Last week at Edinburgh Interactive I was lucky enough to interview Sean Dromgoole for Square Go. He is the owner of GameVision and Some Research, companies that specializes in video games market research. At GameVision their approach seems to be mostly standard marketing demographics led. Lots of statistics and interesting little nuances popping out of the data of tens of thousands of respondents whose data is harvested through an omnibus company. At Some Research it looks like they do the more ethnographic and in depth qualitative part of the research.
Let’s review: you get the numbers about gamers from GameVision and stories from Some Research. Put it together and you have exactly the kinds of things Rachel and I have been playing with in the Patterns of Play Project. We have been looking at ways to unite the numbers and the stories to provide an efficient way to drive the game’s development forward. We tried it with game log data visualizations and ethnographic techniques and Sean does it with massive market surveys and interviews or focus groups.
Check out the full interview (click here).
I have some interesting comments to add in response to some of the things he mentions, but I will have to post them in a little bit. I am right in the crunch time of preparing the masters thesis.
