Unit 6: Critical Approaches to creative media products - Assignment 1: Task 1 + Task 2

Critical Approaches to creative media products

Audience research is research which is purely focused on the audience. The kind of results that you gather are about the audiences preferences, interests, attitudes etc. Finding out their interests would help define what aspects I would like in my game.Quantitative research is very specific and narrowed down whereas qualitative research allows freedom for the in-depth responses.When using qualitative audience research, you are able to engage with a smaller audience to then gather in-depth information back. However, when going with the quantitative audience research approach, you are able to engage with a larger audience and collect a large sum of statistical,brief information back. Combining the two types of audience research really helps define what kind of audience in particular you are working with. Quantitative audience research can be gathered by using methods such as audience ratings and measurement panels whereas, qualitative audience research can be gathered by doing interviews and questionnaires. Audience classification is another route into audience research. It means defining your target audience, Socio-economic audiences is one way of audience classification. Socio-economic audiences are divided up into a grading system; A - Upper Class (Professionals, Doctors, Lawyers), B - Middle Class (Teachers), C - Lower Class (Nurses, Clerical), C2 - Skilled Working Class (Trades Person), D - Working Class (Semi-skilled and Unskilled) and E - unemployed, students, pensioners. This will help with the approach of deciding how much your product would be priced at. If you gain an audience in which the majority fall into the E class, then you would aim your products price lower due to the amount of income that they have. If you aim for your product to be a high price then you may want to target your audience further towards the top of the system. Psychographics is a term for consumers personality traits; personalities, beliefs and attitudes and interests. These are other alternate ways for gather information rather than just using gender and age to define your audience. I began to research what sort of audience ratings the film got. On "Rotten Tomatoes" website, this movie has a "Tomatometer:71%". What the "Tomatometer" is, is the percentage of how many critics would recommend the movie and in this case, 71% of approved critics would recommend the movie. 17 reviews has been counted on this site for the movie, 12 of them were fresh tomatoes and 5 were rotten. 59% of the audience liked the film and the remaining 41% didn't. The critics say "Killer Klowns from Outer Space's title promise darkly goofy fun and more often than not, the movie delivers". After reading up on the rotten tomatoes website,it gave me a good idea on how many people enjoyed the film and reading what the critic said, it gave me a good idea on what they enjoyed about the film. I have conducted two questionnaires in which use qualitative and quantitative data. The first questionnaire which I conducted was called "Killer Klowns Film Review". These questionnaires were put onto survey monkey which allowed for anyone to answer them. The first question which I asked was whether the people who answered the questionnaire male or female, 17 people were male and 2 were female.
The next question gathered data on how old the people were; 10 were 17, 3 were 18 and 5 were 19+.

The third question was asking the people for their opinion on the film, however I gave them a mutiple choice instead of allowing them to write down their thoughts, 3 people liked the film, 8 thought it was okay, 5 disliked the film and 3 hated the film. The next question adds onto this question, I ask them to write down the reason why they chose what they chose in question 3. This question delves in the qualitative research side as I am allowing them to answer in depth whereas the first 3 questions were quantitative questions which gave me solid and brief results which was what I needed to define my audience.

Above are a few of the responses I have back from the people who answered the question. As you can see there are similarities with some of the responses whereas a few others have gone into depth with their answer and added a few more comments. My next question was another qualitative question which allowed them to answer more in depth.

Above is an image of the results. A few of the results were very brief, I was hoping for the majority of the responses to be more in depth rather than have a few words which are the same.
My next question was asking whether the film was made well, 13 out of 19 people thought the film wasn't made well whereas the rest thought it was. This question was a simple yes or no answer. My seventh question I believe was the most successful at getting in depth responses. The question was "Do you believe the film was lacking in some aspects?".

The above image is a screenshot of a few of the responses that I have. Here are a variety of in-depth answers which contrasts against the answers I had received from the previous qualitative question. The last two questions are both quantitative questions. I asked if a game could made from the movie and the results were 11 people believed a game could be made whereas the other 8 thought it wouldn't work. I then asked at the end what sort of game would they possibly like and i gave them 4 choices. The choice which had the most votes was for the game to be a FPS and no one wanted a top down shooter game.

