游戏邦在:
杂志专栏:
gamerboom.com订阅到鲜果订阅到抓虾google reader订阅到有道订阅到QQ邮箱订阅到帮看

思考玩家在创意过程中扮演的角色及作用

作者:Will Holt

在我观看某视频的过程中,有个问题引发我的兴趣——“创意是基于个人神秘内心世界的独立行为,还是能让我们制作出更令人满意的创造性体验的普遍创意法则?”

这令我霎时间变得不知所措,但下面是我基于个人经验的看法。

任何艺术学科无疑都有能够让我们制作出更令人满意的终端产品的普遍法则。

例如,音乐就有非常明确的系列规则。其中包括能够带来不同感觉和想法的各种音符。以大调演奏的游行乐队慷慨激昂。而以小调演奏的小提琴手听起来悲伤许多。以降B布鲁斯音符演奏的内容听起来会非常消沉,会促使你戴上太阳镜,点上香烟,开始唱歌叙述自己的女人如何离开自己,远走他乡。

剧院也有自己一套传统和功能规则。五彩缤纷的灯光能够激发观众的各种情感,各演员的不同着装会让观众投以不同关注度,语言呈现方式也会影响观众对作品的诠释。例如,想想罗密欧的“嘘!那边窗户里亮起的是什么光?哦,那是东方,朱丽叶就是太阳。”非常浪漫,是吧?这是热恋青年闯入仇家花园,偷瞄在舞会一见钟情女子时所说的话。现在假设他并非幻想自己能同朱丽叶交谈,而是置身舞台中心位置。设定更强烈的陈述语气,是吧?也许罗密欧就不会那么令人毛骨悚然,而更像积极进取的浪漫英雄。但这并不符合《罗密欧与朱丽叶》的整体故事,他依然属于热恋中的青年。

视觉艺术尤其如此,它有自己的指导方针和方法论,因为这是第二古老的表达方式(游戏邦注:除故事叙述外)。其存在某些确定的艺术风格和普遍理念,如视域、视角、颜色和细节,将观众目光带入特定视角,有时规则甚至会曲解或完全忽略其他既定规则!由于视觉艺术不依靠协调性、故事结构或者甚至是语言之类的元素,从根本上看,它只依靠两条规则。确保具有能见度和辨识度。但二者在应用上存在差异性;能见度降低或缺乏辨识度都可能变成决定性因素。

故事叙述非常重要。故事叙述方式、措辞及故事模式多种多样,微观发行&迷你发行&宏观发行,通过角色制造悬念,通过环境制造悬念……我尚无法驾驭此话题,所以还是回到最初的问题。

相比更古老的艺术形式,游戏相当新颖,我们很难说出游戏的普遍法则,只是因为关于游戏的学术研究还不够普遍。有人认为游戏是各学科的综合。在我看来这完全正确。显然游戏融入音乐、视觉艺术、角色设置、台词呈现以及故事结构。而且还融入互动要素,这是问题的关键。我们要如何更深入把握沙盒环境下的交互性(其局限性因具体情况而异,不仅体现在不同游戏之间,而且还体现在相同作品之中)?

若是进行大胆猜测,我觉得运动是有限空间交互性的最佳代表。例如,在足球运动中,球员禁止用手。这意味着他们得用头、胸和肩。但愿无需用到脸。聪明球员会从此有限规则中发现独特表达方式;“如果我们用头顶球,会出现什么情况?”这说明你球技很好,能够成功实现倒勾射门。

另一体现有限空间交互性的例子就是《龙与地下城》。我相信你们很多人都知道这款游戏,但肯定很多人都没听过谷歌《龙与地下城》优化结构。虽然在实际战斗中运用这些角色颇令人怀疑,这取决于DM和战斗,但创造这些结构的玩家能够基于既有游戏规则创造出子游戏;这是对规则和既有资源的呈现,其基于优化结构发展完整社区。若还想要更多例子,不妨查看地精Pun-pun。此角色并非供玩家进行体验,而是作为思维训练。原本旨在促进角色扮演和地牢爬行的游戏如今也衍生出学术元素。这完全偏离最初目标,但依然没有超出虚拟空间的界限。表现相当出色。再来就是“投石巨人”。

Oblivion from guides.gamepressure.com

Oblivion from guides.gamepressure.com

也许有人会说这不过是用户生成内容。没错,但这不同于改变升级运作模式的《湮没》mod。而更像是体验vanilla《湮没》的诀窍,游戏将玩家最不常用的技能变成主要技能,而非瞄准竞技、杂技或保护工具,因为前两者会自动升级,导致你提高敌人威力,而却没有增加自己的战斗能量,此外,只要你从Nocturnal神殿获得牢不可破的迪德拉撬锁工具,后者就会失去效用。这是基于子游戏的社区。

