As gaming appeals to a wider spread of people how does that affect the design process?

As gaming appeals to a wider spread of people how does that affect the design process?

With games becoming more mainstream, we are seeing a big push for casual gamers to start taking up gaming, such as with the DS and the Wii from Nintendo. Game designers have to be mindful that they are going to be catering to an audience that aren't necessarily au fait with the vocabulary of old school games. Some of the standard things that we do in game design would rely on people remembering how a game always works. For example, always know the x is jump and being comfortable with the controller. A lot of people find picking up a controller intimidating. There are a huge number of buttons there and if you haven't really gotten used to that before, you don't know where to start. Appealing to a wide gaming audience is all about simplifying. It's also about thinking about content that is actually going to interest people beyond what we've been seeing up till now, which is often quite genre specific. It's about shooting, for example. Lifestyle games are coming into the fore now, sing-along games, general quiz games, and they're doing extremely well. It's a big market and you have to be aware of the audience.