社交游戏开发商Playdom的设计师Tony Ventrice认为，社交游戏应该运用“制造休闲”的理念进行设计，要区分于所谓的hardcore游戏，并给出了hardcore游戏和非hardcore游戏的六大要素。区分hardcore和休闲的不同玩法机制，并对两者进行了清晰的说明和划分。

面对Facebook上的游戏以及其他社交网络上的游戏列表，社交游戏意味着更为广泛的受众，游戏设计师要从休闲的角度出发而不是从hardcore游戏的角度出发。游戏是休闲的还是hardcore？

然而，令人惊讶的是，社交游戏领域中很少谈论到关于hardcore的定义。代之的是采用“尝试并经过验证的”设计方法来设计这一新型模式的游戏，社交游戏在A/B测试，计量分析和斯金纳箱心理学中成长起来。在大量案例中，专业游戏设计师的专业知识陷入了简单的实验和错误。

然而社交游戏是游戏，游戏就需要游戏设计师。A/B测试和心理调节只能走这么远。

功底深厚的设计才能加上透彻的理解 – 游戏成功和失败的原因最终意味着泡沫和朝阳产业之间的不同。

社交游戏要达到成功，它们的设计师必须有意识的努力采纳“制造休闲”这一30年来的行业设计理念。

那么，回到我们的问题，是什么让游戏休闲？怎样定义hardcore的游戏元素，以便在社交游戏设计中避免它们并充分运用其所不具备的元素来加强社交游戏？

首先，答案似乎微不足道：如果一个游戏易玩，它就是休闲的；如果不易玩，他就是hardcore。然而“难”是一个广义词，描述很多困难的事情。Pac-Man（吃豆人）很难，但是它是hardcore的吗？Tetris（俄罗斯方块）又如何呢？Teris肯定是休闲的，然而总是以失败结尾的游戏如何能够不被认定为是难的呢？

区别在于上手度。即使在结尾的时候很难，容易开始的游戏就是易上手的。但了解这些并不能确切地让我们有革命性的领会。为真正了解休闲，我们必须先深入挖掘是什么让游戏难于上手 – hardcore的组成元素有哪些。

六大要素组成游戏hardcore，这些要素并不适用于社交游戏：

1. 难于控制

2. 无法抗拒的设置

3. 先备知识

4. 抽象记忆

5. 不明确的目标

6. 不明确的解决方案

而Hardcore游戏所不具备的六大要素则更适合应用于社交游戏中，这些要素包括：

1. 挑战

2. 实验和错误

3. 策略

4. 主题

5. 反复

6. 深入/循序渐进的目标

什么是Hardcore

难于控制。早期游戏，如Pac – Man（吃豆人）和Frogger（青蛙过街），通常是通过一个杆来控制 – 上下左右构成的基本的操纵杆。而《超级马里奥64》是说明控制走了多远的典型案例。马里奥的长跳要求两个按钮和方向杆。这一动作不是靠直觉的，用户必须学习它。更难的是，还涉及含糊不清的时间：用户必须首先在x秒内跑进所要求的方向，然后在按A键之前要持续按住Z键y秒。尽管复杂的控制给出了时间，精确和发现性应用的培养。但休闲倾向的用户没有耐心去学习。

无法抗拒的设置。游戏邦认为，就算休闲玩家了解8把不同但对等平衡的枪的功能和独特之处，在前进时刻决定要使用哪一把，仍然是无法抗拒的。

有人也许会争辩说，为找出正确的设置而产生的实验和错误只是学习过程的一部分，但这会忽视了一个事实，即休闲用户通常缺乏游戏体验。为让实验有意义，用户必须能够将决策范围缩减至单一的未确定（意味着至多只有一个未知因素）。当多重未知因素存在时，实验空间的组合规模很快就变得无法抗拒。选项必须循序渐进的分布在游戏体验中。

先备游戏知识。如果你的游戏假设玩家玩别的游戏，它就会要求优先知识。甚至是“普通常识”的游戏惯例，如捡起一件新物品就会将旧物品放在储物袋中，或者任何无尽的死亡重生也许是要求解决下一个问题，但这些要求并不明显，除非你是个经验丰富的玩家。