我觉得子游戏是虚拟有限空间创造性的普遍法则之一。若你停留在虚拟有限空间的预期范围内,《超级马里奥兄弟》会在何处?如果你无论如何也无法跳过旗杆,或无法跳上1-2层的天花板,会出现什么情况?举《超级马里奥兄弟》中一个典型例子,若是玩家需拿下蓝色yoshi,吃下贝壳,在门柱下飞翔,杀死yoshi方能知晓通向星际世界的秘密通道如何?这违背游戏的预期规则,但令人印象深刻。任天堂这么做非常具有独创性!

dungeons and dragons from mmohuts.com

dungeons and dragons from mmohuts.com

再来看看一个允许玩家富有创造性的负面案例——《龙与地下城 4》。玩家只享有少量选择和变化,虽然特殊规则依然超越普遍法则,但玩家在规则界限内所享有的创造性过多。游戏原本应设有子游戏,但其最终避开此内容,旨在通过减少可能性降低新用户的准入门槛,而设置子游戏其实非常必要。我不是说《龙与地下城 4》不好;更通俗易懂意味着会有更多用户,能够更好地延续《龙与地下城》的品牌,这是件好事,但我觉得游戏开发者给予长期衍生内容的关注度太少(游戏邦注:这能够提高重玩价值和创造子游戏)。

总之,创造在玩家角色背景中体现个人兴趣,是玩家对虚拟有限空间规则的认知,这些内容能够通过精心设计和运用特殊超越普遍规则得到强化,没有太多限制普遍应用沙盒效应的特殊障碍。精心运用规则能够让玩家发挥个人创造性,其中途径是让个人创造性影响和塑造玩家在虚拟有限空间的运作方式。(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

Thoughts on the Player’s Role in the Creative Process

by Will Holt

So I was watching The Escapist’s Extra Credits feature on The Role of the Player, and a question mentioned in the video intrigued me. The question was, “Is creation merely a personal act referencing only the secret inner life of the individual, or are there universal aspects to creation that might allow us to make a more satisfying creative experience?”

It had me dumbstruck for a moment, but here’s what I worked out based on my own experience.

Within any given artistic discipline, there are definitely universal aspects that allow us to make a more satisfying end product.

For example, music has a pretty concretely established set of rules. There are (among a vast array of other things) different scales that are known to bring different feelings and concepts to mind. A marching band playing something in a major key is going to be toe-tapping. A violin playing something in a minor key is going to sound much, much sadder than the aforementioned marching band. Something played using the B flat blues scale is going to be funky, and might inspire to you put on a pair of sunglasses, light a cigarette and start singing about how your woman left you (dun dun) and went so far away (dun dun).

Theatre also has a set of traditions and functional rules of its own. Differently coloured lights can evoke different emotions in the audience, dressing the actors differently can make the audience pay more attention to one character than another, and line delivery methods (soliloquy vs multiple character dialogue as well as the emotion invoked by the actor when delivering said lines, posture and movements during the line delivery, hell, even where they stand on the stage) all play into how we interpret the work being presented to us as an audience. By example, imagine Romeo’s “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks; it is the east, and Juliet is the sun.” Ok? Pretty romantic, eh? Yeah, being taken in the context of lovestruck teenager breaking into opposing family’s garden to steal a glance at the girl he saw once at a party can do that. Ok, now imagine instead of intending on speaking with her (he totally was, don’t give me that ‘he was seen accidentally’ nonsense. If he didn’t want to actually speak with her, he wouldn’t have been in the Capulet’s garden. But, I digress.) and standing off to the side, up stage left or stage left (where he’s important but not at the forefront), he’s standing down stage centre (where he’s front and centre). Makes a bit more of a bold statement, yes? Perhaps Romeo seems less a creepy teenager and more a conquering romantic hero, jumping from woman’s bed to woman’s bed in a single bound. That doesn’t fit with the general story of R&J, though, so lovestruck teenager it is.

Visual art, especially, has its guidelines and set methodologies, as it’s pretty much the second oldest form of expression, short of storytelling. There’s definitive styles of art, common concepts like scale, perspective, color, detail, drawing the viewer’s eye in to a specific point, and even rules that distort or completely ignore any other given rule! Because visual art doesn’t rely on things like harmony, story structure or even language, at its most visceral form it has merely two rules. It must be visible and it must be distinguishable. Even these two base rules vary in their application, though; a piece’s reduced visibility or ease of distinguishing it from the background could be a defining factor.

