ABSTRACT
While it has been noted that videogame play is an extremely popular activity, precisely who is playing is less well known. Throughout the course of this chapter, we will note a variety of ways in which the videogame audience is, and has been, understood and delineated by marketers, researchers and players themselves and the motivations that underpin these conceptualizations. As such, we will see that the ‘audience’ is a slippery entity that is variously considered as a group of market researched users, a group to be targeted and sold products, and a group not defined through empirical research but rather ‘read’ or ‘implied’ from the text of the videogame.
