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分析应用图标的种类及其适用范围

发布时间:2013-03-23 14:40:42 Tags:,,,,

作者:Greg Pollock

拥有一个极具吸引力的应用图标十分重要,这关系到潜在玩家对游戏的第一印象,影响到他们下载应用,以及开启和重新开启应用的决定。在我看来,制作一个优秀的应用图标,首先要传达出游戏的主题。假如你制作了一款高质量的游戏,那最好向玩家展示游戏的趣味性。但如果许多极为相似的应用也使用了这种外观设计策略,即使是出色的图标也可能淹没在众多竞争者之中。

我根据今年1月25日应用商店热门游戏总营收排行榜、高营收RPG排行榜、高营收冒险游戏的应用情况制作了一个表格,将各个应用图标划分为以下几类:

*卡通人物

*逼真人物

*卡通动物

*逼真动物

*相对逼真的静物

*形象化/抽象化元素

我对于用来鉴别身份和性诱惑的图标设计也很感兴趣(看过那些《Evony》广告吧?),并为那些表现出强烈的男性或女性倾向的图标制作了专栏。因为我想解答一个问题——性别鉴定如何在应用图标中发挥作用?

但要说明的是,并非所有拥有明显性别特征的应用图标都被归入这些专栏中。例如,我就忽略了那些从肩膀、臀部来看像是使用了男性人物的图标,因为我并不认为这种设计使用了与《现代战争》(出现了男性的脸)相同的性别鉴定设计方式。这可能是我这种方法的缺陷,我希望能够更细致地研究应用图标中的性别设计元素。

我做这种调查的部分原因是,只有人眼才能评价创意性。如果我遇到了一些数值分析可以解答的问题,就会交付费营销和分析团队,让他们提供尽量准确的回答。但目前还没有哪种可以解读图标美术风格的指令,所以要回答这个问题,我只能采用较少的数据集合,以及一个并不完美的印象主义分类法。

我发现我针对这些图标的命名很有限。卡通化和逼真化这种说法很不准确,也有点误导性。在此,逼真带有细节丰富的倾向,而卡通化的含义更为广泛。许多被我划入“逼真化”类型别的图标其实带有动画风格,本身并不逼真,它们的逼真感来源于其使用的可捕捉真实事物细节的技术。这就是我所能想到的最佳描述术语。

*我使用这种区分法是因为它很适合描述两种主要的人类外观风格。也很适合反映游戏的目标用户是男性(逼真化)还是女性(卡通化)。在展现女性角色时,这一理念尤其正确。根据我从Facebook网页游戏所搜集到的历史应用数据,那些带有奇幻主题,呈现“逼真化”女性角色的PvP游戏,一般最吸引男孩玩家。而带有现实主题的游戏(游戏邦注:例如《美女餐厅》或《Campus Life》)则属于瞄准女性的游戏。

*这种逼真化/卡通化分类最不适合描述动物,许多此类应用(包括Gaia的《Monster Galaxy》系列)排在中间席位。我认为这是因为怪物养成游戏较少出现明显的性别化倾向,它们吸引的群体多为儿童用户。

*卡通风格的图标在拥有大众用户的游戏中也更为常见(游戏邦注:例如《Clash of Clans》、《Jetpack Joyride》、《Temple Run》)。原因很简单:未划分性别的通俗图标更易吸引大众用户。关键在于,为吸引此类大众用户的游戏设置这种相得益彰的图标。

*另外,我还发现在高营收榜单中,有许多与《Minecraft》相关的应用,《Minecraft》已然不只是单纯的游戏,而是一个平台。

*形象化/抽象化的图标中就是两种类型,一者是具象主义的(形象化),另一种是非具象主义的(抽象化)。我发现老虎机应用图标兼具这两种类型(作为图标和游戏,它们都呈现了自身的抽象性:它们只是一些带有图片的随机数字生成器)。我无法理解为何现在还有这么多老虎机应用,但事实就是如此。除了老虎机应用,我也很惊讶为何有这么多游戏会采用这种形象化/抽象化图标设计,因为在我看来,这真是一种呈现游戏内容的糟糕选择。

*在高营收榜单上,呈现强烈性别特征角色的图标分布均衡。在此我要说明的是,如果你要打性别化的招牌,最好让男性或女性角色同样显眼。

*如果你查看下其中的子类,就会发现总营收榜单所出现的极大差别。RPG就是子类中的一个极端分化的典型,此类游戏的图标更常使用人物形象。其中女性角色(通常是男性视角的女性形象)是其他应用的两倍以上。这可能说明使用美女形象是这类游戏所采用的普遍策略,或者说这类游戏图标已经过度饱和了。

*比起其他两个排行榜,冒险游戏似乎更常使用逼真化的静物,但我并不是说逼真化的图标就更好或更坏,而是说你应该根据自己的营销活动所瞄准的榜单目标而更改图标。

*最后,我查看了顶级应用排行榜(详见下图),发现前9或前10款应用获得了大量的曝光度和收益。

app icons(from gamasutra)

app icons(from gamasutra)

*我的调查样本数量十分有限,我查看的是这三个排行榜前100名的应用。上述结论多取自前100名应用的情况。《Kingdoms of Camelot》和《Marvel War of Heroes》是我所谓的“逼真化”应用图标。在前10名营收、付费和免费榜单中,除了《She-Hulk》之外,没有一款应用的图标采用女性形象。但子类应用情况并非如此,前10名RPG榜单中有两款应用含有女性形象。

查看了上百个应用图标之后,我重新调整了自己原来的理念,意识到有些策略在特定游戏类型中更为常见,这在子类应用排行榜中表现尤其明显。如果你想适当改进原有游戏题材,了解它所适合的位置,有助于让你的设计更符合玩家预期;如果你的游戏是一个根本性的创新,了解这一点则有且于让游戏更为与众不同。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,拒绝任何不保留版权的转载,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

Picking the Perfect App Icon

by Greg Pollock

The following blog was, unless otherwise noted, independently written by a member of Gamasutra’s game development community. The thoughts and opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of Gamasutra or its parent company.