抽象记忆。按住按钮来跳跃 vs. 按住操纵杆跳跃；一个是抽象的并且必须要被记住，而另一个凭直觉，较不需要花费精力来记住。性能越是抽象，忘记它的风险就越大，并且，玩家忘记的性能越多，就越容易感到沮丧。

模糊的目标。任何必须由用户指出下一步的游戏都是hardcore。开放结尾或用户定义的目标实际上是一回事，但是随着玩家开始对开放结尾设置感到厌倦，那么最好有一些清晰定义的目标来让玩家完成。

甚至像“杀死所有的怪物”这种直接暗示的目标也不像你想象的那么清晰。休闲玩家想要做出有趣的决定，不是尝试着揣摩目标所期待的结果。

模糊的解决方案。这里我需要做一个详细的区分。你不必确保每个谜题的每个解决方案都是明显的，但是你必须让方案类型保持清晰。

举例来说，四个压力传感器需要重的石块压在上面，这是清晰的目标，带有可接受的模糊的解决方案；已知全部要素（传感器和石块），但是必须找到同时集齐所有四个石块的方法。

不可接受的解决方案是那些甚至连解决方法都未知的方案。在《旺达与巨像》（游戏邦注：Shadow of the Colossus）中，游戏给了玩家一道指出下一个巨像方向的光束 – 这是清晰的目标。但与此同时，找到巨像的有效路径则非常地不清晰。

习惯于在狭窄的盘山道长途跋涉来定位目标的玩家，不会适应在空旷地带探索未标记的足印。未公布的解决方案变更就是hardcore。

小结

这六个hardcore要点广泛的涵盖了大多数赋予游戏hardcore的设计案例中。避免它们将有助于保证游戏更易上手。但是若走得太远就会存在危险。会出现将游戏设计得过于简单而不再好玩的情况。因而界定表面上是hardcore而实际上却不是的元素就非常必要了。

Hardcore不具备的

挑战。人们普遍认为，有难度的游戏也必须是hardcore游戏。这当然不是事实。这种混淆存在于语言中：“hot（热）”既可描述“spice（辣）”也可描述“temperature（温度）”，“难”描述了不止一个方面。

如果你的界面是模糊的，游戏就是“难”的；如果目标不清晰，游戏就是“难”的；如果你的游戏不可能掌握，它同样也是“难”的。难度同时描述了上手度和挑战。难于上手不是件好事，并涵盖于以上提及的六大要素中。

难的挑战则是好的因素，实际上，它是重复可玩性最休闲的路径。你想要用户感受到把握你的游戏是个挑战；每个环节以新的成就感结束。窍门在于循序渐进的挑战，却不带有hardcore游戏的六大要素。Tetris（俄罗斯方块）就做得很简单 – 通过加快方块的掉落度；但大多数游戏并没有这样奢侈又简单直接的解决方案。

试验和错误。正如在hardcore部分所提到的，如果方法是已知的，带有未知解决方案的谜题是可接受的休闲游戏。那些小心设置的有限的解决方案，推动某种形式的尝试和错误，那就不仅仅是可以接受，而是玩家所渴望的了。

休闲用户需要尝试他们的假定，经过一系列的尝试并最终取得成功实际上会让玩家非常有成就感。关键在于削弱失败所带来的影响。在设置后续的尝试时，不应要求休闲玩家重复大量的时间和努力。如果你的游戏不支持在尝试和错误玩法中简单的转折，就会有成为hardcore游戏的风险。

值得一提的是，章节长度通常跟尝试和错误的转折时间相混淆。是的，你的游戏应该允许用户来去自如，但是它不必限制整体游戏体验，将其限制到单一，重复的尝试循环中去。为了让游戏保持有趣，试验 – 发现 – 需要逐步演进并成为更具意义的行动。如果没有逐步跨越障碍的游戏章节，游戏就会乏味枯燥，玩家甚至会失去兴趣。

策略。“策略”也是一个具有双重意义的词。首先，这个词用来定义一个游戏类型。策略游戏是那些最为深入地，最复杂的游戏。策略游戏是hardcore。

策略同时还用来描述玩家在解决游戏谜题的过程中大脑的思路。这种策略不必复杂，在敌人经过之前藏在墙后，然后偷偷跟在他后面就是策略。

事实是，策略是让游戏性有趣的要素；它是玩家做出的选择，这一决定最终会走向胜利。这里的窍门在于认识到策略的简单程度。

任何能够妥当运用智慧并伴随多重动作来处理的情况都是策略。我要等着小蘑菇接近这里，然后跳过他，这是策略 – 因为这是接近移动的小蘑菇并跳过他的方法，或者躲起来等着他掉进洞里，就是恰当的替代方案。

