在今年的游戏开发者大会（GDC）上，如果你没有见识到那些对于“社交游戏”的攻击或者赞许的场面，那么你就算白参加这次大会了。这次会议的内容是关于不同参加者针对此话题的对弈（并且言辞都较为直接）。任天堂总裁岩田聪对于如今受到智能手机和社交媒体影响而日益衰弱的视频游戏产业感到惋惜。

而现在的Zynga似乎意识到应该向那些批评者做出回应了，所以其首席设计师Brian Reynolds便出面向人们保证，他们创造游戏的过程中始终贯穿着创造性这一重要元素。

我将引用文学评论家Kurt Vonnegut（游戏邦注：美国作家，黑色幽默文学的代表人物之一）的观点并针对于游戏产业当前现状进行说明：

任何开发者对任何一种类型的游戏表示愤怒和厌恶都是非常可笑的行为。这就像是一个身穿铠甲的人对大堆热奶油圣代发动攻击一样让人无语。

当然了我也有许多讨厌的游戏，而我也很乐意大声地告诉你们，或者毫无掩饰地咒骂它们。但是，不管我喜欢什么游戏，我都始终牢记一点：

任何游戏的存在都是合理的，因为有人喜欢它。

难道社交游戏就不是游戏？

不论它们是否是游戏都不重要。就像是你用某一种方法得到所有人的一致同意一样，这又有何区别呢？我们几乎不可能听到Zynga在新闻发布会上陈述：“我们最近发现，我们所做的其实并不是游戏，所以我们决定立刻歇业”或者如某些人说：“我过去很喜欢‘MafiaVille’这款游戏，但是当我听说它其实不是一款真正的游戏后，我便不再喜欢它了。”甚至，我更坚信不会有人在2012年的GDC大会上说道：“过去我认为‘FarmBurg’很愚蠢，但是现在我听说它是一款很优秀的游戏，所以我便开始喜欢它了，并且期待着它的进一步发展。”

当我们在思考一款游戏是否是游戏之时，我们可以看看以下的一个例子：

“嘿，妈妈，你在做什么？”

“玩游戏。”

那么恭喜它，那就是一款游戏。

social_farmville(from gamasutra.com)

社交游戏设计严重依赖反馈数据？

Zynga是社交游戏领域的佼佼者，很多知名的游戏都是它旗下的产品。Zynga首席执行官Mark Pincus是拥有金融背景的企业家，而Zynga则是他创办的第四家公司，前面三家都是与游戏无关的企业。我想Zynga之所以会进入社交游戏这个领域并不是出于对游戏的热爱，而是因为Pincus看到了社交游戏能够为初创企业带来成功的机遇。

作为一家新型的网络公司，Zynga会使用参数指导游戏开发也是自然而然的事，而这也使他们能够无需考虑任何道德约束，专心致力于游戏创作。而他们也用产品和当前良好的市场运作状况证明了自己这一实践的合理性。如果他们发展至今仍未使用任何参数机制，那么这才是真正的不合理。

不管怎样，使用参数去引导游戏设计已经算是游戏产业中一个常见的方法了。在我第一次参加E3展会时，我见到了《Madden》的设计者。我问他这款游戏怎么样时，他回答这款游戏糟透了，因为它缺乏有趣的设计，多数时候是根据测试小组的反馈结果调整新功能。尽管如此，我却并未在Gameland（游戏开发论坛）中看到任何有关《Madden》设计问题的争论。

暴雪收集并分析了许多数据，而Bungie以及CCP等其他非社交媒介领域的开发商也都采用了同样的做法。只是他们的做法程度和目的不同，这些公司尝试着去研究玩家的数据时，他们的目的并不是“让越多玩家越长久地坚持玩游戏。”他们并不是想通过外表，如字体或颜色去吸引更多玩家的注意。不过这些游戏之间存在的差别，在一定程度上已经足够反映出问题了。而Zynga也并没有进行足够的说明，解释他们的做法与传统的电视网络获取用户数据的行为有何区别。

你是否认为社交游戏噬食了你所青睐的游戏市场？

传统上来讲，发行商都会通过资助那些他们认为有利可图的游戏而设定产业方向。他们总是会抱着坐收渔翁之利的心态去向这一方向进行投资，而这也意味着那些不被他们认可的游戏就会缺少足够的资金来源。所以，按照这种说法，社交游戏在一定程度上确实吸引了大量原本可投向其他领域的资金和关注。

