Author: Kate Green 14th March 2016
Reposted from Samantha Clarke’s blog
Following my promise of breaking down each of the 7 steps of the Hierarchy of Needs for Serious Games development (Original post can be found here: A Needs Hierarchy for Creating Serious Games.), today I shall be discussing the first stage: Identity.
For some, user identity will seem like a fairly reasonable and obvious starting point when considering how to develop a product, especially when we talk about serious games or gamification, or any venture that involves a high degree of reliability on user preference. Many instructional systems development methodologies, the A.D.D.I.E model to name one, start with the importance of analysing your target audience, as lets face it, knowing who your audience is and why are they likely to want to engage with the product is necessary for making key design and development decisions.
Unfortunately though, this step is often overlooked as a starting point, with focus drawn onto other development considerations such as the technology thats going to be used or the preferred genre of game of the developer. Just this Wednesday, I was having a discussion about developing games for business and corporate training. The person I was talking to was really enthusiastic about using the latest VR for corporate training because it looked shiny and expensive, and that, he explained, was what companies were looking for; something that looked expensive. Whilst I agree that VR will have its place in serious games and gamification, it made me sad that the first consideration to VR game-based learning (GBL) in this case, was how expensive the tech looked and therefore was automatically considered to be the best option for training, rather than asking what are users likely to get from using VR over other options. Anyway, I digress but hopefully you get my point that more often than not, the end user (and the various types of end users) are thought about a bit later in the development stage than they should be.
So why is it SO important when designing GBL? And how do you go about identifying your audience? Well lets address the first question, the why?