K. Isbister - Better Game Characters by Design: A psychological approach
"Many game characters have exaggerated babyfaces... evoking additional player sympathy and warmth and reducing expectations." p. 11-12
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"Good designers also build memorable characters by taking well-worn stereotypes and crafting characters that have a few traits that go against the type." (egs. given are Tetra from Windwaker and Guybrush Threepwood from Monkey Island) p. 14
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Friendliness is perceived through facial expression, body posture and voice
Face: smile, steady but not overly intense eye contact - Body: open, relaxed stance, may lean toward - Voice: warm, energetic. p. 29
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"The impossibility of truly reflecting ethnic identities across multiple cultural groups may help to explain the prevalence of nonhuman characters in games that travel successfully across cultural borders." p. 53
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"A player's cultural and subcultural backgrounds have a profound effect on how she or he perceives the game because of these existing expectations." p. 57
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Design pointers:
- Use simple human universals in character relationships
- Consider avoiding real races and cultural moments (eg. Pokémon, Pacman, Kirby)
- Borrow from existing transmedia (eg. gangsters, rappers, martial artists)
- Be true to the localization of your characters in their own world
- Do not try to take on a subculture or media form your team does not know well
- Include designers from the target culture
- Test early and often with members of the target culture
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Interview with Roppyaku Tsurumi and Ryochi Hasegawa, Sony Computer Entertainment Japan, conducted by Kenji Ono:
Tsurumi: If you don't understand a character by its appearance, children can't draw a portrait of it, and you can't cognize the character in your mind.
Hasegawa: ...the character's silhouette is more important than the character details. For example, if there is a character whose headband is often streaming in the wind, you will know who it is by just the silhouette.
Ono: This is like the way a symbol adds meaning to a character in a game, like Ratchet's bushy eyebrows, for example. His eyebrows signify an animated personality to Japanese people.*
*Japanese culture relies heavily on symbolism, like the "justice scarf" on the likes of Kamen Rider.
Ono: Incidentally, there are a lot of game characters that are created in Japan but are popular all over the world. Are there any characters that were created overseas and are popular in Japan as well?
Hasegawa: Just Crash Bandicoot. That character is the only one made by an overseas production company to sell more than a million titles in Japan.
Ono: When the first Crash Bandicoot went on sale, a lot of Japanese gamers, including myself, mistook it for a Japanese game.
Hasegawa: Naughty Dog, which made Crash Bandicoot, really respected Japanese game development and was eagerly researching our game designs. Their efforts really paid off.
In reference to creating a character that will be accepted all over the world:
- Character should have an appealing identity
- Take initiative to design that character incorporating requests of each region
- Publishers of each region can verify if the resulting character will be appealing in their respective region
- A lot of elements depend on personal taste, so it is difficult to design a character objectively
Sonic was first popular in the US and Europe, then Japan. (possibly lacklustre marketing in Japan - US marketing ploy to sell Sega Genesis systems with a copy of Sonic The Hedgehog, their best selling and most well-received title of the time, gave Sega a majority of shares over Nintendo in the West.)
p. 62-100
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On appealing to both genders:
"Games with cartoonish, nonhuman characters avoid this issue entirely by removing physical attraction from the palette of the designer, which may help to explain their broader cross-gender appeal." p. 118
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"Players can engage in social learning from well-designed characters just as they do with people... subtle clues help guide beginners, or players struggling with the next insight, into the right actions intuitively, avoiding the need for overt hints from guide characters or from the interface itself." p. 149
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"Good character designers direct player emotions by using player-characters to underscore desirable feelings (such as triumph or suspense) and to minimize undesirable ones (such as fear or frustration). p. 151
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On imitation and social learning:
- Expressiveness (using a lot of variety and energy in expressions and gestures when talking)
- Animation (showing a lot of energy in general movement - a bouncy walk, quick reactions etc)
- Expansiveness (taking up space with one's body in movement)
- Coordination (moving smoothly and with grace) p. 171
* choose physical qualities that evoke the experience you want the player to have
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Use voice and music as an emotional regulator (character voice can make players calmer, more enthusiastic, triumphant etc.) p. 192
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On puppet characters:
"Player-character personality can come across in the style of movement and visual characteristics, and social persona is defined mostly through nonverbal interaction in real time between the player-character and NPCs." p. 214
"The strength of puppet player-characters lies in the joy a player feels in physically manipulating them and in watching the results of his or her actions on-screen. Puppets often have super-human qualities - grace in movement, extreme strength and accuracy, and the like." p. 214
M. Brands, R. Brands & A. Terpstra - Sonic the Hedgehog 25th Anniversary Art Book, first edition
"But a well-known character with an instantly recognisable shape doesn't always add up to iconic status. Sonic truly stands as a symbol of the incredible story of video games, as well as a beloved mascot in a brand capacity... Sonic did not reach this status by chance. His conception was the result of Japanese-American game company SEGA's bid to find a suitable character to use as a mascot for their video game enterprises. In a sense, Sonic the Hedgehog was designed to be an icon, says programmer Yuji Naka, Sonic's spiritual father" p. 9
