Unit 6 Assignment 2

Reviews:

Slender is the scariest game I've ever played and it's free 5/5- pixel pulse 

Some of these review sites are quite professional looking whilst others aren't. For example in the first screenshot you can see that it comes from a well known site (Metacritic) whereas the ThePixelPulse isn't as well known therefore people don't really give it a chance or take in the opinions given fully.

In Metacritic the opinions are given by normal unprofessional everyday people who aren't being influenced by the industry, such as when certain reviewers are given the game for free purely for the purpose of reviewing it, this is what makes it reliable. 

They do give pros and cons in most of the reviews this shows that they've not just made up their mind about the game they've actually given it a chance or looked in-depth enough to critique it. 

Slender is not officially rated because it's an indie PC game. 

These scores are useful because it helps us see overall what people think about the game without having to go in-depth and read a 20 page review. It's good for quickly collecting data and seeing if it's a good game to make your focus group play. Also on some reviews people have left their gender/age/location on it meaning that you get to see what people have played it and if they liked it. Which again will help you put together your focus group.

The gameplay is simple and the objective is easy understandable. This is why I think it's aimed at males. Guys are sometimes seen as quite dumb who can't keep their focus on one thing long enough so the fact that it's not a very complicated game means that it would appeal to men more because they don't have to put much thought into playing it. It's been recognised that Male gamers usually play games in the evening/at nighttime. This would prove my point in that guys would play it more because in the evening or at least at nighttime you don't want to put much thought into things.  

(x)

Above is a screenshot of a male Youtuber playing Slender. As you can see this game has a lot of Horror content which is why I think that it would be more male oriented. The reason for this is that girls aren't usually seen as playing Horror games due to the fact that they are viewed as being scared of them.

(x)

If you go on Youtube and search 'Slender play through' you'll only get a few actual girl gamers playing the game. Most of the other ones are guys making their girlfriends play it. 

From a video called 'Teens React to Slender' you can clearly see that out of all of the females who were on that show, none of them have ever played it before. Out of all the males on that show 3/5 had played it before. 

(X)

Thinkbox Audience Profiles
Most of the people seen playing slender are male within the age of 16-34. As you can see the average gamers is 34 but this game is different and opened to a different audience profile.
The screenshots I have gathered are of Famous Youtubers all of the same age bracket which could prove the gamer profile but that could just show that majority of You tubers gamers are male.












The average game player is 37 years old and has been playing games for 12 years.When you first open the game you are thrown into this world, the only noises you hear are crickets, owls and your own footsteps. However, when collecting pages ominous music slowly builds up to intensify the situation, along with the sound of his footsteps becoming louder as you continue. This is one of the best features of Slender; the atmospheric music is able to set an amazingly tense situation. As you know you are being followed your anxiety starts to increase as you tend to panic when you cannot find any pages, knowing Slender Man is after you.

The socioeconomic scale of the people who play Slender are in grade D this means that they are semi and unskilled manual workers. But also a wide variety of different people play it. Everyone in the scale could play Slender but the people that mainly play do fit into the category D.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UwkQ5pUUKM






Slender fans are 12 years and over because they want to be scared of the slender so they can rate the game by themselves. For example if you look at this screen shot of a teenage boy (below) playing slender. This shows that they get scared bit they still want to carry on.


Slender is an indie game but became mainstream through social media. We know it's mainstream because of the fact that loads of popular Let's Players have done the game and uploaded them playing it. We can also see the download figures of just one website.



It was niche when it started out. We know this because of the fact that the game wasn't
produced by a big well paid company. It didn't have an official big release date it just eventually became popular.


Focus Group questions


1) Have you ever played Slender before?
2) Did you enjoy it?
3) Why did you enjoy it?
4) How did you feel when you were playing it?
5) Do you think the game targets you?
6) Would you recommend the game?
7) Did you like the graphics of the game?
8) Did you find any of it boring? (Walking aimlessly for long periods of time)
9) Did Slenderman ever not scare you when he popped up?

Focus Groups:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMmjjAZpFGs - Jack Lee
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn-9LY-3yQc - Freddie Poole
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehLl1cbduCs - Aaron Taylor

Summary:

The majority of the participants in the focus group said they enjoyed playing Slender. When asked why they said because it gives them an adrenalin rush. This is a common theme amongst Horror Gamers. We know that the reason Horror games are so popular is because the players get scared when playing it and it's enjoyable to them because of the adrenaline rush given. The majority of the participants in the focus group also said that they graphics of the game didn't bother them. They felt neutral towards them. I can assume this is because they were focusing mainly on the game and not so much on the graphics. From this we can get that as long as a game is immersive enough, like it's really good at getting you immersed in the game (At the start of Slender it tells you to play in a dark room with headphones on so that you are immersed in the game) So as long as a game is good enough to get you to focus on it and only it with no distractions, the graphics become kind of obsolete. Obviously they do have to at least be good but they don't have to be HD movie quality for said players to enjoy the game. Two out of there people said Slenderman did not scare them after a while. This was because they had become use to the game. We can gather from this that if a Horror game becomes too repetitive it loses some of it's scare element. The minority in the group who said they did get scared everytime Slender popped up, said this because when asked if the game targets him personally, he said 'No I don't like Horror games' But when asked if the game targets him as a Psychographic (Age wise/Gender wise etc) He said yes. We can see from this that the game does target Males aged 15-25+ but you would have to at least have a slight liking for Horror games or just being scared in general.

Overall I would say that the focus group was a success and we learnt a lot from it and got a lot of information backed up by actual proof.