Market Research

2.1, 2.2

According to an article by The Guardian, James Cameron has always strived to appeal to all audiences, including the (at the time) untapped audience of young women and older adults. A Reddit thread on the r/worldbuilding subreddit (where people go to discuss worldbuilding strategies and share tips) talked about how in many cases worldbuilding should be primarily enjoyed by adults and young adults; this thread also put emphasis on the fact that a well-built world should be enjoyed by the creator first and foremost.

Since the vast majority of my peers are adults, young adults, and also fellow worldbuilders, I thought it would be a great opportunity to get their feedback, so that I can better direct my own product. A few weeks ago, I conducted some primary research by sending my peers two surveys; one of them asks a series of questions relating to my worldbuilding research, and the other asks a series of questions regarding the prevalence of certain types of fear in my peers. Each survey got 10 responses total, mostly from my classmates.

Survey 1: Alien Worlds

Question 1

This first question was mostly just to get an idea for how my peers think about the four pieces of media I researched, and which has the best worldbuilding. Cameron's Avatar won by a landslide, which isn't particularly surprising given how in-depth this particular world is. This validates the huge amount of research I did into Avatar, and also mean I might want to take more inspiration from Cameron for my final product.

Question 2

The second question from this survey asks the respondent, “Are there any other pieces of media you can think of that have good worldbuilding?”. There were eight examples given, as the following:

WALL-E
Warhammer
Resident Evil
Rain World

Acotar
No Man's Sky
The Fallout Series
Raya and the Last Dragon

Out of all of these pieces of media, I would consider myself familiar with only two of them; Raya and the Last Dragon, and WALL-E. I would agree that both of these are inspirational pieces of media, and while I would love to familiarise myself with these other pieces of media, I unfortunately do not have the time. It was still valuable and intriguing to hear what other people's thoughts were on well-built worlds, and their favourite picks.

Question 3, 4, & 5

For this question, and many of the ones after it, I have made as a sliding scale of 1-10. These questions are meant to determine how important my target audience deems each aspect of worldbuilding that I went over in my worldbuilding subpages; those being, building a believable environment, the aesthetic qualities, and the link back to reality. I have gone ahead and determined the average score given out of ten to each of these aspects, and thus generally how influential they are deemed by my peers.

The first question addresses the obvious; this is what most of my target is audience will typically associate with worldbuilding. The average score for this question was 7.9 — this shows that my target audience thinks this aspect of worldbuilding is incredibly significant. 2 of my respondents deemed unique and believable world aspects to be a 10/10 in regard to how important it is, and none of the results were below a 6. Question 2 targets the aesthetic qualities of a world; now of course, this is not in any way essential to worldbuilding, as proven by the many books that include great examples of worldbuilding. Nonetheless, my respondents scored it an average 7.3 out of ten on this survey. This is certainly lower than the first question, however it is still quite high — this tells me that my target audience deems aesthetics to be influential to the worldbuilding process, but not as much as creating a unique environment and ecosystem. The third question is actually a bit of a red herring. This question is not necessarily meant to find out whether my target audience deems a connection to real-life aspects important to worldbuilding and storytelling, but it is more intended to find out if my audience realises it is important to do this. I already know through not only my worldbuilding research, but my deep-dive into concept artists as well, that this technique is absolutely essential to building a relatable world in media. However, I am interested to see if my target audience knows this. The respondents overall gave this question a 7.1/10, which is distinctly the lowest of the three results. This tells me that my target audience might not even realise that real-life parallels are important to worldbuilding.

Question 6

This question was mainly intended to get tips and tricks not only from my target audience, but also from people who I know are interested in worldbuilding as well. The question is, “Are there any other aspects of worldbuilding that you think are essential to creating a believable/unique world?”. I was given five pieces of information, as follows (direct from source):

By using references to help make the world as accurate to life as possible.
Realism with scales and size of things.
Pulling things from real life and history (like how in avatar last airbender they used real fighting techniques from different cultures). It helps people believe it more and adds an extra factor of “it cool as fuck”.
Make sure it makes sense scientifically or magically. This should have cause, effect, and reason.
Having a recognisable social class system.

Survey 2: Horror

Question 1

This question is quite standard; I wanted to gauge how popular the genre of horror I will be using is among my target audience. Surprisingly enough, there was actually a pretty even split between people who know and do not know what cosmic horror was; the vast majority of people were unsure on the genre, and what it entails.

This does not mean that the genre is not affective, however; it just implies it is a lesser known subgenre, or at least one that people don't understand fully.

Question 2

This question will actually be directly used in my research — I came up with an idea early on to implement cosmic horror into my game by making creatures/environments based off common phobias. I wanted to gather information to see what things scared people the most — I wrote down every fear I could think of and asked people to say which fears they would consider having. Fear of heights was by far the most common, followed by spiders. Some people were afraid of the dark, the ocean, decay, and sickness, and not many people were afraid of snakes, death, madness, ghosts, and open/enclosed spaces.

I also asked the respondents to say if they had any notable fears not listed — here I got mixed results. Failure was one of them, bridges was another. An interesting result listed was that the fear of not dying was scarier than the fear of dying. One of my peers stated that listing all of their fears would take too long, which is understandable. One of my peers expressed a fear of “gay people”, however I believe this was intended as a joke.

Question 3

This question is formatted a bit differently to the others: here I wanted to gauge how scary people found the fears listed above, on a scale of 1 to 9. The results are a little garbled, however I have found the average score given to each fear, which I have listed to the right of the category. The highest score was given to the fear of heights, whilst the lowest was open spaces. I think maybe people might not have understood what I meant by “open spaces”, and it probably would have been better for me to put image examples next to each answer.

This question gave me similar results to the previous one, just more accurate and exact.

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