I will admit that considering my audience is one of my weak points as an artist. I tend to find it very difficult to think about the audience without losing sight of what I'm trying to express which tends to make whatever I am working on into an incoherent mess. So I was looking forward to the chapter on the player in The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, and was disappointed to find that it is mostly a discussion of demographics. To make matters worse, the demographics are discussed in terms of fairly tired generalizations, and the chapter focuses a lot on the differences between male and female players. There is a danger to focusing to much on the differences between male and female players.
Men and women actually have much more in common than not. The differences tend to stand out because they are so rare compared to the similarities. Since those differences catch our attention so easily, there is an understandable tenancy to ascribe more importance to the differences than is wise. Schell seems to fall into this trap. While his points are not completely incorrect, he makes it sound like it is an impossible task to create a single game that will appeal to both men and women because the things men and women like in games are all polar opposites. But clearly it is not impossible for games to appeal to both genders. Schell even gives an example of how both boys and girls enjoyed the Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the Buccaneer Gold experience at DisneyQuest. Boys and girls may have had slightly different motivations for "blowing up bad guys" and slightly different style of play, but the game accommodated both with the same gameplay. This segment would have been much more interesting if it had focused on how to achieve that kind of gameplay, instead of making it seem like a hopeless task.
The one item in Schell's list of gender differences that I take issue with is the idea that female players shouldn't be given spatial puzzles. While it is true that women on average have a harder time with spatial reasoning, as it turns out video games can actually help erase that problem. Usually when we talk about the transformative quality of any particular media, we're talking about something intangible, but in this one case there is a transformative effect that has been scientifically studied. That someone writing a book about game design presumably in order to influence the future of game design would discourage game designers from making spatial puzzle games that appeal to women seems very irresponsible to me.
I thought it was interesting that the only demographics discussed in this chapter were age and gender. Schell does mention that there are other ways to group people, and then talks briefly about psychographics. Psychographics seem like they would be more helpful and nuanced. However there's simply not much information about them.
The chapter ends with a list of the types of pleasure one might find in a game. The list is well thought out, and it has nice descriptions. I feel like this is the part of the book where it should talk about catharsis, but it doesn't. I'm not sure if I think catharsis should be included as a pleasure in itself; experiencing a tragic story is not always pleasant, but it can be cathartic and there is a sort of pleasure in that. However from what I understand catharsis is also about relieving positive emotions, and therefore it could be the result of the pleasures in a game.
