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- VandenBerghe's Five Domains of Play
- Gamer Dedication
- The Dangers of Binary Thinking
- Summary
- Design Practice Exercises
- Design Practice Questions
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Page 6 of 6
This chapter is from the book
Design Practice Questions
Choosing a target audience for your game (or deciding that it does not belong in any genre) is part of defining your game’s concept, a process that Chapter 7, “Game Concepts,” discusses in detail. When you’re thinking about it, consider the following questions:
- Which of the domains of play do you think you will be offering, and what will that say about the audience that you hope to attract?
- What age range is your game aimed at? The answer to this question will strongly influence many things about the game: its challenges, its user interface design, its pacing, its aesthetics, and so on.
- Do you want to be gender inclusive, or do you want to appeal to one particular sex, bearing in mind that this may limit your game’s appeal to the other? If the latter, what content and features do you plan to include that you think will appeal specifically to your chosen audience?
- How dedicated will you want your target audience to be? Requiring long play sessions, for example, will exclude some players who don’t have the time for it. Go through the list of factors that make up player dedication and ask yourself if you are expecting them from your players—and if so, how you plan to meet their expectations of your game.
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