EA的子公司Playfish为Facebook和手机开发社交类游戏，在它新发布的游戏中有一款叫“我的帝国”的城市建设类游戏。该游戏中的玩家可以建立和管理一个文明的国度，同时还可以共享他们的资源以帮助其他的伙伴建立城市或解开新的建筑方法和选项。

这是该公司通过一系列平台发布的最新的16款游戏中的一款。所有这些Playfish发布的游戏都是免费的，同时提供小额交易模式来让玩家用少量的费用购买游戏中的道具和服务。

Are Growen

Playfish的Are Growen说该公司目标是获得一个核心的市场。这这次对Gamasutra的采访中，他跟我们讨论了社交游戏的概念和他们公司对社交游戏持续发展的决心。

你能提供一些关于“我的帝国”的情况么？

Are Growen：这是一个玩家们喜欢的典型游戏，是一款我们所有人成长过程中玩过的类型。我们只是渴望开发出这样一款游戏，特别是在我们中国的工作室里。我们对制作这样的游戏渴望已久，所以我们仔细地考虑了我们该如何做。这确实仅仅来源于我们想制作一款策略类的建筑游戏。

为了让游戏显得古典传统，我们选择了罗马城市为游戏的主题，这令我们有些激动。我们喜欢那些有好的故事情节的游戏，我们尽可能地使游戏在社交这一空间显得真实。为了避免和“社会城市”的现代主题冲突，我们选择了一个更显古典的主题。

那么您认为“我的帝国”就是您想要开发制作的游戏类型么？或者您是否认为玩家们虽然玩这款游戏，但却得不到其他社交物品的完善服务呢？

AG:我们并不认为这类型游戏的市场服务不够完善。看看现在Facebook上的用户的数量，它几乎可以作为任何好产品的市场。

发布该游戏后，您发现您是对的么？

AG:我毫不怀疑我们开发出了一款非常棒的游戏，但是我们致力于可是说只是老玩家的一部分。我认为你如果观察并比较游戏刚发布时和发布一段时间后的活跃用户的每日递减曲线，你会发现我们确实开发了一个有趣的游戏，人们终究会选择玩它。

一旦玩家们进入了游戏，他们就会希望接着玩后面的情节。这是社交游戏的一个典型的模式。我们总是希望能简单的了解用户的想法，于是我们会见用户，看看他们喜欢什么，不喜欢什么，然后据此来建立我们的游戏模式和设置等。我们现在就正为“我的帝国”添加更多玩家喜欢的元素而努力着。

你是怎么样在传统的游戏设计中保持玩家的热情和游戏的合作的？

AG:这个问题确实非常难处理。我们像其他一些有制作游戏经历的制造商一样，一开始并没有太注意这个问题，但是我们真正想解决它时，我们做了很多的努力。当然，这也是因为市场在发展。如果市场一开始就是非常随便，那么运用这个老方法将是十分错误的，我们要利用已经习惯了的像“休闲”和“铁杆”等旧条款。我们缺少好的方法。但是一开始，我们所有人将它看成是一个极端随便的空间，玩家可以保留在实践生活中的与你朋友间的关系、成就和一些值得炫耀的东西或者你可以在传统游戏中学会并是你感到有成就的事情。

但是这些会跟着市场的发展而变化。现在的玩家在传统游戏中追求一种更深层次的，在某种程度上可以称为无所拘束的玩法。但是这并非真正的没有限制，他们在游戏中使用的用具相对就较为简单。你的游戏可以分几个阶段进行发展完善，越来越多的改善将加入到游戏中。

当你建立一个像这样的游戏时，你说它更近似于你在自我夸耀，甚至比夸耀更甚。那么您认为社交互动的形式有什么变化么？我们知道许多其他的设计游戏都是有游戏的物品来帮助朋友或吸引朋友加入之类的。

AG:我认为这也在发展。社交游戏的市场起初非常的不成熟，回到那些最初的日子，你也许会收到一个游戏邀请，你点击邀请信息后它也许会提示你邀请20个朋友，这是游戏程序的第一步。直到你邀请了20个朋友，你才可以看到游戏的真面目。当我们发布“谁拥有最大的大脑”作为我们的第一款游戏时，市场正是这种状态，但我们很高兴我们没有设置这样的邀请步骤。而是你如果想玩这款游戏，你必须点击那个可以开启邀请链接的按钮。现在的方法也是从那开始逐步演变来的。

