Determining an Audience for Digital Public History

This week, were working on the skeleton of our final projects for the class, what is it, what softwares do we want to use, and who is it for. My original idea, one that’s been floating in my head for a while, was to make a visual novel game with choices that matter and character statistics and resource management features. I thought the Wives of Henry VIII would be a fun way to explore this educational game idea. It also connects to a trend in mainstream gaming of “rogue-like” games where once you die, you start over again with more information as the player and potentially more features or buffs. As there are 6 wives, it would give the player 5 additional lives to play with.

When I met with my professor for this course, he really liked the idea, but he felt it was better suited for the next class in the sequence for the certificate I’m working on. It was a little disappointing, but also a huge relief. He suggested that I keep the topic of Catherine, Anne, Jane, Katherine, and Katherine, but try another medium of showing it, with the same argument that the game would’ve had, that way I can spend the next class not researching the women, just figuring out how to transfer the research from one medium to a video game. I think I’ve landed on a timeline for the medium this semester, but when I conducted interviews with potential members of the audience of my project, the questions were geared at the video game, so let’s see if there’s any transferable information:

I interviewed two people that frequently play video games, but not necessarily history related ones, and one AI. (I asked the AI just for fun but I had some good answers, though I’m not sure how much I’ll go into that in this blog.)

Some of the key concepts that I came across:

-If the game sets certain rules for things that are important (i.e. rules for survival in a survival game) and the player ignores them, there should be consequences.

-Comedy is good in games, If the game makes it clear that historical accuracy is exchanged for levity, it’s appropriate to do so, otherwise if the game takes itself seriously, it should be as accurate as possible.

-Good visuals are more likely to draw in certain players, but even simple graphics, when done purposefully can get the job done.

-A game centered around the Tudors should have multiple perspectives because there’s so many interesting people in this historical setting. It would be a shame to only have one of their perspectives.

-Tudor History is thought of as a sort of historical soap opera, if there isn’t drama or weird quirky things included, it would likely feel a disservice to the historical setting.

So how does this relate to a timeline now? The 2nd bullet describing tone is likely still applicable, it’s important to establish the tone of the project because it will affect which types of people are drawn to be the audience. Some want historical facts that are comedic, and some want pure seriousness and fact. The 3rd bullet about visuals is also still applicable, if the timeline is not easy to navigate or is too cluttered, it will make the user experience more frustrating, when possible there should be images or other media that add to the timeline instead of only text. The 4th bullet describing multiple perspectives is still a given, a timeline should probably include events from a handful of people’s lives in order to have more variety and a means of comparison.

So even though my questions were about educational video games, I still think a lot of the advice is applicable to a timeline, but my audience (and personas) may be completely different next week with these project tweaks in mind.