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"I Am First and Foremost My Audience":

Images and Models of Digital Game Players

Introduction

In the second stage of playermaking, digital game companies use the information and data they have gathered to create images of their players. These images go on to be formulated into broader models that can be put to use for specific design and production decisions, and are able to be shared across the production chain. Eventually, these images and models circulate into broader discourse to be negotiated with actual players in the third

playermaking phase.

As James Ettema and D. Charles Whitney simply state, “Professional mass communicators don't seem to have a very clear or complete image of their audiences” (1994: 6). My interviews indicate that this is generally the case for the creators of digital games, as evident in one developer's comment that “we don't really consider our audience... we just look at the audience as a sort of massive heterogeneous blob that we serve as best we can” (Anonymous B, interview).

The creation of these types of audience images is not unique to the medium of digital games, but rather plays a critical role in the production of virtually every other major form of media, ranging from television (Ang, 1991), music (Ryan and Peterson, 1982), and film (Kapsis, 1986) to fine art (O'Regan, 2002; Gillard, 2002). This chapter focuses on

unpacking what actually penetrates into and structures these vague images, while questioning whether or not vague images are a problem for game makers.

In terms of player images, my argument here falls along three lines. First, despite rhetoric emphasising the “newness” of new media formats, I argue that the way digital game

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creators make images and the forms they end up taking fall closely in line with those of traditional media like film, television, and news media. This is significant in enabling a study of games to benefit from established scholarship focused on other media.

At the same time, there are a number of issues revolving around media specificity where digital games diverge from other media. These include the games industry's focus on individual players rather than grouped mass audiences, in part due to the assumption of interaction for every individual engaging with the medium. Thus, issues of passive versus active audiences, while still central to the construction of gaming audiences, are framed in very different ways. In adapting pan-media audience models to take into account the specificity of the games medium, I therefore expand the concept of the “audience image” into a combination of three other types of images: the player image, the product image, and the platform image.

Finally, the images and ways of creating them reflect changes to media and media work today, most notably in becoming increasingly technologised, deterritorialised, and personalised (Deuze, 2007). These features inflect both the ways game workers develop ideas about their audiences and the resultant images, meaning images of game players are closely based in technology, marginalise or disavow specific geographic implications, and focus on individuals and identity over features shared by masses. This has meant that game workers typically hold especially complex, yet largely ambiguous images of their

audiences, which is something common to all mass media.

When these images are broadened into industry-wide models of players in order to more fluidly guide broad aspects of the industry, they build upon this technologised,

deterritorialised, and personalised ambiguity in which players both shape and are shaped by the conditions of media production. Whether these models are individualised or generalised, they exist in a system of tension between fears of precarity and the utopian possibilities that are embedded in the idea of the player. Here, the vagueness of player images creates a blank slate onto which these hopes and fears can be applied, as much reflecting the forces that create them and generating a more concrete form from which future players can be constructed.

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Audience Image and Player Image

Starting most broadly, the “player image” is an image developed by media workers or institutions of a player as person. I am adapting the term from “audience image” which is most often attributed to Herbert Gans. He describes this as “not a unified concept, but a set of numerous impressions, many of which are latent and contradictory. These impressions deal primarily with how people live, and how they look at, and respond to the roles

personalities, relationships, institutions, and objects that movies portray” (1957: 316-317).

For Gans, the audience image plays three key roles. First it is an “external observer-judge against which he [the creator] unconsciously tests his product even while he is creating it” (1957: 316). This perception invokes a critical or even adversarial audience, clearly separated from the content creator and potentially existing completely beyond the producer's conscious decision-making. In our interview, Mike Ambinder described their players in this way, but with measured feedback able to convert their external judgments into valuable production decisions, stating, “Our players are the final arbiters. We draw on their feedback to determine whether or not we have a product worth creating” (Ambinder, interview, 2012).

Second, Gans argues that “the audience image... functions to bring the moviemaker in contact with one of his major reference groups” (1957: 317), indicating that this image taps into a creator's existing human relationships that are not necessarily defined by the media in production. Finally, the audience image is the source of a media professional's

livelihood, with Gans stating that “[e]very mass-media creator, whatever his skill, is to some degree dependent on the validity of his audience image for his status and standing in the industry” (1957: 322). This indicates the financial and occupational significance of the audience image, while also emphasising the importance of the audience image in relation to other media producers and professional peers.

