CRAPin video gameVideo game cover design involves a com-plex battle between morals and marketing, colors and characters, and text and truth.

covers

by Justin Jensen, Edward Mendiola, Allison Simons, and Sean Wippert

Shouldwomenbeobjectifiedtobringinsales?Shouldredbeadomi-nantcolortoimplythepowerofacharacter?Shouldthetruthbehiddentoattractskepticalbuyers?TheanswerstothesequestionsandmorelieinWilliams’CRAP1designprinciplesandKimballandHawkins’perspectiveoncultureindesign.2 Contrast,repetition,alignment,andproximityarefourdesignprinciplesthatwillstrengthenanydocument.Cultureisamorecomplexprincipletoanalyze.KimballandHawkinsdiscusstwodesigntoolswhenobservingper-spectivesonculture:graphicsandcolor.Graphicsarestronglytiedtosocialandculturalfactors.3Thesefactorsdeterminehowweascribemeaningtoim-ages.Forexample,animageofasoldierwithabowwillimplythatthemajor-ityofthegamewillinvolveusingarcheryinawar. Thegraphicofavideogamecovermustsimultaneouslyrepresentthegame,attractbuyers,andestablishvisualcohesion.Themeaningofcolorisdeeplyinfluencedbyourculturalbackground.Redmaybeassociatedwithloveorbleeding.4Blackmaybeassociatedwitheviloremptiness.Colorisn’tjustforlooks,itisanimportantculturalelementtoconsider.Inasimilarwaytographics,colorsonavideogamecovercanrepresenttheentiregame.

Mario and ConkerTwocartoon-stylevideogamecharacters:oneforkids,oneforadults.

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Old vs. New Both games, Mario Party (N64) and Mario Party 8 (Wii), greatly use the prin-ciple of contrast to enhance the cover art of each game. Both games utilize a variety of colors to create a playful, fun pathos for users. The colors used in Mario Party are somewhat more calm, mainly primary and secondary colors, such as red, blue, orange, green. Mario Party 8 uses very bright, vivid colors such as fuchsia and electric green. Whether the colors are bright and bold or primary and secondary, each color scheme is maintained throughout the cover art, which creates a repetitive color scheme. These color schemes are prevalent throughout the cover art whether in the graphics, such as the characters, font, or shapes. One can see in Mario Party 8 that the designer used colors that were prominent from the main cover image to color the boxes filled with text on the back. The boxes are colored differently according to the various information inch box relays. This color coding creates a sense of order. To create a sense of order with the information on Mario Party the designer placed all the graphics on the back cover to the right and the information into boxes on the left. To further the sense of order the designer of Mario Party placed all of the symbols on the right of the cover, such as the game system, rating, consoles, etc. Unlike Mario Party, Mario Party 8 placed the symbols throughout the cover

art, which lacks the distinguished order that the original Mario Party created. To further the idea of unequal order in the two cover art images one can compare both covers. Mario Party 8 has much more information crammed onto the back cover along with graphics. Mario Party balances the information and graphics by aligning each (text or graphic) to certain sides of the docu-ment. Mario Party also limits the graph-ics from gameplay to five screenshots, unlike Mario Party 8 which has six screenshots and small images of charac-ters or confetti placed throughout. A user might see the cover art of Mario Party 8 as stronger in regards to the playful, fun ethos, but upon further comparison of the two Mario Party game covers, one can see that Mario Party 8 is more chaotic than its forefather Mario, which limits its graphics and texts to create a nice, organized cover art.

Analyzing the Sales Perhaps there is a correlation with the amount of sales and viewing of the cover art. Mario Party 8 sold 8.11 mil-lion units globally,9 while it’s forefather, Mario Party sold 2.70 million glob-ally.10 One could credit the plethora of information and graphics on the cover of Mario Party 8 for being more able to entice users into purchasing the games. However it is necessary that one takes into account how video games have become more accessible over time. On the release of Nintendo 64 in 1996 Gary Cross and Gregory Smits said, “One-