就算是有意义的社交互动游戏，其中也没有太多你通过一个比较有意义的方式邀请合作伙伴的游戏，社交游戏领域还有很多地方可以改进。但是随着市场的发展，对大多数的游戏设计来说，每个研发者都为游戏拥有一个无限的自由度而努力。

例如，实时多人游戏可以非常容易的让你和你的同伴进行合作互动，但是这立即会使游戏变得不像是社交类游戏。一旦你深入了游戏设计的细节，如怎么样保持游戏中完全的异步控制并不要让玩家浪费太多的时间，那么其他的方式也将变得困难。打个比方，我不想计划一些我还没经历过的事情，因为我的游戏中的伙伴不想再次经历这种事情，所以我只能够在没有伙伴的情况下自己计划实施。

随着时间的推移，我们会发现不同的情况。我们也许可以看到越来越多最后发展为和陌生人一起玩的游戏。因为在游戏团队里，伙伴们希望你，有时甚至需要你继续玩你们在合作的游戏。这样，过了一阵子之后，你那些在游戏中仍然活跃的伙伴就会变得越来越少，最后游戏就会变得孤寂和无聊并逼迫你邀请新的伙伴，除非我们给你介绍那些仍然留在游戏世界中的玩家。

社交游戏的一个缺点是你一旦进入，你就必须持续的玩。与普通游戏相比，这是一个你必须克服的挑战。但是在很多社交游戏中，这种挑战并不难克服，你只需管理游戏就可以。你们在为这个问题的解决做努力么？

AG:是的。这就是我在一开始强调的，这也是游戏的传统。我们都以这种方式看问题，但是我们并不认为这一定正确。我们引进了所有这些概念来说明一个游戏应该是什么样子的，同时我们希望游戏的世界能遵循着些概念的解释。当我们研发“我的帝国”时，我们有一个非常强烈的愿望，就是让用户使用技能并进行战略性的思考，最后做出艰难的抉择。这就意味着当你做出一个错误的决定时，你将受到一定程度的惩罚。但是这不是这个市场的真相，没有规定规定游戏一定要这样子。

社交游戏的发展历程表明，一种类型的游戏有一个很大的至少在目前，不用你在调查它的同时在游戏的运营上投资、了解游戏或做出决定的市场。但是人们在管理的过程中找到了乐趣。例如，对于日本游戏，你可以只通过点击一个按钮就可以看完整个故事，并且这种游戏非常的流行。如果你仔细想想，你会发现那些概念表现方式会有一点奇怪。

我的妻子在玩一款游戏，我不准备说出这款游戏的名字，游戏中你必须将3个珠宝排成队。她在这个游戏上花费了大量的时间，在某种意义上，这不是一个有意义的工作，例如，这就不比管理一个游戏农场来得有意义。但我们作为游戏设计师就得经过全过程（笑）。我记得我们曾经对一些老设计家说过的“难道我们不被允许再做游戏了吗？”这个问题上进行了激烈的讨论。这就是社交游戏如此的背离传统游戏以致于我们无法辨识它的原因。

在您到Playfish工作之前，您从事什么工作？

AG：我是一名商学院学校金融分析专业的学生，但是我喜欢上了制作游戏。所以我加入了无线和无线增值服务的新创立的公司。在那儿能在设计方面做的很少，所以我想进入游戏行业。我曾管理过中国全国的电子竞技队，接着我就开始在瑞典一家叫Jade Storm的公司做游戏的工作。Jade Storm在手机多人游戏方面非常的强，而我的任务是制作一款以技巧我基础的赌博游戏。

接着，我开始在我自己的手机游戏工作室里为EA，Glu做3D的赛车游戏，然后为Playfish制作游戏。我喜欢在制作这些产品过程中的所有挑战，这是一个软件技术和硬件技术的有趣结合的地方。你花费你一天的时间来看一点点艺术知识并试着去感受它。接着你做出一个游戏的片段，感觉不错，然后你又花了一点时间试着了解市场的情况。

对比之前的两款游戏，就是其中一个不比另一个更有意义的那两款。我能明白你的意思，减低到较基础的水平来看的话，这两个游戏的行为是非常相似的，可是你不认为行为发生的环境能给它赋予更多的含义么？

AG:是的，你说的对。在GDC上的谈话也有发言者认为整个事情是对降低玩游戏的门槛的不断进化的需要。说比赛是社会活动，认为你可能为了实现社会价值而将朋友聚集到牌桌上打牌等等。但是，当情况转到电脑平台上后，它的全面性丢失了。游戏变成了你一个人孤零零的坐着，你不会与任何人交往，这要你能多快就适应。

