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幽默的音效设计可驱散玩家的厌倦感

发布时间:2011-10-11 18:20:40 Tags:,,,

作者:Brice Morrison

“等等,再说一遍。”我正在尽量向大学好友解释《传送门》的机制。

“好的,我刚刚做的是在地板上创造出一个传送门,然后在墙壁上创造另一个传送门。当我从墙壁中掉出时,就会穿过地板上的传送门,这样看起来我就像是一直在坠落。”

于是我使用了两次传送门枪,然后展示了我刚刚阐述的内容。“能够理解吗?”

他挠着下巴说道:“等等,那么接下来呢…”

这真是次漫长的讨论。

传送门(from thegameprodigy)

传送门(from thegameprodigy)

《传送门》是设计精巧的游戏。许多开发者和粉丝都很乐衷于Valve创造的续作《传送门2》。2007年游戏面世时震惊整个行业,这款AAA主机游戏质量很高,还有着通常在抽象的独立游戏中看到的创新之举。

《传送门》中有着大量的绝妙游戏设计,但是今天我们要探讨的是开发公司消除玩家厌倦乏味的技术,所有的解谜游戏都会面临这个挑战,因为玩家在这种类型的游戏中每次需要花数分钟的时间思考方能理解某些事由。这个时间太长,而且让人觉得乏味。

游戏设计:音频叙事中的幽默感

可应用平台:解谜游戏

可应用体验:让玩家在思考时仍然觉得有趣,不会对游戏感到厌倦

在《传送门》的相关报道中,Valve的开发者讨论了他们在第5或第6个房间左右时开始面临的挑战。虽然谜题越来越复杂,给玩家带来越来越大的挑战,但是他们发现玩家开始对这个过程感到厌倦。使用左脑的时间过长之后,玩家似乎觉得有些劳累。

为解决这个问题,Valve团队尝试了多种方法,最后决定利用游戏中的叙事者GLaDOS,设计这个电脑模拟器的目的是为了引导测试物体通过关卡。让GLaDOS显得更具娱乐性似乎非常简单,将她改变得更像角色即可,比如她会说如下话语:

“记住,Aperture Science的‘Bring Your Daughter to Work Day’是测试她的最佳时机。”

“在危险测试环境中,Enrichment Center总是会提供有用的建议。比如,地板会让你死亡,所以尽量避开。”

“与其他测试体相比,你最快地将Companion Cube安乐死。祝贺你。”

如此设计并不需要耗费过多的精力。让玩家听到的音频显得轻松愉快,这种设计确实能够发挥作用,驱散了玩家心中的厌倦感。这种音频可能出现在每个关卡的开始和结束,有时玩家做出某种动作后也会听到,玩家很乐意听到机器人发出的这些愚蠢评论和挖苦。稍许右脑的娱乐似乎就能够让左脑的解谜显得有趣且富有吸引力。

更棒的是,Valve还将这种幽默感融入到游戏的故事情节中。使用的GLaDOS不只是用来讲述小笑话的机制,而且也是游戏世界的背景故事,引导玩家面对最终的BOSS。

没有充满幽默的文字,只有充满幽默的语音

这种设计解决方案中需要注意到的是,Valve选择不通过文字的形式来呈现GLaDOS的叙事。尽管这种设计沿袭自其他《半条命》游戏,但这也是设计能够发挥作用的关键特征。许多玩家时常会觉得阅读很单调乏味,无论文字内容本身多么富有吸引力。对动作游戏或第一人称射击游戏感兴趣的玩家正属于这个类别。文字通常会完全被这类玩家忽略。

因而,这种解决玩家厌倦的设计方法可能难以运用到非主机或可下载游戏的平台上。比如,对Flash游戏而言,音频文件的大小会让游戏设计显得不堪一击。

这个设计的另一个重要层面是,它无需玩家主动执行某些操作。玩家无需在主要行动线路之外通过拨弄开关或施展某些动作来体验这些幽默的笑话。幽默与游戏的正常路径并行,而且能够自动运行。而且因为这种幽默是音频的,所以会迫使玩家去体验。如果幽默是可选的或者需要玩家采取某些行动,那么许多玩家就有可能选择只专注于让游戏向前发展,而在此过程中感到厌烦。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

Keeping Players Awake With Humor and Narrative

Brice Morrison

“Wait a minute…go back.” I was doing my best to explain Portal to one of my old college friends.