主题。主题和内容通常都会被混淆。举例来说，某款游戏因为它有一个佩剑的小精灵就不是hardcore游戏了。然而大量的以精灵和剑为特点的游戏都是hardcore，这是事实，并且其关联性正在发展，那么如果说精灵和剑是游戏hardcore的原因是否公平呢？

这回到了之前的理论，问题实际上是：包含精灵是否暗示着大量的预先知识呢？在某些案例中，比如《塞尔达传说》，精灵暗示着尖尖的耳朵和绿色的衣服。但是在其他游戏中，这种暗示更为深入，通常表示角色善于轻快的动作和魔法，这些实际上能够组成预先知识的重担。

最后，你需要对通过主题表达的信息有信心，但是要了解到，主题决定受众群体，不是上手度。是的，hardcore玩家和年轻小伙子是两种交叉度很深的群体，但他们不是一回事。

重复。休闲玩家不在乎一遍一遍的做同样的事情，尤其是某些小的过程变得越来越有挑战。俄罗斯方块是个很好的例子，《口袋妖怪》也是。《口袋妖怪》中的战斗非常的重复，但是每个敌人都稍微不同，避免了过程枯燥乏味。

这一要点的实质性关键在于认识到每款游戏都是重复的，hardcore的关卡应直接瞄准新鲜度。然而，如果你的游戏是非常明确的hardcore游戏，你应该引入更大幅度更频繁的游戏性转换来让玩家感到满足，然而休闲游戏应该将转换保持在叫小幅度和频率的基础上。换句话说，hardcore游戏更少重复，休闲游戏则更多重复。

深度/循序渐进的目标。这一点至今仍是最难说明的，主要原因在于很少有休闲游戏能够证实这点。正如我在重复中所提到的，引入新的转变是hardcore的目标。

这一点在于强调，并不是要完全避免新的游戏性。重要的是渐渐的将新的性能展现给玩家，让玩家完全卡主并不总是值得的。解决方案在于玩家正在体验的策略复杂程度。如果你有一款游戏，策略成为了第二特征并不再有趣，是时候改进游戏性让新的策略出现了。不能做到这点会让游戏性变得陈年乏味并阻碍了重复可玩性。

这一点之所以很难说明的原因在于，太多的休闲游戏不重视重复可玩性了。至今，大多数休闲的戏都是在短期内失去趣味性的期待下开发的。如果商业模式支持它（如在线下载，iPhone，或带有片段内容的游戏），用户所期待的实际上是游戏会跳出陈旧乏味以及其他能够影响购买决定的因素。

只有在订购和免费游戏层面上，用户和游戏之间的长期关联才更为重要。并且，正如所期待的，开发者们在这一层面上面临的最大问题就是用户保有度。但是其深度不在于搜集新的漂亮的东西或圣诞主题的小游戏，深度在于新的用户选择，新的游戏性目标建立了或进化了之前的迭代。

如果你注意到这些列表中任何一点，都会归纳为：上手度为王。流行的游戏并不在于某项少见的技能，成功的游戏不能够建立在人们喜欢可爱的宠物或秘密能量的假设上。游戏必须要易于上手。就像流行的书籍易于阅读，流行的电影让感情易于随之而动一样，流行的游戏容易玩。

如果你多注意一件事，那应该是，游戏必须要并保持有趣；一旦用户没有新发现，游戏就会变得乏味，不再能保持玩家的兴趣。

总结

我最后要说的是，尽管我的重点在于重新考虑了休闲层面的游戏设计，但是这些要点对其他类型的游戏也同样重要。Hardcore在热忱的玩家中也许是枚荣誉勋章，然而，随着越来越多的人玩游戏，重新评估我们的假设同样物有所值。有多少hardcore层面建立了彻底的挑战，又有多少省事的设计远离了市场份额？休闲层面也许还要从它的前辈中学习很多，但是并不是说它本身没有重要的因素来影响它自己。（本文由IIEEG编译供稿，游戏邦/gamerboom.com发布）

[Veteran mobile and casual game developer Tony Ventrice, currently at social game firm Playdom, examines the difference between hardcore and casual play mechanics -- and dispels commonly-held myths about which are which.]

