Hey, what am I doing?

I haven't posted much recently, and it's because I don't really have a lot to tell you about. I'm in a bit of a rough spot artistically, and I was hoping I could get some help.

I want to begin work on another game, but I'm unsure of what it should be yet. I have had several plans fall through before I made any significant progress, and most of it happened because I began to have serious doubts about why I was making that particular thing.

I understand the importance of experimentation, but I have only a finite amount of time left in my life... and I'm not really going anywhere right now, which I would like to change. I can't just keep poking around; I need to get something significant going.

A key problem is that I like to believe I have an audience in mind, but I don't have enough specific ideas of what that audience really looks like or how to reach it.

I often go through miscellaneous friends and acquaintances in my mind and ask, "Would that person be interested in playing this game?" I usually have a pretty solid answer, but it's hard to understand why I picked those particular answers. Usually the "no" answers are because "she's just not a gamer type" or some such reason. This has been a struggle for me.

I think the number of people on earth who absolutely do not play games of any kind is very, very small (I would like to go so far as to say the number is zero, but I don't want to say anything too extreme on this). Most of the people I interact with enjoy playing board and card games (Monopoly, poker, etc.) or more physically oriented games (pool, tennis, etc.), and, furthermore, a pretty sizeable number like to play small-scale electronic games (minesweeper, Tetris, etc.). The real gap, I think, is between the people who play those "casual" electronic games and the people who play "hardcore" electronic games... And this is where I hit the most trouble, because I want to make things to appeal to a wide audience. Getting people who play board and card games to fit into that next group of people who play simple electronic games seems fairly natural and easy, but getting people who play simple electronic games to play something more sizeable or complicated is, puzzlingly, more difficult, as far as I have been able to tell.

I don't think it's necessarily an issue of complication versus simplicity. There are more complicated board and card games out there -- let's say Settlers of Catan (it's not necessarily the most complicated thing, but it certainly has more depth than, say, Chinese checkers), and a seemingly wide variety of people enjoy them... but the people who would play a deeper electronic game are only the "geek" types. I can understand why the audience for games like those in the Final Fantasy series is a pretty nerdy niche, but I don't understand why, for instance, the games in the The Legend of Zelda series don't attract more "normal" people (they're a plain, understandable kind of fun). True, they do have a comparatively wide audience, but, to my eyes, it's not as wide as it should be.

Adding more confusion to this issue, some simple electronic games are enjoyed by a wide variety of people, whereas others are not. Angry Birds, for instance, is enjoyed by a wide variety of people. Super Crate Box, even if it were not relatively obscure, would only be, it seems, enjoyed by geekier types of people. Most of the games I plan out are along those lines: pretty simple, but still, for some reason, geeky.

All of this seems quite solid and straightforward. I don't often ponder at length whether a certain game would appeal to "normal" people. The part I have to ponder is why it would or would not appeal to "normal" people.

One easy way out of this is to try making a board or card game, because I would instantly broaden my audience just by switching to the different medium. This would be more challenging, though, since it would introduce a cost for producing physical prototypes, and eventually, a physical end product.

Meanwhile, I think this might take me out of my element. Music can't be comfortably integrated into a board or card game, and the art in physical games is different and less significant because it is, at least, substantially less interactive and, at most, completely non-interactive.

I haven't completely thrown out the idea of making a physical game, but currently, I'm leaning away from it. I may put some "electronic versus physical games" thoughts in a future post -- I think I could say a lot more, but this post was getting lengthy enough without going into detail on this.

My important questions, then, might end up being: How can I make a game that appeals to a broad audience made of a wide variety of people? Why do all my ideas and plans always bring up serious doubt as to whether they will reach this goal?

I'd like to hear some thoughts from people -- particularly "non-geeks" / those who only play more casual electronic games (or no electronic games at all) -- I'm feeling pretty lost here. Please comment if you have ideas of any kind!