COP3 Research: Target Audience

Context of Practice 3: Research into a Target Audience 
As I now knew generally what kind of game I was going to be creating based on my research and everything else that I had done so far, I wanted to start thinking about who my audience was going to be. As there are many different generations of gamers now, ranging right though from children to the older generation I had to think about who I wanted to aim my game towards and the decision wasn’t actually as difficult as I thought after looking at the different audiences.

Infants 
When thinking about creating a game for infants, I mainly start to think about games that use bright and bold colours, and generally have some form of teaching involved to help think about shapes and
numbers and the form of them. This really isn’t something that interests me, as I want to be able to make a clever game environment that I don’t think infants of the age of 2 would understand.

Children
I then looked at children, roughly between the ages of 6-11 when they are beginning to understand games more and interact with them, but they do still tend to have some form of learning process to them and they require help at times to understand not only the mechanics of a game but also the controls in general so again I think this age range may be a little too young for this idea of a puzzle game that I have.

Teenagers 
Moving onto an age range that could definitely be more interested in a puzzle game is teenagers around the age of 12-18. They have the capabilities to understand the mechanics behind games and pick up on the controls a lot easier. They are able to understand and figure out how a puzzle would work and this is an age range that would seem more appealing. As to what kind of game aesthetic they would enjoy more, comes down to an individual person more than the game itself so this is very forgiving in this way.

Young Adults 
Next I looked at young adults in the age range of 19-25. This is probably the key age range that I want to look at and this is definitely the appeal I want to generate. This again is an age range similar to teenagers as they think the same and will usually tackle puzzle challenges in the same way. This age range is probably the best to aim for as they have no special requirements and will play lots of different ranges of games.

Adults 
This age range of 26 right up to 50 is a broad range to look at but works in the same way as the young adults as they are used to playing a lot of different genres of games and have really experiences many different types of puzzles so will know more about how to tackle it, making this age range another obvious one to look at when thinking about my game, just because again its very versatile and they have no special requirements like children’s games would.

Elderly 
Lastly I wanted to look at older people, 51+ age range, and how I could create my game to suit them. At the moment it’s a difficult age range, as most of them did not grow up playing video games as they just weren’t around, but that doesn’t stop them from being a consideration as they could have caught onto the trend later on. Although it could make it difficult, they may have requirements of the buttons being bigger so they can see them from further away or they may not understand some of the terminology used to describe what is happening in a scene making it a difficult decision to pick this age range.

Overall I am definitely going to be setting the audience of my game level over multiple age ranges due to how many places I could see it fitting. The main one I think being young adults as it is hopefully going to be a challenging puzzle in itself, but also visually beautiful at the same time with a small amount of exploration involved if you wanted to look around the environment. I do think it could spill into teenagers and adults though as I wouldn’t want to limited the age range to just 5 years as its hopefully going to be a game for a number of ages, due to the environment, the background and the game mechanics I will incorporate.