作者：Tadhg Kelly

Duke Ellington（游戏邦注：爵士乐史上最杰出的人物之一，钢琴演奏家、作曲家兼编曲家）认为：无论是哪种流派和时代，音乐都需要节奏鲜明。而在我眼中，趣味性的情况也同此理，如果一款游戏只有一些公平游戏机制，却不能提供给玩家成功的乐趣，那么它就不能称得上是一款游戏。

但是也有一些乐趣比起其它乐趣更具有吸引力，不仅拥有天生的魅力而且能够吸引人们尝试游戏。我将其称之为“魅力法则”。

It don’t mean a thing if it aint got that swing(from whatgamesare.com)

首先说说灵感

首先是关于游戏是否给予玩家一个充满英雄感或管理者的角色。英雄角色意味着玩家可以在游戏中采取一些惊人的举措而克服许多不可能的任务，就像是足球游戏中的前锋或者恐怖生存游戏中的敢死队员这样的角色。在这种情境下，胜利的喜悦是来自于玩家生理意义上的成就感以及避免死亡时的紧张感。

管理人员就像是后勤，看管者或者那些专门解决疑难杂症的角色。而在这种情境下，胜利的喜悦不再是关于紧张感，而是玩家在成功解决一个难题后的满足感，就像园丁看到自己的花园里开满鲜花一样。就像那些对管理职务感兴趣的足球游戏粉丝并不认为前锋这个角色有趣，冒险游戏玩家比起战斗或行动更喜欢解决谜题并破解故事，而虚拟宠物游戏玩家也更加沉迷于复杂的看管和教学任务一样。

另外一方面是关于文化。足球在英国是一种非常普及的体育运动，而英国的小孩正是伴随着这种文化而成长。因此，对于足球游戏在英国大受欢迎，以及《FIFA》等游戏在当地的高销量都是不足为奇。而美国的《疯狂橄榄球》亦是如此。在不同情况下，玩家总是会受到一些与游戏相关的外部因素影响，而游戏则能够帮助他们实现一些幻想。

最后是关于玩家到底是处在现实与幻想之间的边缘，还是只是纯粹的一名麻瓜（游戏邦注：巫师界对不会魔法的人类的通称）。处在边缘境界的玩家更愿意尝试新鲜事物，所以他们经常会选择一些奇异的角色，如《块魂》系列游戏。而麻瓜玩家则只会专注于一些预料之中的内容。

关于魅力

当玩家受到了游戏的激励而决定挑战英雄或者管理人员角色时，他们心中肯定希望能够找到最佳方法而达到目标。因此，游戏必须持久保持这种魅力，才能推动玩家最终到达目的地。我在此对于魅力的关键词定义是“控制”。

其实玩家的大脑就像是机器的大脑，只会把游戏当成是目标，规则和手段，而不会考虑游戏中的美学，故事，精灵或者其它丰富的内容，因为深入接触这些只会让玩家的大脑感到麻木，而这也是许多最终放弃游戏的原因。

所以，魅力法则要求游戏必须具备丰富的多样性，并鼓励玩家学习游戏，赢得游戏或者获得其它结果。不管游戏提供给玩家的是英雄角色还是管理者的角色，游戏多样性都应该体现在不同游戏阶段，并始终调动玩家的积极性。这就意味着所有成功的游戏都必须基于这两种原型的其中一种。

有些设计者认为，游戏设计就是关于创造经济利益，但是我认为这只是一种片面说法。因为除了创造经济利益，游戏还能够创造活动。绝大多数游戏都是主要涉及其中一方面，而略微包含另外一方面。

野外运动如足球，英式橄榄球或者美国足球等都是关于技巧的测试。它们能够测试玩家的忍耐度，精确度，速度以及协作能力，但是这些运动都是围绕着一颗小小的球而展开。获得控球权并运载着它得分是游戏中的“经济活动”，但是这种经济行为却不是游戏的真正魅力。

魅力是关于一些身体活动，包括玩家尝试着去获得财产，玩家向敌人发动攻击或者英雄角色获得分数等。换句话说，这种魅力并不是带给玩家紧张感，而是推动玩家在游戏中努力对抗敌人。

Texas-Hold’em-Poker(from ipfun.org)

《Texas Hold ’Em Poker》则是一款完全不同的游戏，这是一款依靠直觉去判断对手心理的游戏。玩家必须知道自己手中握有什么牌，桌上的纸牌代表了什么以及每个玩家手中拥有何种筹码。他还必须猜测其他玩家会如何下赌注或者弃牌，并且何种情境下自己才能获得胜利。而所有的这些内容都是关于经济活动。