Want to write your own blog post on Gamasutra? It’s easy! Click here to get started. Your post could be featured on Gamasutra’s home page, right alongside our award-winning articles and news stories.

Having a compelling app icon is important to an app’s success, first when potential players are making the decision to download and later when they’re opening or re-opening the app. Creating a good icon is, in my opinion, first of all about expressing what the game is. Presumably you are making a quality game and honestly presenting its fun is your best bet for getting players. But even a great icon for a great game can get lost in the noise if many superficially similar apps are using the same representational strategies. Knowing what icons your app will be situated near can help  you choose one that will stand out from the pack.

I made a spreadsheet where I took a snapshot of overall top grossing overall, top grossing RPG, and top grossing Adventure on 1/25/13, categorizing each icon as one of the following.

•Cartoon person

•Realistic person

•Cartoon animal

•Realistic animal

•Relatively realistic inanimate object

•Iconic/abstract

I am also interested in the use of gender for both identification and sexual attraction (we’ve all seen those Evony ads, right), and made columns to track when a strongly gendered male or female figured showed. Because of the question I wanted to answer–how does gender identification work in app icons–not all figures who appear to have a gender are tagged in those columns. For example, I omitted figures that, judging by shoulder and hip width, are probably male, because I do not think this kind of representation is using gender identification in the same way that something like Modern War (which has a close up of a man’s face) does. This could well be a flaw in my methodology and I would be happy to see a better study focused on gender in app icons.

Part of the reason for doing this study–as well as the reason for the softness of my methodology–is that creative judgments require a human eye. When I have a question that numerical analysis can answer, I trust our marketing and analytics team to give as precise a response as possible. But there’s no command that can read the art style of an icon, and so to answer this question I had to accept a small data set and an imperfect, impressionistic method of categorization.

Part of what I discovered were the limits of my rubric. The distinction between cartoonish and realistic as I use is very imprecise and a little misleading. Here, realistic tends to mean detailed while cartoonish means broad. A lot of the icons that I class as “realistic” are done in an anime style and are not realistic per se, but realistic in that they use techniques that would capture the detail of real things. This was the best terminology I could come up with.

•I used this distinction because it works pretty well for describing the two major styles of human representation. It also maps pretty well to whether the target audience for a game is male (realistic) or female (cartoonish). This is especially true when women are represented. Very “realistic” women front grindy PvP games with high fantasy themes, which, based on historical app data from Facebook web games, I believe do best with boys. Cartoonish women front games with realistic themes (paradoxically enough) like Diner Dash or Campus Life. Again, this repeats a pattern seen in Facebook web games.

•The realistic/cartoonish distinction works worst for describing animals, where many icons (including Gaia’s Monster Galaxy franchise) sit in the middle. I think this is because monster training games are less discretely gendered and are more likely to be popular with kids.

•Cartoonish icons also appear more common in games with the largest audiences (Clash of Clans, Jetpack Joyride, Temple Run). This makes sense: an accessible icon that doesn’t divide by gender has a larger addressable audience (than, say, an anime babe in a metal bikini). The key, of course, is to put such an icon on a game that is also addressed to a similarly large audience.

•An aside: there are a lot of Minecraft-related apps in the top grossing charts. Minecraft isn’t a game, it’s a platform.

•The iconic/abstract category was originally two categories–iconic and abstract–attempting to parse the difference between representational (iconic) and non-representational (abstract). I broke down under the weight of slots apps, which are both iconic and abstract. (I would say that as icons and games they represent their own abstraction: they are just random number generators with pictures). I cannot understand how there are still so many slots apps, but there are. Slots aside, I was surprised how many games use iconic or abstract strategies when it seems to me like a bad way to represent a game. This is something I learned.

•In top grossing, strongly gendered characters split evenly. I take this to mean that if you are making a gender play, either a male or a female character has equal chances of standing out to your audience.

•If you look at subcategories, there are striking differences from overall top grossing. RPG is a good example of the extreme deviation that happens in a subcategory, where app icons use human much more frequently than in overall top grossing. There is also a marked change in gendering, with women (and most often women represented through a male gaze) more than doubling the number seen in overall. This could either mean that using a babe is a strategy with consistent results or that it is oversaturated.

•Adventure seems to use realistic inanimate objects more than the other two charts. I don’t take this to mean that a realistic icon is s better or worse, but that you might change your icon to match the goals of a marketing campaign targeting a particular chart.

•Finally, I looked at the very top of the overall charts (screenshot below), since the top nine or ten apps get the lion’s share of exposure and revenue.

•The sample size is by definition very low, which is why I wanted to look at the top 100 of three charts in the majority of my study. The rates of representation are about what we see in the top 100. Kingdoms of Camelot and Marvel War of Heroes, for example, are apps I would class as “realistic,” and they have about as much representation in the top 10 as in the top 100 grossing. One thing of note: in the top 10 of grossing, paid, and free, there are no women except for She-Hulk tucked in the corner of the Marvel icon. The same is not true of the subcategories, where two apps in the top 10 of RPG have female characters.

After looking at a few hundred app icons I’ve been able to refine my initial idea of matching the image to the game. Certain strategies are more common for certain game types, and those tendencies become more exaggerated when you look at the subcategory charts where they are selected for. Knowing where you’ll fit can help you play to your audience’s expectations, if you’re going for a modest improvement on an existing genre, or give them something that will stand out if your game is likewise a radical innovation.(source:gamasutra


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