The terminological shift from “audience image” to “player image” retains these three functions and continues to be defined, at least initially, by individual media workers. These creators largely base their images of players on what they know, be it from experience,

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intuition, stereotypes, or their immediate surroundings. And due to medium specificity and the increased personalisation of media and media work, they are much more individualised than the mass conceptions wrapped up in audience images. Despite this, player images, like images of audiences, tend to be shaped by three main reference points close to game developers: their social groups, professional peers, and themselves.

With regard to the first of these, for example, in our interview Brenda Romero spoke about envisioning a very specific person she uses as her base reference point:

“I also, with social games, have a very specific, literal, real player in mind. There's a friend of mine who is a 40-year-old stay-at-home mom with two [kids], highly educated, super type-A, great woman, and she plays these games, she plays social games, and so I will often mention her by name. I will often say, well, you know Julie Austin wouldn't want to do that, or Julie Austin would think this is interesting” (Romero, interview, 2011).

These standard reference points, held in common with virtually all other mass media, have themselves become rapidly altered by technological and sociocultural changes. Several game developers told me that, at least in part, they based their understandings of their players on information gleaned through social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Romero continued about Julie Austin:

“I, in social games, actually have the opportunity to watch her [Facebook] Wall, see what she's doing, see what she's playing, and I look for the things that she sends, you know, like gift invites and all that other sort of stuff.” (Romero, interview, 2011)

These networks are highly technologised and deterritorialised, offering the potential for developers to increase the breadth of their social groups to previously unimaginable levels, such as Doom (1993) creator John Romero's five thousand Facebook “friends.” In the case of social game developers, they can even see players interacting with their games and then contact them for feedback instantly and all in one place.

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However, beyond even the basic concerns over the “digital divide,” these services have their own individual audience biases and levels of access (such as Facebook's official limitation to people over the age of thirteen). Moreover, these systems embody the

increased personalisation of today's media, with much or all activity restricted to “friends” as controlled by developers themselves, as well as complexly merged with their personal identities. This can lead to an insularity in which developers are actually continuing to rely on the same family and friends as they would have prior to the existence of such

technologised networks, or just expanding their circle of professional peers rather than including new voices.

Game developers often base their images of their audiences on their knowledge of their professional peers, whom they also see interacting with games and who clearly hold deep knowledge about production, technical, and content conventions. Herbert Gans suggests that filmmakers, “... had little knowledge about the actual audience and rejected feedback from it. Although they had a vague image of the audience, they paid little attention to it; instead they filmed and wrote for their superiors and for themselves, assuming... that what interested them would interest the audience” (1980: 230).

Scholar Ingunn Hagen describes the danger of this type of “single-loop learning,” in which members of an organisation or institution primarily develop their images internally and then recirculate these images within the institution, resulting in insular images that are slow to respond to external factors. This increases the divide between producers and consumers, which can bring about negative attitudes towards audiences now pitted in opposition to both production standards and creator's artistic autonomy (Hagen, 1999: 133).

Hagen suggests that “double-loop learning” deals with this problem by establishing information streams from the external world to promote new perspectives. The example provided is audience measurement systems that contribute to “different kinds of learning horizons” (ibid), yet as I argued in the previous chapter, the mere existence of these measurement systems is not sufficient to infuse new ideas into the game development process. Instead, it requires that these systems be deeply integrated into production

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many companies. Even when these systems do work in conjunction with one another, it still relies on the assumption that measured information is not continually conceptualised by existing assumptions and standards. However, when deeply implemented “double-loop learning” does offer the possibility for a more diverse picture of the player that is at least not solely defined by entrenched insularity.

Moreover, while media makers hold a deep understanding of the content they produce, their consumption habits are not especially representative of most consumers. Muriel Cantor's research into the television viewing habits of TV producers found that they watched more for “work” than for “entertainment” (such as to know what the competition is up to or to check out new technologies in action). Producers also were much more aware of trade publications and press surrounding their medium than the average viewer, yet reported that they did not watch as much television as most people due to the time constraints of their jobs (1971: 178-180).

While this type of time constraint was expressed among several of the developers with whom I spoke, Design Director Brett Norton argued that the opposite temporal situation can also be the case, but with a similar disconnect between producer and audience consumption. He stated,

“Developers are usually rampant gamers, like hardcore, playing games, working on games, every day, ludicrous involvement in gaming... They're specialists, or experts, and your audience is not specialists, they're not experts. They're often times the casual guys that play for a couple hours, five to ten hours a week, so you're building games for them, versus you who works on games, and plays games, somewhere in like the sixty to seventy hour range maybe, depending on what you do and how much you like to play outside of work. So big audience difference there.” (Norton, interview, 2012)

In both cases, these descriptions indicate that media workers are not analogous with many media consumers, and that any audience images based upon them are surely skewed. At the same time, it emphasises that the audience images that do exist are closely linked with the conditions of production. This focus on individual experiences of media and media work leads us to the last main reference point for media workers: themselves.

