Adaptation in Digital Games

Designers typically create digital games for either a specific audience, such as fans of the first-person shooter genre, or for mass appeal, such as Will Wright's The Sims (http://thesims.ea.com/us). These games encapsulate the designer's hypothesis for what a particular and ideally large population would enjoy playing. Digital games, unlike traditional media such as film or even board games, have the unique advantage of using computing power to break beyond this simple notion of designing for the masses. Games are, more than most media, mutable, flexible, and confined only by the data and reasoning we as developers give them.