Agreed Upon, Artificial Rules

When one animal is hunting another, that is not a game. The goals in such a scenario are to kill or survive. There are rules in the hunt, but they are dictated by biology, physics, chemistry, and many other factors. While there are physical limits to what can be done in the hunt, there are no artificial limits; there is no such thing as cheating in the hunt.

So hunting is not a game, but we can observe many animals playing hunting-like games in the wild. Bear cubs may wrestle but not attempt to hurt each other. Wolves may chase each other as they would prey—but without attacking. These, essentially, are games. We, as humans, tend to think we have the monopoly on creating games, but we certainly do not.

Now let’s consider two forms of human combat: street fighting and collegiate wrestling. In a street fight, there are no rules. Street fighting is against the law, so there is not even a semblance of any rule in the activity. If one combatant is clearly larger and more skilled than the other, the fight will likely be lopsided. If one of the combatants can grab and use a weapon, he might be able to gain the upper hand. Whatever the physical circumstances of the environment allow can happen in a street fight. So, a street fight is indeed combat, and it could even be considered some form of contest, but it is not a game.

On the other end of the human combat spectrum is collegiate wrestling. It is also a very physical contest that can resemble a fight, but it is a game. So what makes it different from street fighting? The rules. In wrestling, the players are not allowed to use weapons. They are not allowed to punch each other, even though they clearly have the means to do so, and it would almost certainly be an advantage to do so.

Now let’s look at a contest that involves no real physical contact, let alone combat: checkers. When two players sit down to play checkers, the goal is for one player to capture all of his opponents checkers. Although there is nothing physically stopping the player from simply reaching over to the other side of the board and grabbing his opponent’s checkers, he is not allowed, by the rules, to do so. To play the game, both players have agreed that they must create a specific set of circumstances in order to remove an opponent’s checker. Only when the players have followed the artificial rules of the game and one of them has created the circumstances to remove all checkers can that player be declared the winner. In the rules of checkers, the set of circumstances needed to remove a checker is exclusive—which means that any move that does not strictly adhere to the stated rule is assumed to be against the rules.

If the rules of a game were not agreed upon, the game would quickly break down and fail to function. If there is an established set of rules for a game and a player chooses to play that game, we can implicitly assume that the player has agreed to all the rules—regardless of whether that player knows or understands them.

While all of the attributes that make a game a game are important, the most important one is that a game has agreed upon, artificial rules. Without these rules, there is no game.

Players Have an Impact on the Outcome

This attribute is actually slightly controversial. A small number of people believe that a game can be a game even if players have no impact on the game. However, for the sake of our definition in this book, if a player does not have an impact on the game, she is not a player at all, and the activity is not a game. Let’s take a look at a couple of examples.

In the game Candy Land, players take turns drawing a card and then moving an avatar along a linear track toward a goal. Is this a game? According to the criteria we are putting forth—that a player must have an impact on the game—it is not. A player does not have any agency in Candy Land. Imagine that one person were to play Candy Land as all four avatars. Could this player have enough influence to make a preferred avatar win? No. Candy Land would proceed in exactly the same way with one person doing all the moves for all the pawns as it would if four people were making moves individually for each pawn. It would proceed identically regardless of the desire, skill, or intent of the player.

In contrast, with chess, if a single player plays the turns for both sides, it is easy for that player to decide which side will win and which will lose. In fact, most people find it difficult to play chess against themselves because it is too easy to favor one side winning without even trying.

People Can Opt Out

So far, we have established that a game has artificial, agreed upon rules and that people involved in a game can have an impact on it. Laws fulfill both of these requirements, but clearly, they are not games, and we would not consider lawmakers to be game designers. We have a defined word for lawmakers for a reason. But what makes the law more than a set of game rules? The people involved can’t opt out. Let’s consider a couple of examples.

If a person is walking with a basketball and someone calls out, “That’s traveling. You must be dribbling the ball while you walk,” the person might respond, “I’m not playing basketball. I’m just walking, so it’s okay.” This is perfectly fine. People are never obliged to play a game.

