Identifying your audience and understanding their behaviour
We are used to thinking that all players play games the same way, or at least we believe that we have a reasonably good idea of how players will react to your game. This might or might not be true, but I believe that in order to predict player behaviour, it is important to understand the kind of player who is going to play your game.
After making a game, if you have no target it’s not like “Shoot for the moon if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” You’ll be shooting into the black expanses of space — where no one exists. After having a rough idea it is important to sit down, look at what you are offering and look around at who you think would be perfect for your product or service. Identifying a target audience or demographic can lead to informed design decisions and in turn lead to better products.
I believe that products that are developed, keeping in mind the purpose and specific demographic tend to have more chances of success than products that try to find an audience after release. One of the examples I can think is of Wonder Workshop’s Dot and Dash. Dot and Dash are two robots that are targeted towards a very specific purpose — teaching kids how to program. I believe that they have had tremendous success over the past couple of years because they are geared towards solving a very specific problem for a specific target audience. The reason why some of the other consumer robots aren’t doing as well is because they aren’t made for a specific market.
Once, the target demographic is set and you have a working prototype, it is important to test your hypothesis about player behaviour. It is likely that you would have gone wrong in your predictions and this process would inform game and level designers of issues that should be fixed or improved upon. It’s also important to get a variety of different players within your target audience. For example, while building puzzle games it is critical to play-test your game with all kinds of people as people have varied preferences in terms of difficulty in puzzle games.
I have previously been horribly wrong in predicting player behaviour for my games. Sometimes it is just impossible to put yourself in someone else’s shoes to predict how they would respond to certain moments in the game. Play-testing plays a very important role in these kind of scenarios. The greatest learnings I had while designing an educational game for kids was when I spent time in classrooms looking at teacher-student relationship and behaviour. Also, one can learn a lot by just observing kids play your game.
Not only is it important to study user behaviour before launch, it is also likely that after release, you realise that your players are playing the game very differently to what you would ideally like them to play. For example, recently I read an article about Magic: The Gathering, where the creators of the game wanted the game to be a card trading game, but the popularity of the collectables was starting to overpower the game. This led to the designers making a conscious effort to ensure that Magic remained a card trading game first and a collectable next.
Studying user behaviour not only applies to games but products in general. The market trends change very quickly and it is important for a company to adapt according to market trends to stand a chance in this competitive digital age. Game Analytics and Product Analytics has become a big thing lately and the only reason it is so popular is that it leads to creating better products that the audience appreciates and continues to use.
