Audience Classification- Media Diary: Week 3

Audience Classification of Deponia

Deponia is a point and click adventure game produced by Daedalic Entertainment in 2012. The plot of the game revolves around our protagonist Rufus who lives on the rubbish tip of a planet called Deponia, he believes he is destined for more than life on Deponia and his goal is to travel to the infamous floating city of Elysium. But when his attempt to get off of the junk yard planet fails he is left with a damsel in distress and conflicted ideas about what is more important; his personal goals or the people he will leave behind.

Income Status Model
I believe that this game is aimed at people in the E bracket of the income status model. This means that they are people of lower level income including student and the unemployed. The reason I think this is that people of this level of income tend to have a lot of free time on their hands and this would give them time to play and complete this game as it is quite time consuming as it is primarily puzzle based.

Audience Profiling 
In my opinion this game is aimed at the male gender as gaming is primarily seen as a past time for men, also the main playable character is a man who tends to use humour that would be more relatable to as a male and that gender would probably find the dialogue more humorous. As well as this, the very few women in this game are quite highly sexualised and are used in many of the advertisements of this game to try and pull in male audience members. The age group of the players would most likely be from 15-21 as this is a very prominent time when people have time to play and enjoy video games. I believe that a person of strong religious beliefs would probably not be the target audience for the game as some of the humour may be perceived as offensive by them and also the display of women in the game may be unacceptable to people of some cultures and believes. Despite being developed in German, I believe this game is target towards people living in the U.K and America as the characters and humour is very reminiscent of people from those areas.

Young & Rubicam's 4Cs
Primarily I believe that this game is aimed at the Strugglers of society. This is due to the fact that their main thing they seek in life is escape and the perfect way to do this is with a video game, especially point and click game as they truly allow you to think about another characters problems and ignore the real world. The completion of a game like Deponia gives them no real asset in the real world only the justification that they have completed the game. The fact that the game is on the PC, gives the struggler no reason to leave the safety of their home as it is easily downloadable off of the internet.

Lifestyle Categories 
I think that the target lifestyle category are most probably Drifters, who are not at all sure what they want out of life. A game like Deponia would allow a drifter to escape the pressures of everyday life and the choices the come along with that and just enjoy another persons world, this allows for complete escapism. It could be argued that another targeted lifestyle category is the Traditionalists as point and click games are an un modernised platform of gaming that rely more on story than graphics and action sequences. This would appeal to the traditionalist if they have grown up on games like this and don't enjoy the current gaming trends.