“Ok, so what I did was create a portal on the floor, and then another one up on the wall. When I fall out of the wall, then I go through the one on the floor, so it’s like I’m falling continuously.”

With a zap I fired the portal gun twice, and then illustrated my point, sailing through the air. ”Got it?”

“Uh…wait…” he said, scratching his chin. ”So….”

Augh…this was going to be a long discussion.

Portal was an impeccably well designed game. With Portal 2, many developers and fans are very excited to enjoy what Valve has as the follow up to the smash hit. The game that came out in 2007 rocked the industry, taking the high quality polish normally associated with AAA console titles and combining it with innovation normally seen with obscure indie titles.

Portal has a number of great game design nuggets, but the one we’ll be covering today has to do with their technique for fighting player boredom, a challenge in all intellectually-charged puzzle games, games where players can often be stuck in a room trying to understand something for minutes at a time. Too long and …*snore*

Game Design: Humor in Audio Narrative

Applicable Platforms: Puzzle Games

Applicable Experiences: Keeping players’ interest while thinking, avoiding boredom

In the commentary for Portal, Valve developers discuss the challenge that they began to run into on about the 5th or 6th room. Though the intellectual challenges presented by the puzzles became more and more sophisticated, providing more and more of a challenge to the player, they found that players began to get bored or tired of the process. A little too much left-brain action, it would seem, is exhausting.

In order to remedy this, the Valve team experimented with a few approaches and decided to take advantage of the narrator in the game, GLaDOS, the computer simulation designed to guide the test subject through the levels. It was quite easy, it seemed, to make GLaDOS more entertaining by developing her into more of a character:

“Remember, the Aperture Science “Bring Your Daughter to Work Day” is the perfect time to have her tested.”

“In dangerous testing environments, the Enrichment Center promises to always provide useful advice. For instance, the floor here will kill you. Try to avoid it.”

“You euthanized your faithful Companion Cube more quickly than any test subject on record. Congratulations.”

And it didn’t take much. By keeping the audio that players were listening to lighthearted, the design worked and the boredom went away. For a moment at a time at the beginning of each level, at the end, and sometimes after certain actions, players were delighted to hear silly comments and sarcasm from the robot. It seems that it just took a little right-brain humor to keep the left brain puzzle solving interested and engaged.

What better is that Valve was also able to weave this humor into the narrative of the game. Using GLaDOS as not only a mechanism to deliver light jokes, but also as a source of backstory about the world and instructions for the player, and finally as a final boss.

Not Humorous Text, Humorous Voice

One important thing to note in this design solution is that Valve choose not to have the narration from GLaDOS in text form. While this makes sense because it follows in the vein of their other Half Life games, it is also a key feature of what makes this design work. Many players often find reading to be tedious, no matter how enthralling the text itself is. Players who are interested in action games or first person shooters can tend to fall in this category. Text is often completely bypassed.

Thus, this design solution to player boredom may be difficult on platforms other than console or downloadable titles; in Flash games, for example, the audio file size may make the design untenable.

Another important aspect of this design is that it happened without the player’s doing. Players didn’t need to go out of their way to go and find humorous jokes by flipping switches or performing any action. The humor lined the normal path of the game and ran automatically. And since it was audio, players were forced to enjoy it. If it was optional or required player action, then many players may choose to just focus on moving forward and, in the process, bore themselves. (Source: The Game Prodigy)


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