Social Science report

Social Science Report

Made in April 2014 by:
Aldo Leka student nr. 352468
Andre Wilmerink student nr. 354535
Table of contents

Target group segmentation

Player persona

Creative thinking

Intellectual property

Moodboard

Conclusion

Target Group Segmentation

Target group: crafty world

Who are they?

The “crafty world” are young people (between 20 and 30) that are raised in a simple family. They come from anywhere where there are medium prosperity areas which is in a city or near a city. They are dynamic, opportunity seeking and have had a medium to high education. Their goal is to achieve success and independence from materials things.

They come from a simple family meaning they never had much special. This creates the urge to make prestige for themselves. Also coming from a simple family means they are medium educated, but because of being opportunity seekers they will find ways to increase their education or make the most of it, giving them a medium to high education.

Because they are dynamic and opportunity seeking, they often achieve these material things. Being dynamic means being active, resolute, effective, lively, enterprising, pushing and energetic. This helps in getting to targets faster. Opportunity seeking means they will find ways to achieve their material things by finding the opportunities that lead them there, by making the opportunities that lead them there.

Their goal is to achieve success and independence from materials things. This means that they have reached success when they can afford material things, like a car, and have reached independence when they use those material things to live on their own, for example a house symbolizes the independence because they live alone, and the success because they can afford it.

They have a job that costs little time so it gives them lots of free time to go out and find opportunities, action and their goal. Because of the free time they know a lot of people, but they don’t commit to their social life.

Their lifestyle is a regular lifestyle due to their medium budget. They are unconscious customers because when they want something they get it.

Leisure time

Because they prefer free time over work, they have a lot of leisure time. In their leisure time they go out, looking for action or stay at home watching action movies or playing action games.

Because they have a fulltime job they don’t have that much free time, they have about 1 to 2 hours a day after work, so there isn’t much spare time. So they mostly contact friends on the internet, look new things up on the internet, play games or watch a movie.

For sports they exercise at the gym or at home to get some bigger muscle, to increase their man power. They also join a group sport because of the competition with the other people.

For holiday, because of the amount of free time and the medium budget they go on holiday once a year to party, find romance and sex and just go for some action. The vacation will take about 1 to 2 weeks at maximum.

They don’t go to museums because there is too little action. They aren’t interested in art or history they are more interested in the action they can acquire to gain elsewhere.

Hobbies are the sports they do, playing games or chatting with friends. Otherwise they have no hobbies. In the time that there’s left they try to relax from work.

Now for games: they mostly like games that require little time, are easy to grasp, just throw you in immediately and can be enjoyed with friends, games that allow them to get action quick.

Player Persona

Jim Jones

Quick stats:
Age: 24.
Occupation: fries baker.
Location: New York City.
Status: single.

About Jim
Jim comes from a simple family, and has moved out 4 years ago. He has lived on his own, he has a very active live, goes out a lot, works part-time and has finished school just recently. Now he is looking for a new job.

Goal:
To achieve some quick satisfaction from games through action.

Actions: tries games like: Call of Duty, Battlefield and GTA

Creative Thinking

Association
Association chain of words: Chill house music, fun, relaxing, marijuana, massage, slow breathing, depressed young man.
The main character is a depressed late teenager who consumes marijuana as much as he can to keep himself relaxed and not go crazy. The player controls this character and has to do many mini-tasks for different people including his parents, bigger brother, friends etc. so they can give him money in return and he can buy more marijuana to stay in a calm mind state. Whenever the player doesn’t balance the marijuana quantity to character’s escalating dangerous mind state, the character goes crazy and player loses. It is a “survival” game where the player keeps playing until the game becomes too hard to not lose.

Premises
Concept: Tower Defense game
You have to build towers / You should not build towers
You stop enemies from going to a spot in the field / You help enemies to go in a spot in the field.
You use towers to kill hordes of enemies / You use towers to heal enemies.
You upgrade towers to make them better / You downgrade towers until you destroy them.
The player controls The Devil, which is the main character of the game and his goal is to send an army of little devil guys to Earth so they destroy it (just for fun). God will try to defend Earth by blocking little devil guys way with towers and upgrades. The Devil can control these towers though and he can downgrade them until he destroys them, but in the same time he has to sacrifice some little devil guys. He can also transform a tower from God to a Devil tower by sacrificing lots of little devil guys, but in return he can heal many others by doing that.

Direct Analogy
Subject: Gangster, pimp, alpha guy / Analogon: Mountain
Traits of subject:
Has a great life style
Is centered, lives in his own reality.
Other’s opinions don’t make a difference in his reality.
Has always enough money to cover whatever he wants.
Has an abundance with women in his life.
Loves to live on the edge, likes adventures and fun.

Analogon’s similarities with subject:
Is unshakable, huge.
It transmits a feeling of majesty, undisputed authority.
Humans have almost no power over it.
Ideas: All people respect him because he is so grounded and centered in his own reality. Everyone feels subordinate in his presence.

Analogon’s differences with subject:
Doesn’t change or changes very slowly.
Doesn’t really do much beside hosting a habitat for animals / trees.
Ideas: He likes to keep to his lifestyle without trying new activities but instead pushing it to the maximum with the ones he currently does. During the weekends he transforms into a lazy person, doing almost nothing.

The game
It is about the lifestyle of a very dominant, alpha guy who loves life and himself to extremes. The player is going to be guided though the life of a person who is trying to learn from this guy whose presence is so powerful, that everyone feels subordinate to him. He likes to help people and motivate them to a better life. He does extreme activities like skiing, martial arts, sport car driving etc. During the weekends he gives himself a filling rest doing almost absolutely nothing but hanging out with friends or dating few of the many women he has in his disposal. The player’s character is worthless compared to this guy and the player has to develop his character into this lifestyle by learning from the master. It is an open world (GTA like) game.

Superhero
Our superhero doesn’t contain any beyond human ability. He has just trained himself during all his life to be a master at persuading people and convincing them almost always to do whatever he pleases. He feels like he owns the people around him and no one can get to him.

Concept / Problem - Facebook social card game
Our superhero would first give a very detailed way the user would handle the card game (ex. Open game, play with friends / anonym / computer, chat or close chat, play game, skip or watch instructions, help or make it harder for other players, buy credits for the game etc.) than analyze the demographic of most of the players that are going to visit the game and lastly he’s going to analyze their interaction with the game in a much more deeper level by analyzing as good as he can their default unconscious process (different texts / symbols / figures during the game that suggest longer gameplay, more interaction with other players and even buying credits from the game).

Personal Analogy
The object: A blob character in a 2D side-scroller puzzle game.
I would feel funny and I’d want to rub myself against the walls and objects of the game as much as possible. I would want to make a funny action from time to time like jumping around or saying something funny. I would like to troll the player sometime and interrupt him controlling me and go somewhere else just to make the player a little mad and laugh. I would want to change my color from time to time and even sometime take the color of the environment so the player can’t see me for a while. I’d also change my color and behavior to fit other blobs during the game so the player can’t tell between me and others.

Intellectual Property

There are more ways to protect your ideas and more situations in in which you can protect this. You have a company, an individual and individuals in the company.

The company has to protect several things starting with its name. In order to protect its name, it will register a trade name for the name. This will make sure no one will be able to steal the products they have produced. For other characteristics of the company to protect like: a logo, the slogan or the game name there are trademarks. This way, because you have a trademark, the company will be able to prove that a game idea and name is his.

If you are an individual in a company you have nothing to protect because everything you make belongs to the company, but only if you have signed a contract where it states this, which is most of the time. If you have not signed a contract, you will own the product and will be able to sell the rights to the company

If you are an individual working on your own, you can create your own company and protect your products like described before or you can create evidence of your game idea and name by posting it on facebook or somewhere else that is reliable with time and where you can prove it was you that posted it. This way you can prove the game idea and name is yours because, you have let other “people” know of your idea, and because the date at when you this happened is earlier then the date of the “thief’s” evidence.

Moodboard

The mood board is based on the game concept derived from Direct Analogy creative technique. The idea resolves around the main character of the game, who is a chubby guy with low confidence, unhealthy lifestyle and scarcity of finances and women. However he is trying to develop his life to be like his role model, a guy who is his mentor. His role-model is physically fit, lives a healthy lifestyle, and has an abundance of money and women. He also does extreme activities like racing, skiing etc. During the weekends though he consciously transforms into a lazy person, chills and may date his girlfriends or even pass some time with his buddies.
The mood board is composed in a way that communicates well both the characters and their lifestyle. On the left side the main character is portrayed as a low confidence guy, lost in the world, emotionally reactive to everyone and the environment, eating unhealthy, playing games and being addicted to his phone. On the right side, the alpha guy is portrayed, with his striking confidence, his powerful presence, abundance of women, healthy lifestyle, friends and beer for the weekends and extreme sports.
In between there’s the open world of the game where the story will develop.
This game fits the target group of “crafty world” very well since they are young adults with an age between 20 and 30 who are active, resolute, effective, lively, enterprising, pushing and energetic which means that playing through a story of transforming an insecure guy to a real alpha guy presents a great challenge, fun and is relaxing in the same time. The game is played for as much time is required so as busy people, this target group can very well play the game for minutes to a few hours daily to accomplish the missions to progress in the game.

Conclusion

During this quarter we learned a lot about target groups, mood boards and creative thinking.
We hope you will find this report informative