Data from our player demographic

Bill got over 12 responses to his email survey, and he did me one better—he put a due date on it, and offered respondents a set of collectable artist trading cards if they answered all of the questions. (I love those cards.) He totally knows how to run a show like this. It probably comes from being a professor.

Here’s a small summary of the data we received:

Hardware
Only 5 out of 13 people had the minimum requirements for Unreal Tournament. Geeze.

However, 10 out of 13 had the following:
> 1.5 GHz processor speed
> 1 GB memory

If we dropped our requirements to 512 MB memory, we’d add one more person.

Graphics hardware followed a similar curve.

On a side note, one person had a Mac.

Game consoles
One person had a Wii and one person had all three (Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii).

2D vs 3D and moving around
This surprised me. One person didn’t care because they focus on other aspects of games, and one person preferred 2D. Wow!

The pressure is on to find a 3D game engine that would produce something that could run on 1.5 GHz processor and 512 MB RAM.

One person mentioned the frustration of moving around in 3D. We need a solution for this. I like Neverhood’s solution, of a solitary path of travel. You can’t move to every spot of the surface you’re walking on—you can only click to move a few steps in any valid direction, as if you’re in a roller coaster car on invisible rails. I also like the solution of the original Myst. When you move, the scenery that you’re looking at changes in regular intervals, creating the illusion of movement, as if you’re clicking through slides that were taken by pressing a camera button every 2 seconds. I might use this tactic in my demo.

Granted, this grievance against moving around in a 3D world is mostly coming from me. I HATE it. I hate how you can’t be precise, and how easy it is to overcorrect your direction, and so on and so on. Maybe, I won’t worry about movement too much until we’ve had some of Bill’s clients playtest the game.

Game preferences
What a diverse list. Some refer to physical games that aren’t on the computer. Here is a chart of likes and dislikes: (page down to see the table)

Likes	Dislikes
Flight Simulator Myst (3 people) Q/A games Jigsaw puzzles Flash games on Facebook like Farmville Tetris (2 people) Strategy Chess Poker Memory Action (avoiding capture) Cribbage Sudoku Arcade Card games like Solitaire Mario Galaxy Little Big Planet Scrabble Monopoly	Shooting Racing Killing Most (oh no!) Violent ones So complicated that you give up Q/A games that give no aid or resources or allow a difference of opinion Flat, superficial feeling Themes of societal greed and consumerism Too simple Games with activities that aren’t incorporated into the final goal