I wanted to introduce the importance of understanding your audience early so I could talk about the many ways in which we consistently fail to do this simple thing, but I didn’t expect to be handed such a clear and useful example just a few days later!

Let me start with some background. World of Warcraft is currently running a seasonal event called Brewfest. This is an alcohol-fueled party in the vein of Oktoberfest. In addition to free-form drinking, there are a number of small quests, most of which reward the player with tickets that can be used to buy special Brewfest items. Most of the reward items are seasonal fluff (food and drink, funny hats and other clothes, a pony keg for roleplaying and so forth) but the big reward of the event is a player mount: a Brewfest Riding Ram. This is especially exciting to players with Horde characters since there is otherwise no way for them to obtain a ram mount. The player reaction to Brewfest has been … mixed. The event began with some severe bugs and design flaws and although most of those have been resolved, one portion of the event had to be permanently disabled due to griefing.

More interesting to me, however, is what we can learn about Blizzard’s characterization of their audience based on what they’ve said about Brewfest. Seasonal events like Brewfest have been touted by Blizzard as proof of their commitment to creating content for more casual players. But what are these casual players like?

The following is quoted from a WoW dev involved in creating the event in a thread on Blizzard’s WoW General Forum. I’ve pulled together several posts on the same thread below (separated with elipses) and snipped out the actual math of ticket acquisition that he’s referring to for brevity.

You would earn…. 782 tickets. More than enough for the ram, for logging in once a day, perhaps 15 minutes, every day, from now until Brewfest ends. I fail to see how that isn’t “casual” by definition.

…

None of my math is contradictory. One is averaging 7 keg turn-ins a day, the other 20 (10 per run, twice a day). One was for the casual crowd; what I quoted the second time was a far more challenging estimate.

…

In a later post, I gave the 20 kegs a day, which was for a more “hardcore” mentality towards the event in getting most of the items.

So putting this together we see the following picture of casual and hardcore players:

1. Casual players can log in once a day for 15 minutes. Hardcore players can log on for longer amounts of time more than once a day.
2. Casual players are less skillful at completing a short mini-game than hardcore players. Note that the mini-game does not rely on skills needed elsewhere in the normal game and takes about four minutes to learn.
3. Casual players will be satisfied with just the mount reward, but hardcore players will push on and get the rest of the rewards, including the funny hats and roleplaying keg.

In the abstract, these characteristics fit our assumptions about casual players: they have less time to play, they are less skillful, they are more easily satisfied. And yet it’s easy to see that these characterizations — especially #2 and #3 — are not at all logical. Why would hardcore players want a funny hat or a roleplaying knick-knack? And if you want to stereotype, then shouldn’t casual players be better at the mini-game? After all, they sit around all day playing Bejeweled instead of raiding …

And what about assumption #1? Can we really assume that casual players will log in once a day for 15 minutes? That’s not very long, true, but it still implies a commitment to a particular schedule. Are casual players known for their commitment? Even when the commitment is there, that schedule may not be feasible: for example, what about the weekend warriors — players who have carefully scheduled their very full lives to allow themselves six hours in Azeroth on Sunday even though the rest of the week is dedicated to work, school, and family?

(If they care enough they’ll make time, you say. And yet this event was carefully designed to appeal to casual players … right?)

The problem occurs when we boil a complex picture of our multi-faceted playerbase down into a couple of adjectives, each with a handful of broad, simplistic attributes, and then we build up designs based on the simplifications (i.e. less time) instead of the more complicated reality (i.e. some have less time per day, some need shorter or interruptible sessions, some need a more flexible schedule). And what we invariably end up with is content that doesn’t appeal properly to anyone because it isn’t actually targeted at anyone. In short: wasted content.

Last year I spent some time writing a monthly column for Skotos called Lessons from the Live Team. (If you’re not familiar with Skotos, it’s a bit of an odd bird: a game developer/publisher that is perhaps best known for its extensive archive of articles on game development. There’s some really good stuff in there, including but not limited to the history of Skotos itself. You should check it out if you haven’t already.)