然而扑克游戏中的实际行动，包括下赌注和弃牌都是这类游戏的基本做法。不像运动类游戏需要融入大量技巧性要素，玩家下赌注就是下赌注，并不是说你用不同的方法下筹码就能够更快打败其他玩家。反正下不下都随你，不需要使用任何技巧。

技巧设置并不是魅力的体现。在这类游戏中，魅力是关于玩家下赌注后有何结果，猜测对方会出何种牌以及最后会出现什么纸牌等。与运动类游戏不同，纸牌游戏中的“控制”是关于策略和管理，而玩家的乐趣则体现在慢慢的摸索过程。所以，“河牌”（游戏邦注：德州扑克游戏中的第五张公共牌）便是这种游戏的魅力体现。

1：3比例

Rockstar通过添加业务机制，培训技能，购物以及约会等机制而不断扩展《侠盗猎车手》这款游戏。在注重于活动的游戏中添加如此经济元素并不能给游戏增添多大乐趣。就像在赛车游戏中添加游泳技巧并不能帮助游戏增加乐趣一样。

而如果是关于活动方面的扩展，如增加自行车或者直升飞机，情况可能就不一样了。这些内容是符合游戏情境，并且能够实现的。它们之所以具有乐趣是因为能够帮助玩家采取其它方法去掌控游戏，并争取最后的胜利。

当游戏设计者尝试着在游戏中添加更多额外的内容时，他们也可以想办法让活动与经济内容相平衡。他们可以在动作类游戏中添加更多资源，或者在策略游戏中添加一些物理技能，而所有这些理念都是为了提供给玩家更多乐趣而提高游戏的用户粘性。

同时你还必须思考，那些扩展内容是否能与游戏现存的活动或经济元素相搭，也就是这种扩展行为是否值得。有时候，活动和经济的混合只会让游戏变得更加糟糕。这种类型的扩展只会增加玩家的紧张感，或者让他们在游戏中手忙脚乱而最终放弃游戏。

一般来说，在完美的游戏（事实上是不存在的）中，活动和经济的比例是1：3或者两者比例对调。这就意味着玩家对游戏相关元素不会投入超过25%的注意力。所以游戏设计者应该让技巧游戏拥有适度的策略或者让策略游戏拥有适度的技巧，不能太多也不能太少。

在《光晕》中，游戏考验的是玩家的活动（即射击，闪避，移动）技能，并且只有一小部分经济元素，如军士长能够拥有多少弹药或武器。玩家必须多加留心自己的资源，但是只能在支持或影响活动的前提下。在游戏中经济元素只能吸引玩家10%的注意力，而玩家会将剩下的90%注意力放在行动上。

在《星际争霸》中，经济元素包含建造一只完美军队所需的后勤投入和策略，但是速度也非常重要。《星际争霸》玩家总是能够快速移动鼠标并敲打键盘以选择最佳单位并下达命令。在游戏最初关卡设置速度策略会让许多新手玩家措手不及。

尽管该游戏拥有较高的速度要求，很多玩家还是非常重视经济元素。他们必须牢记许多复杂的因素，如单位的位置，资源的现状，敌人的位置，单位的更新以及获胜策略等。

虽然如此游戏控制变得更加复杂了，但是玩家所控制的行动却保持了一致。《光晕》的物理技能是来自于玩家扣动板机并瞄准目标（不论成功与否），而虽然《星际争霸》的侧重点与之不同，但是“Protoss”（《星际争霸》中的神族）在攻击“Zergling”时也采用了相同的物理技能，并且产生了相同的结果。玩家剩下的75%的注意力在于下达100个相同的命令以及一些其它管理活动。而如果这时候游戏仍要求玩家更多地关注于战斗中，游戏的乐趣便会大大降低。

结语

在阅读了上述内容后可能有人会问道“如果一款游戏缺少乐趣了会怎样”或者“如果一款游戏并不能带给玩家胜利的喜悦会怎样”？这就像是游戏中的叙事元素这个话题一样，虽然总是备受争议，但是却值得我们去寻找答案。

《The Stanley Parable》是《Half Life 2》的一个模组，描写一个终日埋首于电脑前的主人翁原本单调的生活被破坏后的情境。这是一款叙述性第一人称游戏，所以当玩家进入游戏后，便能够从Stanley的角度去看他的生活。

作为玩家，你能够亲眼目睹游戏中的任何发展与变化，但是你却不能真正去感受它们。虽然这种游戏很有趣，但是却缺少魅力。游戏中会出现许多录像的画面帮助玩家做出路线选择，但是如此却让游戏失去了挑战性，或者说不能够让玩家感受到真正的胜利喜悦。

《The Stanley Parable》与其它的一些游戏都被称之为交互式游戏，但是说实在的，将它们称为游戏都有点勉强了。在《The Stanley Parable》并不存在传统游戏中一些常见术语，所以这款游戏看起来更像是一出戏剧，或许称之为电视剧，交互式戏剧更适合。

