“For anyone interested in a social understanding of music, the experiences of advertisers are ripe for the plucking,” writes music psychologist David Huron (1989, 559) in an article for Oxford University Press. “Musical styles have long been identified with various social and demographic groups. Musical style might therefore assist in targeting a specific market.”
As game composers, we may not think of ourselves as composing music in order to
“target a market,” but whether consciously or not, we’re usually doing just that. Video games are classified into an assortment of genres. Each genre delivers a unique play style, and may also display a form of atmosphere and energy level that typifies games in that category. Most important, game genres each have a strong appeal to their own specific target demographic. The game developers are well aware of this, and have designed their games with the likes and dislikes of their target demographic in mind.
When the development team asks us to create music in a specific style, their choice might have been directly influenced by the musical tastes of their target demographic.
Likewise, when we study the music styles of other representative games in the genre of our current project, we’re likely absorbing and internalizing demographically inspired choices.
Our foremost goal as game composers is to create great music that will enhance the enjoyment of the player. While keeping demographics in mind may feel to us as though we’re being motivated by less-than-artistic considerations, it’s good to remember that significant art can be achieved while also compensating for factors that have nothing to do with art. Personally, when I get frustrated by limitations I usually remind myself that baroque composer George Frideric Handel created his Water Music with instructions from King George to fashion a work that could be performed on a floating barge on the Thames River, with the audience bobbing all around on many barges of their own, and the noise of the Thames competing with whatever music might be presented there. These circumstances certainly imposed some challenging limitations for Handel, but the result remains one of the finest examples of baroque orchestral music ever written. Limitations don’t have to stand in the way of composing meaningful and artistic music. They may guide us in unanticipated directions, coaxing inspired musical choices from us that might not have otherwise occurred to us.
If we are to consider the player’s musical tastes, then we need to understand the particular community of players that our game project is targeting. Each video game genre appeals to a specific segment of the gamer public. Browsing through the reviews section of the video game news site GameSpot.com, I saw thirty-six video game subgenres listed, ranging from first-person shooters to party games. That being said, this multiplicity of play styles can be simplified into a more comprehensible model that can help us understand gamer personalities and preferences, including musical inclinations.
Let’s take an investigative journey through this world of game genres and gamer demographics, one step at a time. So, what do we need to know first?
The Target Market of a Video Game
Contract game composers are typically hired late in the game’s development schedule. In all likelihood, the developers have already settled on a target market for their game by the time they hire us. Even so, if there is any possible doubt regarding the nature of the intended target demographic, this can become troublesome for the game composer down the line. The target market is a crucial factor for everyone involved, including the composer. The musical tastes of the target market usually have a direct bearing on the nature of the music we are asked to compose. If that target market were to change in the middle of music production, it could render previously approved tracks suddenly unsuitable as the developers scramble to choose a new musical style for their redefined audience. Needless to say, everyone would like to avoid such a mid-production scramble, and every effort will be made to conclusively decide on the nature of the game’s target demographic as early as possible.
How do developers define their target markets? Some development studios simply create games that will appeal to people who share the same tastes as their own employees. While this narrows the target demographic down quite a bit, it also limits that
studio’s potential to broaden its audience. Other developers attempt to pursue the highly dependable “hardcore” demographic of veteran gamers who play lots of games, spend lots of money on their favorite genres, and are thought to favor high-octane experiences laced with mature content. However, some diversity does exist within this particular gaming community, making it risky to formulate design decisions based on assumptions about their tastes. When a developer chooses to step back from personal partialities and look at the nature of the gaming audience in a purely objective fashion, the great range of personalities, play styles, and preferences can be staggering.
To deal with these overwhelming variables, focus testing is widely employed by development studios, game publishers, and even scholarly researchers. In a study conducted at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, researchers described focus groups as “an innovative approach to study game related behavior,”
adding that focus groups enable researchers to “explore differences in game experiences according to player type, game genre, and context of play” (Poels, de Kort, and IJsselsteijn 2007, 84). When conducting a game industry focus test, a studio or publisher will bring in a group of people to play a game while it is still in development. Afterward, these people will fill out questionnaires that explore their reactions to the gameplay experience. Focus tests can shed light on how players interact with a game’s aesthetic design, user interface, and play mechanics. But what does a developer do when a game is not yet in a playable state? Where can developers (and game composers like ourselves) find more general information about player preferences?