Overall, I believe this questionnaire was successful at gathering information about peoples opinions on the Killer Klown film. The majority of the people who took my survey were young and male so I feel as if I could have done with a few more females to average out the gender ratio and to have a few more older people take the questionnaire. The age and averaging out of gender may have made a difference or it may have not.

My second questionnaire was going into detail on, if I made a game, what would they prefer. The first question I asked was whether they preferred a shooter or a stealth game. The majority preferred the shooter version rather than the stealth version which is something that I wasn't quite sure on as my idea for the game was to be more stealth and assassinations then shooting. The image to the left shows the results of the first question.

This image to the left is a screenshot on the results from the second question. I feel as if the results from this question were heavily influenced by the other question as most people prefer first person shooters than third person shooters.

The results for this are varied. Although, the majority of the vote went for a horror/gory game which goes against what the film was whereas, the next highest voted choice was for the game to be funny and that is the genre of the film.

For the fourth question, I got great results. Relating back to the film, I got them to tell me what they would like from the film in the game. The majority of the responses I got back were very different. This gave me a real insight into what people wanted and it gave me many ideas to think about.

The next few questions were both questions in which the people had a choice of what they wanted in the game, what sort of perspective they would like to play from, what weapons they would like to use, if they want the game to relate to the film and where would they like the game to be. The final question which I asked was how much would they be willing to spend on a game. This question touches lightly upon the socio-economics side.


I believe I should have asked a few more questions based on the socio-economic side to find out more of my audiences background and then ask a few more questions which relate with the psychographics to find out more about the audiences personality. The balance between the quantitative questions and qualitative questions was quite even, a few of the results I got back were in-depth whereas a few weren't. The lack of in-depth answers proved to me the little interest that they had the film in overall.


Task 2:

Title: The Last of US

Genre: Action-Adventure, Survival, Horror.

Selection of Content: Dark, Apocalyptic world,

Construction of Content: Narrative

Narrative Conventions: Story Driven game, apocalyptic, need a cure.

Codes and Conventions: Health, Killing a horde of enemies, variety of use of weapons, third person.

Target Demographic: Young Adults


Title:  Thief: The Dark Project

Genre: Stealth

Selection of Content: Dark, first person, fantasy/middle-ages,

Construction of Content: 12 Levels

Narrative Conventions: Three organisations, protagonist pursues a life of thievery, wanted for failure to pay a protection fee

Codes and Conventions: Visibility gem, Health Bar, parts of the HUD disappears when items are not in use, First- Person.

Target Demographic: Young Adults (Majority Males)



Title: Lost Circus

Genre: Stealth

Selection of Content: Dark, Cold, Carnival/Circus, fantasy

Construction of Content: 3 Levels

Narrative: Protagonist Abandoned in unknown place, uncover whats happened with the place and the odd doll, escape

Codes and Conventions: Health, Stamina, Visibility, Third person, variety of weapons

Target Demographic: Teens/Young adults



Media Text:

Media Text is information in which can be viewed by the public. Examples of this are; Advertisements, Posters, TV Commercials, leaflets, magazines, etc. The Last of Us for example has advertised using trailers and posters but also advertised on the PlayStation home page which is a strong contender for when wanting to advertise a game, place an advert on the gaming console itself. The content that is displayed in the trailer and the age disclaimer at the bottom of the advert at the start, shows that there is violence and that the game is aimed towards and adults/teens. The dull colours and the derelict world really emphasises the apocalyptic theme within the game and the start really emphasises this. Below are three examples of the advertisement they have created for the game, the last one is the reveal at E3 which is a huge event where future games are showcased.

Thief: The Dark Project was a game which was first advertised in 1997 E3 so, the graphics to the trailer isn't the best compared to what we watch now. The game is very dark and again contains violence so this game is towards towards adults/teens.

