Audience consumption
- Who is the target audience for LA Noire?
The target audience for LA Noire is meant to be more mature people, (18+).
- What enjoyment do audiences get from playing LA Noire?
LA Noire provides a compelling storyline set in 1940’s America and there are many points in the game that require the player to think and use emotional intelligence to make progress. This may provide more enjoyment for more intellectual people that don’t mind using logic once in a while.
- How do Rockstar encourage their audience to interact with both the game and institution?
Rockstar allow the players of their games free access to the Rockstar Social club. This allows gamers to display their game progress and ‘intuition points’ from LA Noire and other Rockstar games. This gives the player more involvement with the Rockstar industry.
- How does the game appeal to a wider demographic?
LA Noire appeals to a wider demographic as it is a game that requires the player to do a lot more than just senselessly kill people. It requires people to think and use their emotions to progress through the various cases of the game. This kind of game could appeal to more intellectual people that would possibly not normally consider playing videogames.
Issues around Audience
- To what extent are audiences beneficiaries or victims of change within the videogames industry?
The audience that play the games are the most important people in the videogame industry. They decide which games are good or bad and whether they like the steps that a videogame producer has taken. In the case of LA Noire the audience were given a game that was a lot different from almost all other Rockstar franchises. In the place of senseless violence he audience were required to use common sense in place of just wanting randomly kill people so some people may have liked the changed and some may not.
- What are the wider issues audience issues surrounding video games – consider media effects theories.
Some of the wider issues that affect audiences of videogames are that people think that younger audiences are instantly more susceptible to the graphic nature and violent imagery in some videogames. There is no proven link that when a child views violence in videogames that it goes on to affect them later on in life. Also this raises the subject of gatekeeping. If parents are so concerned about the way that videogames affect their children then why buy them the games in the first place.
- Discuss the +/- of gatekeeping
There as many negative points as there are positive in the videogames industry to do with gatekeeping. Gatekeeping is set in place for more graphic videogames to stop younger audiences from being affected by some of the issues raised in the game which can be a positive point, however quite a lot of parents are willing to buy younger audiences these videogames which means there is no real sense in the gatekeeping even being there.
