Wired News: GDC Dilemma: Luring the Non-Gamer
Mar, 09, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO -- As the 20th annual Game Developers Conference wrapped up here Friday, programmers and designers took home with them the daunting puzzle of how to win over a target demographic crucial to the industry's ongoing success. And guess what? It's not you.
It's your mom, your little brother, your girlfriend -- anyone you know who would never dream of calling themselves a "gamer," but who, if properly motivated, would happily spend time -- and money -- playing games just the same. Developers who never really concerned themselves with expanding beyond their core audience are now realizing their very survival may depend on wooing consumers who've never held a controller in their lives.
MobyGames designer Warren Spector broke it down during his Wednesday afternoon presentation on storytelling-in-gaming: As games get more and more expensive to produce, any company that can't crank out a blockbuster is in serious jeopardy, and counting on significant sales volume from the core audience is a risk that developers can no longer afford to take. His suggestion for luring a new segment of players was, not surprisingly, to tell better stories.
"Stories can be key to reaching non-gamers," he said, "but they have to be emotionally satisfying and truly interactive."
The problem, as Spector sees it, is that too much of a typical game's budget goes to flash -- graphics and physics, for example -- which have next to no appeal for the typical non-gamer. That doesn't leave enough money for those elements that would matter to a larger audience, like believable characters or realistic dialogue.
The success of the Nintendo DS and Wii is due in no small part to the company's dedication to the "expanded audience," as Shigeru Miyamoto, the company's top game designer, pointed out in his keynote on Thursday morning.
To illustrate his point, he referenced his "Wife-o-Meter," his way of judging a game's potential appeal by getting his wife to play it. If developers want to expand their audience, Miyamoto said, the one thing they should consider when designing their game is "How fun it is for people who don't play them."
Relentless Software's David Amor knows all about the power of what he refers to as the "other 90 percent," a number he admittedly pulled out of thin air to represent the chunk of the populace that doesn't consider game playing an important part of their lives. His game, Buzz, a simple Jeopardy-type quiz game that comes packaged with four buzzer controllers, has sold in numbers that would make any developer salivate.
More than a year after its release, Buzz is still selling at full price, a rarity in a market that usually sees a title's price slashed just a few weeks after its initial release. In a presentation on Wednesday, Amor was direct with his audience that they needed to change their attitudes about playing to the non-gaming market.
"These types of games are considered very unsexy by the industry," Amor said. "But these games are more important than Gears of War. These are the games your girlfriend buys and starts to play."
