People Who Play Games

If you’ve chosen to take this course, chances are that you enjoy playing games. What kind of games do you like to play? Do you have friends who are playing games with you? Any friends with very different tastes? The fact stands, with 8 billion people worldwide, 3.7 billion are gamers. It means that about 2 out of every 5 people around you might also enjoy gaming.

With such a vast number of gamers, it’s impossible for everyone to have identical preferences. Even players devoted to the same game often have their own unique reasons and aspects they favor.

So we see that game developers are both refining aspects like graphics, levels, and overall experience in traditional game genres, while also pushing the boundaries of gameplay to meet the tastes of their intended audience. As a result, studying the target players is of significant importance. Major game companies tend to have specialized departments that carry out user research upfront, with the goal of sidestepping issues and capitalizing on strengths during later stages of development.

As players, we typically don’t face such commercial pressures, but you might still want to understand your gaming buddies better—whether they’re friends you’ve made in-game or those you play with in real life. So, moving forward, let’s focus on models for understanding and analyzing player preferences towards games and gaming behaviors.

Reflect & Share

Welcome to tell an experience about how you make a new friend or a group of new friends in games, you can share your thoughts in the comments below.