作者：Rob Lockhart

有个现象让我觉得很滑稽：在21世纪，你想做的几乎任何东西，都要先注册一个域名。但在你注册域名以前，你必须给这个东西取个名字。我的东西就是一个独立游戏工作室。给它取个名字真是不容易。

更准确地说，它是一个教育类游戏工作室。我之所以决定制作教育类游戏，是受了Neal Stephenson的书《钻石时代》启发。在那本书中，作者描述了一款非常有效的教育类电子游戏叫作《A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer》，或简称为《The Primer》。我用于启动工作室的ING储蓄帐户叫作“Primer Fund”。不幸地是，当时间到时，我的工作室却再也用不了“Primer”这个名字了，主要是因为《Code Hero》的工作室已经叫“Primer Labs”了。（我偶然发现这个名字的灵感也来源于这本书）。

Unique-baby-Names(from gamasutra)

所以，我的教育类游戏工作室要叫什么？我开始围绕“Game”（游戏）和“Learning”（学习）这两个词想名字。如：

Plearn（学玩）

Playcademy（游学）

Luducation（乐育）

Funstitute（乐教）

Institute of Higher Gaming（高游）

……

从纯美学的角度看，我不喜欢我想出来的上述名字（如果你刚好有中意，那就拿去用吧）。没有一个听起来琅琅上口，而且都让我不断联想到一个让人扫兴的词“Edu-tainment”（寓教于乐）。我好像太盲目了——我需要一个计划。所以，我罗列了一些条件，作为给我的小工作室选择好名字的标准：

命名原则：

1、有趣

2、有韵律

3、有含意

4、没有被用过

很快，第四条就成了一大难题。游戏工作室可以用的好名字那么多，但工作室也有不少。我最喜欢的一个被否绝掉的名字是“Epicycle Games”。我还为它画了一个LOGO：一个人骑着一辆轮子上也是轮子的自行车。结果，这个名字已经被制作《Blindside》的人先用了，但不知出于什么原因，他们竟没有使用这个名字的.com？去抢啊，伙计们！

很多东西是要网上查的：

有没有人拥有这个.com？他们是确实在使用它还是只是霸占着它？

我以前在Toy工作室工作时，CEO很乐意出高价跟域名拥有者谈判。在那时，我完全不喜欢在这方面花费我少得可怜的钱和时间。那意味着，我必须想出一个独一无二的名字。

是否有人有搜索优先权？

我希望我的工作室的网站是在谷歌搜索栏中输入名字后得到的第一个结果，甚至不需要做任何SEO。这意味着这个名字不能是某个非常流行的网站已经使用的名字，不能出现在某个URL不同的网站的标题中。

是否有人有Twitter句柄？

这一点倒没那么重要，因为真正的Twitter句柄和关联的用户名不一定一样，但仍然可能引起混乱——至少当工作室具有足够大的影响力时就会被twitter验证。

我有许多选择可能满足以上标准，但犹豫不绝地选择了6个小时以及跟Chicago Game Dev的朋友讨论后，我选定了“Important Little Games”。

到目前为止，我对这个名字还是很满意的。我听到的评价都是积极的，它满足我所有的要求和期望。但它有两点不达标：

没有透露出“学习”的含义

我认为这一定程度上其实是个优点，因为它让工作室更具灵活性。如果工作室选择开发另一个方向的游戏，我们就不必改名字了。另一方面，名字中带有“重要”的意思，已经有那么一层意思了。

Twitter句柄不可能存在

结果是，@importantlittlegames太长了，Twitter不接受它成为句柄，所以我不得不改成@importantgames，希望少了“little”后，这个名字听起来不会太自命不凡。

我想这两点还是可以接受的。

下一步是设计LOGO。从“Important Little Games”这个名字中我得不到太多视觉信息作为参考，所以我只能自己画草图。我的第一个念头是，画一个像将军一个的人，躲着他的下属玩游戏。虽然我仍然喜欢那个概念，但对于工作室可能在LOGO中融入的多个含义而言，它的图像不够简洁。

ILG_Man_Logo(from gamaustra)

我最喜欢的一个被否绝掉的概念是一只鸭子、另一个鸭子和一只鹅的站成一排的剪影。因为鸭子和鹅的外形太像了，我把LOGO给别人看时，他们都以为鸭子是小鹅，或者鹅是大鸭。无论如何，没有人领悟到其中的笑点。然而，使用一个“小游戏”（石头、剪子、布）中的元素来代表一个工作室，再摆成宏伟的形状（皇室盾形徽章），这个想法很吸引我，于是我想到了这个：

ILG_Logo_small(from gamasutra)

（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）

Diary of an Indie Studio: Choosing a Name

by Rob Lockhart

The observation strikes me as funny: Almost anything you’d want to create in the 21st century starts with registering a domain name.  But before you can register a domain, you need a name for this thing.  Well, my thing was an indie game studio, and coming up with a name was not easy.