On the other hand, if a person is walking across the street through traffic where there is no crosswalk, someone might say, “That’s illegal. You are not allowed to jaywalk.” This person can’t get away with responding “I’m not playing, so it’s okay.” Regardless of whether they want, care about, or even know about the law, all people are required to comply with the laws of the location they are in. This is a key difference between laws and game rules: People can’t opt out of laws, but they can opt out of games.

Game Sessions Are Finite

A game must have some form of ending so that participants are sometimes “playing the game”—but not always. A massive multiplayer online game (MMO), for example, may go on indefinitely, but players do stop playing from time to time. The rules of the game exist for those who are playing but not for someone who has finished a session.

With a social club, such as Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, there are artificial rules, the members can have an impact on their status—and therefore the outcome of the membership—and the members may opt out (quit) if they want to. So, based on these three attributes, these kinds of organizations could be considered games. However, they do not have finite sessions. When you join a club or another social group, you agree to follow the rules of the group at all times—and not just during specific times. This makes social clubs, music bands, theater troupes, and many other interests distinctly different from games.

Intrinsic Rewards

Based on the attributes mentioned so far, we might consider a job a game. It has artificial rules dictating what you should be doing when and where. You can opt out, and it has finite sessions. So what differentiates a job from a game? One more aspect that distinguishes games is intrinsic rewards—that is, rewards that have value only in the game. For example, when you play checkers, it is valuable to capture an opponent’s checker. However, that captured checker holds no value outside the game. At the end of the game, all checkers are returned to the set to be redistributed at the beginning of the next game. At a job, on the other hand, the reward for work is usually money. The financial reward does not lose value outside the job and can be used in the larger economic system.

Let’s consider a slightly more complex example: poker. We generally recognize poker as a game, although some people play it as their profession. In this game, the players play for money that has an extrinsic value, but there are significant portions of the game that hold only intrinsic value. For example, in the context of poker, having cards of the same suit and in order is considered highly valuable. Outside the context of poker, randomly drawing five cards of the same suit in order is still very rare, but it has no value. It’s the addition of intrinsic rewards that changes a task, an errand, or a job into a game.

Game Attributes Summary

By bringing together all the attributes of games we have just discussed, we create a unique definition of game. Every game discussed in this book has all these aspects.

Determining what is a game and what isn’t can get rather complex. Jobs can have games in them. Games can have more games in them. Some activities can be called games but are missing a crucial needed aspect (such as Candy Land lacking player influence). Despite these oddities, we now have a clear enough idea of the attributes needed to call something a game that we can go forward in this book with a shared definition for reference.

Age

Age can most effectively be split into two major groups: adults and developing children. As children develop cognitive skills, they do so (very roughly) by age. Games made for developing children have specific requirements and face legal restrictions. As a game developer, you must take into account the cognitive development of children of different ages if you want to make games for them. There are entire fields devoted to child development and making learning activities or games for children at different stages of development. If you are planning on making a game for children, you need to do some research into the field of child development.

Adults, on the other hand, can be grouped into one large pool for the sake of game development. You can assume that all adults that you make games for can read, use a controller or keyboard, understand basic mathematics, and work out puzzles on their own. This makes the categorization of adults by specific age nearly meaningless. While there are some cultural references that generations will interpret differently, there is not much to be gained from splitting up age any further, so when defining a target audience, it is generally sufficient to say the audience is “any adult.”

Gender

There is really no need to dive into the politics of gender because gender is not a particularly effective attribute for defining a gaming target audience. While a few games do target a specific gender, most don’t because there is very little that has to do with belonging to a gender in most games. So, unless you have a good reason to include gender as an attribute in your game’s target audience, there is no need to include it at all.

Tolerance for Learning Rules

Many people hate learning new rules. If you doubt this, hand someone a thick rule book and ask her to read it. Many people would think this sounds awful, right? These people often decide it is not worth the effort to play any new games. Think of people who play chess on a daily basis but no other games. They are certainly gamers, but they’re not the same kind of gamer who picks up a new game weekly just to give it a try.

