Week 3: Have draft plan completed, discuss team roles.

week 4: View research blogs to get some ideas for analytical procedures + style and content of writing.

week 5: List some reading materials and collect images of company logos, and what the company’s main product is. Do they have any other  icons?

week 6: Begin focusing on games: look at fan-base contributions for various modern computer games. How do the companies keep their fan-base active? What sort of press releases are involved? Analyse these press releases.

week 7: Research highly successful and popular icons. Look at the way the games are designed, and how much might the advertisements for these games have contradicted consumer expectations?

week 8: Set out a report template.

Personally, I think the plan is a bit limited, but it will do:

Now for some extras that I included in the written supplement with the screencast: this reveals the directions we’ve been taking over the last two weeks:

Proposed research title:

“A study of the periods of development and downturn of Nintendo and Sega (1980 – 2000) – with a focused analysis on particular contributing factors: game iconography (franchise entities), marketing (with brand awareness and consumer expectations) and resulting cultural impacts and company rivalry.”

Notes: On the 26th March, Me and Paul discussed this with Oksana. She says it would be better if we don’t include research into cultural impacts. We’ve proposed that it is better to include research about the impact of culture on games — she agrees with this.

This section (The methods section) might also be important.

Methods:

Play testing: Our play testing methods don’t involve us closely working together; this means one person can play the game and write his findings. The purpose of play testing is to get a feel for the elements of games and allow a non-restricted viewing (as opposed to a secondary source which would have been captured according to what the other person thought was worth capturing).

We list the entities, their actions and their purpose (objectively). We then think of the cultural aspects of the game design. Explaining “why” requires referencing other sources and then tying those sources with obvious speculation.

Obvious speculation? : Questionnaires for popular games would be close to being redundant (but not existing questionnaires that have good contributions). It is specified in our new plans that we aim to introduce people to unpopular games (not requiring them to play the games of course).  What follows is a questionnaire. However, these investigations are not to be included in the screen cast — but the case is that there is no problem with having our own judgements, so long as we have other sources along-side. For popular games, we hypothesize that the links to context outside of the games are “obvious to the majority.” In our research, we investigate stereotypes also.

Promotional material: Illustrations for the purpose of advertising is what we’ll focus on. We can scrape the surface of art/design to back up our claims. Game art may be abstracted further for the game, perhaps due to technical limitations. However, we want to prove that (for popular games) the illustrations (for product awareness) are more faithful to the actual content of the games – though on top of that, they will embellish certain parts, or include necessary details that cannot be conveyed accurately in the games. We’ve done a shallow analysis of arcade machine illustrations, but it is the right direction to take, and these things can be analysed objectively, providing certain presumptions are made such as: “Mario has been drawn in such a way that it looks like he’s just grown bigger and ended up in the state shown in this framing.” Our reference to “Still Life” art is a valid comparison and we think that we can prevent our judgements from having a personal bias if we use a logical technique of deduction so that we’ll know what sort of an art style it is not — and what styles it borrows from. The “it” we’re referring to is a hypothetical “it.”

Pure documentation:

What is meant by this is that the history of both companies and their archives of games can be found. We can find quantitative data as well – and that will enable us to make statistical comparisons between Nintendo and Sega within different time periods.

This is what he wrote  (Linking to his blog is more difficult than I imagined, so I won’t bother. But he can show me bits of it at any time).

In the next post, I’ll be making a link to our joint blog, which I’ll set up for work over the holidays. It will continue discussing new planning ideas etc, as it’s been a bit patchy in this blog. But there is still some more project planning to include in this blog yet, before I am no longer able to post in it.

SOME OF MY OWN THOUGHTS ABOUT ALEX KIDD AND MARIO BROS (VERY ROUGH):

Comparing entities/icons

Transportation pickup                                  End level Flag and castles (then bowser’s castle)
Bags of cash                                                       Coins which ping out of question mark blocks, or glow
Punch blocks with fists                                   Headbutt blocks from underneath
1 hit death                                                            Mushrooms/fireflowers, morphing and growth
shop for interesting vehicles                       100 coins = extra life
Orphan child from the planet Aries          Italian Plumber
Rock paper scissors                                         Bowser and drawbridge

There’s a lot about logos in here, but this particular entry was of interest. http://www.logoblog.org/wordpress/logo-design-questions/

