The reason for my age range is because of the fact that my game plays off the nostalgia factor that a game that has intentionally pixelated graphics preys upon. and as a 1998 titled "Feelings, Fantasies, and Memories: An Examination of the Emotional Components of Nostalgia" and many others find that when you look at things from your past you tend to see things through the proverbial "rose tinted glasses".
How the Media Portrays My Audience
So there are two forms of media and each views my specific audience differently.
Firstly how they are seen in old media such as the TV or News or something like that. In old media all video gamers are seen as lazy, aggressive and Not getting sex. Also watch this this is funny (Kinda Linked in). This perspective is more perpetuated by White, Corporate run news organisations such as Fox News, The sun and The daily mail. However due the fact that they don't understand the nuances of video games and gamers they have only one stereotype for gamers in general.
New media Is different however as new media is in essence built buy people who are more likely to play videogames. So what is the new media stereo type for Retro gamers... Here I'll use a quote:
"Fat, nerdy, neck beards who cry in to their Japanese love pillows at night." - Ben "Yahtzee" Crowshaw. So this may not seem to different but... it kinda is.
They are seen as Men in their mid to late 30's, they still live with there parents, they don't have sex, they are still obsessed with anime and manga, and they are super nostalgia blind to anything they loved as a kid, essentially in a state of arrested development.
But that is just the stereo type so what are they? Just like many groups that have a stereo type they are essentially everyone. Statistical more likely to be men, Aged between 12 to 60, and they just love games that take them to an place where they where younger.
THEM 0.0
to optimize the number of people who download this game I need to go for as broad an audience within my niche market as possible and to do this i need to go off and do some research of my own with a survey on people within it, so I shall go off and write my survey and post it among forums that cater my key demographic.
And here it is
So considering the common way that retro gamers are seen the first one really surprised me as you see that they actually don't mind modern mechanics in a retro game. this maybe due to the fact that many have actually realized that old games had things that new games don't have. I mean if you look at some of the stupid games in the early area of gaming you see they had some not so good ideas, one that both me and many others including Ben "Yahtzee" crowshaw have raged against is the lives system, a mechanic that was designed to take as much money as possible from children at early arcades, but in modern games it is useless.
When you look at number two you get somewhat of an odd reading as you get a large number of people liking the idea of purposefully retro decisions however they don't wish to keep the frustrating or inaccurate game-play of retro games. This is actually what I thought would happen with the crowd this survey was aimed at is, they are the sort of people who enjoy the nostagia and simpleness of old games however they don't wish to relive the game-play of old games that was often as hard as Eminem claims to be.
Number 3 is something that shocked me but also made my job somewhat easier. Mario topped out easily but that game is just a simple "Jump Man Platformer" so I need to incorporate something from the runner up that is megaman X. This game was thrown in to the questions despite being a SNES game rather than NES like all the others on the list. This game is one of the most innovative games in history as it manages to refresh an old idea in a way that still has yet to be replicated in my opinion.
What I am going to do is build a standard platformer that incorporates the three main bits of megaman X that people love:
1. No handholding
2.Introduce things in an organic way
3. Interesting platforming.
The fourth question restores my faith in humanity as it proves not every gamer is obsessed with graphics and actually would rather time spent on building interesting levels meaning that i am going to have to allocate a larger amount of time to coding and less time to art and sprite design.
This isn't uncommon in gaming. Any game jam you see where there is only one individual building the game in 48 hour. You will see that only about 4 hours or even less is spent on the art so as to build a game that is interesting or fun rather than just pretty.
The fifth one is just so I can get an idea of what they prefer in the story and despite the idea of robot being popular among many games in the past it seems that people like the idea of an experiment in better.
FA☆☆OT
Yeah... I want to talk about a huge issue in online video games and in all honesty this is the best place to put it, and that is the other F word.
Most see this as being anti-Gay and I can see the reasoning but as it stands it isn't really about being Anti-LGBT... Yet.
I played Call Of Duty For this and this is an honest quote from someone who sounded about 13 over the group chat and i am going to quote it probatum because I was honestly shocked at this I wrote it down at the time and I want you to have a good feel,
"Fuck you, you fucking faggot, I will fucking swat you and they will come over your house and fuck your fucking faggot face up you fag."
I am a pansexual male and in all honesty I have an idea about how this occurs and I call it the School ground Theory.
As a child you would go out with friends and go over there house, chill in the living room or just be at school and during all of these activities you were almost always in ear shot of your parents, or maybe your friend may be the sort that would tell. The only swears you hear is from carefuller parents or the brother of a friend.
Now swap playground with in your room all on your own, swap the friend that may tell with a complete stranger, the adult that may hear you with no one and what do you get? A child who grows up not truly understanding what you should and shouldn't say, learning wrong and right from random adults and teens on the internet, this is why video games have and ESRB ratting to stop children playing on a game ratted 18, or at the very least with supervision.
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