More specifically, it’s an educational games studio.  My inspiration to create educational games, of a certain sort, was inspired by the book “The Diamond Age” by Neal Stephenson.  Described in  that book is an amazingly effective educational video game called ‘A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer’ or just ‘The Primer’ for short.  My ING savings account for starting a studio was called ‘Primer Fund.’  Unfortunately, when the time came, there was no way I could use the name ‘Primer,’ in any form, mostly out of deference to Primer Labs, creators of Code Hero (who, I happen to know, were inspired by the same book).

So, what to call an educational game studio?  I started by putting together some portmanteaus of ‘Game’ and ‘Learning.’  Names like

Plearn

Playcademy

Luducation

Funstitute

Institute of Higher Gaming

etc.

On a gut aesthetic level, I didn’t like the direction I was headed (though, if you like any of these names, go ahead and use them).  None of them seemed to trip off the tongue, and they all reminded me a bit of the buzzword Edu-tainment, which is a big turn off.  It seemed like I was flying blind – I needed a plan.  So, I came up with a set of criteria for determining whether something was a good name for my nascent studio.

Game Designers make rules, I guess.

Very soon, #4 became my biggest problem.  There are lots of good names for a game studio, but there are also lots of game studios.  One of my favorite rejected names was Epicycle Games.  I pictured a logo with a man riding a bicycle whose wheels had wheels.  Turns out that name was already taken by the guys who made ‘Blindside,’ but who for some reason don’t own the .com?  Get on it, guys.

It turns out there are a lot of things online that need checking:

Does someone own the .com?  Are they actually using it or just squatting?

At my old job at Toy Studio, the CEO was willing and able to go chasing after domain owners and to negotiate inflated fees for their posession.  At the moment, I am completely unwilling to spend my meager allowances of and time and money in this way.  That meant I really had to come up with something unique.

Does someone have search priority?

I wanted my studio’s website to be the first google result for it’s name, even without doing any kind of SEO nonsense.  This means that it can’t be a phrase that a very popular website has included somewhere, and it can’t be the ‘title’ of a website with a different url.

Does someone have the twitter handle?

This is a lot less important because the actual twitter handle and associated username need not be the same, but still might cause confusion – at least until the studio is influential enough that it gets verified by twitter.

I had a couple of choices lined up that might have fit these criteria, but after hemming and hawing for about 6 hours, and chatting with Chicago Game Dev friends, I settled on “Important Little Games.”

So far I’m very happy with the name.  I get only positive remarks about it (though it would probably be a pretty dick move to say something negative right off the bat), and it’s met all my needs and expectations.  There are only a few things it doesn’t address well, namely

It doesn’t necessarily imply games for learning

I think this is actually a blessing, in a way, because it gives the studio more flexibility.  If the studio tacks a different direction we don’t have to change the name.  On the other hand, there is the connotation of importance, which is related.

The twitter handle cannot exist

It turns out that @importantlittlegames is too long for twitter to accept as a handle, so I had to settle for @importantgames and hope that it doesn’t sound too pretentious without the ‘little.’

I think that these are an acceptable tradeoff.

The next stage was to figure out the logo.  ‘Important Little Games’ doesn’t imply a lot of visual information to go on, so I was going almost from scratch.  My first thought was to make an ‘important little guy’ like a general who tries to hide his gaming habit from his subordinates.  While I still like the concept there, it wasn’t a succinct enough image to use for all the multifarious purposes that a company logo may be put to.

My favorite rejected concept was the silhouettes of a duck, another duck and a goose all in a row.  Due to unfortunate anatomical similarities, people I showed this to thought that the ducks were goslings, or that the goose was a giant duck of some kind.  Anyway, nobody got the joke.  However, the idea of using a ‘little game’ to represent the company, and giving it some importance through form and presentation appealed to me, and I came up with this:(source:gamasutra)