The column unfortunately fizzled out after nine months, although in many ways this blog is a direct inheritor. Now I don’t intend to crib too much from my old self, but there is one topic that I want to introduce before I go much further: the importance of understanding your audience. Audience is a bit of a hobby horse for me — you’ll see me rant about it often — so I want to start by covering the basics. And since I’m still satisfied with the original article on Skotos, I won’t belabor all the same points here. I’ll just sum up briefly and point you at the original.

So to sum up:

1. Having a clear grasp of the people you believe will want to play your game — your target audience — is essential during the pre-launch development. It’s not about deciding which features to include; you can say you are targeting ‘everyone’ and throw in the kitchen sink, and in fact too many developers do. No, it’s about:
   1. knowing which features to cut, because you will be cutting features (and lots of them!), and
   2. knowing which features need to play together nicely (be integrated, support each other) and which need to run in parallel.
2. Once you’ve launched, you need to have a very clear grasp of who is actually playing your game — your actual audience. For most MMO games, it’s simply not feasible to replace your audience with a new one if you decide you don’t like them (although some have tried). So the only possible result of misunderstanding your audience is a smaller playerbase.
3. And finally: Understanding your audience is not a touchy-feely gut-instinct “I’m building the game for people like me” thing. (Clarification: It’s perfectly okay to build a game for people like you — so long as you know who you are and in exactly what ways your players will be like you.) You need as much solid data as you can get; you need actual intelligent analysis; you can’t afford to assume or oversimplify.

That’s all pretty obvious, right? But how do you really go about understanding your audience? Well, you figure out who they are, why they play, and how they play:

• Demographics: Who are your players? Are they male or female, young or old, educated or illiterate? This data can give you a very basic window into your audience, although it’s very important to understand that it is only a very basic window. As I say in the Skotos article, it doesn’t help to know that 17% of your players are females over the age of 45 unless you have some idea of what a female player over the age of 45 wants from your game — and it’s unlikely they all want the same things anyway.
• Motivations: Why do your players play your game? Although many people still use Bartle’s player types as a useful shorthand, I prefer Nick Yee’s Model of Player Motivations, largely because in my experience, people are very rarely after only one type of experience at a time.
• Habits: What do your players actually do in your game? Actual in-game actions and behaviors may line up perfectly with motivations, or they may conflict. If there’s a conflict, it may be due to bias in self-reporting motivations, or it may be because your game doesn’t allow players to do what they actually want to do. Either way — valuable information!

Now in my experience, a lot of developers either think that this level of understanding is rather more complicated than useful, so they skip it, or they agree that the need is obvious … and then tend to skip it anyway. In truth, it’s hard not to slip into a gut-feeling assumption-laden model of your playerbase. How many times in the past week have you used the term ‘hardcore’ as a shorthand for a set of motivations and behaviors (and probably demographics) without giving it a second thought? And yet even hardcore MMO players are by no means a homogenous group.

For example, let’s take a player I know. He plays World of Warcraft perhaps 10 hours a week; he doesn’t like to group; he’s only got one level 70 and it took forever to get there; he has never ever been on a raid. Not terribly hardcore, yes? And yet … he runs a WoW fansite as a hobby. He spends upwards of 30 hours a week on the fansite, every week. He lives, breathes, and dreams WoW. That’s hardcore.

Now I’ll give you that this friend of mine is hardly typical … so far as we know. And that’s my point. While there probably aren’t millions of intensely dedicated fan site operators in your playerbase, it’s quite possible that you’ve got a bunch of players who are very intensely dedicated but who don’t fit the hardcore mold, either because they are intense about the wrong things (i.e. not raiding) or because while they want to be hardcore, their play habits are circumscribed by real life. You really won’t know until you get real data on both their motivations and their habits.

Our players are complex people with complex needs, and since we make our living meeting those needs we’d best do our damndest to understand them.