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Richard Fine分析游戏展示及陈述内容的方法

发布时间:2011-04-13 17:42:04 Tags:,

在下文中,游戏业资深人士Richard Fine分析与其他阐述方式相比,通过游戏玩法传达信息的益处。

编写小说时会涉及到某条耳熟能详的准则,“展示场景,而并非陈述”。Janet Evanovich对这句话的总结很精妙:“二者的区别就如同演员将事件表演出来和剧作家独自站在空荡荡的舞台上向观众陈述剧情。”从信息及内容的角度来看,后者当然也可以把所有事情解释清楚,但前者看起来更为有趣。为什么会是这样呢?观看表演出来的事件会获得怎样的乐趣呢?

多数情况下,乐趣来源于学习。从事件的做法和缘由中获得新解释说明并由此解开因缺乏信息而产生的问题,这个理解过程让人倍感惬意。或许这就是展示比陈述有趣的原因,因为展示提供更多让人们学习的内容,受众也有更多机会体验理解的过程。

陈述

“Colonel很勇敢。”

当有人告知某些信息时,你有两种选择:接受或摒弃。而且不存在第三种选择,因为你听到的就是他们对事件的总结和看法,无法继续深入研究。如果你觉得有疑点或异议,也没有其他的信息可供推敲。(游戏邦注:此处作者探讨的是播放式媒体,如书籍、电影或游戏。在日常对话中,人们当然可以提出问题,但这些问题通常也是以陈述性答案结束。)

因而,你可以学习的内容非常有限,大部分推理过程叙事人已经替你完成了,你看到的信息就等同于接受的信息。对于作者编写剧情和听众接受事件而言,这种做法省时省力。但是如果事后有怀疑或问题残存在听众的脑海中,该方式对此便无能为力。陈述告诉你某件事情的真相,并且希望能有足够的帮助。

老式游戏中的陈述性剧情

老游戏在游戏故事情节等事物上大量采用陈述的方式,如以“任务简介”样式在各个关卡间用整屏的文字来讲述游戏故事,这就是所谓的文本陈述。而且,许多游戏解释游戏机制的做法是通过在用户手册中向玩家陈述其作用。

展示

“在炮火中俯卧在泥浆上,Colonel咬紧牙关,伸手穿过其沾满鲜血的制服从包裹中抽出一根香烟。伤口剧烈地疼痛着,但现在他决不能后退,因为手下还身陷敌营之中。”

然而,当有人向你展示某些内容时,你会获得更细节化的信息,也可以自己判断哪些是重要的,对角色想法和故事中世界的理解有所帮助。你对事情的运转和角色做事情的原因有自己的想法,随着展示给你提供的信息越来越多,你不断否定和提炼这些想法。

展示中可以蕴含陈述所要传达的想法,如“Colonel很勇敢”,但展示可以让你真正了解为何叙事者会认为他勇敢、他何时表现勇敢以及他表现勇敢的动机何在等信息。如果你对他的勇敢表示怀疑,或者可能是因为他做过其他不甚勇敢的事情,那么随后展示中更为细致的描述或许可以让你对他的看法有所改变,理解他勇敢的本质如何与那些事情划上等号。展示不仅让你了解事情的真相,也知道事情的缘由和形式,这些更为重要的信息可用来回答许多问题和化解疑问。

《半条命》原作因其在故事讲解上的创新而备受赞誉,游戏几乎全部采用展示而并非陈述。这款游戏中没有写满背景故事文字的画面,也不再出现角色丝毫未曾考虑自己的处境而向玩家说明正在发生的事情。当你首次面对美国海军,发现他们以你为目标时带来的震撼感不是立即通过某人说出“海军也得到了把你杀死的命令”这种话语来强调。从而巧妙地让人在短时间内感到困惑——这是意外吗?他们是否错把你当成外敌?不,这些人应该不会犯这种错误。如果他们朝你开火,一定有原因。他们为什么这么做?随后,游戏告诉你真相。

现在,许多游戏仿效《半条命》的做法,截屏和倒叙代替了老式的简述画面。故事内容可以从包含信息的场景设计中推断而得,如电脑终端设备和剪报,更为隐秘的包括出现在被摧毁城市郊外的欢迎横幅以及敌人医学实验室桌面上的人骨等等。

半条命

展示仍然存在不足之处,虽然作者并未像陈述那样公然向你提供他们自身对事件的解读,但仍旧能够产生影响,因为是否向你展示某些细节还是由他们控制。因此,他们会预判你的问题,尽量在展示中包含足够你得出答案的细节信息。但是有时对你所带有问题的预想出现偏差,他们可能就无法提供令你满意的答案,或者你可能也得不到他们原本希望你得到的答案。如果出现这种情况,那就如同陈述毫无解决的办法。

各种信息都可能引发受众学习,作者为你设想了问题和答案并希望能够让你感到满意,通常大部分你想知道的内容他们都会提到,但有时会出现些许未完全解答的问题,如情节的漏洞或看似与角色无关的行为等等。更不用说可能会产生的意见相背结果,正如没看过电影的观众看到角色做出某些愚蠢的事情,于是在想“啊,为什么他们不换另一种方法呢?”

现在来讨论下游戏的做法,作为互动媒体的游戏有第三种阐述方法:玩法。

玩法

游戏制作者可以让你融入游戏机制中且随意把玩,也就是说你有探索与事实相反情况的自由,解答“如果…又能怎样”的问题。在电影或书籍中,如果角色选择走左手边的门,那么无论你重看多少遍,他们都只能进左手边的门。但在游戏中,你可以反其道而行,选择右手边的门。或许看到的并非如你所愿,但确实可以看到不同选择带来的后果。

大多数情况下,你可以自在决定探索哪个问题或测试哪种想法。在玩游戏的过程中,你不仅可以发现事件的情况及缘由,还能够知道为何不会朝其他方向发展,为何在其他媒介中简单呈现的想法无法在保持良性发展的基础上幻化出多种方式。(游戏邦注:某些情况下,电影或书籍中的角色本可以有更好的选择,但人们无法像游戏中那样求证其原因。)

正如你所期待的那样,每个游戏都包含有某些玩法元素。玩法与众不同的游戏最为引人注目,如《Facade》让你感受的是人际关系,《僵尸围城》包含让你体验摄影并捕捉有趣且架构精良的镜头,《镜之边缘》此类的游戏让你有机会自由奔跑和表演杂技。当然,也有大量让你以格斗和策略等内容为乐的游戏。

僵尸围城2

尽管如此,玩法也存在类似于展示的限制。你在游戏中只能选择左手边的门而无法开右手边的门,表面上看来是因为开发者将游戏世界设计成那样(游戏邦注:或设计成锁住右手边的门,或不构建门后房间的形态。),但事实上这种设置意味着“选择哪个门”并非开发者想让你在游戏中做出的事情。他们想让你做的是其他的事情,比如你是否会在走进房间前扔颗闪光弹,你会马上使用医疗包或留待后用以及如果按下“自行毁灭”按钮会发生什么事等等。

玩法仍然屈从于开发者的描述,就像展示和陈述,因为开发者可以自由扭曲或关注他们根据现实世界塑造出的模型。以竞选题材游戏为例,其游戏机制可以围绕激动人心的演讲和设计优良政策,也可能围绕贿赂选举官员和泄漏对手丑闻。

开发者注意事项

依上文所述,玩法也可用于阐述。不过有人可能会认为,难道展示和陈述还不够好吗?

首先应该指出的是,游戏故事的阐述不只用到某种方法。阐述可以用来传达想法,所有你想让玩家获得的想法都要出现在这个框架之下。

其次,尽管展示和陈述通常已足够可用而且较为简便,玩法可以让你传达更深层次的想法,这种传达方式也更具说服力。对玩家而言,要说服他让其相信你的想法是正确的(游戏邦注:至少在当时看来最贴近真相),就应该让他们脑中的其他想法显得较差并因此烟消云散。方式包括让这些想法无法发挥作用、与其他迹象不符、复杂却毫无意义或让它们显得过于偏激等等。

虽然展示和陈述也可以传达想法,但这两者只有一次机会。制作人希望自己某种想法为人所接受,便将其融入最终只能读取而无法改变的媒介中。一旦著作公之于世,就只能传达出这种想法。受众可能以不同解读方式接受这个想法,比如每个人对上文中“勇敢”的理解或许存在差异,但如果他们无法理解,作者也没有再次使其明白的方法。

但是,如果受众在玩法中感受想法,作者的机会就很多。游戏包容所有玩家可能尝试的做法,将他们慢慢引导至最终的结果。如果玩家认为某种方式更好,他们也可以试试。他们可以测试自己的各种想法,依次发现各种想法内存在的实际问题。当玩家打通游戏后,他们不仅理解了你想要传达的思想,也自然抛弃了心中的其他想法。

Sid Meier曾说过一句著名的话:“好游戏需要蕴含一系列有趣的选择。”要让某种事物成为选择,就必须给玩家展现出多种替代想法。要让选择变得有趣,这些替代想法就必须全部值得玩家一试。考虑到业界反对设计让玩家认识到某些事不能做的玩法,就不难理解Meier说法的准确性。如果你不提供选择,那么就只是在做陈述或展示,而并非游戏。如果选择不好玩,那是因为玩家并不认为你提供的替代想法值得去尝试。

实际结果

请考虑下你的游戏中采用了何种阐述方式,想想你现在展示或陈述的事情能否用玩法替代。

假设你正在制作打怪的游戏,你如何向玩家传达已经杀死怪物的信息。我猜你可能会将其展示出来,角色挥舞手中的宝剑而怪物鲜血飞溅等等。玩家可能会理解这种信息,毕竟这种简单的展示方式符合所有标准的游戏图像。但如果你想吸引他们玩游戏,为何不让他们选择如何劈砍被击败的怪物呢?

最佳的策略是让玩家在最短时间内消灭所有存活的怪物,玩家在朝这个目标努力时会犯错误。可能会浪费时间剁碎已经彻底死去的怪物,也可能发现自己需要面对受重伤但还未死的怪物。玩家成功达成目标后,他们不只接受你所要传达的怪物已死这个想法,也会感觉到确实是自己亲手做到这一点,因为他们在游戏中获得了某些知识。这种方法让玩家从普通的斗士转变为真正的屠夫。

让核心的可玩性设计与艺术声效一同传达游戏中的故事、主题和观点,将你想向玩家传达的信息融入其行动中。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,转载请注明来源:游戏邦)

Opinion: Play, Don’t Show

Industry veteran Richard Fine looks at the benefits of conveying information via gameplay compared to other modes of exposition.

There’s a well-worn mantra in fiction writing: “Show, don’t tell.” The Janet Evanovich quotation sums it up nicely: “It is the difference between actors acting out an event, and the lone playwright standing on a bare stage recounting the event to the audience.” From an information-content point of view, the latter still gets everything across — but the former would be more fun to watch. Why is that, though? What’s so fun about seeing the events acted out? In many cases, if not all, fun comes from learning. The process of understanding — of gaining a new explanation of how something is done or why something works, and thereby solving a problem that was posed by the lack of that explanation — is enjoyable.

So maybe that’s why showing is more fun than telling — because it offers more to learn, more opportunities to undergo that process of understanding.

Telling

“The Colonel was very brave.”

When somebody tells you something, you’ve got two options: take it or leave it. You can’t do more than that, because you’ve got nothing else to go on. It’s their way — their summary of events — or the highway. If you’ve got questions or objections, there is no further evidence available with which to reason. (We’re talking about a broadcast medium here, like a book or a film or a game. Obviously in a normal conversation, you can ask questions — but increasingly it stops being what I’d call telling).

So the amount you can learn is very limited — the speaker, usually the narrator, has done most of the inference for you, so what you see is what you get. It’s efficient for the author to write, and efficient for the audience to consume, but if there are any doubts or questions lingering in the audience’s mind afterwards, it does nothing about that. Telling tells you the way things are, and hopes that that’s good enough for you.

Older games made heavy use of telling for things like the game’s storyline; for example, the ‘mission briefing’ format, where the game’s story would be presented as screens of text between each level, is textbook telling. At the same time, many games also explained their game mechanics by telling the player how they worked in the manual.

Showing

“Lying prone in the mud amidst the gunfire, the Colonel gritted his teeth, and reached down past his blood-stained uniform to pull a cigarette out from the packet. The wound hurt like hell, but he was damned if he was going back now — not while his boys were still in the enemy camp.”

On the other hand, when somebody shows you something, you are being given more detailed information, and being allowed to decide for yourself which things are significant, and which things feature into your ongoing understanding of how the characters think and how the world of the story works. You have (or make) guesses about how things work and why people do things, and as the Show gives you more and more information, you reject and refine those guesses.

A show can take a told idea — such as ‘the Colonel is brave’ — and let you see exactly why the narrator considers him brave, and when he is brave, and what his motivation is for being brave, and so on. If you doubted that he was brave — perhaps because he did other things that it didn’t seem so brave — then the more detailed account given by the show might help you see him in a new light, and understand how his brave nature could fit with those other things. Showing allows you to not only discover the way things are, but also how and why they are that way, which is a much more substantial piece of knowledge that can be used to answer many questions and assuage many doubts.

The original Half-Life was greatly praised for its innovative approach to storytelling: it was almost all show and no tell. There was no opening screen full of backstory text, no long cutscenes with characters ‘filling you in’ on what had happened with no regard for what a person would actually say in their situation. The shocking moment when you first meet the U.S. Marines and discover that they’re out to get you too isn’t highlighted with someone saying “The Marines are under orders to kill you too” (at least not immediately). So there’s a wonderful few moments of confusion — was it an accident? Did they mistake you for an alien? No, these guys are too good for that. If they were shooting at you it must have been on purpose. Why would they do that? And then the truth dawns on you…

Many games, now, follow in Half-Life’s footsteps. Cutscenes and flashbacks replace the briefing screens of old. The location design includes information that story elements can be deduced from, like computer terminals and newspaper clippings — or, more subtly, big welcoming banners displayed on the outskirts of ruined cities, human skeletons on the tables of alien medical labs, and so on.

Showing is still limited. While the author isn’t overtly giving you their own interpretation of events as with telling, it still influences things, as they’re still in control of which details you are shown and which you are not. So, they’ll anticipate the questions you’ll have, and try to include enough details that you can work out the answers; but they’ll often fail to anticipate your questions entirely correctly, and they might not provide satisfactory answers — or you might miss the answer that they intended you to find. If that happens, then there’s no recourse, as with Telling.

It’s the learning equivalent of a rail shooter: the author sets up the questions and answers for you in the hope that it will satisfy you, and they usually cover most of what you wanted to know, but there’s often a few unresolved issues — plot holes, actions that seemed out of character, and so on. Not to mention the “Don’t go in there!” effect: Who hasn’t watched a movie, seen the characters do something stupid, and thought, “Aargh! Why they hell didn’t they just do it this other way?”

That’s where games come in. Because games, as an interactive medium, add a third mode of exposition: Play.

Playing

When a creator lets you play with something, lets you engage with a mechanic and poke it and turn it over in your hands, then you gain the freedom to explore counterfactuals (“what if” questions). In a film or a book, if the characters take the left-hand door, then they will always take the left-hand door, no matter how many times you rewatch or reread; but in a game, you can take the right-hand door instead. Instead of being nice, you can be nasty; instead of being cautious, you can be gung-ho; and you can see what happens.

For the most part, you can decide which questions you want to explore, and which ideas you want to put to the test, at your convenience. Through play, you can discover not just the way it is, and how it comes to be that way, but also why it couldn’t be any other way — why the ideas that are simply shown in other media are hard to vary without making them worse. (Or, sometimes, that it should be another way, as characters in films and books often don’t make the best decisions).

Every game, as you’d expect, contains some element of play. The most remarkable ones are the ones that let you play with unusual things: Facade, for example, lets you play with human relationships; Dead Rising includes a mechanic that lets you play a little with photography and capturing interesting and well-framed shots; and a game like Mirror’s Edge lets you play with free-running and acrobatics. There are, of course, a huge number of games that let you Play with things like combat tactics, too.

Just as with showing, however, there are limits. Often in a game you can’t take the right-hand door instead of the left-hand door, because the developers set the game world up that way, barring the door and not modeling the room behind it — but really, this just means that “which door gets taken” isn’t something that the developers are letting you play with in that game. They let you play with other things instead, like whether you throw a flashbang grenade into a room before you enter it, or whether you use a health pack now or later, or what happens if you press the button marked ‘self destruct,’ and so on.

Play is also subject to the developer’s interpretation, just as much as showing or telling, because the developer is free to distort and focus their modeling of real-world phenomena. A game about running for a political office, for example, might base its mechanics around making rousing speeches and designing good policy — or it might base it around bribing electoral officials and leaking scandalous stories about one’s rivals…

Who cares?

OK, so play can be used for exposition purposes. So what? Isn’t showing and telling good enough already?

Firstly, consider that none of these exposition methods apply solely to game stories: exposition can be used to convey any idea, from “he is Luke’s father” to “you should hit the weak point for massive damage.” Any idea that you want the player to acquire will appear somewhere in this framework.

Secondly, while showing and telling are often perfectly fine and easy, play allows you to convey deeper ideas, and it allows you to convey them more persuasively. For a person to be persuaded that an idea is true (or at least, the closest thing to true they’ve seen so far), any alternative ideas they can think of need to be dismissed as inferior — inferior because they don’t work, or they don’t fit the evidence, or they’re pointlessly complicated, or they’re too arbitrary, or whatever.

While showing and telling can convey an idea, they’re one-shot weapons: the creator decides what idea he wants to get across, and commits it to a medium that is ultimately read-only, in that, once published, his work will only ever communicate that idea. The audience consumes that idea, perhaps with varying interpretations (i.e. my idea of ‘brave’ might be a bit different to your idea of ‘brave’), but if they don’t buy it, the author has no second chance to convince them.

When the audience is invited to play with an idea, however, the author’s got a much more populated arsenal: the game can accept an entire range of approaches that the player might try out, developing them to their conclusions. If the player is playing the game a particular way, and they think of a better way, then they can try that out. They can put all of their alternative ideas to the test, and discover what the actual problems are with each one in turn. When they’ve finished playing the game, not only do they understand the idea that you set out to communicate, but they’ve also dismissed many of the alternative ideas they thought of, too.

Sid Meier famously said that “a good game is a series of interesting choices.” For something to be a choice, there must be multiple alternatives available to the player — and for the choice to be interesting, the alternatives must all be viable, to the extent that it could be worth trying any one of them. Considered against the role of play in allowing the player to learn what not to do, it’s clear to see why Meier is right: if you don’t offer choices then you are merely telling or showing, rather than playing; and if the choices are not interesting, it is because the player doesn’t consider the presented alternatives to be superior and in need of testing.

Practical ramifications

I invite you to consider which forms of exposition you’re using for which aspects of your game, and to think: are there things that you’re presently showing or telling that you could be playing instead?

If you’re making a game about a demon hunter, for example, how are you communicating that the player has killed a demon? I’m going to guess that you’re showing it — the player swings their sword, the demon spits up blood, and so on. The player will probably buy that — after all, it’s a simple show that conforms to all the standard gaming imagery — but, if you wanted to let them play with it, why not let them choose exactly where to stab and slice the defeated demon, based on a simple model of demon anatomy?

The best strategy is the one that leaves no living demons, while still taking the least time (because other demons are around and the player shouldn’t linger). As the player works their way towards that strategy, they’ll make mistakes, sometimes wasting time chopping up a thoroughly dead demon, other times finding themselves face to face with a pissed-off and wounded but not dead demon… but when they succeed, they won’t just be taking your word for it that they killed the demon, they’ll feel like they did it with their own two hands, because they’ve developed expert knowledge on the subject. It helps transform the player from a generic fighter into a real butcher.

Let the writing of your game — not just the story, but the themes and concepts you want to convey — inform not just the art and sound direction of your game, but the core gameplay design itself. Bake the message you want to send into the player’s own actions. (Source: Gamasutra)


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