社交游戏所能做的是将社交的价值在游戏中体现并降低游戏的门槛来使它更有意义。在多数人的眼中，和他人进行社交联系比你自己坐在电脑前挑战你自己来得强。我认为这就是社交类游戏的核心，也是它们为什么这么流行的原因。这也许可以让社交成为体验的核心，就像大多数人认同的那样。

比如说我的妹妹，她就从来不玩游戏，就算她小时候也没有。这听起来不可能，但我从来没有看到过她玩任何游戏。她刚刚获得心理学家学位，她有三个孩子，照理说她现在应该忙得不可开交，但她突然想玩社交类游戏，这只是那些认为游戏很有意义和他们可以自我判断游戏价值百万大军中的一员。

你发送一个小的挑战，你这一行为微不足道的额外的社会价值会让你有兴趣继续在游戏上投入时间。(译者：唐统权)

EA subsidiary Playfish develops social games for Facebook and mobile devices, and among its newest releases is the city building game My Empire. It allows players to build and manage cities based on classical civilizations; players can share resources to help build each other’s cities and unlock new buildings and options.

It’s the latest of 16 titles the company has released across a range of platforms. All of Playfish’s games are free-to-play, and use a microtransaction model that allows players to purchase in-game items and services for a small fee.

Playfish’s Are Growen says that with My Empire, the company aims to address a core market; in this interview with Gamasutra, he discusses traditional conceptions of social games and their steady evolution against them — where is the line between social games and traditional titles, and how can players find meaning through simple in-game actions?

Could you provide a little background on My Empire?

Are Growen: It’s a typical game that gamers like. It’s the type of game that we all grew up playing. We just had an itch to make something like this, especially in our China studio. We were itching to do it for a long time, so we figured out how we’d go about doing it. That really came from just wanting to a strategic building game.

And then we chose a Roman theme because it shows our gamer heritage; we’re a bit dramatic. We like games with nice storylines, we like to make them as immersive as we can tolerate in the social space. Instead of going in the contemporary direction as Social City did, we chose a more typical gamer theme.

Were you driven by the fact that My Empire was the kind of game you wanted to make? Or did you think that the audience was present for this game, but they were being underserved by the other social offerings?

AG: We thought there was an underserved market for this type of game. Looking at the user numbers on Facebook now, there should be a market for pretty much anything that’s well produced.

Do you find that to be true after you launched the game?

AG: I think honestly that we have a very good game, but we are working on the sort of older gamer part of it. And I think that when you look at trajectory of users up to the game’s launch and after that, the decline in daily active users, it shows that we had a really interesting game that people would pick up and play.

Once they got a little into it there, they were looking for the next step. And that’s typical for social games. We always want to get things out the door easily, meet the audience, see what they like and don’t like, and then build from there. We are working on adding those things to My Empire right now.

How do you reconcile traditional game design with driving user retention and interaction?

AG: It’s quite different. We, like everyone else who has a gaming background, don’t really see that so much in the beginning, but we see it more over time as we work with it. And also, of course, the market is evolving. For a market that was ultra-casual in the beginning it’s wrong to use these old terms that we’re used to like “casual” and “hardcore” and so on; we’re lacking better terms.

But in the beginning, we all saw it as an ultra-casual space, and user retention comes from actually doing stuff with your friends, achievements, and bragging rights more than, skill or other things that you typically learn in traditional games that make you feel achievement.

But that’s also changing as the market evolves. Players are now looking for more depth, which, to a certain degree, we would call more hardcore mechanics in a traditional game. But they’re not really hardcore; they’re implemented in a relatively simple way. They are stages to evolve your game, and more and more layers are being added to it.

When you’re building a game like this, you said that it’s more about bragging rights and things like that. Do you think that the forms of social interaction have changed? Many of the other social games are about helping your friends or luring your friends in with items and such.

AG: I think it’s going to evolve. The social game market started off extremely crude. Back in the day you would get an invite, you would click it, The game would tell you to invite 20 of your friends. That was step one; you didn’t get to see the app unless you did this. When we launched our first game, that was the state of the market. We felt very proud that we were not doing it. When we launched Who Has The Biggest Brain?, you had to click the button that would open the invite interface. Gradually, it evolved from there.

In terms of very meaningful social interaction, there are not too many games that are letting you cooperate in a meaningful way. There’s still a lot of room to do new things. In the most evolved form, you become a form of currency for your friends, and the amount of investment you put into the game helps them to achieve something in their game. But as the market evolves, for most designs, everyone is struggling with the fact that these games can evolve in a hardcore direction.

