Short interview with Sam

I did a small interview with a friend that I thought might fit into User profile nbr1, since I wanted to do a sanity check for it. This is what I found out:

This person (we can call him Sam) has a great interest in games. He is somewhere arount 30 years old and lives with his girlfriend. He knows a lot about games and has been playing for about 20 years and works with games professionally.

He keeps an eye on indie scene and tries out games that have been recommended by his friends. The reason why he doesn't try out more indie games is that he thinks that most of them are pretty bad. He doesn't want to risk wasting time om bad games, there are too many other things he wants to spend time on apart from playing games. He has a few sites that he visits and if there's a lot of good things written about an indie game there he might try it out. However, he stresses that word of mouth is the most important factor when he decides if he's going to try out a game or not. Sam thinks it's easiest to buy games at xbox live or at Playstation network. He doesn't mind spending a smaller sum of money to try out new games there.

Even though he says he's never bought as many games as he does now, he also says that he spend less and less time playing them. If they don't immediately catch his interest he will quit and never play them again. Sometimes the games don't even make it out of the box...

It was hard getting Sam to list the titles of games he likes, he said he's played all kinds of games except for MMO:s, and he didn't care much for strategy games. He likes has many games that he really likes but he says that they have to be put into perpective of when they were released. Both his preferences and the games have changed so much that a game he played 10 years ago might not be a game that he would enjoy today.

The games he enjoys most today however are games he can play together with his firends. They meet now and then at someones house and play either single or multiplayer games. If playing single player games, one person will play and the other will watch while chatting with each other. They may take turns being the one who plays.

Mutliplayer games is his favorite type of game since he thinks it's a good alternative to watching a movie or similar. The multiplayer games that Sam and his friends play are mostly competitive, meaning that they play against each other, not against another group via the internet. However, they would very much like to play more games that called for team collaboration. The problem is that not many of those are being made. Sam has a PC and all the newer consoles. When Sam has friends over they mostly play on the xbox360 or PS3 though.

Things that Sam is interested in are gadgets, movies, and other things a tech nerd would enjoy.


So, there is a slight difference here to our preferred user group. Sam mostly plays games on console when he plays together with his friends, but the games they play are competitive and they wish there were more games that required teamwork.
I think it's also worth noting that Sam is a bit sceptic towards indie games since many of them aren't very good.