How to Understand the Gaming Audience (FutureLearn)

Learn techniques to understand your audience and use gamification to improve your creative communications. While the audience sits at the heart of any successful communication, the community you build is what supercharges gaming. Often called the new social media, this medium is where people want to interact, engage, and spend their time. On this three-week course from D&AD, you’ll explore how to build and engage a gaming audience, maintain their attention, and empower them to do good.

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Better understand your audience with creative empathy

Whether you’re inserting your brand into a game, or being inspired by the power of gaming to enhance an existing experience, knowing the steps your audience will take is vital.

You’ll learn to see the power of games through the eyes of your audience; what’s their character, perspective, and identity, and how does this affect their experience?

Explore gamification and how it can improve creative communications

By deploying multiple techniques and tools, games successfully create a place where people want to spend their time.

On this course, you’ll learn how gamification can enrich your advertising and marketing comms, and how the social aspect of maintaining a community can positively impact all areas of creative communications.

Create an authentic audience experience

Creating an authentic experience starts with understanding and empathize with your audience.

In this section, you’ll move to the next step and learn how to create an authentic gaming experience based on audience motivations and player types, plus understand the importance of characters and know how to overcome the uncertainty in gaming.

Learn from experts in the field

This course is led by D&AD and features content created by a variety of experts in the field from top companies in the industry such as Massive Entertainment and Phantom.

Syllabus

Week 1: Understanding Your Audience

Week 2: Engage and Entertain

Week 3: Gameplay, Character and Uncertainty

What will you achieve?

By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to...

- Explore who gamers are and the principles that engage them in games

- Apply empathy and persona mapping to get under the skin of your audience

- Assess the use of gamification in creative communications

- Investigate how to create authentic connections with different audiences
Who is the course for?

This course is designed for creatives that want to tap into the power of gaming for their communications, marketing, and advertising.

Whether you’re a brand builder, social media executive, or business owner, this course will guide you through how to harness gaming and use immersive storytelling to create a community for your customers.