Why Don't People Play Games - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 63

could ever be. An interesting crossover is Farmville, a Facebook game which relies
on social networking with other “farmers” in order to grow crops and make money.
When we last checked, Farmville had over 80 million users.
We can thus see that there are, potentially at least, strong links between player
types—of which we have only given the very briefest of overviews— and:
• Emotional keys: The correlation between emotional keys and player types
would be quite fruitful.
• Genres: There are defi nite correlations between player types and genres. Some
genres, such as RTS and sim games would seem to be made for a specifi c
player type; managers, in this case. Others might well appeal to a variety of
player types, perhaps unwittingly.
• Aesthetics: We have already discussed the strong correlations between aes-
thetics and emotional keys so aesthetics might well correlate with player types
through the emotional keys.
All these map down onto activity profi les for individual games, franchises, or genres
and subgenres.
One idea that does begin to emerge here is that game developers and others,
such as the developers of Second Life, don't really know who they are developing
for or why these elusive people play their games. Resident Evil may well be popular
because it appeals to conquerors—probably deliberately, because they do approxi-
mate a large class of hardcore player pretty accurately—and accidentally, because
it might well appeal to wanderers, who want story but also missions and distraction
and lots of gameplay that they might never actually fi nish, but they will still play
the game for many hours before drifting off to something else.
Many hardcore players might well fi nd Second Life pointless, even ridiculous,
and yet Second Life might well be the interactive entertainment experience (“ game ”
is not really appropriate) that appeals to the largest groups of “ game players ” ; either
casual wanderers or participants who don't want to play games at all.
DEMOGRAPHIC RESEARCH
While International Hobo has a methodology called Demographic Game Design, we
can take the idea further using GIL. By talking to members of particular demograph-
ics, fi nding out their game choices, and analyzing them for underlying patterns, we
will discuss a particular example of the kind of research that Jo conducted. The
demographic she chose was hardcore female players. By talking to such players on
a particular online site she was able to establish their collective favorite games
matched against an ideal activity profi le for this group. The top six were:
1. Resident Evil
2. Sonic Heroes
3. Tomb Raider
4. Silent Hill