Brandstrat process #2: People

So who are our peeps? The temptation is to do this as a niche of one, and to a great extent it is, but that can be difficult (try psychoanalysing yourself and turning that into strategy). Instead we’ll do it similarly but pull other aspects from a larger demographic of older gamers.

We won’t waste time with multiple personas, which can confuse the process (even though sometimes you just have to).

Our main character, our person, is a guy in this mid to late 40s, who thinks he’s in his 20s. He didn’t do well in school or college, due to a lack of interest and perhaps even borderline ADHD. Since then he’s found it hard to stick to one path, and as such finds himself suddenly in the middle of his life working an entry-level job, or stuck in a middling kind of role which he doesn’t really like, but which pays the bills. He has one child, a stable, happy relationship that keeps him going, and is dedicated to his family. But he knows he has potential, and yearns to do something more interesting. However, he believes this is unrealistic, so he keeps on with his hobbies with no real direction or plan to focus and monetise them.

Meanwhile, his wage stagnates and the cost of living routinely doubles. Every time he moves house he has to commute longer, while the idea of home ownership would push him even further out of the world he grew up in. Let’s call him Grant. It’s an average kind of name for an average kind of person, who isn’t actually average at all. The world just doesn’t fit him.

He’s a quiet kind of person who values quality over quantity socially. He’s been gaming on and off all his life, having grown up with the first shooters and watched the industry evolve. He’s recently started to get back into gaming, call it a mid-life-crisis. He found some of the new boomer shooters that looked cool, but weren’t challenging or engaging, as if like gameplay was an afterthought. He doesn’t have long to game, because he likes to do it when everyone’s gone to bed, so he’s looking for a game he can chip away at and savour, not breeze through and forget. Quality over quantity.

He likes sci-fi, movies, dressing down, reading, beer, is secretly addicted to porn, holidays in Japan where he likes to take photos, biking weekends with the fam, and listening to his records. He avoids unnecessary social contact (waste of time) and prefers to spend time with the family.

Goals

Grant wants to own a home and he and his wife have been saving for a deposit. They’re nearly there but their budget means a drop in quality of life.
He dreams of starting his own business or side-hustle, but can’t settle on an idea, and doesn’t believe he has the motivation to do it as well as work.
His child takes up a good deal of his thought. What he has missed out on in life he hopes to create for them by encouraging curiosity and learning and providing stability. In this sense he desires to sacrifice his dreams for his kid’s.

Gaming is something of an escape for Grant – something he does to switch off in his downtime, recapture some of his ever more distant past and connect to the inner kid that life increasingly demands he ignores. It doesn’t contribute to the goals above, but provides relief.

There is opportunity here to link an in-game story to real-life struggles, especially the struggle to retain a hopeful, youthful perspective.

Obstacles

Goals create problems – things in the way. They often conflict with each other, for example saving for a deposit requires the stability and earning potential of a career, to which a side-hustle may only add extra stress and work.

Like many middle aged men, it almost seems Grant’s goals are not his own, or goals created in the past that dictate his current life, but which he would be tempted to alter if given a chance. In that sense he often feels trapped, a slave to his own life.

The main issue is time – he has little of it, he exists to serve the family unit. If it weren’t for his child, who he loves with all his heart, his life might easily fall apart.

Still, his wife and he find moments to enjoy each other’s company,