Via Official Shrub.com Blog, a game covers meme.
The original challenge, from Yudhishthira’s Dice, was geared towards women gamers:
Ladies, what RPG covers (or interiors) have you seen that involve a woman in the art that make you say, “I want to play that” or, just as good “I want to play her.” Or that make you feel like it is a game you could like, or be included in by a group of guys you’d never met and whose maturity you didn’t neccisarily know?
Meme Rules:
- Copy the text of the original challenge from Yudhishthira’s Dice and give a proper link attribution.
- Copy these rules exactly.
- Find images of game covers (interiors are okay, too) that make you want to play the game. Any kind of game — video game, card game, tabletop RPG, etc — is fine. Post them and include a short (or long) explanation on why the image makes/made you want to play the game.
- The original challenge is about finding out what women think about how game art is marketed and therefore it is targeted at women. I’d like to keep it that way, please.
- You can tag as many or as few people as you want. You do not need to be tagged to participate in the meme.
- When you make your post, please post the link on this thread so we can all see what others have said.
I'm kind of violating rule 4 here by talking about the covers when I wasn't part of the original challenge, but I'll try not to co-opt things.
Might and Magic 1. At a time when CRPG artwork meant bad fantasy-novel covers (I'm looking at you, Dragon Wars), Might and Magic's
cover was simply part of the game map - but it was an interesting map,
with a lot more detail than the other games of the time. And it was in
a spiral-bound notebook rather than a game box, which gave it more of a
pen-and-paper feel.
Wasteland, Neuromancer and Starflight. I'm cheating a bit here, because part of what hooked me on these boxes was the fact that they were Electronic Arts/Interplay "square boxes." But Wasteland had its postapocalyptic Western showdown, Neuromancer its pixellated cyberpunk head, and Starflight its spaceship boldly going forth, back when all of these genres were relatively unexplored in computer gaming.
Archon. I didn't discover Archon through its cover; a friend had a copy. But it's the most emblematic cover I've ever seen with its almost Escheresque symmetry and contrast.
Fahrenheit 451 and Nine Princes in Amber.
These was one of the first adventure games I ever played (and how I
heard about the books), and the covers (which I actually prefer to the
covers for the novels themselves) emphasized that these games would be
"smart."
Trinity, A Mind Forever Voyaging and Wishbringer. Infocom games of the "striped gray box" era were another "automatic check-out", but these boxes were the best of the bunch. Trinity's juxtaposition of the gnomon and mushroom cloud perfectly encapsulates its mixture of whimsy and seriousness; A Mind Forever Voyaging showed an everyman peering into the future, and Wishbringer put magic in my hands. (I suppose it does help, with respect to the last two, that I'm white and male.)
- The games I've picked, from memory, are much older. These days, I don't really go on cover art because I have the Internet to keep me informed on what's out there. At best, I'll spot a game - usually because the art signifies a genre I like, like RPGs - and look it up later.
- I don't much care for representations of people in my cover art. The only face is in AMFV (maybe Neuromancer too) and that's more because of the background images. Contrast this with Tekanji's picks, which tend to feature women that she'd like to play as. I think that, because I'm in the "target" demographic, I don't look for this - very few games are going to directly alienate me. That said, I do get turned off by exploitative art, like the cover of Dragon Wars, or more recently the ubiquitous MMORPG ads featuring half-naked elf women. I want to be able to show games to my friends and not have to apologize for the covers.
- I also don't care for art that attempts to suggest the visual style of the game. In part, I'm always skeptical of it - there's no guarantee that the game will match the art. I make a bit of an exception for games in which the visual style is unique and a key element, like Okami.