundation games such as Call of Duty and Halo and Red Dead Redemption, games that have masses amount of money gone into them and high production teams, might just be popular as people know what they are buying and so games that are more secretive and less giving away such as some indie games might not be as popular. My question on what makes a game stand out had 7/20 people saying it was down to little details such as key events happening later on in the game that were foreshadowed earlier on and other simple details such as external games within them. A close runner up was the complexity of a storyline so games such as skyrim rather than simple games such as flappy bird are preferred by this target range. A lot of these games also have a lot of freedom and free roaming ability as it makes the player feel like they are more in control rather than being shepherd or forced down one route even though there might only be one route it gives that illusion.
On some of my questions I learnt a lot more than I asked for and this can be seen in my 13th question about protagonists. Okay so I got the idea that my audience are aware of the stereotypical protagonist and the majority do want to see change in it but the fact that from the graph I displayed it as male and female views so that you can see that they are still fairly childish. From having answers where people simply circled them all showing carelessness but I can take this into consideration as it shows that they can get bored very quickly and so my game needs to constantly be interesting. Moving on however, in terms of location, the most preferred by far was the idea of any urban location. FPS games were actually deemed as boring according to my survey even though the majority of mentioned games were FPS but none the less giving a game a different persecutive can decrease emotion or connection or at least is believed to but still accomplishable as the GTA series proves.
Some interesting things that I found out was that a large percentage of people actually are bored of 'happy ever afters' this tells me that the audience age group of late teens/ young adults have played lost of similar and too far fetched games and so some reality needs to be brought back. If I am allowed to do this and still make my game conventional then this is what I will do which is possible by leaving cliff hangers or just making up a more realistic ending so that when a game does end they are still shocked.
My final question was more of a self expressive question and this gave me an idea that a common thing that is enjoyed by people who play video games this that they like violence, maybe not too much for some people but more importantly they all by then end showed me they have good imagination as none of them simply chose a gun as their weapon of choice but instead thought outside the box... maybe too much at times with the sexual related items which once again reinforced the
possible stereotype of gamers!
