“黄金法则”：游戏最具价值的资源是玩家的时间和注意力。

WoW from make-wowgold.com

重要性所在：毋庸置疑，玩家的注意力是游戏最重要的资源（游戏邦注：超越开发者呈现的所有内容），但很多人都没有秉承这点原则设计和体验游戏，主要表现如下：

1. 很多玩家都未能坚持到游戏结束的那一刻。他们的对游戏的注意力早在内容进入尾声前就已消失。

2. 《星际争霸》的最佳玩家通常以他们的每分钟操作次数来衡量（他们能够平行操作的内容量）。最佳玩家通常每分钟进行超过200次的点击或每秒3次的有效点击。

3. 《Angband》角色的最大敌人是疲倦感，然后是厌倦感。赢得此游戏的最佳策略是在最短时间内尝试内容——而这却是有违刷任务机制的游戏操作。

4. 无论你如何设计游戏，你都无法阻止玩家选择放弃体验。MMORPG游戏的角色和游戏货币交易可让玩家跳过某些内容，从而为游戏产生经济价值。有些玩家显然愿意在购买游戏上花更多金钱，从而顺利回避某些内容。

结论：在设计游戏过程中，要首先着眼于制作优质体验，而非持久体验。通过开放非线性选择，略过不必要内容，让杰出玩家能够缩短体验游戏的过程。由玩家决定什么内容属于多余，而不是将他们局限于过场动画以及无关紧要的内容。

游戏邦注：原文发布于2009年10月18日，文章叙述以当时为背景。（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 Rules of Game Design:The Golden rule

In Towards a Moral Code for Game Designers, I sketched out some brief rules of game design, and made the promise I’ll expand on them – which I’m doing in this series. I’ll keep the rules punchy, short and easy to remember – the ideas are usually not mine, and I’ll attempt to credit them appropriately. Feel free to respond in the comments, buttress my arguments or undermine them. Remember, I’m trying to be a force for good to Ernest Adams’ evil.

‘The Golden rule:’ The most valuable resource in your game is the player’s time and attention.

Named after: Gold, particularly gold in World of Warcraft.

Why is it important: It should be self explanatory that the player’s attention is the most important resource in the game – far more important that anything else that the developers can deliver – but many people design and play games as if this as not the case. Consider the following:

1. The majority of people never reach the end of a video game. Their attention gets exhausted before the game content does.

2. The best players in Starcraft are often measured by their actions per minute – the total number of actions that they can execute effectively in parallel. In the best players, this is over 200 per minute or more than 3 meaningful clicks per second. This resource is usually more strategically important than perfecting a build queue, or the population cap, or the decision to rush, boom or turtle.

3. The number one killer of characters in Angband is tiredness, followed by boredom. The best strategy to winning the game is to attempt this in as short a time as possible – a counter intuitive approach in a game which is effectively infinitely grindable.

4. No matter how you design a game, you cannot prevent a player from choosing not to play it. In fact, trading of characters and in-game currency in MMORPGs make it possible to put economic value on skipping playing parts of the game. Some people are clearly willing to spend much more than they did on the purchase of the game, to avoid playing it.

Consequences: Design your game so that playing better is more important than playing longer. Allow good players to short cut the process of playing by opening up non-linear progression options, and skipping over any unnecessary content. Leave it up to the player to decide what content is unnecessary, rather than lock them into cut scenes and out of in-game content.（Source：roguelikedeveloper）