What qualifies a game as casual or hardcore? It’s a question essential to anyone designing for a broader audience and, with games on Facebook and other social networks making headlines, one might expect social game developers to be leading industry discourse on the topic.

Yet, surprisingly, the question of what defines hardcore is rarely discussed in the social space. Instead of approaching design by adapting tried-and-true principles to the new format, social games have grown up dedicated to a new religion of A/B tests, metrics analysis and Skinner Box psychology. In many cases, the expertise of professional game designers has been deferred in favor of simple trial and error.

But things change and, 14 months after the start of the boom, the old games are withering, like so much untended virtual wheat. Investment money may be plentiful but an ultimatum is nearing.

The fact is, social games are games and games need game designers. A/B tests and psychological conditioning can only go so far.

Good old fashioned design talent combined with an honest understanding of why certain games work and others don’t will ultimately mean the difference between a bursting bubble and an emergent industry.

For social games to succeed, their designers must make a conscious effort to adopt and “make casual” the preceding 30 years of industry design knowledge.

So, to return to the question, what makes a game casual?

At first, it may seem trivial to answer: if a game is easy to play, it’s casual; if it’s not, it’s hardcore. Yet “difficult” is a broadly subjective term that describes many different things. Pac-Man is difficult, but is it hardcore? And what about Tetris? Surely Tetris is casual, yet how can a game that always ends in failure not be considered difficult?

The distinction is accessibility. A game that starts easy is accessible, even if it ends hard. But knowing this doesn’t exactly give us any revolutionary insight. To truly understand casual, we must first dig deep into specifically what makes a game inaccessible — what makes it hardcore.

Six things that make a game hardcore:

1. Difficult controls

2. Overwhelming options

3. Prerequisite knowledge

4. Abstract memorization

5. Unclear goals

6. Unclear solutions

Six things that do not make a game hardcore:

1. Challenge

2. Trial and Error

3. Strategy

4. Theme

5. Repetition

6. Depth / Graduated objectives

What Hardcore Is

Difficult Controls. In the early days of games like Pac-Man and Frogger, control was usually a stick — there was up, down, left and right and that was basically it. As soon as game controls became more complicated, games were on a route towards becoming hardcore.

Mario 64 is a popular example that illustrates how far controls have gone. Mario’s long jump requires two buttons and the directional stick. The move is unintuitive and must be taught to the user.

To make matters worse, there is inexplicit timing involved: the user must first run in the desired direction for x seconds, then press and hold the Z button for y seconds before following it up with the A button.

Get it wrong, or out of sequence and Mario skids to a halt or, even worse, stops in mid-air and does a ground pound. x and y are inexplicit; they must be discovered and then memorized. This is hardcore.

Limiting input to a mouse goes a long way towards keeping controls casual, but the lessons of timing, precision and discoverability apply in any context. A casual user has no patience for learning or perfecting interface.

Overwhelming Options. At the simplest level, overwhelming options can be thought of as the number of buttons available to being pressed at any given moment. At a deeper level, it pertains to all of the options available to be weighed when deciding what to do next. The casual user wants to make meaningful decisions, but if the full scope of the decision is overwhelming or under-communicated, it goes from meaningful to frustrating.

For example, even if a casual player understands the functionality and unique utility of eight different but equally balanced guns, deciding which one to use on the spur of the moment can still be overwhelming.

One could argue that the trial and error of finding the right option is simply part of the learning process but this would overlook the fact that casual users lack gaming experience. For a trial to be meaningful, the user must be able to reduce the decision space to a single dimension of doubt, (meaning at most there is only one unknown). When multiple unknowns exist, the combinational size of the trial-space quickly becomes overwhelming. Choices must be gradually layered into the gaming experience.

Prerequisite Gaming Knowledge. If your game assumes the player has played other games, it requires prior knowledge. Even “common sense” gaming standards like picking up a new item will put the old one in inventory, or anything being endlessly respawned is probably required to solve the next puzzle are not obvious unless you are an experienced gamer.

