The users we have identified for our game will be young adults and teenagers, including college-age students such as ourselves. In order to learn more about what this demographic looks for in a game, we interviewed a college freshman.
Person interviewed: 19, male, OSU freshman
What are some games that you have played recently?
Poker, snake, call of duty
What kind of games do you enjoy playing on the computer?
Platformers, snake
What are some games you might enjoy playing on MATLAB?
Snake if that’s possible? Or some basic card games would probably be cool.
In your opinion, what is the optimal length a game should take to play?
Should be short, but able to be replayed a lot. Less than a few minutes.
What aspects of a game make it enjoyable to play?
Replay value is huge, like an arcade game. Challenge is important, can’t be too easy, should be hard but beatable, and generally fun and interesting. Not a dull concept.
Would you prefer a game that displays more words or graphics to the screen?
Graphics definitely. Graphics are a draw to a game. Does not like text-based adventure games at all, a game must have graphics to be visually interesting/in order to choose it over another game.
Once our games were completed, we interviewed another person to ask them about what games they most frequently played and enjoyed, and asked them to test the game and provide suggestions. These are the results of the second interview, in which both games were tested.
Person interviewed: 18, female, freshman at OSU
What are some games you have played recently?
Call of Duty, Modern Warfare, Solitaire, Candy Crush
What are some games you might enjoy playing on MATLAB?
Tic Tac Toe, Snake, Solitaire
In your opinion what is the optimal length a game should take to play?
About 5 minutes, but it depends on what type of game is being played. Adventure games or video games might last longer, where something like snake should be much shorter.
What aspects of a game make it enjoyable to you to play?
As long as the game is fun and requires a lot of attention to succeed. It also needs to be challenging and not be too easy to beat.
**At this point in the interview, the person being interviewed played each game for several minutes. Then the followup questions:
When playing Snake, which aspects did you enjoy?
It was just so enticing! It was fun, and I liked that it was fast and you had to move and think very quickly
When playing Snake, what changes would you recommend?
I don’t know what I would change, I really liked it
When playing Tron, which aspects did you enjoy?
It’s a social game so that aspect made it pretty fun. It also made you think again, especially about strategy this time about how you were going to beat the other person.
When playing Tron, what changes would you recommend?
I would add clearer instructions on a start page before the game begins because it was confusing to figure out at first.