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开发者阐述社交游戏带来的行业变革

发布时间:2011-08-19 22:10:47 Tags:,,,

作者:Soren Johnson

今年开始GDC的主要议题不再是当前掌机作品,或将问世的掌机内容。相反,行业去年开始涌现众多Facebook游戏。其实,社交游戏的成功典范要数Zynga《FarmVille》,该游戏问世仅9个月时的MAU(月活跃用户)就增至8200万。

farmville hollow tree from farmvilles.com

farmville hollow tree from farmvilles.com

《FarmVille》用户规模着实无人能敌。早在2010年3月份前,这款在线游戏每月新增用户数量就相当于整个《魔兽世界》的用户规模。此外,《FarmVille》还是首款覆盖全球1%人口的游戏。

看到这些社交游戏迅速崛起,许多传统游戏开发商心中五味杂瓶。虽然庞大用户规模意味着全球游戏群体的扩大,但社交游戏本身通常是非常简单的内容,它强调的是时间投入。此外,某些活动还使得游戏被冠予恶名,例如通过不可信的广告推广创收,以及通过墙报垃圾信息或进行“传销式”的病毒式传播。

虽然如此,Facebook游戏仍旧是游戏行业的一大突破,社交网络带来的四大优势不仅给玩家带来丰富体验,也令设计师受益匪浅:

* 真正社交体验:游戏如今能够只在玩家朋友圈中进行。多人游戏开始摆脱困境(游戏邦注:这类游戏的趣味在于同朋友一起体验,而新玩家刚开始通常都没有朋友)。

* 持续、异步玩法:腾出时间同现实好友一同玩游戏非常困难,特别是对那些成年上班族玩家而言。但异步机制让玩家能够遵照自己的节奏,同自己的朋友玩游戏,而不是那些碰巧在线的陌生人。

* 免费商业模式:新玩家无需支付60美元。用户不会想要购买多人游戏,除非他们知道好友也会购买这款游戏。免费模式则消除此障碍。

* 基于参数的更新内容:零售游戏通常是在闭门造车的环境中开发而成。此外,游戏通常只发行一次,只有一次成功机会。其实很多设计师都希望根据真实反馈信息更新内容。

把握上述四大社交游戏特点的开发商最有希望在饱和的游戏市场中脱颖而出。为深入理解这些机制,我采访了两位Zynga开发人员,他们是高级设计师Paul Stephanouk和产品经理Siqi Chen,并询问二者在这个新兴领域的经历。

社交第一,玩法其次

Zynga首席设计师布赖恩·雷诺兹曾表示,成功社交游戏需把社交性放在首位,其次才是玩法。但就像Chen说的那样,社交功能并不意味着就缺乏趣味:

在某些情况下,对某些人而言,决定种植谷物还是葡萄,购买小鸡还是果树,都是非常有趣的内容。让玩家赠与好友礼物是获得社交货币的绝佳方式,但若礼物非常稀有,需耗费玩家些许金钱,内容就变得非常有趣。游戏也融入技能和挑战,但社交游戏的技能和挑战并不像传统游戏那般有惩罚性或竞争性。令你的《FarmVille》农场变得引人注目是项技能,但让它变得比邻居的更加突出就是个挑战。

在真实好友圈中进行游戏带来新的情感元素:骄傲、职责、感激、欲望,甚至是羞愧。《FarmVille》的枯萎机制——作物若未及时收割就会死去和枯萎,这是个通过羞耻感鼓励玩家照料虚拟农场的典型社交机制。若我可怜的农场充满干瘪草莓,朋友会怎么看我?

其实,有些社交游戏复制此机制的方式并不正确,它们只移植此枯萎机制却忽视社交元素。在《庞氏骗局》(游戏邦注:这是款设置在企业背景下的社交游戏)中,若玩家未能及时回访收集支票,完成任务所得到的相应奖励就会消失。虽然此机制鼓励玩家定期回访,但缺乏《FarmVille》中的社交压力,因为其懒散表现并不会被朋友看到。

异步创新

虽然社交元素至关重要,但Facebook也带来新的有趣设计挑战。更准确地说,对设计师来说,异步玩法依然是个有待挖掘的广阔领域。例如,Facebook如今出现两个独特机制,旨在应对线下游戏进展——能量机制和约定机制。在能量机制中,所有活动都要消耗一定能量,这会及时得到恢复;最终,玩家需待到能量条得到补充方能继续体验。相反,约定机制就能随意进行,但其将在一定时间内容“封锁”玩家;例如,在《FarmVille》种草莓后,玩家4小时后需回去收割,收集商品。Stephanouk阐述其中利弊:

