作者：Sebastian Deterding

Jesper Juul近期在博客中对Ian Bogost和Aki Järvinen的争论做出的回应表明，传统游戏玩家和设计师对社交游戏普遍抱有消极的看法。博文部分内容如下：“要点在于：玩家对社交游戏的偏见与当年对视频游戏的普遍偏见无异。在视频游戏行业中，我们花了数十年时间让视频游戏变得更受人待见，但现在玩家对社交游戏的轻视却使我们再次产生那种感觉。我们可以将社交游戏视为当年的视频游戏。”

我觉得Juul很清晰地表达了自己的观点。但其博文评论者指出，我们不可仅仅专注于对此等偏见做出解释，而应该尝试去理解为何这种偏见又死灰复燃。为实现这个目标，我认为需要将Juul的言论放在较广的历史框架背景中进行分析。

hardcore-gamers(from bbgsite.com)

仅仅数周前，我亲身体验了Juul所描述的社交游戏“玩家偏见”。在柏林新游戏设计师研讨会上演讲之时，只要提到《FarmVille》，就会为听众随即表现出的紧张且令人厌恶的直觉反应感到震惊，辩论至少持续半个小时。某位学生边扮鬼脸边说“或许某天我们只需要设计社交游戏，而不需要真正的游戏！”，面对此刻的情形我会仰头大笑。令我感到愉悦的并非他们对传统游戏的赤诚之心。之前在关于出版社新闻记者的问题上，我听到过极为相似的言论，“或许某天我们只需要根据网络信息来编写新闻，而不需要真正的新闻业！”

不仅在线新闻业遇此窘境。在我对德国角色扮演游戏子文化的调查中，发现当在线角色扮演游戏于2000年之初首次出现并迅速超越大众化的纸笔角色扮演游戏之时，玩家也有类似的反应。潜藏于《无冬之夜》等早期MMORPG中的角色扮演也曾引发视频游戏玩家争论，与今日社交游戏面临的情境颇为相似。玩家觉得这些游戏缺乏深度、复杂性、创意性和自由度，角色扮演“恰到好处”的表达和情感微妙之处只能引诱那些还未形成判断能力和自身品味的年轻玩家。

对于媒体历史研究者而言，所有这些都并非惊奇之事。Marshall McLuhan在与我的交谈中表示，某种媒介中展开交际的人会以老式媒体为标准来构想和评估新媒体。因而，他们时常会觉得新媒介同老媒介相比存在缺点。但是新媒介比老媒介的突出之处在于某些仍未制作完成的层面上，因而这些层面当时不会进入公众的认知领域中，结果只能自行进行评估。早期电影固然不如当代影院，但这与电影的复杂性并无本质联系，今天任何人也都不会通过影院优劣来评价电影的质量，因为电影本就可以脱离影院先行发展。

不仅新媒体面临此等状况，媒介新形式也是如此。看看过去50年来电视题材发生的巨大变革，新形式经常被视为《西方的没落》中的标志，包括音乐电视《Date My Mom》和HBO（游戏邦注：美国有线电视网络媒体公司）的《The Wire》。

我的观点是，对于媒介受主流文化责难和偏见，伴随视频游戏等媒介成长起来的专业人士和粉丝社群无法阻止新媒介的这种历史命运。他们在面对视频游戏之时的表现与那些电视观众和电影爱好者同样无力，就像书籍和报刊读者首次面对漫画一般。

在Juul的博文中，他将玩家对社交游戏表现出的偏见与臭名昭著的美国反游戏行为主义者Jack Thompson相比，或许还参考了Frederic Wertham的作品《Seduction of the Innocent》（游戏邦注：本书旨在讨伐美国漫画界）。漫画粉丝在面对大量涌入的印刷漫画以及那些漫画店新顾客时有着极为相似的反应。

如同之前的其他媒体那样，社交游戏的有趣之处不在于以传统视频游戏为标准来评估而得出的价值，而是将来数年后它们如何成为评估传统游戏的参考背景，“视频游戏”的概念或许会因它们而发生改变。

游戏邦注：本文发稿于2010年9月3日，所涉时间、事件和数据均以此为准。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

History Repeating: or Why Gamers Despise Social Games

Sebastian Deterding

In a recent blog post, Jesper Juul reflected on how the media echo of a debate between Ian Bogost and Aki Järvinen was symptomatic for the generally negative reception of social games among ‘traditional’ gamers and game designers: “Here is the point: Gamer prejudices against social games are verbatim copies of general prejudices against video games. Within video game culture, we have spent decades trying to make video games respectable, but now we are simply taking the prejudices against us, and regurgitating them at a new form of video game, looking down on social games the way that culture at large has been looking down on video games. We have made social games into the video games of video games.”

I think Juul makes a valid point here. But as some commentators of his post have pointed out, rather then merely falling for defensive reflexes, we should try and understand why we see this regurgitating of prejudices. And for that, I believe, we need to contextualise Juul’s observation within a larger historical frame.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I had a vivid first-hand experience of the “gamer prejudices” against social games Juul describes. Speaking at a seminar of fledgling game designers in Berlin, once I so much as mentioned the word FarmVille, I was stunned by an immediate, intense aversive gut reaction (and ensuing half-hour debate) of my audience. I almost had to laugh out loud when a student said: “One day, it might go so far as to us having to design social games <grimaces with disgust> instead of real games!” What amused me was not the obviously heart-felt sentiment. No, it was the fact that I had heard that exact phrase before, when, back in another life, I had to deal with print journalists. Quote: “One day, it might go so far as to us having to write for online instead of real journalism!”

And it’s not just (online) journalism. In my ethnographic research on the German roleplaying subculture, I observed the same reaction when online roleplaying games made their appearance and quickly surpassed pen-and-paper games in mass appeal in the beginning of the 2000s. Roleplayers scowled at early MMORPGs like EverQuest with pretty much the same arguments video gamers now bring forward against social games: They would lack the depth and complexity, creativity and freedom, expressive and emotional nuance of roleplay ‘proper’, and seduce and exploit the young who haven’t developed any judgement or taste yet.

Sense a pattern yet?

To a media historian, all of this comes hardly as a surprise. Speaking with Marshall McLuhan, people socialised within the world of one medium are prone to conceive and evaluate new media in terms of the old one. Hence they often see the new medium as somehow lacking compared to the old, when indeed the new one is transcending the old towards a form that is still in the making, that is not at their cognitive disposal – and ultimately, that will have to be evaluated on its own terms. Certainly, the earliest movies were inferior to the sophistication of then-contemporary theater. But that says nothing about the sophistication possible in movies; nor would anyone today judge the quality of a movie by asking how good a theater play it is, because movies can and do do things differently than theater plays.

And this is not only true for new media, but also for new forms within a given medium – just think of the tremendous evolution of TV genres over the last fifty years, and how new formats were regularly framed as final signs for the Decline of the West. Granted, there’s MTV’s Date My Mom. But also HBO’s The Wire.

My point is that just because the professional and fan communities of one (formerly new) medium like video games grew up with ‘their’ medium being stigmatised and prejudiced by mainstream culture doesn’t make them immune against this pattern of media history. They can help it as little as television watchers and movigoers could when they were confronted with video games, or book and newspaper readers when they first encountered comics.

In his post, Juul compares the prejudices displayed by gamers towards social games to notorious US anti-games activist Jack Thompson, but he might as well have compared them to Frederic Wertham’s classic Seduction of the Innocent. Comic fans reacted in very much the same fashion when they were faced with the influx of printed manga and the different audience it drove to ‘their’ comic shop turf – at least in Germany.

As with other media before, the interesting thing about social games is not how well they will be able to ‘measure up’ with traditional video games. But how, looking back in a few years from now, they will have become a background against which our understanding of traditional games and indeed, the very concept of “video game” might have changed. (Source: Social Game Studies)