但是这并不仅仅发生在社交游戏领域。回到过去的几年里，你将会发现许多过去同样很抢手的项目，例如即时战略游戏，第一人称射击游戏，大型多人在线游戏，手机游戏（包括iPhone出现前和出现后的游戏），休闲游戏，游戏内部广告，电脑游戏，掌机游戏，网页游戏，免费游戏，僵尸游戏，魔兽争霸游戏等等。它们也都曾一度发光发热，吸引了许多发行商的目光。

市场还在不断地变化。我敢保证，社交游戏的发展趋势并不是历史的终结。我们一定会在不久将来的GDC大会上再次抱怨一些不同类型游戏中的不同价值等（也许下次的抱怨对象会是“3D游戏”）。发行商的投资也会不断发生变化。事实上，越多投资涌向社交媒介其实也是在预示着一个事实，即这个领域的淘金热状况很快也要达到一个饱和点。俗话说得好，如果你不喜欢现在的天气，只要等上15分钟就会出现变化。即使是你再喜欢的游戏，也不会一直走在最前方。

游戏本身也会发生变化。不论是玩家还是开发者，你也许不会再喜欢今天社交游戏所提供的那些内容，但是这也不是一种非常绝对的说法。在社交游戏空间还会出现一些有趣且吸引人的内容。但是因为来自于风险投资以及初创企业欲一夕致富的压力（他们都更加关注于那些“已被证实的成功模式”），社交游戏中还存在许多未被挖掘的巨大潜力。现在的社交游戏提供的多是派生出来的公式化内容，因此没有多少人认为现存社交游戏可获得长远发展。如果这些游戏希望在激烈的竞争情况下获得生存，就应该不断进化，只有创意型人才有望取得最终胜利（这也是Zynga之所以加紧招揽资深游戏开发者的原因）。

最后，无论你是力挺社交游戏（或者其它类型的游戏），或者不能忍受这类游戏，都请听我一言，不要再进行无谓的争议论了。没有哪样东西可以轻易地摧毁一切，没有什么东西会强大到让其他一切事物瞬间黯然失色。

游戏邦注：原文发表于2011年4月5日，所涉事件和数据均以当时为准。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

We Must Eradicate / Support Social Gaming Before It Ends Life On Earth / So Kittens Can Live Forever

You couldn’t go ten minutes at GDC  this year without running into someone either raging against or defending the virtue of “social gaming.”  The content of the conference mirrored this, frequently seeming very much like the same arguments attendees were lobbing at one another only delivered on stage (and with somewhat less slurring).  Satoru Iwata, Nintendo CEO, bemoaned the decline of the industry at the hands of smartphone and social-media in his keynote. The rant session was a collection of people from the social-gaming space ranting against the fact that other ranty people were ranting about them too (probably most mentioned from this being Brathwaite’s call for solidarity).

And now Zynga apparently feels a need to answer critics of their development process, with Brian Reynolds going out of his way to assure people that, hey, there actually is creativity involved in how they make games.

I’ll borrow from the late, great Kurt Vonnegut here and recast his take on overly-concerned literary critics to fit the current situation:

Any developer who expresses rage and loathing for a type of game is preposterous.  He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

There are plenty of games I don’t like.  And I’m happy to tell you about all of them, in great detail, loudly and with very liberal use of swears.  But, regardless of what I enjoy, there’s one truth I keep in mind:

The reason any game exists is because someone likes to play it.

What’s the issue here anyway?  Social games aren’t really games?

Something along those lines is usually preamble to a lengthy argument about a working definition for “games,” invariably engineered to either include or exclude social-media anything from the family.  I’ve been present at these often enough now that the suggestion of another prompts a Pavlovian response, causing me to unconsciously hand my American Express to the nearest bartender with instructions to “bring me as much scotch as this will buy.”

It makes no difference if they are “games” or not.  Imagine you get unanimous agreement on a definition one way or another, what changes?  I somehow doubt you’ll see a Zynga press release stating, “we recently learned that what we’re doing isn’t actually games, so we’ve decided to immediately go out of business” or that you’ll hear anyone say, “I used to love playing MafiaVille but I hear that it isn’t really a game so now I don’t.”  Conversely, I doubt GDC 2012 will be filled with people telling you, “I used to think FarmBurg was stupid but now I hear it qualifies as a game so I love it and respect the devs who worked on it.”