重视游戏进展的玩家在能量内容表现更杰出——《黑手党战争》就是个典型例子。约定或“回访”机制是个更柔和的模式。回访模式在《FarmVille》之类的游戏中表现突出,这些玩家不那么求胜心切,更关注社交和创建元素。总而言之,这完全取决于游戏。两个模式都能取得杰出成绩,甚至能够融为一体。这两个模式在《FarmVille》都得到体现;拖拉机燃料就是融入能量元素。

能量机制更契合虚拟商品,例如,补充包能够让玩家重新获得能量,继续玩游戏。而约定机制则能够让玩家安排现实活动。15分钟任务非常适合能够随时返回游戏的在线玩家。而2小时或8小时任务则适合要去吃饭或睡觉的玩家。

顺应主流

社交游戏和硬核游戏的一大区别在于游戏主旨。零售游戏通常关注细分主题(游戏邦注:如奇幻、科幻、竞赛、第二次世界大战和僵尸),但成功社交游戏通常选择大众化主题。Facebook 十大热门游戏包括农场、餐厅、宠物和水族馆主题。其模式如此不同是因为,和掌机、手持设备或高端PC内容不同,社交群体源自普通大众,而不是由早期细分玩家发展而来。

从很多方面来看,Facebook都算是行业首个“游戏电视”,平台让玩家能够在安全、标准环境中转换不同游戏,没有门槛限制,而其好友也在玩相同游戏。平台让玩家能够宣传成就,邀请好友参与,其比电视更胜一筹,因为平台玩家能够直接互相施加社交影响。

但主流玩家影响的不仅仅是社交游戏的推广或主题,还包括其潜在机制。Stephanouk是这么描述其从即时游戏(例如《国家的崛起》)过渡到社交游戏所转变的看法:

从中我需要转变的一点是零和冲突的重要性。出身策略游戏领域的我非常关注游戏竞争元素。我知道玩家喜欢创建或探索,但我总是把它当作冲突驱动的目标。我发现,对很多人而言,传统游戏的冲突驱动性质是一大缺点。我并不说整个冲突模式一无是处或者不要在社交游戏中植入冲突刺激活动,完全不是这么回事。我的意思是,很多社交玩家都希望体验无需竞争的内容。

Left4Dead from nocookie.net

Left4Dead from nocookie.net

零和冲突的确是硬核开发商经常采用的机制。虽然近年来合作游戏大受欢迎(游戏邦注:我们可以从《Left4Dead 》或《魔兽世界》自动组群功能的风靡看出),但竞争玩法其实是指一方获胜,另一方失利。社交游戏依然能够融入没有破坏性的竞争元素;答案就是平行竞争,例如同好友较量餐厅发展和完善速度。

设计师角色

社交游戏同传统游戏最后一个不同之处在于其通常借助参数快速更新内容(通常基于每日或每周标准)。通过分离测试,检验设计设想是开发领域的一大变革。Chen举了个简单例子:

回到我还在经营Serious Business(游戏邦注:这是Chen创建的社交游戏公司,后来被Zynga收购)的那个阶段,Facebook允许应用借助通知渠道,我们想要知道较长通知效果更好,还是较短通知。我猜想其各有优势,短通常更简洁,但长通知则更显眼,因为他们体积更大。

我们开展了30回合的分离测试,让团队成员提供不同内容。结果发现,通常长短和玩家点击频率呈线性关系。通知越短,玩家点击的频率就越高。差异程度高达300%。

出现在很多人脑海中的一个问题是,设计师在这个几乎要靠实时反馈信息开发游戏的新环境中扮演什么角色。设计师是否还是游戏体验的主要“创作人”,或者开始扮演新角色,成为社区和公司纽带,上网浏览输入数据。雷诺兹承认其在Zynga的“首席设计师”职位并没有像大家想象的那么重要。Stephanouk是这么描述参数在其当前职位中的作用的:

参数几乎就是一切,或者至少我希望其能够在设计师们就玩家会点击这个按键,还是那个按键方面争论不休时,决定一切。设计师为何还要无视那些已有清晰答案的问题?了解人类居住方式不会扼杀建筑创造性,获悉玩家体验方式也不会损及游戏设计创造性。这恰恰相反,知识帮助我们把握限制条件,而局限通常是优秀设计的创建模块。我是否不那么像“创作人”?这要取决于小说,还是非小说体裁?

设计师-导演模式也许不适合此内容,但优秀游戏设计师通常愿意“深入人群”,同用户进行全面互动,旨在获悉哪些元素适合,哪些元素不切实际。社交游戏开发其实推动此过程向新极限发展。

游戏邦注:原文发布于2010年9月14日,文章涉及数据、事件以当时为准。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

Game Developer Column 13: The Social Revolution

By Soren Johnson

For the first time in recent memory, the dominant topic at this year’s GDC was not either the current console generation or the one coming over the horizon. Instead, the industry obsessed over the astonishing explosion of Facebook gaming over the last year. In fact, the poster child for the social network’s success – Zynga’s FarmVille, with its 82 million monthly active users – had been out for just a mere nine months.

FarmVille’s scale is difficult to compare with that of other games. Before plateauing in March, the online game had grown by the size of the entire WoW user-base, every single month. Certainly, FarmVille must also be the first online game that can claim to be actively played by over 1% of the world’s population.

Many traditional game developers have mixed feeling about the rapid growth of these social games. While the huge audience signifies a massive broadening of the worldwide gaming demographic, the games themselves are often simplistic affairs, emphasizing time investment over interesting decisions. Further, certain practices have given the format a bad name, such as monetization through dubious lead generation offers and viral growth from wall post spam or in-game pyramid schemes.

Nonetheless, Facebook gaming does represent a real breakthrough for the industry because the social network combines an enormous audience with four advantages that promise great things for gamers and designers alike:

* True Social Play: Gaming can now happen exclusively within the context of one’s actual friends. Multiplayer games no longer suffer from the Catch-22 of requiring friends to be fun while new players always start the game without friends.

* Persistent, Asynchronous Play: Finding time to play with one’s real friends is difficult, especially for working, adult gamers. Asynchronous mechanics, however, let gamers play at their own pace and with their own friends, not strangers who happen to be online at the same time.

* Free-to-Play Business Model: New players need not shell out $60 to join the crowd. Consumers don’t like buying multiplayer games unless they know that their friends are all going to buy the game as well. The free-to-play model removes that friction.

* Metrics-Based Iteration: Retail games are developed in a vacuum, with designers working by gut instinct. Furthermore, games get only one launch, a single chance to succeed. Many developers would love, instead, to iterate quickly on genuine, live feedback.

Developers who master these four characteristics of Facebook gaming stand the best chance to break away from the pack in an increasingly crowded field. To help me understand these dynamics, I interviewed two Zynga developers, Senior Designer Paul Stephanouk and Director of Product Management Siqi Chen, asking them to describe their experiences in this new field.

Social First, Gameplay Second

Brian Reynolds, Zynga’s Chief Designer, often points out that successful social games need to be social first and games second. However, just because a feature is social first doesn’t mean that   it won’t be interesting, as Chen explains:

In a certain context, to certain people, deciding whether to plant the grain or the grapes, whether to buy the chicken or the fruit tree, are all interesting decisions. Letting players gift things to their friends is a good way to build up social currency, but it becomes an interesting choice when the gift itself is scarce, or it costs the players something real. There’s a place for skill and challenge, but skill and challenge in a social game might not be as obviously punishing or competitive as a traditional game. Making your farm in FarmVille look impressive is a real skill, and making it look more impressive than your neighbor can be a real challenge.

Playing within the context of one’s actual friends brings new emotions to the table: pride, obligation, gratitude, desire, even shame. FarmVille’s wither mechanic – in which crops die out and shrivel if not harvested in time – is an example of a social mechanic designed to shame players into caring for their virtual farm. What will my friends think of me if my poor farm is full of dried-up strawberries?

In fact, some social games have incorrectly copied this dynamic by taking the gameplay of the whithering mechanic while ignoring the social factor. In Ponzi, a social game set in the corporate world, the reward for finishing jobs drops to zero if the player does not return in time to pick up the check. Although this mechanic does encourage players to return regularly, it lacks the social pressure found in FarmVille because the decaying jobs are invisible to one’s friends.

Asynchronous Innovations

Although the social factors are paramount, Facebook titles do pose new, interesting design challenges. More specifically, asynchronous play is still a largely unexplored territory for designers. For example, two distinct mechanics are currently evolving on Facebook to handle offline progress – the energy system and the appointment mechanic. Under the energy system, each action costs a certain amount of energy, which regenerates in real-time; eventually, the player must wait for her energy bar to refill some before continuing play. In contrast, appointment mechanics are free to start, but they lock the player out for a specific period of time; for example, after planting strawberries in FarmVille, the player must return in four hours to harvest them and collect the sale. Stephanouk explains the pros and cons:

Progress-oriented players tend to respond better to the energy approach – Mafia Wars is an excellent example of this. Appointment, or “return”, mechanics are perceived as a softer approach. Return works well in games like FarmVille where players are, as a whole, less competitive and more focused on the social and building components. Overall, it really depends on the game. Both methods can be successful and can even be combined. FarmVille has examples of both models; tractor fuel is an example of energy.

The energy system has the advantage of being a more natural match for profitable virtual items – a booster pack, for example, can allow players to refill their energy and continue playing the game. Appointment mechanics, on the other hand, allow players to strategize around their real-life schedule. Fifteen-minute tasks are useful for players staying online, who know they can tab over to the game at any time. Two-hour or eight-hour tasks, on the other hand, are great for players going to dinner or heading off to bed.

Meet the Mainstream

One big difference between social and core games is the subject matter. Instead of the niche themes usually found in retail games – fantasy, sci-fi, racing, WWII, zombies, etc. – successful social developers choose very mainstream topics. Facebook’s top ten games include titles on farms, restaurants, pets, and aquariums. The format developed so differently because, unlike with consoles, handhelds, or high-end PC’s, the audience started out mainstream, without having to grow from early adopters with more niche tastes.

In many ways, Facebook is the industry’s first “TV of gaming” – the site allows users to flip from game to game in a safe, standardized environment, with the expectations of no barriers-to-entry and that their friends will be playing the same games. By allowing players to advertise their accomplishments and invite their own personal network to play, the site goes beyond TV by letting players exert direct social influence on each other.

However, the mainstream audience affects not just the distribution or the themes of social games but their underlying mechanics as well. Stephanouk describes what he had to unlearn when transitioning from real-time games like Rise of Nations to social gaming:

One of the things I had to come around on was the importance of zero-sum conflict. Coming from strategy games as I did, I was very focused on the competitive aspect of games. I was aware of players wanting to build or explore, but I always saw that as serving a conflict-driven goal. I have learned that, for many people, the conflict-driven nature of traditional games is a major detraction. I’m not saying that overall conflict is bad or that you can’t have conflict-driven action in social games – both of these things are very much not the case. What I am saying is that there are a lot of players out there, far more than I understood, that really want a game experience that isn’t driven by the need to compete against another person.

Zero-sum conflict is indeed one mechanic core game developers usually do take for granted. Although cooperative gaming has grown in popularity in recent years, judging by the popularity of Left4Dead or the auto-grouping feature in WoW, competitive play usually means that one side triumphs and another is destroyed. Social games, however, can still be competitive without being destructive; the answer is parallel competition, the race to grow and improve one’s restaurant, for instance, faster than one’s friends.

Who is the Designer?

One final area social games differ from traditional game is the pervasive use of metrics to inform rapid iteration, often on a weekly or even daily schedule. The ability to test design hypotheses by split-testing can revolutionize development. Chen provides one simple example:

Back when I was running Serious Business [a social game company Chen founded which was later bought by Zynga], Facebook allowed applications to access the notification channel, and we wanted to find out whether longer notifications performed better, or shorter ones. I guessed that it was probably a wash – the shorter ones are more concise, but the longer ones were probably more noticeable since they were physically larger.

We ran a 30-way split test where we asked our team to come up with a bunch of different copy. As it turns out, there was a roughly linear correlation between how short the notification was and how often players would click through it. The shorter it was, the better the performance. The difference in performance was up to 300%. That’s a huge impact for basically writing a few lines of copy.

The question on many minds is what is the role of the designer in this new environment, with virtually real-time feedback for development decisions. Is the designer still the primary “author” of the game experience, or do designers now fill a new role, surfing the incoming data while sitting in the murky middle ground between the community and the company. Indeed, Reynolds admits that his role as Zynga’s “Chief Designer” is not nearly as important as one might imagine. Stephanouk says the following about the role of metrics in his current job:

Metrics are everything I thought they might be – or at least what I hoped they would be every time I found myself sitting in a room of designers fighting over if a player would rather press one button over another. Why would a designer want to remain in the dark on something that has a clear, knowable answer? Undersanding how players play doesn’t stifle creatitivity in game design any more than understanding how people live stifles creativity in architecture. I think it’s the other way around – knowledge helps us understand constraints, and constraints are usually the building blocks of good design. Do I feel less like an “author”? That depends, fiction or non-fiction?

The designer-as-auteur ideal is perhaps incompatible with this model, but the best game makers are usually the ones willing to “get dirty” – to engage fully with the audience to discover which ideas actually work and which ones were simply wishful thinking. Social game development simply accelerates this process to new extremes.(Source:designer-notes


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