I feel that it is useful because: understanding some of the considerations designers make before they begin designing, is a step towards figuring out how to analyse designs — because, without questioning the designers (we don’t have the resources) there is no way of directly getting into their heads — and the truth is that though there may be guidelines and even specifications that the designers use, I hypothesize that every designer would produce something different and this is due to their personal preferences and opinions. Designs would be useless without any cultural significance. “Culture” is a loose term to use, so here’s one definition I’ll refer to: 10: the product or growth resulting from such cultivation. From:http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/culture

So what I mean by “Designs would be useless without any cultural significance” is that the readers of a media texts will have been subjected to cultural influences; will be part of certain cultures; will be aware of certain cultures; will have certain expectations of media products (subjective judgements rely on qualitative comparisons and different cultures demand particular qualities). Therefore, the designer knows how to cultivate designs,  with the specifications set out (by the company?) -  in mind. Semiotics deals with signifiers and signs; logos mainly deal with semiotics – establishing them as devices for companies to use for brand awareness. I don’t think that a company would want consumers to come to tentative conclusions about the company or their products, with the branding itself in question.

Thoughts on 27th March: Ideally, logos would penetrate cultural boundaries — this is because all designers must work with design limitations, and one such limitation is culture, because if people don’t understand the symbols and signs, the logo is redundant. Here’s another definition of culture from the same source as was listed earlier: 4: development or improvement of the mind by education or training. One thing I think “education and training” have in common is “discipline.” Where are these disciplines derived from? What I know is that disciplines can be refined over time. In my mind, “honor” and “efficiency” are interrelated: I’ll provide my own example…

Honor, to me, is intrinsically intangible — but not when it  pertains to ‘particular disciplines.  There are different subtypes of “efficiency” — some of which counteract progress (pertaining to ‘particular disciplines’). In my opinion, efficiency can be measured in two ways; taking into account the strictly recorded processes and then the quantifiable product (with its objectively measured excesses).

What I think is that honor can be derived from any discipline, or multiple disciplines that bring about tangible results (when other people recognise the progress as being beneficial or commendable, so honor is also derived from group cultures). “Beneficial” and “Commendable” account for both halves of the process of figuring out how efficient a person is at a particular discipline. For example, if a person uses established processes to create something, and each milestone yields ‘unwasteful’ results — and as physical changes happen on Earth or in that environment (perhaps with the inclusion of people), the person acts at a stable speed so that the changes are of no consequence by the time the product is unveiled: would that be high efficiency?

There’s no point in objective measurements if there isn’t a “why” in question — this is why I think that determining the efficiency of a person requires social analysis and Human values, with” honor”. Furthermore, I don’t believe that there are any innate truths for how things should be designed. I do agree with disciplines being warranted, but each individual designer has his/her own unique mental processes/abilities (with say 50% of intelligence being hereditory). This is, however, an on-going debate.

I consider both judgements (beneficial and commendable) to be subjective and not necessarily measurable, however, I think the only thing that allows us to measure anything in a meaningful way, using the mind, is culture of the mind and culture of the affected societies (of which, as a collective, are a manifestation of each individual’s thought processes). It becomes a problem when one part of the system has proprietary rights and as a result, particular processes are favoured against others. In this example, the processes are treated as coefficients for people, who are the variables of the “function machine.”

With the above in mind, I have dismissed our idea of analysing designs according to a non-Human system .  We’re more interested in the processes, the people involved, and the target audiences, and “humanistic efficiency” bearing no relation to scientific methods. What we considered at one point was analysing logos using a system, but not too rigidly relying on the system. It could work well, but now we’re not interested in the broad subject of logos. This means, despite all of my ramblings above, we’re not persuing investigations in this area.

HOWEVER, perhaps some of these questions can be applicable in other areas of our research?? If we change the wording of these questions so that they aren’t phrased as if they apply to ourselves, but instead, apply to the company being researched.

What is the purpose of your business?

What products and services are you offering to your customers?

What target audience you will be catering?

Who are your present and potential competitors?

What differentiates you from your competitors? (Universal Selling Point- USP)

Will you be following logo design trends or come up with an innovative logo design concept?

What tagline best describes your business?

How much are you willing to spend on logo design?

How much time can you dedicate to logo designing?

What fonts and colors will you employ in your logo design?

Where will you be using your logo design? (Letterheads, online, banners…)

What do you want your logo to tell about your company?

What symbol best portrays your business? (products and services)

Where do you see your company in the future?

Will you consider redesigning your logo in the coming years?

NOTE: I hope what I said made sense, and if it didn’t… I know that I have to be more careful in future to say things that make sense and are not stupid or uneducated. However, the blogging exercise encourages free thinking!