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"Sonic's redesign was driven by SEGA of America, and in particular by product manager Madeline Schroeder, who readied Sonic for a future where he would resonate with audiences worldwide, and could be used in comic books or television series." p. 35
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(In reference to the different teams handling marketing in America, Japan and Europe & the different box designs for early Sonic games)
"People on Sonic Team "were not very happy with these different interpretations of the character," game director Takeshi Iizuka says. "Starting from Sonic Adventure, SEGA decided they would have no more of this, and would manage and control how the character is represented."" p. 42
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"When it comes to character design, there were a lot of memorable character designs back in the day [the early 1990's], be it in video games or animated TV shows. but most of them had this cute quality to them, a certain softness. When Sonic came out he stood out for being really fast, really cool, and for this really strong attitude, and this fundamentally put him apart from the rest." - Game director Takeshi Iizuka p. 44
R. Lin, P. C. Lin, & K. J. Ko - A study of cognitive human factors in mascot design
"Businesses must develop and nurture their corporate identities, which can be emphasized through mascots." para. 2
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"Generally, subjects with a design background preferred connotative adjectives such as subject-related, creative, and symbolic; meanwhile subjects without a design background were concerned more with denotative adjectives such as attractive, artistic, and cute." para. 11
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"The subject space reveals that `design style' is more important than other factors to the mascot design." para. 15
C. Pruett - The Role of Culture In Video Game Characters
"Though there are exceptions, most popular American games focus on masculine lead characters, and employ an ultra-realistic art style, while Japanese titles are often much more stylized, and often employ a wider variety of characters." p. 4
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"Truth be told, American developers do produce a large number of titles that vary in artistic style and execution, though they are generally aimed exclusively at a younger audience and often fail to impress reviewers." p. 5
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"American culture has traditionally dictated that comic books (and video games by extension) are a medium for young males, regardless of content. In contrast to America, the Japanese culture does not tend to regard comics, video games, or animation as media designed for a specific audience. The culture permits these types of media to be enjoyed by all walks of life, and consequently the market for comic media is much wider than in the United States." p. 5
M. Wallace - Be Kind: Rewind: The Real Story Behind Blinx, Xbox's Mediocre Mascot
"I was excited about Blinx, about the concept, about the team working on it, and about how it felt to play. That’s more what I cared about, rather than some theory about having to have a mascot." - Ed Fries para. 5
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“It was always hard, because when we went to Japan, we heard all kinds of things, and it was difficult to know how seriously to take them them,” Ed says. “Like that we should make Halo easier for the Japanese market because Japanese gamers weren’t as good as American gamers. That didn’t really strike me as something that was true, but it was said. Or that the Xbox couldn’t be black, because black is the color of death, and the ‘X’ also means death. But the PlayStation [2] was black! We’d hear all these random things from different people, and it was always hard to tell whether they were true or not.” para. 6
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"For the US market, Blinx was never truly intended to be the next big video game mascot character, or even something to go up against platformer mascot mainstays, for that matter. “There was definitely some talk [about Blinx being competition for Mario],” Ed explains. “I’m not sure how seriously we took it... we didn’t really have a mascot, and I didn’t feel like that hurt [us]. When we launched [with the original Xbox], obviously we had Halo there, and even then I didn’t feel like we were missing a mascot." para. 8
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"Launched in the US on October 7, 2002 as ‘The First 4-D Action Game Ever’—a slogan that Ed laughingly takes the blame for—Blinx would enter the market to somewhat middling reviews. “I think it’s a better game than that,” Ed admits. “Though the fact that the main character had a vacuum was unfortunate, because one of our big competitors then was Gamecube, and [Luigi’s Mansion] had come out basically a year ahead of us with the ghost vacuum. So it kind of looked like we were imitating that game to some degree, but Blinx was in development long before we saw what Nintendo was doing." para. 10
E. Smith - What became of the cartoon video game mascot?
"...back in the 1990s and early 2000s, things were different. The race was still on, and just as fervent, but the goal wasn't to top Battlefield or Assassin's Creed. Everyone was looking for next cartoon hero, a new, colourful, family-friendly "face of the brand" to usurp Mario." para. 1
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"Characters were mascots, not just for their own franchises, but for consoles too." para. 2
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"Personally, I prefer to think it was because gaming matured, or at least started to move in more mature directions. Today, games still have a reputation, a (self-perpetuated I might add) public image of belonging to children. They're escapism. Even to adults, they promise a return if not explicitly to childhood then to simple, pleasant experiences. But slowly, reluctantly, they are growing up." para. 6
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" Nintendo will always do its thing and games for kids will continue to be made because, of course, kids still play games. Gaming should never become a uniform culture, whereby the only games produced are ones suitable to a particular kind of consumer." para. 8
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"...I'd rather games not re-enter the race to find merchantable cartoons - Croc, Parappa, Banjo et al all died of natural causes. Games like theirs will thankfully always exist, but if gaming as a whole needs a unifying challenge, the revival of the cartoon mascot is not it." para. 12
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