Saturday, March 21, 2009

Target audience

Who likes a particular piece of music?

This question has a lot of answers. I would not be able to answer it in detail. All I can hope to do is to understand the piece of music and how it relates to world according to some quantifiable properties.
  • What kinds of music it is similar to
  • If it is easy or challenging to listen to
  • If it is easy of hard to perform
  • Maybe also what it is about
These can be broken down in little pieces. Like which things are similar to what, detailed infuences and so on. The relationship to the audience is influenced by these details. You rarely really know in advance which things have what influence. To get a satisfied audience as a musician you focus on making the music as good as possible. There are some genre dependant properties which define more or less strict rules for the audience. I usually like the extreme of improvisational jazz, as it is one of those hardcore music genres with a comareably small and devout following. It is also defined by quite rare properties with strong influence over the artform.

There are those moments when peple convert to become listeners to this type of jazz, they might make the leap based on a lot of various motivations. Not very relevant really...

When it comes to games I am quite confident that the same general principles apply that exist for music. The difference for games is from my perspective that most of the games we know are like improvisational jazz. Every game has relatively strict and strong influences which fence the player off from the experience.

A game will require the player to make that leap to become a player. The interesting question is why the player will make the leap. And how the game can make the leap as painless as possible.

When you want to push normal people to become listeners to improvisational jazz you can use a few tricks. Like making the musicians play things which are easier to listen to and follow than what they commonly do.

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