作者：Lewis

此前我曾撰文探讨游戏如今所蕴含的深度及角色扮演游戏自《龙与地下城》发行以来所发生的变化。我发现二者存在某种联系，玩家在游戏中的追求在过去30-40年来发生巨大变化。

D&D(from watchplayread.com)

30-40年前，许多业余游戏玩家在游戏中追求的是玩法深度，而现在很多玩家不再追求玩法深度，转而瞄准多样性，这是一大变化。如今越来越多玩家也开始在游戏中追求故事叙述元素，但我不确定它们是着眼的是叙述深度，还是叙述多样性。就长远决策来看，游戏体验如今变得越来越被动，这和玩法深度相违背。是的，如今许多电子游戏都融入丰富操作和短期决策内容，但其中决策和选择没有长远意义。

多样性能够带来重玩价值，但游戏深度也会带来重玩价值。所以它们其实是殊途同归，目标都是促使玩家反复体验游戏。

多样性“不好”？显然不是。玩法深度就“很好”？显然也不是，但这是我在过去50年的游戏体验中所追求的元素。

我这里谈论的是游戏爱好者，那些常玩游戏的玩家。家庭玩家是截然不同的群体，他们既不追求游戏深度，也没有着眼于多样性，他们体验游戏的目的是同家庭成员和好友进行社交互动。

我所指的深度和多样性是什么？深度玩法需要玩家做出众多深度决策，这些决策会影响游戏结果，而且通常具有多种选择，因此玩家就能够选出最佳选择，但能够获胜的选择不止一个（游戏邦注：所谓的“可行”选择是指，其至少在特定阶段能够促使玩家走向成功，这和“貌似可行但实则不然”的选择不同）。这类游戏通常存在突然显现的元素，通常是玩家在初次体验时不会发现的选择。这通常和决策体系有关，一决策带来另一决策，而此决策又引出另一决策，周而复始，这就是所谓的树形结构，能够提高游戏的获胜机率。这有点相互矛盾：若游戏有太多决策和可行选择，那么如果各决策和选择对最终结果毫无影响，游戏就会丧失深度。

而多样性就是玩家进行众多类似操作和相关活动，游戏没有呈现额外重要决策和可行选择。多样性有时会以另一决策代替某决策，或者更多时候以另一选择代替某选择，但重要决策和可行选择的数量及决策体系的深度依然保持不变。多样性可以通过融入额外情节或关卡、各种地图、不同角色类型或随机事件形成。

变化情况

究竟发生什么变化？40年前，我们还没有接触过电子游戏，CCG（卡片游戏）也还没有诞生，此时棋盘和纸牌游戏及RPG游戏都才刚刚诞生。RPG游戏的出现反映30-40年的行业巨变。很多第1、2版《龙与地下城》的玩家都追求玩法深度。第3版《龙与地下城》的侧重点则转变成优化角色元素，游戏推出各种各样的级别、技能和特技，旨在呈现完美军队，进行策略斗争。《龙与地下城》变成虚幻版《Squad Leader》。玩家不会轻易在游戏中死去，人们的对“死亡恐惧感”慢慢从游戏中消失。

在电脑RPG游戏中，这点表现得更明显。若你死去，最糟的情况就是重新加载，回到之前保存的内容，然后继续前进。在众多电脑MMORPG游戏中，玩家无需保存游戏，会自动获得重生，然后继续游戏。毕竟MMO开发者没有将玩法深度当作自己的目标，他们的目标只是尽量让玩家继续游戏，这样他们每月都能获得营收。为留住用户，很多在线电子游戏都会持续奖励玩家，而非要求玩家必须取得进步和优势。若玩家无需一定要取得进步，那么决策就变得不那么重要，选择也就无足轻重。社交游戏将此发挥得淋漓尽致，这一领域的用户粘性完全取代玩法。

玩家不仅无需对游戏操作负责，死亡恐惧也在电子RPG游戏中消失。若死去与否无关紧要，若玩家在失败时能够再次进行尝试，那么决策对于未来将发生的内容就没有什么影响，所以它们就鲜少涉及玩法深度。《魔兽世界》是款鲜有玩法深度的游戏，专业“pharmer”会在操作具有经济可行性的时候将角色玩至较高等级，然后将角色售给那些贪图方便的玩家。“刷任务”是这类体验的特点，对于很多玩家来说这就像是“工作”。前面说到多样性已取代深度在游戏中的地位，但在《魔兽世界》中，玩家似乎对于多样性不怎么感兴趣，直到他们到达最高等级为止。角色在前进过程中获得的乐趣很少，这只有等到他们到达最高等级才会体现出来。对于那些处于最高等级的玩家而言，多样性是保持游戏趣味性的必要条件。

即便在最高等级，许多玩家依然持续操作相同内容，扮演相同的角色（游戏邦注：DPS和治疗者等）。据大家所述，此阶段的内容具有约束性，会自动重复，不涉及基于各种可行选择做出重要决策。