不论称之为什么，总之它们并不是真正的游戏。游戏必须具有乐趣，而乐趣又必须具有魅力。否则玩家便不会继续游戏，而我们也将看不到游戏中的任何艺术意义。玩家并不是单纯为了乐趣而玩游戏，而游戏也不是一种讲故事的艺术形式，虽然我们总是习惯性地把讲故事当成艺术的唯一表达形式。

但是不管怎样，还有许多游戏开发者坚信为了让人们更严肃地对待游戏，就必须剔除掉一些乐趣元素。不幸的是，他们不能这么做，也不需要这么做。他们其实已经是艺术家，只是他们创造的是魅力世界而非电影作品。

Duke Ellington之所以认为音乐需要节奏鲜明，而在游戏中，魅力也符合相同道理。当一款游戏缺少了魅力，它就很难称得上是一款游戏。（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）

The Law of Fascination [Game Design]

Duke Ellington’s point was simple: Across all genres and eras, music needs to swing. It’s a creative constant. I make a similar point about fun, arguing that it too is a creative constant and a game is not a game if it lacks the joy of winning while mastering fair game dynamics.

But some kinds of fun are more appealing than others. Some are innately fascinating and inspire the play brain to play, where others just don’t. I call it the law of fascination.

First Comes Inspiration…

The relationship between player and game starts long before the game is ever played. It starts with a marketing story that says ‘Look, in this world you get to do this awesome thing.’ And the player is either inspired or not. Why?

The first reason is to do with whether the game promises the player an empowering role with the prospect of heroics or stewardship. Heroics means the opportunity to overcome impossible odds with amazing action, like the striker in a soccer game or the terrified teenager in a survival horror. The joy of winning in those circumstances is the sense of physical achievement and the thrill of avoiding death.

Stewardship is more like the appeal of logistics, caretaking, puzzles and figuring out complex problems. The joy of winning is less about thrill and more about satisfaction of solutions, like a gardener feels when all his blooms spring forth. The soccer fan who is interested in stewardship does not find the role of striker to be half as interesting as that of manager. The adventure game fan is interested in the puzzles and decoding the story, not combat or action. The virtual pet fan is interested in the complex problem of caretaking and teaching.

Another factor is culture. Soccer is a widely televised sport in the United Kingdom and children are brought up in that culture. It’s no great surprise, therefore, that they play videogames based on soccer and buy franchises like FIFA in their millions. Madden NFL occupies a similar position in the United States. In each case players are inspired by that which they know outside of the game, and the game promises to help them enact their fantasy.

Lastly there is the question of whether the player is on the fringe or is a muggle. Fringe gamers pay attention and want to try new things, so they will often find an exotic role, as in Katamari Damacy, exciting. Muggles, on the other hand, tend to only look for that which they already expect.

… Then Fascination

As the player tends to be inspired to play for heroics or stewardship, so the play brain wants to search for the optimal path to achieve that goal. Therefore it must find the game fascinating enough for the player to get there. In a previous post I described fun as the joy of winning while mastering fair game dynamics. For this post, the key word in that definition is mastering.

The play brain, remember, is the machine-like part of the mind which only sees a game as objects, rules and levers. It doesn’t care about the aesthetics, story, numina or rich content of the game and when it achieves maximum mastery it grows bored. Boredom in the play brain is the reason why players don’t finish games.

So the law of fascination requires that a game dynamic is robust enough to encourage wins, learning and many outcomes. Whether empowering the player through heroics or stewardship, the game dynamic has to be able to stand up to many play sessions and yet still be deep enough to be exciting. Which means that all successful games are based on one of two archetypes.

Some designers believe that all game design is about creating economies, but I think they are only half right. The other half is creating activities. Most games are mostly about one, but contain a minor amount of the other.

Field sports like soccer, rugby or American football, for example, are largely tests of skill. They test player endurance, accuracy, speed and ability to work together, but they do so around a ball. Obtaining possession of the ball and trading it for score (via a goal, try or touchdown) is the economic activity in the game but that trade is not really the fascinating part.

The fascinating part is the physical activity involved in attempting to acquire possession, the dynamic between players as they co-ordinate an attack, and the heroics that tend to emerge from scoring. In other words it’s not the points that bring about the thrill of scoring a try. It’s the hard work of pushing through an opponent team to get there.

Texas Hold ’Em Poker is the reverse. It’s all about judging resources understanding complex situations, intuiting the psychology of opponents and so on. The player has to know what’s in his hand, what the cards on the table likely imply and how many chips every other player has. He has to understand how other players tend to bet or fold and judge whether some situations will result in wins or losses. All of which is economic play.

