Guitar Hero: Audience Research

In our group we’ve all played Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock and have decided to base this task on this game. My part is exploring examples of audience research for Guitar Hero. Audience research is where people take part in collecting information from the general public; or a specific target audience. For example in the games industry developers who are planning a new game would have an idea of who their ‘fans’ are by checking to see who liked their last games/ franchise series, in which case they would normally ask questions of what could be improved for the new game this company plan to create or what would the fans want. On the other hand, the developers could try to bring in another target audience in order to gain more fans, money and acknowledgment. General questions of what is an individual’s favourite game, genre and what would they look for in a game could be asked and then, the company has the option to look at other products to see what they can make with new and fresh ideas.

Other reasons for collecting information from audience are also for ethics. When making a game you have to be careful with a game’s objectives, for example you couldn’t perform anything that’s racist, sexist ect. Also when distributing the product some parts in the game could be banned or offend a religious race, for example in China you couldn’t use a gothic style where bones are showing and in Vietnam, you wouldn’t be allowed to represent a poppy because it represents the wars they had.

You could use both primary and secondary research techniques for this. If it’s primary then ways of collecting the data would be to engage in surveys, interviews, personal experiences, observations and possibly experiments. With Guitar Hero I could ask people

• ·         How much do they play it?
• ·         Why?
• ·         What’s the best genre of music?
• ·         What could be improved?
• ·         Should there be a wider variety of music?
• ·         Should new instruments be created? E.g Flute ,violin ,keyboard?
• ·         Make the songs harder?
• ·         Create a new HUD, visual style, characters?

·         Be allowed to choose favourite songs out of a large library so you don’t have to buy/down load them separately, instead of getting a list of songs you don’t like or never heard of?

In secondary research people could look up on forums, charts, questionnaire results from other people, watch online videos, get comments from other sites, books, magazines, internet and many other ways.