Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
not about actually designing a game for one. If you want to make your game partic-
ularly appealing to a special group, see Appendix A, “Designing to Appeal to
Particular Groups.”
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Men and women.
Men and women are not nearly as different as various works
of pop psychology like us to believe. A large number of games are made with only
male players in mind, but it doesn't take much to make them more appealing to
women as well. See Sheri Graner Ray's
Gender Inclusive Game Design
for a thorough
discussion of the subject (Ray, 2003).
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Children and adults.
Children's gaming preferences and abilities differ much
more sharply from those of adults than men's differ from women's. Children have
different motor and cognitive skills, different attention spans, and different lin-
guistic abilities, and all of these change dramatically as children grow up. Most
important, however, games designed for children must be appealing and acceptable
to their parents as well. There is a vast amount of research on creating entertain-
ment for children. If you're interested in targeting this market specifically, you
might start with Chapter 9 of the topic
Digital Storytelling: A Creator's Guide to
Interactive Entertainment
by Carolyn Handler Miller (Miller, 2004).
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Boys and girls.
For years, the male-dominated game industry had a precon-
ceived notion that girls didn't play video games, so the designers didn't bother to
think about girls. This idea was wrong, however. Girls were playing video games, in
spite of the industry's neglect. Still, boys' and girls' interests differ more widely than
men's and women's do, and making games that appeal to girls requires knowledge
that few designers have. Appendix A contains a discussion about games for girls.
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Players with disabilities.
A number of developers are working to improve the
accessibility of video games to players with disabilities. Although few games are
made specifically for people with special needs, it is easy and inexpensive to make
games more accessible. You can make your game available to the deaf by including
subtitles for spoken dialog and providing visual as well as auditory cues for particu-
lar events; you can allow players with visual impairments to adjust the contrast of
the screen and the font size of any text in the game.
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Players of other cultures.
The process of adapting a game for sale in a country
other than the one for which it was made is called
localization
. The process involves
more than just translating the text to a different language and rerecording the
audio; for the game to be a hit, you must take numerous cultural factors into
account. It is far easier to make a game enjoyable to people in other countries if you
plan it that way and consider them a part of your target audience from the begin-
ning. Designing for localization is outside the scope of this topic, but if you want a
worldwide market, you must take the time to research the subject.
If your game will be a long one, the player will need a sense of progress through it.
At this stage of game design, you must decide what will provide that sense of progress:
