Personas

In your game design career, it is not often that you get to make games for yourself (unless you’re a full time Indie). Most of the time, you’ll have to work on a genre that may not be your favorite for an audience that does not resemble yourself. As a professional, it is part of your job to empathize with the player and learn what they expect from a game, what they find fun. To do this our first step is to have a clear understanding of who the player is, even beyond their gaming habits; this is where Persona’s come in.

A Persona is a fictional person created to represent your target audience. Used widely in advertisement, software development and marketing, it becomes a focal point for the team and stakeholders when discussing the direction the project should take or which features to add. In essence it puts a face to the player base and helps separate the project from the whims of those who are creating it.

In practice, using data from similar or past games, you create a page that profiles this fictional person. You give them a name, gender, age, birthplace and find a picture that could represent them.The goal is to understand this person as completely as you can. Common information to find in a persona include:

• Educational level
• Work and income
• Personal interests/hobbies
• A small bio of how they relate to the project
• Motivators (here you can use the Bartle, Quantic Foundry or other system)
• Familiarity with technology (specifically the platform you are launching on)
• Disabilities or accessibility challenges
• Brands they interact with (not just game brands, but in general).
• Gaming habits (if any)
• Favorite Games/Movies/Books
• A summarizing quote

This is not an exhaustive list, and it shouldn’t be set in stone. We should always include information that is relevant to the project; depending on the goal of the project information such as values, needs or pain points, might also be required.

A persona should be generated with data (for example from similar or past games); however this is not always possible, especially for smaller teams. It then becomes tempting to create a persona based on your assumptions, which is called a proto-persona. This is fine but, as with the rest of Deliberate Design, you need to then validate your assumptions. Once you start getting testers or players, go back to the persona, and make sure that it is relevant to the audience that is looking for your game.

Ideally you should create multiple personas for each type of player you expect to attract. A game, especially larger projects, could have multiple audiences and we should have a good idea of who each one is (e.d. This is independent of the evolution of players mentioned in the player journey). The classic example is a fighting game that attempts to become an e-sport. Here we would want to attract both the regular player and the super competitive e-sport player, so each one would deserve their own persona. More complex games, like MMOs, can have even more audiences. When thinking of a game feature, your team shouldn’t ask if they like it, but instead ask would the personas like it.

According to Kim Goodwin in his book Designing for the Digital Age, Alan Cooper, the father of Visual Basic, was the first person to propose the use of personas in software development.

1. Find demographic data to base your persona off of. This can come from previous projects, platform data or from competitors^*.
2. Analyze the data, find what the average and the median is. The closer the average and the median are, the more representative it is of our audience. If they are very different I would use the median, however this is an indication we might want to separate into two personas. (A classic example of this is for mobile game spending, where a small number of players spend A LOT more than most).
3. Given the demographic information you have, create a name and find a picture online for our persona. Baby name sites are a good place for name inspiration, while stock image sites, such as ShutterStock or Pexels (which is royalty free), are good places to look for images of people. You can also use Google if you filter by creative commons license.
4. Use google to find marketing analysis of the demographic. Searching “top 10 brands for ____” or “average income of _____” will yield good results.
5. Set all the information in your persona template. There are many templates online (like these ones from adobe), however in my experience, it’s better to make your own, as each project will need slightly different information.
6. Present it to the team for feedback. I recommend making at least 2 personas for a game before presenting to the team, even if you have a narrow target audience. This helps avoid stereotyping your players (one of the main criticisms of personas) and forces you to think of different ways your game might be played (for streaming, more casually, competitively, etc…).

* This can be hard to find. However, there are marketing intelligence services (such as sensor tower or data.ai for mobile games) that can provide some of it.

Let’s imagine that we are working on a medical game that’s helping people with diabetes. The intent is to have a mobile app that gamifies different elements of their self-care, for example recording the food they eat, tracking their physical goals and supporting their insulin intake.

Medical games are done with expert support from healthcare providers; they would be the best source of data for our target demographic. For this exercise however, I have conjured up the data for illustration purposes (with some help from the ADA), and isn’t based on medical research. It’s also important to remember that this is just an example of a person, and is not meant to represent all people of a specific demographic.

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