There are several scholarly “models” that attempt to explain video game player inclinations. These models tend to be based on player impressions gathered either informally or through the use of questionnaires, much like the data gathered at the end of focus testing. Author and game design pioneer Richard Bartle (1996) categorizes players into four distinct personality profiles: socializers, killers, explorers, and achievers. This model does not indicate what types of games would be enjoyed by each personality profile, since the article focuses on the players of only one type of game—text-based Multi-User Dungeons, or MUDs. Research scientist Nick Yee (2007) created a more elaborate model of personality types, but he confined his research to players of MMORPGs. A third model, however, explored a method for describing and categorizing both player personalities and the types of game genres that these disparate personality profiles would likely enjoy. This study is particularly useful to us as we attempt to compose music that would entertain the target market of our game project. First, let’s take a look at this model of gamer personality types.
DGD1: A Model of Demographic Game Design
Game researchers Chris Bateman and Richard Boon (2006) conducted the study using a two-pronged approach: they presented two separate questionnaires to a large pool of study subjects. One questionnaire gathered statistics about game-playing and purchasing
habits, and the other was a thirty-two-question personality test based on the famous Myer-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The Myer-Briggs test was first developed during World War II to aid women who were entering the workforce for the first time and didn’t know what sort of jobs might best suit their innate temperaments. Since then, the test has been used heavily as a measure of personality characteristics. For the purposes of Bateman and Boon’s research, the MBTI was able to identify some specific aspects of the personalities of his study subjects. Here are a few examples of the sorts of characteristics that were revealed:
• A propensity to be outgoing and comfortable in large groups
• A willingness to think ahead and embrace imaginative ideas
• An inclination to consider the feelings of others when making decisions
• A tendency to prefer planned rather than spontaneous action
• A predisposition to engage in conflict or to consider conflict to be acceptable The thirty-two questions of Bateman and Boon’s adapted MBTI test allowed them to sort the study subjects into groups, depending on their responses. These results, coupled with the questionnaires regarding game-playing habits and preferences, painted an interesting picture of the gamer community and the personality types that could be found within it.
After examining the completed questionnaires, Bateman and Boon discovered that four distinct gamer personalities had emerged into which the study respondents could be categorized. They gave these categories descriptive names: Conquerors, Managers, Wanderers, and Participants. Conquerors are fiercely determined players, unwavering in their quest to “beat” the game. Triumph provides Conquerors with an intense burst of emotional satisfaction that serves as the ultimate reward for their efforts. For Manager players, victory is not about “beating” the game but mastering all of its required skills.
Managers excel at keeping track of many simultaneous variables that require monitoring and adjustment. In contrast, Wanderer players are interested in neither victory nor mastery and would rather be plunged into an immersive environment offering bountiful opportunities for exploration. Finally, the Participant is the most social and emotional player type, preferring games that involve interaction with other people as well as stories that include compelling characters.
Figure 5.1
The player types revealed by Chris Bateman and Richard Boon’s 2006 Demographic Game Design research study.
Bateman and Boon further refine these results with two important modifiers for each category: Hardcore and Casual. Hardcore gamers play lots of games, play for a longer time, are willing to learn complicated procedures, and are likely to talk about games with their friends and represent gaming as a part of their identity. Casual players play a smaller collection of games in shorter play sessions, prefer games that are less complicated, and view gaming as a pastime rather than a lifestyle.