Week 3: Have draft plan completed, discuss team roles.

week 4: View research blogs to get some ideas for analytical procedures + style and content of writing.

week 5: List some reading materials and collect images of company logos, and what the company’s main product is. Do they have any other  icons?

week 6: Create a system for analysing logos and icons. Apply this to both well-known and relatively unknown logos and icons. Continue this in week 7.

week 7: Research “the parallel between” virtual worlds and the real world (with a focus on iconographic content in both “realities.”)

week 8: Set out a report template.

1. 3D and 2D: Some iconic characters began in 2D, but the shift to 3D had to be overcome. A new section to our report will have the title: 2D to 3D — how can a shift from 2D to 3D limit or expand potential for core game entities? “Core game entities” will be defined as well.

2. ANIMATION: This is of course essential to our study! We’re not just dealing with still image iconography. We’re suggesting that because animations are done in frames, they’re a collection of still images. This is no fantastic revelation; it’s pretty obvious. But for now, my proposed heading for the section is: animation with signifiers — how do people process entities  in motion and how does it affect iconography?

SUB HEADING FOR ANIMATION: depiction of games in motion

This is the section requiring usage of questionnaires and  : We’re testing to see if the depictions accurately portray the game in motion. As far as questionnaires go, it can be done in an experimental fashion: Using already well established icons can be problematic, whereas relating to less well-known games would be of benefit. We can play the Mario and Sonic games to see if they meet our expectations (we shall literally interpret the images). It would be a bad idea to trust that people would be honest when answering questions about Mario and Sonic — this is because they aren’t aiming to write an accurate report. With those people answering out of their will, it’s understandable that they might not all want to spend time thinking through their answers. As has already been mentioned, it is better to use games that are not very well-known, or – for a point of comparison – it would be worth our time to test games that failed. A possible venture would be “genre marketing limitations.” A turn-based strategy game, for example, may be advertised with images depicting action.

Implications:

Iconography: Still images with identifier potential.

Entities: Animations (collection of still images with identifier potential)  “Identifier potential” will be explained in the report.

So, this means the next blog entries will be going back a few weeks. The best way to go through this blog in a logical order is by clicking on the categories. I’ve noted the weeks, so it should work fine.

I and Paul will communicate using a separate blog. Clearly we’re showing that we’re not just blogging because it is a requirement of the module. My reasoning for this is that there is a deadline for this blog. If we set up a new blog, it’s undoubtedly ‘safe’ to post after that deadline.

I’m thinking of the post below — how do I make it more precise? Here is my new version:

This entry will impart information regarding our aims to reduce the scope of our research product and refine the elements of the proposal. It is not necessary to write a revised proposal, but it is necessary to redefine/reduce our research aims — these aims are listed later in this entry. The case is that some of the original research questions have been omitted.

Discussion about aims

It has been discussed that our research aims might be too broad. To give the research greater relevance, we’ll be directly focusing on “computer games” as opposed to a more general approach which would deal with analysing iconographic content from a wide range of media sources non-related to the games industry. The focus of our research was already established before the change; this means the focus was on computer games and it still is — but now there is less importance placed on other Medias (though they still offer a contextual grounding for our new research, which serves a different purpose).

Purpose

We’re refining the research objectives/aims not for the sake of surrendering ambition, but instead, for the refinement of its elements so that it offers a unique array of meaningful findings with conclusions – and it remains consistent. With time being an important factor, we’ve decided our initial research aims are inviable.

Deductions and changes

REMOVED QUESTION – How do logos/icons affect people’s perceptions of a product or company?

How have Sega and Nintendo marketed their products in their various stages of development? (This will include cultural analysis).

(The above question requires semiotic analysis of advertisements and packaging/promotional material. The removed question below would require an extensive study on the subject of general design, which is far too broad).

REMOVED QUESTION -  Do more successful companies use icons that follow, more closely, the principles of design?

What is the need for icons?

(The first part to this question can include contextual research into icons in general, but without in-depth analysis. The second part deals with the development of Nintendo and Sega and their iconography).

-  How have particular iconic game characters changed over the generations, and why?

(What impacts have technological and cultural advances/ differences had on the iconic game characters Mario and Sonic?)

REMOVED QUESTION – Do virtual worlds change according to progress in our current world, and how much of a parallel is there?

What do icons rely on to remain successful?

IDEA: How far are the attitudes of the “fan culture” a determiner of success?