Assuming your casual audience knows nothing of video games seems an obvious thing to do, but in practice is actually very difficult; years of video game immersion can be a hard thing to set aside.

Usability testing can be an invaluable asset for spot-checking a design, but the details are often tiny and overlooked. An effective casual designer must learn to live and breathe ‘casual’ and make the knowledge base second nature.

Abstract Memorization. This was hinted at already, but it is important enough to warrant its own category. Anything that is not directly intuitive and can’t be inferred from a typical player’s lifestyle, must be memorized. Winning the race involves crossing the finish line first is obvious. Shells shoot forward and bananas go back is not.

At the purest level, this is the difference between: press the A button to jump vs. press the stick up to jump; one is abstract and must be memorized, the other is intuitive and more effortlessly remembered. The more abstract a feature is, the greater the risk it will be forgotten, and, the more features a player forgets, the greater the likelihood of frustration.

Unclear Goals. Any game where the user must figure out what to do next is hardcore. Open-ended or user-defined objectives are one thing, but as soon as the player grows bored with open-ended options, there had better be some clearly-defined goal waiting to be achieved.

Even an implied goal as straightforward as “kill all the monsters” may not be as clear as you think. Casual players want to make interesting decisions, not try to figure out what’s expected of them.

Unclear Solution. There is a very careful distinction that needs to be made here. You do not need to ensure that every solution to every puzzle is obvious, but you must make clear what the nature of the solution will be.

For example, four pressure sensors that need heavy blocks pushed onto them is a clear goal with an acceptably unclear solution; all of the parts are known (the sensors and the blocks), but how to get all four blocks simultaneously into place must be discovered.

Unacceptably unclear solutions are those with which even the method of solving is unknown. In the Shadow of the Colossus, the player is given a light-beam pointing in the direction of the next Colossus — this is a clear goal. But at times, finding a valid route to the Colossus is intensely unclear.

A user trained to locating his target by riding vast distances in a narrowing spiral, will not be conditioned to search out an unmarked climbing foothold in an out-of-the-way location. An unannounced change in solution methods is hardcore.

The six hardcore bullet points broadly cover most cases of design that make a game hardcore. Avoiding them will help ensure a game that is more accessible. But there is a danger in going too far.

There will be those who oversimplify their designs to the point that they are no longer fun. Therefore it is worthwhile to define what may appear to be hardcore but actually is not.

What Hardcore is NotChallenge. The most common assumption is that a difficult game is necessarily hardcore. This is simply not true. The confusion lies in the language: just as “hot” describes both spice and temperature, difficult describes more than one thing.

If your interface is vague, the game is “difficult”, if the objectives are unclear, the game is “difficult”, if your game is addictively simple yet impossible to master, it is also “difficult”.

Difficult describes both accessibility and challenge. Difficult accessibility is bad and is covered by all six bullets in the previous section.

Difficult challenge is good and, in fact, it’s the most casual route to replayability. You want a user to feel that mastering your game is a challenge; that each session ends with a new sense of accomplishment. The real trick is in instilling challenge without devolving into one of the six pillars of hardcore design. Tetris manages to do it simply by speeding up the drop rate of the pieces, but most games don’t have the luxury of such a straightforward solution.

Trial and Error. As mentioned in the hardcore section, a puzzle with an unknown solution is acceptably casual if the method of solution is known. Puzzles in which the solution set is carefully limited promote a form of trial and error that is not only acceptable, but desirable.

Casual users need to try out their hypotheses and a series of trials that end in success can actually be quite rewarding. The key is to soften the impact of failure. In making subsequent attempts, the casual user should not be required to repeat a significant amount of time or effort. If your game doesn’t support an easy turn-around on trial and error play style, it risks becoming hardcore.

It might be worth pointing out that session length is often confused with trial and error turn-around time. Yes, your game should allow the user to come and go with ease, but it doesn’t have to limit the entire scope of game experience to a single, repeatable trial loop. In order for games to stay interesting, the experience — the discovery — needs to evolve and become more meaningful.

If no sense of anticipation bridges play sessions, the game stales and the player eventually loses interest.

Strategy. “Strategy” is another word that has multiple, nuanced meanings. Foremost, the word has been taken to define an entire genre of games. Strategy games are some of the deepest, most complex games available. Strategy games are hardcore.