For example, real-time multiplayer would be an easy way to add a meaningful interaction with your friends. But that drives the game instantly to become something different than a social game. Other forms become difficult once you get into the details of the design, such as how to keep it totally asynchronous and not require people to invest a lot of time. For example, I don’t want to design something where I don’t progress in the game because some of my friends didn’t want to progress in the game any longer; I have to be capable of progressing without my friends.

We will see different things over time. We will probably see more games that eventually evolve into playing with strangers, because at game companies, we would like you, and sometimes need you, to keep playing the game if you like it. And after a while, the number of your friends that are still active in the game will be relatively low, so it will become a deserted and sad world you would be forced to operate in unless we introduce you to strangers who still want to stay in the game.

One of the criticisms of social games is that you come in, and you do maintenance work. With a regular game, you have a challenge that you have to overcome. But in many social games, there is a low challenge level; you just manage the game. Is that something you’ve been working on?

AG: Yes. That’s what I pointed out in the beginning. That’s the gamer heritage. We all view the world that way, but I don’t think it’s necessarily true. We bring in all these concepts of what a game should be, and we would like the world to conform to those concepts. When we were making My Empire, we had an extremely strong desire to have the user use skill and think strategically and make difficult choices, and that implies being punished when you make the wrong choice. But that isn’t really what this market is about. There’s no given rule that a game has to be like that.

What the social game experience has shown is that there’s a large market for a type of games that, at least at present, don’t require you to go through the same time investment in operating the game, understanding the game, or making decisions, but people find pleasure in managing something. This is similar, for example, to Japanese games that only use one button where you click your way through a story, and those games are immensely popular. If you think about it, those concepts are a bit odd in a way.

My wife plays a game — I’m not going to say the name — but you have to organize three jewels in a line. The amount of time investment that she puts into this game is quite enormous. In a sense, it’s also not a very meaningful task, not more than, for example, managing a farm somewhere. We went through this whole journey as game designers. (laughs) At one point, I remember we had a heated discussion where some of the older designers were saying, “Are we not going to be allowed to make games anymore?” That was the feeling that the social games are so departed from traditional games that we can’t recognize them.

What is your background, you know, prior to Playfish?

AG: I’m actually a business school finance and strategy major, but I fell in love with making games, so I joined some startups in wireless and wireless value added services. That was very limiting in what you can do in terms of design, so I wanted to get into gaming. I was running the Chinese National e-Sports team, and then I started working with gaming through a Swedish company called Jade Storm. They were extremely strong on multiplayer mobile gaming, and I was doing a skill-based gambling game.

And then I started my own mobile studio doing 3D racing games for EA, Glu, and then Playfish. I like the whole challenge of producing these titles. It’s a very interesting mix of soft and hard skills. You spend your day looking a little bit at art and then trying to get a feeling, and then make a short game pitch. It feels emotional, and then you spend a little bit of your day trying to work on marketing numbers and segments and number sizes.

You contrasted two games earlier, a few moments ago, saying one action is not more meaningful than another action. I can understand what you’re saying; the actions that you take are very similar when reduced to a basic level, but don’t you think the context for the actions is what adds the meaning?

AG: Yeah. There was a talk at GDC where the speaker had an interesting take on the whole thing where he sees this as a continuous evolution of lowering the barrier to play games, saying that games were social activities that you would mainly play for the social value of gathering with friends around the table playing cards and so on. Then, after it moved over to the PC, that whole side of it was lost, and it quickly became something where you were sitting alone, you’re not interacting with anyone, and it’s all about how fast you can twitch.

What social games do to that is bring the social value back into games and lowers the barrier to games by making them more meaningful. In most people’s view, it’s more meaningful to have social interaction than to something where you are arranging objects on your computer as a challenge with yourself. I think that’s what the core of social games is and why they are so popular. It’s possible to make that social interaction the core of the experience, which for most people feels valuable.

My sister, for example, never played games, even when we were kids. I could never get her to play anything; it was just impossible. She is now just finished as a psychologist, she has three kids; she’s been extremely busy. But she suddenly started playing social games, and that’s just one of the million examples of people who feel that the games are meaningful and they can justify it to themselves because they’re sending a poke, it’s like sending a little gift.

You’re sending a little challenge, and that little extra social value of your action makes it something that you’re interested in investing time in. (source:gamasutra)

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