third of homes in the United States had a Nintendo system.”11

“Video games evolved at a rapid rate throughout the 1990s, moving from the first 16-bit systems (named for the amount of data they could process and store) in the early ’90s to the first Internet-enabled home console in 1999. As companies focused on new market-ing strategies, wider audiences were targeted, and video games’ influence on culture began to be felt.”12 The strat-egization of video game companies in marketing and targeting wider audiences can be identified as the main target for the purchasing of newer games such as Mario Party 8 being more popular. Although Mario Party’s rating is much higher than Mario Party 8’s rating, this didn’t transfer to sales. Perhaps Mario Party 8’s gameplay wasn’t perceived to be as great as the original Mario Party. However, we may be able to attribute Mario Party 8’s much larger success to its cover design. The design may have enticed more buyers than the original Mario Party, but they may have been disappointed with the game itself in the end. Therefore, it can be said that the design of the cover art of a video game may have a large impact on its sales. As said previously, one of the “new market-ing strategies” of companies may have been to focus on designing better cover art. With these results, it is important to follow Williams’ CRAP principles and Kimball and Hawkins’ perspectives on culture in order to make successful video game cover art that can transfer into suc-cessful sales.

Target Audience Before we can analyze these prin-ciples as they are used (or not used) on actual video game covers, we must first understand the target audience of video games. We can categorize the target audience by using the Entertainment Software Rating Board’s (ESRB) rating system. We will closely analyze three video game ESRB ratings: E for Every-one, M for Mature, and T for Teens.5

Demographics The ages of gamers are not too far apart in 2014. However, it is interesting that gamers under 18 years old make up only 29% of gamers — the least amount of gamers in relation to age — as video games were initially perceived as an activity for children. However, 39% of gamers are over 36 years old, making them the largest group of gamers in rela-tion to age. The amount of male gamers and female gamers are almost equal. In fact, women over 18 years old represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (36%) than boys under 18 years old (17%). Howev-er, this may not have been the case until very recently, as the number of female gamers age 50 and older increased by 32% from 2012 to 2013. These demographics were quite dif-ferent 10 years ago.

As shown in the figure7 above, in 2004, the demographics are almost the opposite from now. Gamers under 18 years old (34%) make up double the amount of gamers than those over 50 years old (17%). There is also a signifi-cant gap between male gamers (59%) and female gamers (39%). There can be many explanations for this. Perhaps im-proved graphics influenced older gamers to appreciate the artistic side of video games. Women are also more com-monly becoming the main protagonist in video games, whereas they were often the “damsel in distress,” but they still take this role today in quite a number of cases.8

Knowing the design principles and audience of video game covers, we can now closely analyze real examples to see if they match with the aforementioned conventions.

Time to Analyze Now that we know the audience and demographics of video games from to-day and the past, we can analyze actual examples of video game covers. We will look at old and new examples for all three ESRB ratings. For each of these ratings, we will analyze an old version and new version of the same franchise: Mario, Final Fantasy, and Conker. We will also analyze the sales and how the cover’s quality relates to the sales. Does a cover’s design affect sales and ratings?

WHAT THE CRAP?Contrast“Don’tbeawimp.”Theprin-cipleofcontrastreliesonele-mentsbeingdifferent.Theseelementscanthencom-plementoneanotherthroughtheirdifferences.Forexample,lighttextiseasiertoreadagainstadarkbackground.Alargetitlewillattractatten-tion,andsmallersubtextwillstayoutofitsway.

RepetitionRepeatingelementscansome-timescreateamorecohesiveunit.Theprincipleofrepeti-tionreliesonelementsbeingrepeated.Acoloronachar-acter’scostumecanbeusedasthecolorforthetitleofthevideogame.Aspecifictypefacecanbeusedmultipletimestocreateunity.

AlignmentTheprincipleofalignmentreliesonelementsbeinglinedupwithoneanother.Ifaswordisplacedhorizon-tallyonacover,textcanbealignedwiththissword.Ifacharacterisfacingtotheleft,textcanbeplacedtothelefttoattractattention.

ProximityTheprincipleofproximityreliesonelementsbeingputtogetheriftheyrelatetoeachother.Companylogosshouldbeplacedtogether.Thetitleandcharactersonacovershouldbeclosetooneanotherasrepresentationsofthevideogame.

