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游戏内涵取决于游戏机制而非特定主题

发布时间:2011-08-17 14:16:33 Tags:,,

作者:Soren Johnson

游戏内容由谁而定?

乍看之下,流行桌游《Ticket to Ride》似乎是《Age of Steam》、《Eurorails》和《1830》系列等铁路大亨游戏家族的新成员。玩家在游戏中接受独特的路线挑战,将某些城市连接起来,比如将纽约与旧金山相连,迈阿密与芝加哥相连等等。

为完成任务,玩家必须铺设轨道将相邻的城市连接起来,同时也要努力阻碍对手完成他们的挑战。游戏中还有些次级目标,比如拥有最长的铁路线或首先完成整个铁路网络等。

因此,多数玩家都会把《Ticket to Ride》描述成构建最佳铁路服务的游戏。但是,游戏规则中的说明却并非如此:

在某个深秋的夜晚,5个老朋友在城市中最老且最私人化的俱乐部中见面。每个人都经历了长途的旅行,从世界各地赶到这里,在1900年10月2日这个非常特别的日子里见面。28年前,伦敦人Phileas Fogg接受在80天内环游地球的打赌并赢得了这笔2万英镑的赌注。此后,这5个人每年都在这一天见面来庆祝这个时刻。而且,每年他们都会提出新的探险项目,并且难度逐渐增加。今年正值新世纪的开始,今天他们又准备提出新的难以实现的旅行。这是场奖金为100万美元并且胜利者可以获得所有奖金的比赛。他们的目标是,看看谁能够在7天的时间里通过铁路访问最多北美城市。

这个官方版故事让许多玩家感到惊奇,甚至包括这款游戏的那些资深玩家,因为这个主题根本不符合游戏玩法。比如,玩家怎么可能只是为了到某个城市而特定修建铁路呢?在铁路修建之后又怎么可能阻止其他人使用这条线路呢?然而,游戏玩法却完全符合残酷的铁路大亨竞争这个主题。

而且,路线修建顺序并非一成不变,所以将玩家假设为游戏世界中的旅行者时会受到各种限制,这是毫无意义的。架设铁路更像是购买这个路线,而不是为了利用铁路来到达某个城市。

Ticket to Ride(from bojicafe.com)

Ticket to Ride(from bojicafe.com)

机制决定游戏的含义

上述这种玩家想法与游戏故事的不一致性引发了某些很有趣的问题。如果游戏故事与玩家心中所想不同,那么游戏设计师是否还有权利来决定游戏的故事内容?如果设计师没有这个权利的话,那么游戏的官方“故事”是否还有设计的必要(游戏邦注:因为这种故事很容易为玩家所忽视)?

设计师需要认识到,游戏的主题并不能决定游戏的含义。含义来源于游戏的机制,即游戏间各不相同的一整套决定和后果。游戏需要玩家做什么?游戏惩罚和奖励哪些行为?游戏鼓励玩家采取哪些战略和做法?这些问题的答案就可以揭示出游戏的内涵。

而且,虽然人们购买游戏时看重的是游戏的主题(游戏邦注:比如“我要成为一名星际战士”),但是真正的乐趣来源于游戏机制本身(游戏邦注:即射杀外星人)。当这两者间出现严重偏差的时候,玩家感觉自己受到了欺骗,设计师用主题为诱饵来引诱他们购买游戏。

进化主题游戏《孢子》正属此例。在2008年10月的《科学》杂志上,John Bohannon就这款游戏的主题评述如下:

我和某个科学家团队成员玩过《孢子》,并且对游戏中的科学主题进行评价。在生物学方面,尤其是生物进化方面,《孢子》的设计并不好。根据这些科学家的看法,问题并不是《孢子》的科学事件设计错误,它毕竟只是一款游戏,但是其中的生物学部分设计的确实很差,而且毫无意义。

玩家之所以会产生这种感觉,是因为即便《孢子》以进化为噱头来销售游戏,但游戏本身并非有关进化的游戏。事实上,《孢子》是款有关创造性的游戏,玩家真正喜欢玩游戏的原因在于他们可以在游戏中利用编辑器来创造出某些游戏设计师都未曾料到的东西,比如乐器、奇怪的生物、戏剧性的场景等。

但是,尽管《孢子》并非有关进化的游戏,流行网游《魔兽世界》(游戏邦注:下文简称WOW)中确实有进化内容。尽管游戏中含有打斗和魔法主题,但是机制本身鼓励玩家在决定如何培养角色时作出自己的选择。

玩过数年的游戏之后,WOW资深玩家总结出一套升级方法,根据玩家所扮演角色的分支而有所不同。比如,圣骑士有3种路线:神圣(治疗)、防护(坦克)和惩戒(伤害输出)。而且,在这些主要分类之下,还分为PVP、PVE和团队竞技等。在玩家多年尝试各种组合后,这些方法逐渐形成。

透过主题看游戏含义

通过观察游戏机制对玩家体验的影响,就能找到游戏真正的含义。比如,《超级马里奥兄弟》是款定时游戏,与修水管并无关联。《战地》系列游戏关注的是团队行动,并非二战或现代战争。《Peggle》是款有关混沌理论的游戏,与独角兽或彩虹并无关联。

事实上,相同主题的游戏可能有着不同的内涵。比如,人类与外星人的冲突是贯穿电子游戏游戏历史的流行主题。但是,每款外星人主题的游戏都可能因规则的设定而有所不同。《Galaga》注重的是样式配对,《X-Com》注重的是在有限的信息下做出决定,《战争机器》有关的是如何使用防御性武器,而《星际争霸》旨在呈现不同种族间的战斗和挑战。

相反,有着不同主题相同机制的游戏事实上属于同类游戏。《文明》和《Alpha Centauri》的场景设置在完全不同的星球,但是大部分机制是完全相同的。《Alpha Centauri》中的思维虫、探索团队和秘密项目从本质上来说就等同于《文明》中的野蛮人、间谍和世界奇迹。玩家可以轻易透过游戏主题来发现在两款游戏中可以用相同的策略来做决定。

题材选择也会影响游戏的含义。玩家希望主题能够显示出游戏内容(游戏邦注:比如有“我是魔法师,所以我可以施展某些强大的魔法”)。不幸的是,题材传统通常会让游戏与玩家心中所想有所偏差。所以,当玩家因为游戏主题而购买游戏时,如果游戏机制和题材做法与玩家心中所想并不一致,他可能会觉得自己受到了欺骗。

比如,近期两款主机游戏《光晕战争》和《残酷游戏》就让玩家感到惊奇,他们没想到是战略游戏。对于前者,许多玩家认为这款游戏是基于反射的打斗,而后者的重金属音乐丝毫没有战略游戏的影子。设计师或许开发的是有趣的规则,但是游戏的主题使其并没有获得正确玩家的关注。

主题和机制的统一

《Risk》和《Diplomacy》这两款桌游的比较会得出很有趣的结果,它们有着相同的征服世界的主题。实际上,乍看之下,这两款游戏的机制也很相似。游戏棋盘分割成各个区域,玩家用军队或海军游戏替代物来表示对区域的控制。这些区域可能因战争而易手,而且胜利者可以从他们新获得的土地上招募更多的军队。

risk(from screenrant.com)

risk(from screenrant.com)

但是,规则上的某个小差异使得这两款游戏的内涵完全不同。在《Risk》中,回合按顺序进行,而《Diplomacy》中各个玩家的回合是同时进行的。这种差异使得《Risk》成为注重风险的游戏,而《Diplomacy》成为注重外交的游戏。在前者中,玩家必须明白他们在自己的回合中能得利多少,并且希望骰子能够掷出好点数。但是《Diplomacy》中没有骰子,玩家只能在他人的协助下获得胜利,这就需要通过与其他玩家进行外交和谈判。只有经过数回合之后,你才会发觉谁是真正的朋友,而谁是背后的反叛者。

《Diplomacy》这款结合了主题和机制的游戏尤其值得关注。肯尼迪总统认为这是他最喜欢的游戏。这款游戏的内涵和它的名字一样,注重外交谈判。如果游戏的主题和机制大相径庭,那么玩家的反应也会是消极的。第二部分的内容将注重阐述某些成功统一主题和机制的游戏,以及那些未实现这个目标的游戏,并讨论这种做法的优缺点。

游戏邦注:本文发稿于2010年6月14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

Game Developer Column 11: Theme is Not Meaning (Part I)

Soren Johnson

Who decides what a game is about?

At first glance, the popular board game Ticket to Ride seems to be another link in the great chain of rail baron games, such as Age of Steam, Eurorails and the 1830 series. During the game, the player draws unique route challenges, to connect certain pairs of cities – New York to San Francisco, Miami to Chicago, and so on.

To complete them, she must claim a series of tracks that connect adjacent cities while also trying to block her opponents from finishing their own challenges. There are sub goals too, such as having the longest contiguous rail line and completing one’s network first, which ends the game for everyone.

Thus, most players would describe Ticket to Ride as a game about building the best rail service, by grabbing choice routes and cutting off the competition. However, the introduction in the rules tells a different story:

On a blustery autumn evening five old friends met in the backroom of one of the city’s oldest and most private clubs. Each had traveled a long distance – from all corners of the world – to meet on this very specific day… October 2, 1900 – 28 years to the day that the London eccentric, Phileas Fogg, accepted and then won a £20,000 bet that he could travel Around the World in 80 Days. Each succeeding year, they met to celebrate the anniversary and pay tribute to Fogg. And each year a new expedition (always more difficult) was proposed. Now at the dawn of the century it was time for a new impossible journey. The stakes: $1 Million in a winner-takes-all competition. The objective: to see which of them could travel by rail to the most cities in North America – in just 7 days.

The official story comes as a surprise to many players, even veterans of the game, because the theme simply does not match the gameplay. For example, how can a player “claim” a route just by riding on it? Do the trains shut down, preventing anyone else from using that line? On the other hand, claiming routes matches perfectly the fiction of ruthless rail barons trying to control the best connections.

Furthermore, routes can be claimed in any order – there is no sense that the player actually exists in the world as a traveler with real, physical limitation. Instead, claiming routes feels a lot more like buying them rather than traveling on them.

Mechanics Give Meaning

This disconnect leads to some interesting questions. Does a game’s designer have the right to say what a game is about if it doesn’t match what’s going on inside the players’ heads? And if the designer doesn’t have this right, then does a game’s official “story” ever matter at all because it can be invalidated so easily? Isn’t a game about what one actually does during play and how that feels to the player?

Ultimately, designers need to recognize that a game’s theme does not determine its meaning. Instead, meaning emerges from a game’s mechanics – the set of decisions and consequences unique to each one. What does a game ask of the player? What does it punish, and what does it reward? What strategies and styles does the game encourage? Answering these questions reveals what a game is actually about.

Furthermore, while people buy games for the promise of the theme (“I want to be a space marine!”), the fun comes from the mechanics themselves (actually shooting the aliens). When there is a severe dissonance between the two, players can feel cheated, as if the designers executed a bait-and-switch.

The reception of Spore, a game sold with an evolutionary theme, provides a recent example. In the October 2008 issue of Science magazine, John Bohannon wrote the following about how the game delivered on the theme’s promise:

I’ve been playing Spore with a team of scientists, grading the game on each of its scientific themes. When it comes to biology, and particularly evolution, Spore failed miserably. According to the scientists, the problem isn’t just that Spore dumbs down the science or gets a few things wrong–it’s meant to be a game, after all–but rather, it gets most of biology badly, needlessly, and often bizarrely wrong.

The source of this dissonance is that, even though it was sold as such, Spore is not really a game about evolution. Spore is actually a game about creativity – the reason to play the game was to behold the wonder of other players’ imaginations as they used (and misused) the editors to create objects not imagined by the game’s designers – from musical instruments to fantastical creatures to dramatic scenes.

However, even though Spore is not about evolution, the scientists should keep looking because one of the most popular games actually is about evolution – World of Warcraft. The game may have a swords-and-sorcery theme, but the mechanics encourage the players to conduct their own form of natural selection when deciding how to develop their characters.

Over years of experience, veterans of WoW have established a number of upgrade paths (or “builds”) for each class, depending on what role the player wants the character to fill. For example, the Paladin class has three main builds: Holy (for healing), Protection (for tanking), and Retribution (for damage-per-second). Further, underneath these main categories, sub-builds exist for player-vs-player, player-vs-environment, and mob grinding. These paths have evolved organically over the years as players tried out different combinations, depending on what the game rewarded or punished.

Seeing Past the Theme

One can look at any number of games through the lens of how the mechanics affect the user experience to find out what the game actually means. Super Mario Bros., for example, is a game about timing, certainly not about plumbing. Battlefield games are about teamwork, not World War II or modern combat. Peggle is a game about chaos theory, not unicorns or rainbows.

Indeed, games with the same theme can actually be about different things. For example, human conflict with aliens has certainly been a popular theme across video game history. Nonetheless, each alien-themed game can mean something very different depending on the rule set. Galaga is actually about pattern matching. X-Com is about decision-making with limited information. Gears of War is about using cover as a defensive weapon. StarCraft is about the challenges of asymmetrical combat.

Conversely, games with different themes but the same mechanics are actually about the same thing. Civilization and Alpha Centauri are set on completely different planets, but the mechanics are largely the same. Alpha Centauri’s mind worms, probe teams, and Secret Projects are essentially identical to Civilization’s barbarians, spies, and World Wonders. Players can easily see past the game’s chrome to see that they are still making the same decisions with the same tradeoffs.

Genre choice can also affect the meaning of a game. Players expect a theme to deliver on certain nouns and verbs. (“I am a Mage – I can cast powerful Magic!”) Unfortunately, genre conventions often put a barrier between a player and the game he imagined while holding a copy in the store. Once again, players buy games for the theme – if the mechanics and traditions of the genre are wildly unfamiliar to the player, at odds with the game in his head, he may feel cheated.

For example, two recent console games – Halo Wars and Brutal Legend – surprised players by being strategy games. With the former, many players expected a Halo game to be about reflex-based combat; with the latter, heavy-metal music is not inherently strategic. Because strategy games are often played at a considered distance, players expecting the visceral thrill promised by the games’ themes were disappointed. The designers may have built fun and interesting rule sets, but the themes sold the games to the wrong fans.

Uniting Theme and Mechanics

One interesting comparison is the board games Risk and Diplomacy, which have identical themes of world conquest. Indeed, at first glance, the two games also seem quite similar mechanically. The game board is split up into territories, which the players control with generic army or (in the case of Diplomacy) navy tokens. These territories switch hands as battles are fought, and – in turn – the victors are able to field larger militaries from their new lands.

However, a small difference in the rules makes the two games about something very different. In Risk, turns occur sequentially while, in Diplomacy, they execute simultaneously. This difference makes Risk a game about risk while Diplomacy becomes a game about diplomacy. In the former, players must decide how much they can achieve during their own turn and then hope the dice are not unkind. With Diplomacy, however, there are no dice; players can only succeed with the help of others, which can only be promised but not actually delivered during the negotiation round. Only when the secretly-written orders are revealed between turns is it clear who is a true friend and who is a backstabbing traitor.

Diplomacy, in particular, is a perfect marriage between theme and mechanics. Indeed, President John F. Kennedy considered it his favorite game. The game is about exactly what it claims to be about – the twists and turns of diplomatic negotiations. On the other hand, when a game’s theme and mechanics are sharply divorced, players can react negatively to the dissonance. Part II shall discuss examples of games which made a successful union of the two and ones which did not – and the rewards and costs of doing so. (Source: DESIGNER NOTES)


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