thread: 2011-01-25 : Social Context and Design Scales
On 2011-01-26, Marco wrote:
That's actually a pretty good clarification and you're right—I don't disagree with what you've said in that perspective. I do know for a fact that some people, perhaps a lot, do want tightly focused games and that within that category you certainly need to speak to them.
So, no, given those qualifiers, I don't think I disagree with anything. My thoughts were more around the ideas that:
.- I don't think everyone wants a tightly focused game in the way I think it's meant here (although, as I said, clearly a lot of people do).
.- I suspect that a good deal of mission statements will have multiple "correct" interpretations where the specific implementation of the game designer only meets one. This is because mission statements usually aren't formal (that is, they use English or some other language rather than being a tightly structured expression of some sort) and they are not (usually, because we are not, by-in-large a marketing/demographic driven industry) derived from external analysis but rather by the game designer's perspective.
That, above, put another way is this: big companies with target-market segments target those markets and 'what they want' from a whole lot of sample data and test-cases and focus groups* and stuff like that. In other words, they know the target-market exists because they can see it out there and observe its behavior.
"People with the same love-hate relationship with Shadowrun" may or may not be a real target-market in the same way that it's meant in more formal business-speak. Certainly "D&D's audience" is (as I'm sure we'd all agree) a hugely fractured thing if it's a 'thing' at all.
But I don't think my observations are especially controversial here so I'm back to just reading along :)
-Marco
* Everyone knows focus groups suck.