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Old vs. New Conker’s Bad Fur Day appeals to adults with the use of beer and mature characters being depicted. Conker: Live & Reloaded can mistakenly appeal as a game for a younger audience as the colors are used differently. It still depicts heavy weaponry and violence suggesting its intentions. Conker: Live & Reloaded colors ap-pear as a lighter contrast in comparison to the older version. It uses hazy pastel looking colors that appear cooler in color temperature than the colors used in Conker’s Bad Fur day. Conker: Live & Reloaded also uses repetition between the blue color in Conker’s eyes and the word “LIVE” in the title. Conker’s Bad Fur Day uses bright and warm colors that pop out at the user. Warm orange colors compliment the title along with the color of the orange squirrel charac-ter. It can be inferred that Conker’s Bad Fur Day uses bright and bold colors in contrast to Conker: Live & Reloaded that uses a combination of primary and secondary colors. Conker: Live & Reloaded uses an obvious amount of repetition in color between the title and character. The uniforms and army colors can also be seen as an example of repetition. It can also be seen that the word “Conker” uses repetition to match the color and imita-tion of a squirrel figure. In Conker’s Bad Fur Day, they use a similar method with the game title by using the same orange color matched to the character. The difference is that instead of a hazy

background they use a black background with brighter colors. Conker’s Bad Fur Day also does a better job of using proximity than Conker: Live & Reloaded does. The

newer game cover lacks proximity and everything is crowded closer together taking up the whole cover. The older game aligns all of its compatibility infor-mation to the right and the newer game uses symbols crowded into the graph-ics. Proximity and order are lost in the advancement of the newer game. According to IGN, “Rare’s twisted, deliciously witty 3D platformer is just as deep in design as Conker is in feces.”13 The game’s graphic design and bright colors made it a bestseller for the Nintendo 64. Gamers like the graph-ics Conker’s Bad Fur Day used for its design. The bright colors in contrast while using proximity effectively may exemplify why this game was a success-ful seller. However, the newer version was not nearly as successful in ratings as the original Conker’s BFD. The game cover

for Conker L&R did not use as many of the CRAP principles as effectively as the original N64 game cover. It can be inferred that the original game received better reviews because the cover was more visually appealing.

Analyzing the Sales Conker’s Bad Fur Day sold 0.77 million copies,14 while Conker: Live & Reloaded sold 0.71 million copies.15 This isn’t such a large difference, but when comparing to the Mario Party games, the fact that the older version of Conker wasn’t behind by a large margin, and was in fact ahead in sales, can show that the cover influenced the sales of the two games. Whereas Final Fantasy VII was essentially revived due to its integra-tion with the Steam gaming platform, Conker’s Bad Fur Day remains as a Nintendo 64 exclusive. Perhaps Conker: Live & Reloaded could have sold more games if it did not have the implications of violence that were instantly displayed on the cover. Conker’s Bad Fur Day gives a much more comical appeal, and there are ad-ditional implications of sex in the game with the female character’s pose. While these factors deal with the differences in the gameplay of the two games, the covers also accurately display these differences. As the cover is the first impression of buyers, the sales for these two games make sense considering the design of the covers.

“Proximity and order are lost in the advance-ment of the newer game.”

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Old vs. New For a game that sold 9.8 million copies,16 the Final Fantasy VII box art is exceedingly simple. One man on a mission against a much larger foe. That es-sentially is what you get in a predominantly black and white montage. You don’t even get a look at his face. He is just there and ready for attack. It also feels like the devel-opers went way overboard in leaving unused space for this. The near total wash of white on the box art may be good for contrast, it also feels incomplete, as though the box art itself was secondary to the game. Final Fantasy X, while sell-ing only 6.6 million copies17 by comparison, tells more and less of a story with its box art. Like its predecessor, he stands with a look of sheer determination. His world is littered with a wash of warm and cool colors that go to great lengths to draw the attention of its audience. It is a much pret-tier world that of the one of Final Fantasy VII, but one that is notice-ably lacking in one thing: an enemy. There is no massive structure in the distance, ominously facing him down. Beyond that, this box art cover excels in almost every department. The contrasts are way more stated, the repetitions are more smartly portioned, the alignment is very straightforward, and the proximity is more organized. All in all it just brings more to the table in every way as far as box art is concerned.

Analyzing the Sales With the Mario Party games, the sales seemed to match up with the quality of the cover design. These two games do not have as large of a gap in sales as the Mario Party games, but Final Fantasy X still sold much less than Final Fantasy VII. One thing to note is that Final Fantasy VII was re-released on Steam, a PC gaming platform. This potentially increased sales because the game can be played on PC without the need to buy a separate gaming system, especially an older system such as the original

Playstation. Final Fantasy X did not

“He stands with a

look of sheer deter-mina-

tion.”

release its game to PC, and therefore is only avail-able on separate gaming systems. This may be a case where other factors contributed to the sales of the game more than the dif-

ference between the games’ cover art designs.Essentially, the game was revived. The game was given a second chance, especially since many gamers may have bought the game twice if they had bought it in the past. Although the first game had sold more, some of those sales could have been doubled due to the fact that the

game was re-released. At any rate, the game was named 1997 Game of the Year, and a movie that expanded on the game’s universe was also created in 2005. This movie adaptation could have given the game more sales, as well, since the title was given more attention. We shall see in the coming years if Final Fantasy X’s HD release on the Playsta-tion 3 will help it catch up on sales!