What matters most to us about Bateman and Boon’s study is their pairing of certain game genres with certain player personality types (we’ll be discussing these game genres and their associated player types later in this chapter). The correlations in the study and the resultant Demographic Game Design model (DGD1) can help us find the personality type most closely associated with our current project. Armed with this knowledge, we can then imagine the unique emotional journey that the target personality type would
experience while playing a particular game. Putting ourselves in the mindset of the Conqueror opens up a very distinct range of emotions, suggesting musical strategies that represent the ferocity and determination of this player type. On the other hand, music for the Wanderer mindset may be characterized by that sense of wonder and discovery typifying a constant desire to reach beautiful new horizons. Understanding the ways in which the Hardcore and Casual modifiers change the meaning of each personality type provides additional references that help to ground us and focus our work. Combined, these player characteristics can offer insight that has the potential to fuel our creativity while at the same time ensuring that our music rings true with its intended audience.
While this can all be helpful in a general sense, an important question has yet to be addressed: is it possible to determine the general musical tastes of each of Bateman and Boon’s player styles? Is there a way to establish what genres of music have the potential to best enhance the specific genres of games that these players most enjoy?
Music and Personality
In the attempt to consider this question, we can rely on some additional scholarly research to provide us with thought-provoking ideas. While the research of scientists should never supersede our own judgment when it comes to musical choices, it can afford us the opportunity to feed our creative consciousness with interesting and provocative possibilities. We do not need to fully accept such studies in order to find them creatively stimulating. When contemplating possible correlations between musical styles and personality traits, we can turn to the fields of psychology and musicology for some fascinating viewpoints on the subject.
In a study published in the European Journal of Personality, researchers collected statistics from a large pool of study participants to determine whether personality characteristics could be directly correlated with specific genres of music (Delsing et al.
2008). For the purposes of their study, they categorized musical styles into four large genre groups. The study subjects were given several comprehensive questionnaires, including the Music Preferences Questionnaire (MPQ) and an assessment of personality based on a psychological construct known as the Big-Five. This construct sorts personality characteristics into five general areas of interest: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Openness to Experience.
With thousands of completed questionnaires in hand, the researchers looked for correlations between personality types and musical preferences, and their findings can provide us with some remarkable food for thought.
Before we consider these results, though, we’ll need to take a look at the four big groups into which the researchers sorted musical genres: Rock, Urban, Pop/Dance, and Elite. The Rock category would seem to be fairly self-explanatory. It contains the subgenres heavy metal, hard rock, punk, hardcore, grunge, and gothic. The Urban genre encompasses the musical styles of hip-hop, rap, soul, and rhythm-and-blues. The
Pop/Dance category includes trance, techno, and all those genres that commonly appear on the “Top 40” chart. Finally we come to the category with the controversial name—
Elite. This category includes jazz, orchestral music, and religious music. Setting aside whether we think this music is elitist or belongs to some upper echelons of society, the category itself (regardless of its name) is useful to us as we think about how musical genres correlate with personality characteristics.
Here we come to the most important part of the study from our perspective as game composers. The study demonstrates a few provocative connections between personality traits and musical styles. The respondents showing the highest level of introversion were also most likely to enjoy the Rock category, whereas those who were scored to be outgoing extraverts were most likely to enjoy Urban and Pop/Dance styles. People who showed the most eagerness to embrace new experiences were also likely to enjoy both Rock and Elite music. The respondents who tended to think ahead and avoid spontaneous action were also likely to enjoy the Elite musical style. Those people whose temperaments led them to think often of the welfare and feelings of others were likely to enjoy the widest range of music, including Urban, Pop/Dance, and Elite.
What makes this so useful is the fact that these personality traits can be paired with similar traits in the DGD1 model of researchers Bateman and Boon. Since there are correlating characteristics between the two studies, this allows us to draw some connections between music preferences and the DGD1 play styles of Conqueror, Manager, Wanderer, and Participant. Going a bit further, we can look at the specific game genres that these player types enjoy most, and we’ll begin to see connections forming between preferred music styles and preferred game genres. These connections can be fascinating, particularly as we see that the musical history of each game genre seems to add support to these conclusions. It’s a unique way to look at the musical traditions of video game genres, allowing us to consider how our music may fit into the experience of a game’s target market.