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Philip Schlesinger's claim that for journalists, "Ultimately, the newsman is his own audience" (1978: 134) is closely mirrored in a statement from my interview with game designer Brenda Romero, in which she claimed, "I am first and foremost my audience" (Romero, interview, 2011).

This temporal prioritisation of first designing for oneself was a recurring theme with my interview subjects, such as developer Andrew Smith's claim that his games are typically “aimed at people like myself, initially, and then I try and sort of massage it in one direction or another” (Smith, interview, 2012).

Caspian Prince told me much the same in a more self-deprecating manner, saying

“I'd start with me, because I don't really know any other in any real detail. I'm not a very good game designer. I'm no good at working out what other people like, so I have to start with myself and hope there's overlap... I couldn't conceive of writing a game I wouldn't enjoy playing” (Prince, interview, 2012).

Even more common are statements similar to this quote from Jay Stuckwisch: “I wouldn't necessarily say we make games for a specific audience. We just make games we think are fun to play” (Stuckwisch, interview, 2011)1_{. Here, the definition of what is “fun to play” is}

based on the creator's own experience with the game, assuming that what the developer finds fun will be fun for others.

While this may just seem convenient, there are also practical reasons why developers would design for themselves. Brian Hackett of Glasgow's Claymore Games told me that many independent developers design for themselves because they don't have the funding or manpower to perform rigorous audience research, indicating an economic restriction (Hackett, interview, 2012)2_.

1_{Jay Stuckwisch is the Marketing Director at Austin, Texas based Twisted Pixel Games, a small}

development studio that was independent at the time of interview, now owned by Microsoft. The company is known primarily for downloadable titles on Microsoft's digital platforms that feature bizarre humour and high levels of difficulty.

2_{Brian Hackett is one half of Glasgow, Scotland based Claymore Games, an independent}

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Dallas Snell focused on worker morale in our conversation, saying:

“Developers often are best at making the kind of games that they like to play. It's hard for them to often get into making a game they don't like to play themselves, especially the core design group.” (Snell, interview, 2011)

As such, his company aims to appeal to both internal and external audiences at the same time, with Snell stating:

“[t]here happens to be enough overlap between the demographics on Facebook... that we can make a game that appeals to our design group and appeals to a large enough segment of the demographics that we enjoy making it and hopefully they enjoy playing it.” (Snell, interview, 2011)

Brett Norton advocated for a type of middle ground, at least for commercial projects, claiming:

“Part of the problem that the gaming industry, even the motion picture industry, and a lot of creative endeavors have, is that you have the creative interests of the developers and then you have the actual thing that people will consume, and the two don't always line up... My creative passions and what an audience is going to pay for have to be in sync” (Norton, interview, 2012).

While the dual-appeal approach used by Snell's company may certainly be viable, its widespread success is premised on a fairly equitable overlap between audience and production crew. However, historically the games industry has struggled with a

development community that is anything but diverse, and that has in turn limited the types of games produced.

This is increasingly problematic as the demographics of people playing games continue to change, especially with the influx of social and mobile gamers. With regard to the most commonly cited mismatch, gender, although games like Bejeweled Blitz (2010) draw in a majority female playerbase, the games industry has and continues to be comprised of mostly men (see International Game Developers Association, 2005, web). Even within this

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segment, research indicates that women in the games industry are much more likely than men to hold jobs in administrative, marketing, public relations, or human resources departments and less likely to fill core design, programming or other production roles (Prescott and Bogg, 2011; Krotoski, 2004; Haines, 2004). This lack of diversity extends to most other identity categories of game developers, such as ethnicity, age, and disability. Thus, if audience images are being created based on developers themselves, these images are not reflecting the diversity of the potential or actual playerbase, and may even be actively constraining it.

Today's blurring of the lines between production and consumption, as well as work and leisure, has made the relationship between producer and audience even more complex, reifying the position of the producer within the audience image while emphasising the role of experience in understanding audiences. As part of the job, game developers are expected and required to play some amount of games, but the distinction between producer and consumer ultimately comes down to experience.

Satoshi Ito, a Japanese game designer working for Sega, reverses the assumption that developers define players based on themselves, arguing that developers and players actually play differently. In an interview for a prominent games industry news website, he states,

"It is very important for developers to play games, but they shouldn't be