On the other end of the spectrum are players who enjoy learning the rules of a game; they might even enjoy learning the rules as much as or more than playing the game itself. These people might belong to a local board gaming club, where they play a new board game every week, rarely replaying a game. The draw of the game for this group is learning new rules with the group, and the games themselves are secondary.

As you create a game, you need to decide what tolerance level for learning new rules your target audience will need to have. People basically fall into five groups when it comes to tolerance for learning rules:

• Refusing: Players in this group all but refuse to learn new rules. If you are making a game for this group, it is almost certainly a game based on a real-world game, or it is a sequel to an existing game, or at least it fits tightly into a very specific genre. For example, Wii Bowling was able to grab an audience of people who had no interest in video games but already liked bowling. It is fairly rare to design games for this group, and doing so is much more challenging than creating a game for a more accepting audience.

• Resistant: Players in this group do not like learning new rules, but they will do so occasionally so that they can play a specific game. Players in this group tend to stick to a small variety of games, or possibly a narrow genre, and tend not to explore new titles beyond what they already know. Designing games for people in this group is easy if you are doing something that would be familiar to them and takes very little ramp-up. However, members of this group are nearly impossible to reach if you are doing something unique or well outside their comfort range. Think of the “match three” genre of games, like Bejeweled. Many players play only this genre because it is easy to learn and play and is available on a convenient device, such as a smartphone. If you wanted to make a new twist on a match three game, this group might be open to giving your game a chance. However, you shouldn’t expect them to wander outside of this narrow focus willingly.

• Neutral: Players in this group are fine with learning new rules if it is for the specific purpose of playing a new game. Many casual video game players and board game players fall into this category. This group is unlikely to read or understand all the rules; instead, they learn as they go, and they may be interested in only the rules that are needed to play the game. The neutral category is a large segment of the market. Many, many people fall into this category, and it may be worthwhile targeting them, even though getting the rules through to them can be challenging. Players in this group are the kinds of players who follow several specific franchises and buy each new installment of those games. They are also likely to buy similar competitors within the same game genre, but they are unlikely to wander outside their preferred genre to try something completely new. For example, think about players who buy every variant of first-person shooter (FPS) that is released but rarely if ever buy games from completely different genres. This kind of player might be convinced to try something new to play with a friend but would not seek the experience without that kind of prompting.

• Accepting: Players in this group like learning new games and new rules. They often learn more rules than the bare minimum needed to play. They sometimes seek out rules exploits and use them to their advantage. This group is also likely to have a favorite genre and stick to it mostly but also explore other genres. The accepting category is a significant market and makes up a good share of professional game developers’ target market. There are far fewer gamers in this category than in the three more resistant categories, but there are enough to warrant creating large-budget console and PC games for them. This is the group that is most targeted and valued by the gaming industry, and accepting players are often flooded with a variety of games made for them. This can have an oversaturating effect on the group, and each individual game created for the accepting crowd is likely to face challenges in terms of standing out in the crowded field.

• Enthusiast: Players in this group love to learn new rules. They often jump from game to game, and many of them drop a game as soon as they figure out the rules completely. While it is easy to get a rules enthusiast to play your new game, it is just as hard to hold on to that player. This group is also willing to accept many more rules and much higher barriers to entry than are the other groups. While there are no exact numbers on the size of each group, sales of games with many complex rules provide significant anecdotal evidence that this is the smallest of the five groups.

Interest in Challenge

There are many varieties of challenge, but we can simplify this attribute to tolerance for failure. Most games have mechanics that allow the player to both succeed and fail. We can quantifiably measure the frequency of success versus failure and use it as a metric that defines challenge. To some players, failure is almost—or even completely—unacceptable. They want constant rewards and play games simply to feel good or pass time—and not for challenge. Other players accept or even crave high failure rates. It is possible to quantify this aspect by listing an accepted failure level as a simple ratio of the number of failures to the number of successes. Consider these two dramatically different ratios:

• 15/1: This notation indicates an expected 15 failures for every 1 success. This is a very challenging game; it is so challenging that it will likely drive away many players, but it may attract a small devoted following.

