I was watching a videogame review the other day – I really can’t remember the game but it was this really childish and simple game that I thought would be quite enjoyable for most kids. In the end, the reviewer gave it a really small score, saying it wasn’t that good of a game and it wasn’t worth your money. At the time, I thought to myself – “Who isn’t this game good to?”
The fact is that videogamers have evolved through time. While most still consider the videogamers a grey mass of players who simply differ by their genre preference or time invested playing, the fact is that the videogame target has definitely changed though time – and it has evolved deeply.
To simplify it, we can consider we’ve had 3 generation of videogamers – the ones before the videogame crash, the Nintendo generation and the new age gamers. And inside each we have different profiles and tastes. But what is more interesting is that each generation, like in everything, criticize the new generation by becoming a moral order and condemning the values the next generation is gaining by playing those games. So, those who are now criticizing Grand Theft Auto were the ones who were playing Super Mario in their NES at home a few years ago. And those who judged the Super Mario fans at the time were the ones playing Pong and Space Invaders in the arcades in the dawn of games. This leads me to two points: Continue reading ‘Online and Videogame Targets – Are you targeting correctly?’

More and more studies are portraying women as a perfect target for Brands. Many reasons can be appointed towards this – more independence, a background on fighting against sexual discrimination, the ability to prove themselves again and again in the work place, etc… The reasons are endless and one thing we can be sure – women not only are shaping modern society as they are becoming one of the biggest and most attractive buyers a marketer must consider when developing the Brand’s positioning.
Truth be told, there are various websites addressing this fact. I could go on forever on an article that would turn into a small thesis describing all areas of society where women are creating a movement, a change in mentalities and on the symbolical universe we all share as common knowledge. But I’ll spare you the unbelievably long essay and focus on one point at a time. For starters, let’s start with a less common ground: videogames.

Why videogames? Because it’s always been a male dominant environment. And I’m not talking production-wise but story and character development-wise. Videogames started having the classical fairytale structure when addressing the roles of gender in society – the man assumes a protective brute force that saves the defenseless maiden from the evil monster. And the maiden would thank him ever so much with a kiss. While this might sound common to you, this is blatant discrimination of the genders – not because of one isolated case but because of the constant it has become. To prove it, just think to yourself – did you ever think twice about those fairytales you’ve always listened to and think about the actual symbolism inherent to it? Did you go “beyond good and evil” and actually question the innocence of a tale that is based on the conception of roles and duties in a society that was still light years away from the woman’s suffrage movement? OK, I sound like a feminist talking, but I actually believe that both genders have their strengths, and while the men’s strength has been shown through time, women’s has only recently started to actually shine. And guess what – videogames actually helped in that matter! Continue reading ‘Still think I’m defenseless?’