However the actual actions of Poker, such as betting and folding, are rudimentary. Unlike a sport, where the skilful execution of a tackle can significantly affect the game, a bet is always a bet and there is no way to beat other players by placing your chips down in a different way. You either place your chips in the pot or you don’t.

The skill of placing is not fascinating. The fascinating part is the dynamic that results from betting, figuring out the permutations of possible hands and waiting for the big reveal of cards at the end. Unlike a field sport, mastery is all about strategy and logistics and the fun is tied up in lessons learned from doing that. So the revelation of the river card is fascinating.

A 1:3 Ratio

Rockstar attempted to extend Grand Theft Auto by including the ability to own businesses, train skills, buy clothes and go on dates. Each added an element of economy into what was a heavily activity-focused game, and none were particularly fun. There was little joy in earning swimming skill points (as you had to in GTA: San Andreas) to be allowed to undertake a mission.

However the extensions that focused on activity, like bikes or helicopters, were much better. They made sense within the context of the game and were robustly implemented. They were fun because they added extra ways to achieve the heroics that the play brain already wanted to master.

When trying to figure out a way to add an extra dimension to his game, a game designer will often make the same mistake. He will take a design that focuses on activity or economy and then add some of the other in order to make the game more rounded. He’ll add a numbers-and-resources element to an action game, or a physical skill requirement to a strategy game, all with the idea of increasing engagement by giving the player more opportunities to have fun.

Extensions to a game that work with its existing active or economic focus tend to be worth including. However blending activity and economy tends to make a game worse rather than better. Those kinds of extension usually breed design tension (by making the focus less joyful) and introduce busywork that the player would rather skip.

As a general rule of thumb, consider that the ideal game (which doesn’t really exist) has no more than a 1:3 weighting of activity versus economy, or vice versa. This means that the play brain never has to devote more than 25% of its attention span to elements that are not the focus of the game. Enough to make a skilful game a little strategic or a strategic game a little skilful perhaps, but no more.

In Halo, the main tests are activities (shooting, ducking, movement) but there is a small economic aspect through rules like ammunition or how many weapons the Master Chief can hold. The player must be mindful of his resources, but only in so far as they support or detract from activities. The game economy only draws perhaps 10% of his attention, leaving 90% for the action.

In Starcraft the economy involves the logistics and strategy of building a perfect army, but speed is also important. World class Starcraft players have lightning-fast mouse and keyboard skills for selecting units and issuing orders, and speed-focused tactics to rush opponents in the early stages of the game catch new players off guard.

However despite the need for speed most of the player’s attention is actually on the economy. He has to keep many complex factors in mind, such as position of units, status of resources, enemy positions, upgrading of units, and formulate a strategy to win.

Although the controls might be complex, the actions that they govern are uniform. Unlike Halo, where the physical skill of pulling a trigger and aiming may hit or miss, a Protoss zealot ordered to attack a Zergling will do so in the same pattern, with the same result, every time. 75% of the player’s attention is focused on issuing 100 similar orders and many other management activities. If he had to physically be involved in combats as well, the game would be a disaster.

Not a Game

Some people may read the above and ask ‘What about games that are not fun?’ or ‘What about games that are not about winning?’ or similar. This is contentious territory because it’s talking

about topics like storytelling in games (which tends to be a lightning rod issue), but needs to be addressed.

The Stanley Parable, if you don’t know, is a mod developed for Half Life 2 in which the player plays Stanley, a lowly employee in a company whose monotonous life has been interrupted. A narrator describes Stanley’s life while the player moves him (a technique that I call alongside dialogue) and interacts with his environment.

As a player you are essentially watching The Stanley Parable and nudging it at various points. But you’re never really tested. It is interesting, but not fascinating. It encourages several replays to see the paths of choices not taken, but there is no challenge (in the play brain sense) or wins.

It and several other works sit on a different branch of the interactive tree, and to call them games is simply confusing. No conventional term exists to group works like The Stanley Parable together, but they seem closest to promenade theatre. Perhaps we should call them videoplay, inter-drama or virtual promenade.

Whatever they are, they are not really games. Games really do need to be fun, and that fun needs to be fascinating. Otherwise players never complete them and any artistic intent that the game may have had goes unseen. It’s hard to accept that fun is a requirement of play and that games are not a storytelling art because we are conditioned to think that storytelling is the only valid form of art.

Blame Hollywood for that if you like, but the upshot is that there are many game developers out there who want to believe that they must go beyond fun in order to be taken seriously. Unfortunately they can’t, but also they don’t need to. They are already artists, but their art is the making of fascinating worlds, not movies.

Duke Ellington understood that music needed to swing because swing was the gateway to everything else. With games, fascination is the same. It don’t mean a thing if it aint fascinating.（source:whatgamesare）