Summary
The point of this chapter was to teach you about different kinds of players and what they want, and don’t want, from their gameplaying experiences. You learned about Jason VandenBerghe’s five domains of play: novelty, challenge, stimulation, social harmony, and threat; and a sixth one, storytelling. Then we looked at a few demographic categories, men and women and boys and girls, with a special focus on what it takes to make games for girls. We examined ways to think about gamer dedication and how that might affect your choice of target audience. The chapter ended with a discussion of the dangers of binary thinking, and the suggestion that you should strive for inclusiveness, not universality. In the next chapter we’ll examine the different game platforms that you can design for.