Storytelling’s a biggie. There are so many different methods of telling a story, the wording you use, the format your story comes in, microreleases (web comics, flash fiction) vs minireleases (comic books, episodic flash fiction) vs macroreleases (novels), building suspense through character, building suspense through environment… the list goes on and I’m not near qualified enough to speak at length on this subject, so back to the initial question as it applies to games.

As games are relatively new to the world in comparison with older art forms, it’s difficult to say what these universal aspects might be, simply because the study of games on an academic level is something that’s relatively new to the world stage. One could argue that as games are a marriage of disciplines, all of the above applies. This is, I think, absolutely true. Obviously, games incorporate music, visual art, placement of actors, delivering of lines and story structure. They also have their interactive aspect which, as far as this post goes, is the crux of the matter. Where can we draw from to gain an increased degree of understanding interactivity as it applies to sandbox environments whose limits vary by large degrees from instance to instance, not only from game to game but even within a game?

Were I to hazard a guess, I’d say that sports are a good example of interaction in artificially limited environments. For example, in soccer (football to anywhere but North America) it’s forbidden to use your hands. This means that conventionally, you’re going to have to use your head, chest and the top of your shoulder. Hopefully not your face. Clever players have found unique means of expression within this artifically limiting ruleset; ‘What if we kicked above our heads?’ It’s become an expression of great skill to successfully pull off a bicycle kick.

Another example of interaction in artificially limiting environments can actually be found in dungeons and dragons. I’m sure a great many of you know this, but google d&d optimized builds. While the usage of these characters in an actual campaign is questionable depending on DM and campaign, players who create these builds have successfully created a meta-game from the rules of an existing game; it’s an expression of the knowledge of rules and given material (interaction in an artificially limited environment) that has grown a whole community out of optimized builds. Want an example? Check out Pun-pun the kobold. This character was NEVER meant to be played, but rather it was meant as a thought exercise. Now hold that thought a second there. A game designed to facilitate roleplaying and dungeon crawls has spawned a purely academic side to it. Something that’s separate and completely different from its original purpose, yet still within the bounds of the artificial environment. That’s pretty freaking cool. For other examples, check out the Hulking Hurler, or pretty much anything at brilliantgameologists.com’s Min/Max it section of their forums.

Now, some may say that’s it’s simply user generated content. This is true, but it’s different than a mod for oblivion that changes how levelling works. This is more like that tip for playing vanilla oblivion that states to take your least used skills as primary skills, and not to take athletics, acrobatics or security, as the first two will level up naturally and can cause you to increase the power of enemies without increasing your own combat capabilities, and the latter can be rendered completely useless once you get that unbreakable daedric lockpick from Nocturnal’s shrine. It’s a community built around metagaming.

And I think that metagaming is one of the universal aspects to creativity in an artificially limited environment (ie/ a video game). I mean really, where would Super Mario Brothers be if you stayed within the intended confines of the artificially limited environment? What if you could -not- jump over the flagpole no matter what you tried, or if you couldn’t jump into the ceiling in 1-2? To use a pretty prominent example from Super Mario World, what about that secret exit that required you to take a blue yoshi, eat a shell, fly -under- the goal post and KILL YOSHI to get that secret exit that led to the star world? That’s SO against the intended rules of the game (y’know, where the game encourages you to get and keep yoshi by not only providing several new mechanics (tongue, immunity to jumping on spinies and fireballs AND the ability to bounce off of these objects to attain greater heights) but also adding another instrument in the music track as long as you ride your faithful if easily scared long tongued friend) that it’s mindblowing! How absolutely ingenious Nintendo was to do this!

To take a look at a bad example of allowing the player to be creative, check out D&D 4e. The player is limited to a (comparatively) small number of options and variations, and while specific rules still override general rules, there’s WAY too much specific to allow any significant degree of creativity within the bounds of the rules. It’s anticipated the metagaming and prevented it, in order to facilitate a lower entry level for new customers by reducing the possibility, and therefore the need, of metagaming. I’m not saying that D&D 4e is bad by any means; more accessibility means more people playing which means continuation of the D&D brand, which is very much a good thing, but I don’t think that the long term ramifications were considered as much as they should have been, as they apply to replayability and metagaming.

In short? Creation, in the context of the player’s role, is a personal act reflective of their interest in and knowledge of the rules of the artificially limited environment, and can be facilitated by careful design and an application of rules that states that specific overrides general, and does not have too many specific barriers to prevent the sandbox of general applications of rules to be played with. This careful application of the rules allows players to exercise their own personal creativity by allowing it to influence and shape the way they work within the artificial confines of the game.

If anyone else has good examples of metagaming facilitating creativity or has other ideas relating to the original question of individual creativity vs universal aspects of creativity, I’d be glad to hear your thoughts.(Source:gamasutra


上一篇:

下一篇: