作者：Lewis Pulsipher

数十年来，我一直在教授计算机管理研究生。在这些课程中，最为重要的主题便是管理者或监管者需要认识到现实性，而不是他个人对现实的愿景。

如果你不知道正在发生什么事情，那么又怎么能把工作做好呢？然而，许多管理者失去了对现实性的把握。

你或许会觉得这对游戏设计师而言无关紧要，但是事实上这是非常重要的。从某种程度上来说，游戏设计就是项目管理。如果你无法意识到项目的现实性或者游戏的真正状况，那么你的项目就无法取得成果。

传统的项目管理流程是“计划——执行——检测——控制——再计划”，然后继续执行并不断循环下去。游戏设计过程亦是如此，尤其是在你获得可以体验的原型之后。“检测”的含义是观察发生了什么事（游戏邦注：即执行阶段的成果）及其与计划的相符程度，“控制”意味着当事情未按计划进行时做出行动进行改变。

当然，如果你没有计划的话，就不可能到达上述两个阶段。对于桌面游戏而言，计划并不能视为对游戏流程的描述（游戏邦注：因为事情会发生改变），更像是对结果的描述。对于传统AAA视频游戏而言，计划更具描述性，因为获得可以玩的原型需要很长的时间。

Reality-Check(from nlsadd)

测试是主要的现实检查方法，这也正是为何关注和倾听测试者意见至关重要的原因所在。如果制作游戏的团队而不是个人，你也可以利用整个团队进行现实检查。

不幸的是，因为团队对游戏的过于熟悉，所以团队的观点可能出现偏差，他们可能无法检验出某些游戏的现实性。

换句话说，由于多数游戏的目标是为了满足目标用户，所以让目标用户进行测试是最重要的。否则，游戏测试结果可能与现实并不相符。这正是许多失败的电子游戏存在的弊病，因无法更改营销计划而未经充分测试便将游戏投放市场是十分普遍的现象。

应当记住的是，有时游戏测试会揭露出那些测试者没有直接告诉你的事实，他们自己甚至都没有注意到这些问题。我回想起某个游戏运转良好而且测试者似乎都乐在其中，但是游戏的弊病在于，所有在游戏中期取得领先的人几乎都可以获得胜利。我需要跟踪这个问题并找机会来修正。或许做更多的测试，这个问题就会被测试者发现，但是无需等到测试者揭示这个瑕疵，你可以通过检测一系列的游戏来自行发现。

游戏设计的核心是检测和控制，而并非计划。电子游戏设计书籍通常强调的层面完全不同，它们主要关注的是计划。这是因为对AAA游戏而言，在可以玩的原型阶段到来之前必须制定大量的计划。

事实上，对计划的过分关注正是软件创造过程的弊端，至少在传统软件创造过程中是这种情况。现在，我们有Agile和Scrum等方法可以加速这个过程，所以很快便能够得到可以玩的原型。但是对于桌游原型诞生的时间而言，电子游戏的可玩原型还是需要耗费较长的时间，这仍然是个问题。

这也正是为何许多专家推荐人们在尽量短的时间内使用纸上原型来设计游戏的原因。

正是因为游戏设计需要关注现实，所以我有时会认为游戏设计需要判断思维和自我批评。游戏设计新手的问题就在于他们不适应“屈从于现实”这种想法。年轻人通常更重视“追寻自己的梦想”并且“更具创造性”，外界都认为他们很特别而且很棒，最终使得他们在评估自己所创造游戏时陷入困境。经验可以帮助他们脱离困境，这包括游戏设计经验和生活经验。当然，接受更深层次的教育也是个有效的方法。

免费网游能够如此成功的原因在于，在其开发过程中玩家为游戏提供了强大的现实检测。这类游戏通常在远不能算是“完成”的阶段就向玩家开放服务，其目的就在通过人们的“纠错”改进游戏。

那么如果有足够的玩家喜欢游戏，他们就有可能告诉开发者自己喜欢和不喜欢的内容。只要意见不受小部分群体操控，就可以提供强大的现实检查。但是，这也正是在线社区的问题所在。这些人表达的观点或许并不代表大多数玩家，但是因为他们是那些在网络上探讨游戏观点的群体，所以很可能被当成是所有玩家的代表意见。

认识到目标用户需要的东西非常重要。我之前发表过博文阐述不可在游戏中添加算数机制，因为许多人对此很反感。有些评论者表示，我没有认识到这种做法能够提升玩家的算数技能。但是，这就相当于挑战现实。本世纪的人们并不希望在游戏过程中产生挫败感，而商业游戏市场的现实就是“算数会让多数人产生挫败感”。

《Don’t Make Me Think》这本书的主题是创造可用的网站，作者为Steve Krug。作者在书中要表达的意思是，不要让人们思考要如何获得网站上的信息，因为这会让他们感到沮丧。这种观点也适合游戏开发。

在许多游戏中我们确实需要人们进行思考，但是我们让玩家思考的是机制和游戏动态。做算数只是游戏的附属内容，只关乎那些将算数作为核心内容的游戏的成败。

不要让人们考虑算数的问题，除非算数是游戏的核心成分。不要让玩家去思考那些对游戏无关紧要的内容。当然，这一切都取决于你的目标市场。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Reality Management Important for Game Designers

Lewis Pulsipher

For a couple decades I regularly taught graduate computer management classes. One of the most important themes of those classes was that a manager/supervisor has to recognize what reality is, not what he would like reality to be or what he thinks it ought to be.

If you don’t know what’s really going on, how can you make it work better? Yet a great many managers lose track of reality, and the really poor ones are often in what I call “cloud-cuckoo land.”

You might feel that this shouldn’t matter to game designers but in fact it’s very important. Game design in some sense is project management. Your project can’t come to fruition if you don’t recognize the reality of it, the true state of your game.

The classic project management cycle is plan-execute-monitor-control-replan and continue with execution. That’s the same thing you’re doing with the game as you create it and especially after you have a playable prototype. In case it’s not clear, “monitor” means observe what is happening (the execution) and how that doesn’t match the plan, and “control” means act to change how things are going when they’re not going according to plan.

Of course, if you have no plan you don’t know where you’re going and so you’re most unlikely to get there. For a tabletop game the plan isn’t so much a prescription for how things will go (because things will change), as a description of where you want to end up. For a traditional AAA video game the plan is more prescriptive because it takes so long to get to a playable prototype.

Your principal reality check is playtesting. That’s why it’s vitally important to pay attention to playtests and to *listen* to playtesters. If you’re making a game with a team rather than solo (solo is common for tabletop games), you can also hope that the team will provide a reality check.

Unfortunately the team’s view of the game will be so skewed by their closeness to it that they will have lost touch with its reality to some extent. (Clearly you can’t rely on your family and close friends as principal playtesters to keep you grounded in reality; though that depends a lot on the family!)

In other words, insofar as the purpose of most games is to satisfy the target audience, it’s important that the playtesting is with the target audience. Otherwise playtesting doesn’t match reality. I’m convinced that this has been the flaw in many video games that fell on their faces, although it still more common that the games are issued before they have been sufficiently tested owing to unchangeable marketing schedules.

Remember that there are facts revealed by playtesting that the playtesters won’t tell you, won’t even notice. I recall specifically a game that worked well and playtesters seemed to enjoy, but which had the flaw that whoever was ahead halfway through almost always won. I had to keep track of the points and notice this before I had a chance to fix it. With a great deal more playtesting it might have been noticed by the testers, but don’t wait for playtesters to reveal flaws you can detect yourself by monitoring a series of games.

The heart of game design is monitoring and control, not the planning. Video game design books often give an entirely different impression because they concentrate so much on planning. That’s because, for AAA games, so much planning must be done before the playable prototype stage is reached.

The focus on planning is in fact a defect of the software creation process, at least as it has been traditionally practiced. Nowadays we have Agile and Scrum and other methods of speeding up the process so that a playable prototype is reached early rather than late in the production. But it’s still the case that it takes a long time to make a playable prototype of a video game compared with the time it takes to make a tabletop prototype.

That’s why many experts recommend that people planning a video game make a paper prototype as soon as possible, if that’s practical at all. I know of at least one video game where the entire game was “played” in a paper version before the software was created. (Shadow Complex, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4119/making_shadow_complex_donald_.php?page=2)

The need to focus on reality is why I sometimes say that game design is about critical thinking and self-criticism. One reason why novice game designers struggle is that they’re not accustomed to “getting down to reality”. Young people especially have been encouraged to “follow their dreams” and “be creative”, and are told that they’re special and wonderful, consequently they can be pretty far into cloud-cuckoo land when they are evaluating a game that they have created. Experience helps, both experience in game design and experience with a broad variety of life. A broad and deep education helps as well.

A reason why free-to-play online games have been so successful is that the players provide a strong reality check as the game is developed. The game is usually made available to players long before it could be called “finished”.

Then if enough players like it they are likely to tell developers what they like and what they don’t like, providing a strong reality check as long as a relatively small group’s opinion does not become dominant by virtue of being noisier. That’s the danger of online communities. They may have opinions that don’t jive with the majority of players, yet because they are amongst the minority who talk online about the game their opinions may be taken as representative of all the players.

Recognition of reality in the sense of what your target audience wants and needs is very important. I recently talked in a post on my primary blog (http://pulsiphergamedesign.blogspot.com/) about avoiding arithmetic in games because so many people find it frustrating. Some respondents were dismayed that I didn’t recognize an opportunity to help improve arithmetic skills by putting them into games. But that’s a venture into cloud-cuckoo land. People in this century don’t want frustration in their games. The reality of the commercial game market is “arithmetic frustrates most people”.

There is a well-known book about creating usable websites called “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug. What the author means is, don’t make people think about how to get at the information that’s on the website, because this distracts and frustrates them. This has to be modified specifically for games.

In many games we want people to think, but we want them to think about the mechanics and dynamics of the game, and about the opposition, not about something that is ancillary to the game, that is not part of success or failure. What’s important in a D20 tabletop RPG is whether or not you hit, not whether you can add modifiers to calculate your to-hit total. Doing arithmetic is ancillary, though there are other games where arithmetic is central to success or failure.

Don’t make people think about doing math unless math is central to the game. Don’t make people think about anything that isn’t necessary to the game.

But it all depends on your target market. (Source: Gamasutra)