Strategy also describes the mental process a player goes through while problem-solving a game system. These kinds of strategies are not necessarily complex; hiding behind a wall until the enemy passes and then sneaking up behind him is a strategy.

The fact is, strategy is what makes gameplay interesting; it is the choices players make and the decisions that ultimately pay off in victory. The trick here is realizing just how simple strategies can be.

Any situation that can be validly addressed with multiple actions is strategic. I’ll wait for the goomba to come near, then jump on him, is a strategy — just as is approaching the goomba at speed and jumping over him, or backing off and waiting for it to fall in a hole are valid alternates.

Theme. All too often theme and content are confused. For example, a game is not hardcore simply because it involves an elf with a sword. It’s true that many games featuring elves and swords have been hardcore and an association may be developing, but is it fair to claim the elf or the sword is the reason the game is hardcore?

This goes back to the question of prior knowledge, where the question really becomes: does including an elf imply a burden of prior knowledge? In some cases, such as the Legend of Zelda, being an elf implies little more than pointed ears and a green tunic. But in other cases, the implications go much deeper, often implying character proficiencies in agility and magic that could actually constitute a burden of prior knowledge.

Ultimately, you need to be conscious of the messages you broadcast via theme, but understand that theme determines audience segment, not accessibility. Yes, hardcore gamers and young males are two groups with significant overlap, but they are not the same thing.

Repetition. Casual players do not mind doing the same thing over and over again, particularly if some small part of the process is becoming incrementally more challenging. Tetris is a good example, but so is Pokémon. Battling in Pokémon is extremely repetitive, but each enemy is slightly different, preventing the process from stagnating.

The real key to this bullet point is to realize every game is repetitive and that the level of hardcore it’s aiming for should directly correspond to the rate novelty is introduced. Therefore if your game is explicitly hardcore, you should introduce larger and more frequent gameplay twists to keep your audience satisfied, while casual games should keep the twists smaller and less frequent.

Another way of saying it is: hardcore games are less repetitive, casual games are more repetitive.

Depth / Graduated Objectives. This is by far the most difficult bullet to address, primarily because so few casual games have managed to prove it right. As I mentioned under Repetition, the introduction of new twists and goals is hardcore.

The point of this bullet is to stress that new gameplay is not to be avoided entirely. While it is important to manage the flow of new features presented to the user, it is not always desirable to choke them off entirely. The solution is to be aware of the level of strategic complexity the player is experiencing. If you have a game where some strategies become second nature and cease to be interesting, it’s time to advance the gameplay so that new strategies emerge. Failure to do this will cause gameplay to stale and hurts replayability.

The reason why this bullet is difficult to argue is that, in many cases with casual users, replayability is not important. So far, most casual games have been developed with the expectation that they will cease to be interesting in a short amount of time. If the business model supports it (such as online downloadable, iPhone, or games with episodic content) the user actually expects the game will grow stale and factors that in to the purchase decision.

It’s only in the subscription and free-to-play spaces where a long-term relationship between user and game is even important. And, as is expected, the biggest difficulty facing developers in these spaces is user retention. But depth isn’t just a new set of art assets to collect or a Christmas-themed minigame, depth is new user choices, new gameplay objectives that build on or evolve the previous interaction.

If you discern just one thing from these lists, it should be that accessibility is everything. The ability to identify a popular theme is not a rare skill and successful games can not be built solely on the assumption that people like cute pets or mafia power fantasies. Games must be accessible. Just as popular books are easy to read and popular movies are easy to follow, popular games are easy to play.

If you manage to discern just one more thing, it should be that games need to be and stay fun; as soon as the user isn’t making new discoveries, the game is boring and no amount of obligation will keep the user from losing interest.

In Conclusion

I’d finally like to add that although my focus has been on rethinking game designs for the casual space, the points made are equally important in any space. Hardcore may be a badge of honor amongst dedicated gamers but, as more and more people play games, it’s worthwhile to reevaluate our assumptions. How many hard-core tropes build honest challenge and how many are simply lazy design that alienate market share? The casual space may have much to learn from its predecessors, but that’s not to say it doesn’t have a few important lessons to impart of its own.(source:gamasutra)