Lost Circus: The way I would go ahead with advertisement is how The Last of Us had advertised their game. They advertised using video commercial/trailer and advertising the game on the platform that it is made on. Both games above have been advertised at E3 which really gained a lot of attention so that is something that would really be beneficial. However, considering it is a relatively small game that would most likely be released on PC, for it to be advertised on Steam would be a plus.


Genre:
A system has been developed to file through all of the different types of films/games/programs and this system is known as Genres. When it comes to video games, there are lots and lots of different genres and this helps the players find games which they prefer playing easier. Some genres are a lot more generic than others, for example; Shooters, FPS (First-Person Shooters) and TPS (Third-Person Shooters). Lots of other genres consist of; RPG, Puzzle, Simulations, Platforms, Sports, Strategy, Dance/Rhythm, Survival Horror, Fighting, Action, MMO, Fantasy, etc. [1] More than one genre can be used to describe the game, The last of Us is an action-adventure, survival horror game, ARK: survival evolved is an Action-Adventure, Survival, open-world game. Defining the games more narrowly helps narrow down the search for what the players are looking for/interested in. My game fits into a few of the genres that the Thief: The Dark Project fits into more than The Last of Us as the Lost Circus is dark, cold and Fantasy based.

Selection of Content:
The selection of content is, what are the creative points of the game? What are the colours that have been used, the tones, the fonts used and the sounds? Furthermore, why have they chose that content? For the game series "Dark Souls" they have used dark colours and tones throughout their games and this reflects upon the story and the nature of the game. My game is going to contain dark colours and tones which is similar to Thief: The Dark Project more than The Last of Us. The colours contained within the The Last of Us are quite still quite bright but that just makes the game environment appear beautiful despite being in apocalyptic world whereas where in my game, I want to portray the darkness that looms over the circus and the story.

Construction of Content:
The construction of content is what the games layout is, whether the narrative is prominent or not and how the game is constructed. This meaning if it has levels, what is guiding the player through the levels, is it the story, or is it something else. In this case, what is guiding my player through the levels are quests. The first quest would be to investigate the area they have awoken in and then to investigate the strange music and so on. Again, this is then similar to the Thief: The Dark Project game than The Last of US as Thief has levels.

Codes and Conventions:
Codes and Conventions are the visual elements to game, such as the HUD. Semiotics is a big play for this subject. Semiotics is a study of symbols and the meaning behind them, this relates to the HUD. For example; In Dark Souls 3, The red line at the top symbols health, the blue bar symbols your mana/magic/attunement and the green bar symbolises your stamina. When the bar is empty it means you are either dead *red*, Can't use anymore magic *Blue* or you can't run for a certain amount of time *Green*. Even in ESO (Elder Scrolls Online), the HUD contains a red line at the bottom which is your health, the green bar in the bottom right is your stamina and the blue bar in the bottom left is your mana/magic. These 3 colours really help gamers define what is what on the HUD. What my game is going to have bits and pieces similar to both games, such as a Health bar, variety of weapons and a HUD which disappears when items are not in use.

With coloured bars being an indication to what they are used for, symbols can also be used. For example; in the game "ARK: Survival Evolved" they use a variety of symbols in the bottom right for your character. Usually, the names would not be hovering over the symbols however, the names help new players understand the symbols. The symbols help the players quickly read what they symbolise rather than reading actual words to find out what is wrong with their character.

Target Demographic: Target Demographic is who you are trying to make your game appealing to. This could be a particular gender, age, background etc. Games which are photo realistic are more appealing to adults than children and children would more drawn to games which are bright and colourful. Furthermore, when finding your target audience, it is ideal to do lots of market research. If you half heart the market research, you may end up in fault for not appealing to one sex more than than the other when actually you want it to appeal to both. My game I would like to appeal to both genders and teens/adults. The Last of Us appealed to both genders of gamers however I believe to think that Thief: The Dark Project appealed to more males than females.

[1] http://www.thocp.net/software/games/reference/genres.htm