Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Dangers of Binary Thinking
You can't make a game for ever yone, so your target audience is necessarily a subset
of all possible players, a subset determined by your answers to the questions “Who
will enjoy this game?” and “What kinds of challenges do they like?” As you answer
these questions, you may be tempted to assume that the people in one category
(adult men, for example) are a special audience that has nothing in common with
people in other categories (adult women, children, teenagers, and so on). This is
binary thinking : assuming that if group A likes a thing, everyone outside that group
won't like it. It's unsound reasoning and may actually cause you to lose part of your
potential customer base, as the following sections demonstrate.
REASONING STATISTICALLY ABOUT PLAYER GROUPS
Suppose you ask a group of players to rate their level of interest in a particular game
on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 representing no interest at all and 10 being fanatical
enthusiasm. Like many phenomena, the overall population's level of interest resembles
a bell-shaped curve, with small numbers of people at the extremes and the majority
somewhere in the middle. If you graph the responses of men and women separately,
you may find for a given game that the two groups have different arithmetic means;
that is, the centers of their bell-shaped curves fall at different places on the graph.
Figure 3.2 shows this phenomenon. For the hypothetical game in question, men's
mean level of interest is at about 5.5, while women's mean level of interest is at 4.5.
FIGURE 3.2
Reported level of
interest in a game
on a 0-10 scale
Number of respondents
reporting to a given level
of interest in a game.
Data from women
Data from men
Number of men
reporting an interest
level of 6.
Number of women
reporting an interest
level of 6.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
 
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