没有一种职业会与钞票绝缘，“职业”这个名词的定义无非就是为赚钱而工作。我也曾经出于自身的兴趣，或者应好友的请求，做过一些非商业性的工作，但我的设计工作多数时候还是要与赚钱挂钩。

很显然，除了“游戏设计师”之外，我已经没有其他可以多赚点钱的生财之道，这也是许多游戏设计师面临的共同情况。换句话说，赚钱是我们工作的重要目标，但绝不是我们的所有行动方向。

Frontierville

作为一名艺术家，你需要追求美感；但如果作为一名职业艺术家，你就需要摆平市场和美感这两者的关系，你得清楚自己是为艺术馆经营者、赞助商、社交网站用户或者其他的创收来源而工作，与此同时，你还要保持高度的艺术修养，甚至得不时让自己的作品看起来不那么商业化。

这一点看起来有点自相矛盾，但事实上，艺术性与商业性并非天敌，这两者是相辅相成的关系。作为一名职业艺术家，你得保证艺术美感与商业利润同时取得平衡。

在社交游戏领域，如果你有一个很好的设计创意，那就可以放手去尝试，只要你的想法可以增加ARPU（游戏邦注：每用户平均收益）就成，因为ARPU就是测验设计理念是否成功的重要衡量标准。这也就意味着：

1.社交游的设计具有可追踪测量的标准；

2.设计师有可能创造了一项无法判断能否提高ARPU数值的新功能；

3.设计师也可能无法使用同样的测量标准，判断用户是否觉得游戏很有趣，或者他们是否获得了更丰富的游戏体验，也无法通过追踪数据发现自己的艺术标准是否可行。

4.综上所述，社交游戏的设计主要取决于商业运营，而不是艺术标准。

从企业家角度来讲，你不必去迎合一些游戏设计者深奥的理论和标准，只需要全心全意尝试创新，只要用户反馈结果证明这项设计管用就行。

但对我们这些真正热爱游戏的人来说，这种情况其实并不理想，因为它意味着我们不能从设计者的角度来考虑“它能不能创造好游戏”，而只能从“它是否有助提高ARPU”角度出发来设计游戏，这是两个完全不同的概念。

我并不是说，社交游戏存在很多问题，因为每个行业都有各自的问题和局限性，在此只是和各位分享我在这一领域遇到的一些麻烦。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

Social Network Games: ARPU over Design

No professional ever ignores money. The very definition of “professional” is that you do it for money. I have at time done non-commercial work, either for my own

amusement or at the request of friends, but the vast bulk of my design work is indeed aimed at earning me some money.

There’s no question, however, that I would have earned a great deal more money over my lifetime by choosing a career path other than “game designer.” This is also true of every other game designer I know. In other words: the pursuit of money is certainly part of what we do, but it is not everything that we do.

To be an artist is to pursue an aesthetic vision. To be a professional artist, you must balance the two; that is, you must work for a market, whether that be gallery owners, patrons, social network users, or some other source of income; yet you must always keep the aesthetic characteristics of the work uppermost in your mind, and at times you may feel it necessary to make decisions that ameliorate the marketability of your work for the sake of the work itself.

This is a contradiction to some degree, but the two objectives — aesthetics and money — are not opposites; they are orthogonal to each other. As a professional artist, you seek to do work that occupies the upper quadrant: both aesthetically pleasing and monetarily rewarding.

The problem with social network games — rather, one of the problems with social network games — is that they give the suits, if you will, the whip hand. Have a design idea? Try it out! If the metrics say it increases our ARPU, then it’s good! Keep it! If not, kill it. (ARPU is “average revenue per user”, a telephone-industry term that’s been creeping into the discussion of online games recently.)

In other words:

1. Social network games produce easily trackable metrics.

2. It is thus possible to expose a portion of your audience to a new feature and determine, with no possibility of argument, whether or not that new feature increases your revenues.

3. It is, however, impossible to use the same metrics to determine whether or not, say, your players now feel they are having more or less fun, or whether they feel they are having a more or less emotionally impactful experience, or, indeed, to track any aesthetically meaningful criteria.

4. Consequently, the design of social network games is driven entirely by business rather than aesthetic criteria.

From the perspective of, say, an aggressive Internet entrepreneur, this is heaven; you don’t have to cater to those annoying game design dweebs and their abstruse theories, you just try shit out and if it works you keep it.

From the perspective of those of us who love games, however, this is far from ideal; it means that development is not driven by “what makes for a good game” but “what makes for increased ARPU”, which are not by any means the same thing.

I am not arguing that the nature of social network games is problematic because I utterly despair of the form; indeed every form of business has its problems and constraints. But there are aspects of the business I find troubling. （source:gamasutra）