Audience Attention

 

    Audience Attention 👪

Let's start with some questions. What makes up your favourite film? What is it that gets you excited to play your favourite game or visit your favourite stores?  Do you see any patterns?

 

Despite what your answer is you are part of a target audience. 

Let's admit it most products are only as successful as their audience. These audiences are the driving force of what a product is or could be as without an audience there's nobody to sell to. So then, how do we get these so-called audience's attention? Well, typically features like genre, purpose, storytelling, or aesthetics has a role to play. However, there are an abundant more building blocks used to capture an audience. 

This leads me to the question of the week: 🌟 Investigation the audience of a currently available commercial project similar to yours and outline how they've captured the attention of their audience and how you can apply similar techniques in your project.

 

I confess I haven't actually, played any walking simulators before. But after some hardy research I feel that the simulator, That Dragon, Cancer is similar to our project as both explore a parent and child relationship and is driven by a story of emotion rather than a story of action or mystery.

 

That Dragon, Cancer is "an immersive, narrative videogame that retells Joel Green’s 4-year fight against cancer through about two hours of poetic, imaginative gameplay that explores themes of faith, hope and love." (Steam & Numinous Games, 2016) Furthermore, as a player you explore the game through multiple different perspectives as you interact with objects and complete mini games and activities.

 

The overall game is targeted at everyone and anyone as it seeks to raise awareness and connect to viewers. However according to an article "chances are, the audience for the game are those who have been unfortunate enough to be in the same or similar situation as the Greens. The story will have meaning to them. It gives them a reason to play it. For the average gamer, however, this may not be the case." (Smith, 2016) The story, likewise, uses its dark themes, sombre music, unusual genre, simple yet unsettling style and poetic storytelling to capture their audience.

 

Considering, our project there's already quite a few things we are doing similar to That Dragon. Such as having a switch between reality and fantasy (though theirs is much more surreal than ours), symbolism, changes in mood as well as a sequence of events that explore emotion. However, they have a lot more interactivity, pacing, world exploration, point of view changes and cinematography than ours.

 

Even though, we have limitations in what we can achieve with our project there are a few techniques we could use. For instance they use both poetic and story dialogue to drive their story. Likewise for our project we could utilise dialogue more in portraying the emotions in the memories. For example, one of our ideas was to make the memories talk in gibberish and at the end scene have a clear line of dialogue for impact. We could also do something similar to the simplistic style of That Dragon by having our characters with no faces and simplistic scenery.  Plus we could use some basic cinematography and music to create mood. 

References

 

Numinous Games. (2016, January 11). [That Dragon, Cancer cover page]. Wikipedia. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cc/That_dragon_cancer_cover_art.png

Smith, D. (2016, March 29). Are let's plays responsible for that dragon, cancer sales figures?. Video Game News, Cheats, Guides, Walkthroughs, Videos, Reviews & Culture.  https://www.gameskinny.com/3k063/are-lets-plays-responsible-for-that-dragon-cancer-sales-figures

Steam, & Numinous Games. (2016). That dragon, cancer. Steam.  https://store.steampowered.com/app/419460/That_Dragon_Cancer/

 

From <https://www.citefast.com/?s=APA7#_Webpage>