While we’re on the subject, if you actually are interested in knowing if these things are games or not, here’s a handy litmus test:

“Hey, mom, what are you doing?”

“Playing a game.”

Grats.  You’re a game.

Or is it that social games rely heavily on metrics?

Zynga’s position at the top of the social gaming heap means that most of this brand of vitriol is pointed in their direction.  Mark Pincus is a serial entrepreneur with a background in finance.  Zynga is his fourth company.  The previous three had nothing to do with gaming.  I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that Zynga was not born of a deep, heartfelt nerd-love of games, rather that Mr. Pincus saw in delivering gaming on social media an opportunity for another successful start-up.

Zynga’s heavy use of metrics thus comes naturally, the result of being a web enterprise first and foremost, and it is unburdened by baggage about any “morally pure” way to make games.  What they’ve demonstrated by applying this practice to social-media gaming is that, for their product and the current state of the market, it works very well.  It’d be amazingly silly of them to not rely heavily upon metrics given the experiences they’ve had thus far.

Using “metrics” to steer design is nothing new to gaming, anyway.  At one of my first E3s, I met a designer working on Madden.  When I asked what that was like, he told me it sucked because there was no interesting design work, as much of the direction was based on how focus groups reacted to potential new features.  Despite this, I don’t remember any debates about Madden’s rightful citizenship in Gameland.

Blizzard collects and analyzes mountains of data, as does Bungie, as does CCP, as do myriad other non-social-media devs.  The degree and intent are different — when these guys look at player data the goal isn’t “make as many humans as possible stick with this as long as possible.”  They aren’t trying to find the font or shade of blue that will attract more people.  But differences in the games partially explain this and Zynga doesn’t suggest that their approach is anything other than what it is.  Brian Reynolds has been pretty clear about the testing they do and the value they see in it and statements from insiders like Andy “it’s not art” Tian (Zynga’s Beijing GM) don’t seem indicative of an effort to convince anyone that they aren’t doing the same thing that the TV networks do when they happen upon a formula that works.

Or is it that you think social gaming is taking away from whatever form of gaming you prefer?

Traditionally, publishers set the direction of the industry by financing the development of games they think will be profitable.  Whenever the Next Big Thing becomes obvious, they move cash in that direction, which means less cash for other things.  So, in that manner, yes, social gaming is gobbling dollars and attention that could be going to other places.

This isn’t unique to social gaming.  Go back through the years and you’ll notice a long line of darlings, including RTSs, FPSs, MMOs, cellphone games (the pre-iPhone and iPhone variety), casual games, in-game advertising, PC games, console games, browser games, free-to-play, World War 2, zombies, DotA games, and so on.  Each of these, to varying degrees, attained a hallowed spot at one point and attracted publisher dollars that would have been spent elsewhere.

It wasn’t that long ago that EA was dropping millions on Jamdat instead of Playfish or that MS was picking up Massive instead of 3DV and Canesta.

Markets change.  I promise you that the social gaming trend is not the end of history.  You’ll return from a GDC at some point in the future and complain that “every freaking talk was about X” with a different value assigned to the variable (my guess for the next: “3D gaming”).  Publisher investment will migrate elsewhere.  The fact that the bumbling dinosaurs with money are showing up to the social-media trough is actually a good sign that the gold rush is winding down.  So, as the old saw goes, if you don’t like the weather now, just wait 15 minutes.  The games you love, whatever they may be, aren’t going away.

And games change too.  You might not like what social gaming has to offer today, as a player or a developer, but there’s no reason that needs to be the case for all eternity.  There are any number of interesting and engaging things that could be happening in the social-media gaming space.  These things aren’t being explored today primarily because a lot of the pressure in this segment is from VC and get-rich-quick “exit strategy vehicle” start-ups, both of which are generally more interested in “proven models.”  But they will be.  And while the current offerings might seem derivative and formulaic, there aren’t a lot of people who think that can continue for many more cycles.  These games need to evolve to survive and creative talent will certainly win that fight (which is one reason Zynga is grabbing experienced game devs at a good clip).
In the end, if you’re infatuated with social games (or any games, for that matter) or cannot stand them, do me a favor and leave it at that.  Nothing is going to ruin everything.  Nothing is going to be so awesome that it renders everything else irrelevant.

Take off the armor and leave the hot fudge sundae alone.（source:insidevoice）