1. Video Games
Types of Audience

2. Key Terms
• Casual Audiences – do not experience the product as a
special event.
• Devoted/Dedicated Audience – makes a specific
choice to access a media product and will return to it
several times. They will identify themselves with some
media products over others and will enjoy the
experience. They are likely to play MMOFPS as a single
player.
• Avid/Loyal Audience – will want to involve themselves
in a media product beyond a simple (often passive)
engagement – the chosen product becomes part of a
person’s life. They are likely to subscribe to an online
game to access more rewards and they may well take
part in the social networking aspects of the game.
They will also want to buy associated merchandise.

3. • Niche Audience – a small audience with a
specific interest.
• Core/Primary audience – main audience for
the text
• Mainstream – conventional audience – the
most amount of people
• Demographic – measurement of the audience
in terms of gender/age/income etc.

4. • Appeal of Video Games
• Immersive nature of some gaming narratives –
audiences not passive, but active participants and
can interact not only with the game’s characters
and its narrative but with other gamers.
• Games can create a world free from consequence
where violent and immoral actions are rewarded -
gamers flee the stresses of modern life for the
hyper-reality of the game world – first person
shooter games…
• Many games offer simple choices – but those with
complex narratives that offer choices that can
drastically affect the world the game is set in as well
as the narrative e.g

5. • Heavy Rain (Quantic Dream for Playstation in 2010) – gives
the player a number of choices that determine which
characters survive and which narrative resolution the
player experiences. The main characters can be killed and
certain actions may lead to different scenes and up to 17
different endings.
• The Walking Dead (Telltale Games, for a number of
platforms, 2012) released in five separate episodes –
episodic point and click adventure based on the comic book
series and linked to the TV series. The player controls the
game’s main protagonist and he survives by solving simple
puzzles within the game world and interacting with other
characters. The player is rewarded with the unfolding of the
narrative and the choices they make can affect how the
characters interact with the protagonist. The player can
choose responses when in conversation with other
characters. In one scene the player has to decide which one
of two characters will survive and subsequent scenes will
play out differently.

6. • PEGI Rating System – Pan European Game
Information – similar to BBFC Film
Classifications – suggest a suitable age for
games (3,7,12,16 and 18) based on the
content of the game. E.g. Pegi 18 may contain
violence unsuitable for under eighteens.

7. • Concern – especially first person shooter games
– immerse the gamer in the experience to the
extent they can be influenced by the ideology of
the game – for instance in games like Battlefield
3 where the enemies are Iranian terrorists, the
PLR– could both play on and encourage racial
prejudice and a simplistic view of world events
amongst the gamers.
• Fear of media measures being injected into an
audience to persuade them to act a certain way
derives from The Hypodermic Syringe Theory.
This runs counter to the Uses and Gratifications
Theory that suggests audiences are active
consumers of media products and pick and
choose the gratifications they get from them.

8. • Desensitisation Theory – long-term exposure
to certain media messages eventually makes
the audience susceptible to the product’s
message.
• Two-Step Flow Theory – suggests there are
opinion leaders (like gaming magazines such
as PlayGamer or PlayStation or PCGamer or
gaming magazine apps like Atomix, the first
exclusive gaming magazine for iPad) that can
influence people’s opinions and attitudes –
think also of ‘celebrities’ who endorse games