FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION

Other Distinctions

Several other groups exhibit particular trends in their game-playing preferences, and a brief list follows. Note that this section is about choosing a target audience,

not about actually designing a game for one. If you want to make your game partic­ularly appealing to a special group, see Appendix A, "Designing to Appeal to Particular Groups."

■ 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).

■ 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 lin­guistic 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 entertain­ment for children. If you're interested in targeting this market specifically, you might start with Chapter 9 of the book Digital Storytelling: A Creator's Guide to Interactive Entertainment by Carolyn Handler Miller (Miller, 2004).

■ Boys and girls. For years, the male-dominated game industry had a precon­ceived 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.

■ 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 particu­lar 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.

■ 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 begin­ning. Designing for localization is outside the scope of this book, but if you want a worldwide market, you must take the time to research the subject.