The Amazing Flexible Audience

Here is an idea. Recently I have been thinking about what makes things popular. There is this wide-spread belief that for a piece of work to be popular, it needs to be somehow streamlined. It needs to appeal to a wide audience. It needs to be reduced to the lowest common denominator. Usually this is mentioned together with concepts like sex, violence, explosions and bubble wrap. On the other hand subjects like art, science or philosophy are supposedly only for a very small, specific audience. And fair enough, you always imagine the football jock who watches something like Transformers 2 and the literature professor who watches something like The Fountain.

“Hey Megan, sign my PhD diploma!” “No, sign mine first!”

I would like to question this belief. My colleague Yu-Chung once mentioned an idea he got from a book (which one, Yu?). People tend to imagine the psyche of other people much more simplified than their own. People are comfortable to maintain very contradictory beliefs because they understand them as the subtle nuances of their complex personality. “Sure, I like Alanis Morissette and Rammstein” they would say. “It may seem weird at first but here is the thing…” On the other hand, when they construct a model of the psyche of a different person, they paint them in the broadest strokes, ignoring nuances and not expecting hidden depths. Like that one relative everybody had that somehow got the idea that you are fond of a particular thing – chocolate for example. They would continue to give you chocolate as presents over and over again. Not that you don’t like chocolate but you like other things too. In TV Tropes, this effect is called never living it down.

It’s the same thing with an audience. Just because the football jock watches Transformers, it doesn’t mean that he won’t enjoy American Beauty. Just because the literature professor watches The Fountain doesn’t mean he won’t enjoy Zoolander. People can have more than one interest. But even more importantly, people are flexible. They can see what kind of mindset is necessary to enjoy a piece of work and they can quickly acquire that mindset.

So when an audience watches a comedy it will be able to appreciate the humor. The same audience might watch a thriller and ignore humor completely, focusing on the suspense instead. It’s seems obvious. We aren’t robots after all. It’s a strategy to get the most from our entertainment. The result is that a piece of work will magically always have the audience it implies. So when a director makes a streamlined, shallow movie it’s no wonder that people that do show up seem to enjoy it BECAUSE it is shallow. That’s not the movie catering to their tastes. That’s the director superimposing a mindset on the audience.

I think that the flexibility of the audience is constantly underestimated. As I mentioned in my Kill Screen interview, I have the impression that especially game designers often make that mistake. In this case, the unrecognized flexibility of the audience reinforces that fallacy among game designers and obscures untapped potential. Let’s have more faith in our audience and explore how flexible they can be.