Evaluation: Audiences, Distribution and Cultural Context

For my artefact, I have created a Room Escape game. Usually, Room Escape games are likely to be either found as a browser based or as a mobile device game. I had chosen to go for the browser based game. In comparison to other browser based games I believe that Room Escape game definitely fits very well for the intended delivery platform. For this Evaluation I will be looking at the Audiences, Distribution / Delivery and Cultural Contexts / Genre. Overall this will cover the ludology of Flash games.

Audiences
As a whole I believe my game would be suitable for it's intended audience of age 13 and up. The intended primary audience for my game would have played room escape games before and are likely to have completed a few. With that being the case, I feel as though my room escape game should not be a problem for these users and they should be able to complete it in a suitable time of around 10 minutes. The secondary type of audience would be those who are browsing gaming websites such as Newgrounds and are finding games to play for fun. From doing my user testing, I've found that even these types of audiences do not struggle to complete my game. The concept of point and click would be easy to grasp for both intended audiences.

Distribution / Delivery
As my game has been exported as a SWF file this means that the game can be distributed across to many online gaming websites. The SWF format is widely accepted and many websites allow this type of submission. My game would be easy to distribute onto gaming websites and this process would typically involve creating an account with the companies website and submitting the game through their database. Although not a necessity, some authors may also choose to add adverts to their games before distribution has taken place. Due to the layout of my game, adverts would be easy to implement and would merely involve shifting frames to the right so that there is room for the advert [to display at the beginning]. Quality control is often used to ensure that games distributed to their sites are of good quality. This is normally done through a rating system as judge by the website's users. Due to the level of professionalism my artefact brings, the distribute of my game should not be of a problem, even with the quality control algorithms on these websites.

Cultural Contexts / Genre
Room Escape games have become very popular on the internet and has it's own genre. In comparison with other room escape games, my one "How I Escaped - The Waiting Room" fairs very well.
The duration it takes to complete my game, as found from using testing, takes 5-30 minutes on their first go. This in comparison to the other room escape games of that length is very similar.
I'm happy with how the visual of my game has turned out, for being vector drawn it hasn't turned out too much like a cartoon and that is mainly because there are not black lines outlining the objects. All types of art styles are suitable for Room Escape games, including photo realistic and simply just vector drawn, so in this regards my room escape game meets it's cultural contexts.
A negative point of my game could be that it did not have any instructions on how to play it, but many room escape games - such as Crimson Room - typically do not have instructions for the game but instead assume that the users would have the vernacular computer knowledge for these types of games. As these games would already be in the category of Room Escape, it would therefore be obvious what the user must do. From the beginning, as mentioned in this post, I made it my goal to make sure that the users challenge should be to figure out the puzzle, not figure out how to figure out the puzzle. I believe that with the title, genre and targeted audience, in game features such as the narration, side arrows and roll over arrows it would be clear enough for the user on how to navigate through the room without instructions.
Many room escape games nowadays have very arbitrary which have irrelevant number colour puzzles involved which you have to figure out in order to escape the room. This wasn't something I wanted to do, even if it would mean breaking the cultural contexts of how these games work. I wanted to make sure that the items and clues the users finds would be involved within the environment and to make sure that these are relevant for the user to escape. I feel as though I have done this very well and hope that more room escape games would take this approach.

Overall I believe that the Audience, Distribution and Cultural Contexts have all been met to the standards that I had originally hoped for. The artefact make not come off as being professional when compared to industry standard work, but that's not what I was going for. The various different room escape games are not always going to be professional and are often made in the developers spare time. I believe that my game is up to par with the other Flash made room escape games and in that regards, it is professional.