Conclusion Through the analysis of these covers, we can see that successful video game cover designs positively affect sales and ratings for video games. The target audience reflected on covers’ designs, as well as perspectives on culture with graphics and color. The large amount of colors and characters on the Mario Party covers implied that the games were made for everyone. The characters with swords on the covers of the Final Fantasy games implied that violence would be involved in their gameplay, suggesting that they were made for teens. Drinking, sex, and violence were highlighted on the covers of the Conker games, implying that they were made for adults. In all but one special case, the covers that followed the CRAP and culture principles sold more copies than those that failed to follow them. Therefore, by following these design principles, com-panies can create covers that attract their intended audience and sell more copies because of smart marketing decisions, regardless of the quality of gameplay.

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1.Williams,Robin.“DesignPrinciples.”InTheNon-Designer’sDesignBook.Thirded.Berkeley,California:PeachpitPress,2008.2.Kimball,MilesA.,andAnnR.Hawkins.“Graphics.”InDocumentDesign,201.Boston,MA:Bedford/St.Martin’s,2008.3.Ibid,201.4.Ibid,253.5.“ESRBRatingsGuide.”RatingCategories,ContentDescriptors,andInteractiveElementsfromESRB.AccessedNovember6,2014.http://www.esrb.org/ratings/ratings_guide.jsp.6.“2014Sales,Demographic,andUsageData.”January1,2014.AccessedNovember6,2014.http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_EF_2014.pdf7.Ibid8.DamselinDistress:Part1-TropesvsWomeninVideoGames.PerformedbyAnitaSarkeesian.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6p5AZp7r_Q.2013.Film.9.“MarioParty.”VGChartz.AccessedNovember6,2014.http://www.vgchartz.com/game/1256/mario-party/.10.Ibid.11.Cross,Gary,andGregorySmits.“Japan,theU.S.andtheGlobalizationofChildren’sConsumerCulture.”JournalofSocialHistory38,no.4(2005).12.“TheEvolutionofElectronicGames.”TheEvolutionofElectronicGames.AccessedNovember6,2014.13.“Conker’sBadFurDay(Nintendo64).”IGN.AccessedNovember6,2014.http://www.ign.com/games/conkers-bad-fur-day/n64-13960.14.“Conker’sBadFurDay.”VGChartz.AccessedNovember6,2014.http://www.vgchartz.com/game/395/conkers-bad-fur-day/.15.“Conker:LiveAndReloaded.”VGChartz.AccessedNovember6,2014.http://www.vgchartz.com/game/394/conker-live-and-reloaded/.16.“FinalFantasyVIIforPlayStationReviews-Metacritic.”Metacritic.AccessedNovember6,2014.http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation/final-fantasy-vii.17.“FinalFantasyXforPlayStation2Reviews-Metacritic.”Metacritic.AccessedNovember6,2014.http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-2/final-fantasy-x.18.CloudRender.DigitalImage.Availablefrom:DeviantArt.http://fc06.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2011/293/b/7/cloud_render_1_by_husachi-d4dfpho.png19.MarioPartyCover.DigitalImage.Availablefrom:Photobucket.http://i414.photobucket.com/albums/pp223/chicore96/random/MarioPartyUSA-1.png20.MarioParty8Cover.DigitalImage.Availablefrom:CoverGalaxy.http://www.covergalaxy.com/forum/attachments/nintendo-wii/5820d1227136155-mario-party-8-pal-cover-disc-mario-party-8-pal-cover-wii.jpg21.Conker’sBadFurDayCover.DigitalImage.Availablefrom:OCRemix.http://ocremix.org/files/images/games/n64/6/conkers-bad-fur-day-n64-cover-front-31950.jpg22.Conker:LiveandReloadedCover.DigitalImage.Availablefrom:Amazon.http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/517W97DA4BL.jpg23.FinalFantasyVIICover.DigitalImage.AvailablefromFFShrine.http://www.ffshrine.org/ff7/coverscans/ff7_us.jpg24.FinalFantasyXCover.DigitalImage.AvailablefromFFShrine.http://www.ffshrine.org/ffx/coverscans/ff10_us.jpg