Competitor Analysis

Whist there are no magazines circulating at the current moment that solely focus on the game ‘Dungeons and Dragons’, there are many popular magazines that are within the sub-genres of ‘Nerd Interest’ and ‘Gaming’.  My magazine will be able to stand out from its competitors as this fusion of the genres will appeal to consumers – especially those with a high interest in the game.

‘Doctor Who Magazine‘ stands out as a notable example of a popular title within the ‘nerd interest’ genre – where it is able to use its broad subject matter to explore many aspects of the fan culture. As a result of this, each issue contains features such as the comics, ‘Ask Steven’ (interview with the show runner), features on the production of the show, and fan contributions. This differs to what would usually be seen in something like a gaming magazine – where there is so much new content to cover that they cannot dedicate features to obscurities. This is also linked to the fact that gaming magazines will be aimed at an audience who are interested in a wide spread of games – whilst Doctor Who Magazine is aimed at the viewers of one specific television show. My magazine will be able to take inspiration from this, as it is aimed at the fans of one specific game that has a low news output.

The magazine is published by Panini Comics – who’s parent company is the UK division of Marvel Comics. This suggests that the magazine is being directed at a large reader-base and will have a sizeable budget behind it. This is reinforced through the fact that it can be seen in the majority of supermarkets throughout the country. Some people may argue that this is not necessary, as it would be assumed that the magazine appeals to a mostly male audience between the ages of 16 and 50 (if you accept the self-perpetuating stereotype that the nerd community is mostly male). Psycho-graphically, the magazine could be said to appeal to main-streamers – who would be watching the programme because it is popular and would therefore have their interest of the magazine come from this. it could also be said to appeal to aspirers, who could look up to the production of the programme and aspire to be a part of it. It may be said to appeal to explorers, due to the magazines wide variety in article types. Under the ‘Uses and Gratifications Theory’, we could say that the magazine is used as a diversion for the audience – an escape from their boring repetitive lives into the exciting world of pulp science fiction.

Doctor Who Magazine fits the general conventions of the science fiction/nerd culture genre in a precise way – mostly because of its large publishing house and fan-base. As seen in previous examples, the magazine uses graphical elements to reinforce the content of the articles and features – both in the ways that it can use images to add to a visual aesthetic of an article (like in the article about ‘The Girl Who Died’) and the way that the images can enhance the point of specific articles and reinforce ideas in an audiences head (such as how the feature on ‘Millennium FX’ contains examples of their work to show readers how vital their work is on the programme). They also use colours in a conventional way – where they will allow each feature to have an individual colour scheme and use these schemes to bring attention to specific parts of the page. Examples of this can be seen in other aspects of my coursework.

While this magazine acts as a notable example of a magazine that has mainstream appeal whilst focusing on a smaller topic, I will be taking my of my visual cues from magazines like PC Gamer – which is distributed by Future PLC. This conglomerate is involved with many sections of the media industry (Film. Video Games and Music being notable examples) – with many of their publications holding high notoriety. Along with ‘Total Film’ and ‘Tech Radar’, ‘PC Gamer’ is “the number one PC games authority on the planet” (www.futureplc.com). As a subsidiary of this magazine, they also operate the ‘Golden Joystick Awards’ – which themselves act as the Oscars of the gaming industry and have wide influence. Interestingly, they are also the publishing house behind the Official Xbox Magazine – which suggests their high influence.

From all of this, the production values behind the magazine become evidently clear  and we can start to realize how mainstream this magazine is. We could infer from this that the magazine appeals directly to the main-streamers, who will follow whatever is popular. However, it could be argued that the magazine appeals towards explorers due to the purposefully wide subject area of the magazine – there’s so much content to explore that the readers could be argued to be adventurous within the medium. Demographically, the magazine could be said to appeal to a similar audience to ‘Doctor Who Magazine’; if you stay within the mindset of the previously mentioned stereotypes. However, the magazine could be said to self-perpetuating these stereotypes as it appeals to the same audience that have been ridiculed for having interest in gaming for many years – whilst there is wide appeal it still mainly serves to act as an escape for this traditional audience.

As seen in my Genre Research, the cover of PC Gamer magazine will often feature an overly-exaggerated high octane shot of a game protagonist in a way that will appeal to this traditional male audience. A difference in-between this magazine and Doctor Who Magazine is their representations of gender and traditional masculinity. Even though Doctor Who has always been based around an inherently sexist premise (a male lead with a female “assistant” ), the show has slowly accepted its position  as a family show and strayed away from the traditional portrayals of gender (and, by osmosis the magazine has done the same thing). However, PC Gamer has always taken the position as showing male leads as either being hyper-masculine (Think Batman or the leads from Street Fighter) or so far away from the traditional view of masculinity that they become a joke (Think the majority of the Nintendo characters). However, for female characters the specification has always been that they must be overtly sexual (both through implication and explicit nudity) – with each moderate female character being seen as a deviation from the norm. In my magazine, I will aim for a more representative, moderate view of demographics through a more diversified representation of gender and race.