• 1/100: This notation indicates an expected 1 failure for every 100 successes. This would be a game that is not intended to frustrate players. Story-driven RPGs and simple puzzle games may have this type of accepted failure level. The challenge of the game is not really the point of such a game, and so challenge is heavily downplayed.

Beyond describing the player you want, this player attribute can help you determine the game’s success after it is released. The success and failure rate of players is one of the easiest metrics to acquire and analyze from play tests and telemetry data. This attribute allows you to compare your expectations with the reality of the game. It can also let you know whether you need to make adjustments to the game to make it more or less challenging to better target your desired market.

Desired Time Investment

Desired time investment can be broken into two subcategories: session time and total time. Some games, such as checkers, don’t have a total time, only a session time. But many games have both.

Session time is how long it takes to play a standalone session of a game or, in longer video games, to have what the player would consider a satisfying session. In some games, such as poker, a single hand could be considered a discrete session; this would be a very small session, and most poker players would consider a tournament or a night of many hands to be a discrete session. Tennis is also a well-divided game. It consists of points that make up games, which make up sets, which make up a match. So, even though you can play a game of tennis in just a few minutes, it’s not considered a full session. Instead, a match is considered a full session, and a match can last an hour or more. In game design, you should consider a session to be something that a player can walk away from feeling satisfied about completing.

Total time is the amount of time it takes to “complete” a game—which can be very different for different games. Some games are never completed. Think of MMOs, match three games, and older arcade games. Players may come up with their own definitions for total time, like “hit maximum level” or “earn all achievements.” So you can see that it’s not necessary to have an end to game. It is, however, important to define a session and a complete game experience for the game you are making.

For each of these time investment subcategories, you need to define what you expect out of a game and what the audience wants. Some players want a quick 5-minute session with no end game; casual mobile puzzle games suit this audience. Other players want 2-hour-long sessions with a 20-hour completion time; many action and adventure video games appeal to this group. Different time investments appeal to different players. You need to know what game you are making and know how to test your game with the proper audience to get accurate and useful information about your audience.

The following are some examples of how you might quantify desired time investment for various games:

• Checkers: 10-minute session, no total time

• Poker: 3-hour session, no total time

• Skyrim: 2-hour session, 100-hour total time

• Mario Kart: 15-minute session, 50-hour total time to unlock every reward

Pace Preference

The pace of a game is difficult to quantify but is important to players. Asking someone who likes turn-based strategy games to play a high-action FPS will not likely yield good results and vice versa. You should consider multiple factors related to pace. For example, a game of speed chess is fast paced, but it is fast in a different way than a “shoot ’em up” top-down shooter is. When you want to quantify the pace preference of players, you should specify what specific type of pace you mean. For example, some games have purposeful rhythms and go through pace changes. Stealth games, for instance, often have a slow methodical buildup, an explosive fast section, and a slower-paced cool-down section.

When describing pace preference, it is important to be as accurate and specific as possible. The following are some examples of how you might quantify pace preference for various games:

• Chess: Slow, turn-based, thoughtful pace

• Ping Pong: Very fast, athletic, reflex-based pace

• Generic computer RPG: Alternating between slow and mid-paced action with some slower thoughtful crafting moments throughout

• Generic deathmatch FPS: Fast-paced, high-dexterity, with very little downtime for breaks

• Generic 1980s arcade game: Moderate and dexterity-based pace to start that gradually ramps up to fast dexterity until the player can’t keep up; play then starts over

Competitiveness

How much do players want to be judged or compared to one another? Some games are built specifically around competitiveness, and others avoid it completely. For example, all racing games clearly rank players based on how they finished the race. Many go further and show campaign-style rankings that accurately display how well each player is doing in comparison to other players. On the opposite end of the spectrum are sandbox games, farming simulations, and other casual games. It is often hard to determine player ability in these games at all, let alone to compare one player quantitatively against another.

As with the other attributes of a game player, it is important to know who you are making a game for and what kind of feedback to provide them. For example, if you were making a highly noncompetitive game, you would want to avoid leaderboards, ranking, and maybe even visible scoring of any sort. Players who like noncompetitive games don’t want to know how they are doing and just want to enjoy the experience. If you were making a competitive game, you would need to plan well in advance how to track, measure, and display relative ability to the player.

Regardless of which way you want to go with a game, it’s a good idea to keep competitiveness in mind from the outset. When creating a player profile, you can use any description of the competitiveness that suits the game you are making. The following are a few examples of how you might describe various levels of competitiveness:

• Noncompetitive: The game has no scoring, no ability tracking, and no player-versus-player comparison. It is meant to be easy and fun to play and not make players feel bad about their current ability.

• Competitive: The game tracks a few key metrics on a per-session basis. At the end of a game session, players are shown a score and given a ranking for that session. However, each session is individual, and the scores are wiped clean at the end, allowing the players to feel a bit competitive without being judged overall.

• Highly competitive: Every possible aspect of play is tracked, measured, and displayed in detail for the player. Individual sessions are tracked and compared, and global leaderboards are dynamically maintained and shown to the player. Players are encouraged to constantly refine their skills and are driven by climbing leaderboards of different time scales (for example, weekly competitions, daily challenges, and best-ever scores).

Platform Preference

Games are available for many platforms, including PC, console, mobile, gambling table games, and VR games. (You could even consider tables and pen and paper to be platforms.) Knowing the specific hardware platform, or multiple platforms, for a game will help define your audience—though not in a deeply meaningful way. There are now games of all types on every platform, and there are audiences for each of those types of games on each platform. It is good for you as a game designer to know the strengths and weaknesses of the hardware for which you are developing. You should therefore always be thinking about platform, although it is not as important to think about console players versus PC players versus mobile players.

Skill Level

Many games require that players bring some skills with them or quickly develop those skills while playing. Like all the other attributes, requiring specific skills for a game will attract some players and repel others. When designing games for adults, you can assume that players have reading skills and basic motor dexterity skills. A game may require many other particular skills, and it’s a good idea to list them early in your development process.

Consider these examples of the skills that some games require:

• Tennis: High degree of hand–eye coordination and physical endurance

• Chess: Ability to think out future moves and options

• FPS: High degree of hand–eye coordination and fast reflexes

• Match three: Pattern recognition

• Sandbox building: Spatial awareness

• Poker: Probability calculation

Genre/Art/Setting/Narrative Preference

This catchall category allows you some freedom to more specifically define what your audience needs to be interested in. Some players are turned away by specific art styles. Some have a strong preference for specific settings, and some may be more interested in the story than in the mechanics and gameplay of the game. This category can also include things like outside interests and hobbies your target audience will likely have. For example, if you are going to make a game based on being a stock trader, players probably need to have some interest in stock trading.

Payment

The simplest form of compensation from players is payment. This could be as simple as each player purchasing a copy of the game. Modern games, however, have much more sophisticated methods of getting payment. Each form attracts some players and repels others. Knowing the kind of payment you want to get from your players from the start is an important factor in determining how the game is built. The following sections describe a few common types of payment and some pros and cons that you should consider for each type.

Other Forms of Value

In the end, money is the goal of professional development, but there is not always a direct path from creating a game to piles of cash. Developers can gain other forms of value from players as well. When developing a target market, it is good to list, right from the beginning, what forms of value you want to gain from your players. When thinking about the additional forms of value, it is tempting to want them all. But you should avoid this temptation and pick only one or two to focus on. Trying to target several secondary values at once is likely to water down individual efforts and weaken the chances of any of them working.

The following are a few of the ways types of value besides money that you can gain from players:

• Word of mouth: When players like a game and discuss it with their friends, their friends are more likely to get the game. When a game has mechanics built into it that get players to play with each other, seek out people to play with, or just talk about the game, there are more opportunities to bring in a bigger audience. When targeting word of mouth as a method of getting value, you want individuals to talk directly to other individuals because they are likely to be trusted by the people they are talking to.

• Social media: Social media is an even more expansive but less personal form of getting the message out than word of mouth. It essentially allows players to act as free advertising. While social media can help a small game reach a much larger audience, there can be backlash over “spam” games in social media. If a game is constantly asking players to share scores and invitations with new people, it does reach more people but at the cost of annoying potential players.

• Popularity contests: “Game of the year” and similar voting contests are common across the Internet. If a small game with a motivated audience can win or even place in one of these contests, it can give the game a large amount of exposure essentially for free. Note that this is a particularly difficult method of value to plan for with a new game. It tends to occur more organically in response to a game that is already on the market.

• Ranking sites: Many websites have ranking lists of new games based on player scores. Games with high scores are typically more attractive to new players. Some small games have broken out and become successful simply by having a consistent and growing following of high scores on ranking sites. It might seem like ranking sites would be an obvious target for every game, but it’s really not. Making a game that consistently gets high ranking scores is often expensive in comparison to making a game that gets good scores. Or, to put it another way, there is an ever-diminishing return of ranking scores based on the input of every growing effort and money put into the development of the game.

• Content creation: A game may allow players to create content within the game. Players can produce more content than any single development team ever could. This model tends to create an enthusiastic and dedicated player base. There are, of course, many development hurdles in creating a game that players can manipulate and expand. These hurdles may be more than many teams want to tackle.

• Player interaction: MMOs and other multiplayer games are good only if people play them. Simply by being in the game and playing, a player adds value to the game. Some multiplayer games need lots of players to do adequate matchmaking. With these games, too, by simply being in the pool of players, a player is adding value to the game.

• Market numbers: Games that are popular and have a lot of downloads or active users get attention. For this reason, some teams are willing to take a financial loss in order to encourage the largest volume of players to play the game. One of the easiest ways to become successful while selling any product is to already be popular.

Target Audience Value

Obviously, a game developer would like to gain as much value as possible from each player, but again, many of the methods listed in this section for gaining value are mutually exclusive. Having a plan upfront about the methods a team wants to use to gain value from players will help guide the team in a single direction.

For example, if the team has a small budget and no established reputation, simply getting noticed is going to be very challenging. In this case, the team might decide to get value from players by giving away the game for free, being ad supported, and trying to gain more value from encouraging players to spread the word on social media. Conversely, if the team is more developed and wants to have a gamer-friendly reputation, it may opt for an upfront cost to the game and offer expansion packs. It might at the same time target high game ranking and possibly some online awards to gain value from players.

Chess

The target audience profile for chess is as follows:

• Learning new rules: Resistant. This player is willing to learn a small number of unchanging rules so they can play the game repeatedly with the same or new opponents around the world.

• Challenge level: Variable. The player will find the right challenge level by finding the right opponent. There is no single-player version.

• Time investment: Sessions are around 30 minutes; there is no total time.

• Pace: Very slow and thoughtful.

• Competitiveness: Highly competitive. One player will win or lose every session. The drive to beat the current opponent is a motivating factor for playing the game.

• Platform: Analog board and pieces.

• Skills required: Very little. Only the ability to comprehend the basic rules.

• Genre/art/setting/narrative: None.

• Value gained from player: Word of mouth and player pool.

Galaga

The target audience profile for the arcade game Galaga is as follows:

• Learning new rules: Resistant. The player is not interested in learning complex controls and systems but wants to get right into the game immediately and figure out the mechanics through trial and error.

• Challenge level: Very high. Failure is assured with every session. The player is happy to start playing knowing that every session will end in failure.

• Time investment: Low. Sessions are around 5 minutes; there is no total time.

• Pace: Players likes to start at a moderate pace and keep playing as the pace increases to the point that they can’t keep up.

• Competitiveness: High. Players can see their score and try and do better. A public leaderboard enhances competition at the arcade machine. Players are driven to beat their own high scores and get their initials on the public leaderboard.

• Platform: Arcade cabinet.

• Skills required: Hand–eye coordination and reflexes.

• Genre/art/setting/narrative: Spaceships and aliens.

• Value gained from player: Direct payment. A quarter gets a short one-play session.

Mario Kart

The target audience profile for Mario Kart is as follows:

• Learning new rules: Resistant. The mechanics and controls are in line with those of other racing games, so a player who has ever played any racing games will be able to quickly transition in. Further, a player who has driven a car knows the rough analogy the game is using.

• Challenge level: High. 5/1 failure rate. When players start, they lose against artificial intelligence (AI) most of the time. As players get better, the AI and challenge level increase consistently to keep players losing frequently. This ratio of loss motivates players to come back for more and improve their skills.

• Time investment: Low. Sessions are around 15 minutes. A total time of 100+ hours is required to unlock all rewards.

• Pace: Very high. There is no time for contemplation in any moves.

• Competitiveness: Very high. Players are ranked per race, and there are multiple leaderboards.

• Platform: Nintendo game systems exclusively.

• Skills required: Basic racing game skills.

• Genre/art/setting/narrative: Fun, bright, colorful artwork that appeals to children. Some adults may be turned off by the cartoon style.

• Value gained from player: Payment is primary, player interaction is secondary.

The Battle for Wesnoth

The target audience profile for The Battle for Wesnoth is as follows:

• Learning new rules: Accepting. The game is similar to many traditional turn-based strategy games but also has many unique mechanics. There are many different character classes and items to learn, and a wide variety of attributes. The player enjoys having a basic set of knowledge about the genre but also enjoys the twists and surprises the game brings.

• Challenge level: 1/1. Players tend to fail the first time and succeed the second on any given level. Players feel motivated by this pattern to replay a scenario multiple times and also explore new content in the game.

• Time investment: High. Sessions last around an hour, and there is enough content to play new sessions for hundreds of hours.

• Pace: Slow, thoughtful, turn-based pacing.

• Competitiveness: Low. While multiplayer mode is an option, most of the content is for single player mode. There is little emphasis on comparing players.

• Platform: PC, mobile.

• Skills required: Lots of reading, probability calculation, and strategic thinking.

• Genre/art/setting/narrative: Classic high fantasy.

• Value gained from player: Word of mouth, player content creation, and player interactions.

Bejeweled

For this final example, I have given the player a name and personality description to illustrate how such simple changes can humanize the target audience and help you better imagine how to make a game for those players. You can also add a few more details to help flesh out the character of your target audience. While this is not essential to get started, it can certainly help with visualization.

The target audience profile for Bejeweled is as follows:

• Player name: Chris.

• Learning new rules: Resistant. Chris does not play a lot of games, but she can easily figure out the basics of a match three game. She is motivated to find a few new combos and strategies as the game progresses, but she is not willing to go on forums or research a better strategy.

• Challenge level: Moderate. 1/10. Chris wants to be able to clear several boards of the game before the challenge starts to grow. Even at the highest challenge level, Chris can usually eke out a win and move on.

• Time investment: Low. Session length is around 15 minutes; there is no total length. Chris wants a game she can pick up and quickly get into and then complete a small session in just a few minutes. Chris does not want to invest large amounts of time in campaign modes or expanding mechanics.

• Pace: Chris enjoys slow and thoughtful turn-based moves. She does not want a game to stress her out.

• Competitiveness: Moderate. Chris mostly likes to play the game to kill a bit of time, but she enjoys occasionally checking the high score boards to see how she’s doing compared to her friends.

• Platform: As many as possible, so Chris can play on any device available.

• Skills required: Chris is likely not color blind, but if she were, she might have a hard time with the core mechanics.

• Genre/art/setting/narrative: Chris likes the universal appeal of abstract decorations.

• Value gained from player: Chris has bought the game on some devices but plays with ads on others. Chris also likes to chat with friends about the game.

Do you feel like you can envision Chris? Maybe you know Chris or even are Chris! If you can envision Chris, and clearly see what will make her happy or upset, it’s much easier to make a game that will make her want to buy the game and continue to play.