有些电子游戏包含“迷你游戏”，迷你游戏嵌于主游戏中，供玩家在对主游戏感到厌烦时体验的不同内容。此内容的吸引之处在于多样性，而非深度。

第4版《龙与地下城》反映此变化趋势。有些玩家责任依然存在，但死亡恐惧在游戏中完全消失，或通过提供充足初始生命值或复原力，或是令玩家在丧失能力后能够轻松返回操作中，抑或者是提供平价治愈选择等。角色无法再通过魔法收集战略信息。过去《D&D》玩家需要通过角色收集信息，或弄清如何通过魔法收集信息：现在他们通过掷骰子。这部分是因为在电子游戏中，裁判员（即电脑）尚不够聪明，无法处理各种对话和玩家意愿，所以内容就简化成对话分支、数据和掷骰子。如今的第4版内容是完全的“自然”形式，几乎是完全不涉及长期规划的策略战斗，因此包含较少策略元素。

若干博客评论家谈到玩家抱怨第4版《D&D》的暗门。这被玩家视作“险恶的DM诡计”。但游戏DM表示，他并没有使用暗门，因为他很清楚自己希望玩家朝何处前进，进行什么操作，隐藏路线毫无意义。换而言之，在将多样性和线性描述当作目标的游戏中，暗门只会起到阻碍作用。在以玩法深度作为目标的游戏中，暗门是个区分点，是否具有暗门选择会带来显著差异。

RPG内容的设计如今更多旨在让玩家感受到多样性、奖励及胜利感觉，而非体验玩法深度和遭遇失败感。它们变得更像是娱乐活动，而不那么像游戏（游戏邦注：这里假设我们所谓的游戏是指存在明显对立，需要深思熟虑，然后做出反应的内容）。

我觉得如今RPG游戏越来越普遍的特点是：裁判设计故事，玩家遵循故事发展。就如Monte Cook几年前在《Origins》中发现的，这款桌面探险游戏比过去更注重故事内容。传统选择就是设定情境，让玩家设计故事，而非要求他们遵循线性脉络。在电子RPG领域，电子/掌机风格的游戏通常要求玩家遵循特定线性故事。有些人将著名的《最终幻想》系列形容成夹杂无关紧要探险和战斗情节的故事内容。

Origins（from mydigitallife.info）

最喜欢的游戏作品

30-40年前，多数玩家都有最爱的1-2款游戏，这些是他们愿意反复体验的内容。这种情况现在很少见。若你询问年轻玩家，尤其是电子游戏玩家，他们最喜欢的游戏作品是什么，他们多半回答不出来或者只是罗列几款他们现

在正在体验的游戏。有些甚至对于此问题感到惊讶。他们通常会将数十款游戏都列为自己的最爱。体验一款游戏数百次或连续体验同款游戏数百小时对于当代玩家来说已是罕见情况。那些具有最爱作品，会反复体验游戏的年轻玩家多数都集中于《魔法风云会故事》和《游戏王》。CCG的目标是逐步改变游戏，说服玩家购买新卡片；有时游戏规则也会发生改变。

许多AAA游戏都涉及谜题或故事元素，只要你顺利解决谜题或完整体验故事，就没有再继续下去的必要。有些游戏会提供若干不同角色，这样游戏就会呈现多样性。但其中鲜有玩法深度。具有深刻玩法的游戏能够供玩家反复体验，同时会呈现新元素和新可能。谜题最终会被被破解，破解后内容就鲜有趣味。

此根本变化也许体现在当前各种休闲活动中。相比30-40年前，如今的娱乐活动存在更多消遣内容和更多机会。现在我们拥有万维网，有众多电视网络，以及可下载电影和电视节目资源，我们拥有智能手机，能够免费发送短信，还有就是iPad和MP3，这些在30-40年前都不存在。用户不再像过去那样长久停留于某物，游戏领域同样如此。

体验具有玩法深度的游戏通常需要耐心，按游戏计划行事。这些内容如今非常罕见，因为人们如今越来越依赖手机等消遣休闲设备。

我们现在已经变成浅尝辄止的“娱乐体验者”。声音/配乐体验者喜欢在他们的MP3上存储成百上千首歌曲，但他们不会特别偏好其中的哪支曲子。游戏玩家也同此理，他们玩很多游戏，但也不会很常玩其中某款游戏。多样性是他们的目标。

这不是这段时间唯一发生的巨变。即便是对那些想要充分发挥聪明才智的玩家来说，解谜也被玩法深度所取代。在电子游戏领域，用户粘性慢慢取代玩法，成为设计师的首要目标。（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）

Depth versus Variety: a Fundamental Change in Game Playing in the Past 30-40 Years

by Lewis

Recently I was discussing via blog posts what depth is in games (http://gamasutra.com/blogs/LewisPulsipher/20111219/9125/What_is_Depth_in_Games.php and elsewhere), and then ran across a discussion of how role-playing games have changed since D&D was first published .  I’ve realized that there is a connection between the two, that what gamers are looking for in games has changed in a fundamental way in the past 30-40 years.

That fundamental change is that 30-40 years ago many hobby game players looked for gameplay depth (and occasionally narrative depth) in their games.  Now most game players don’t look for gameplay depth but look instead for variety, which is quite a different thing.  Many more people now also look for narrative in their games, but I’m not sure whether they’re looking for narrative depth or narrative variety.  Game playing has become much more passive where long-term decision-making is concerned, and that’s incompatible with gameplay depth.  Yes, there’s lots of activity in many kinds of video games, and short-term decision making, but the decisions and choices often don’t really matter in the long run.

Variety tends to lead to replayability, but game depth also leads to replayability.  So they are two paths to the same objective, getting people to play the game over and over again.

Is variety “bad?”  Certainly not.  Is gameplay depth “good?”  Not in and of itself, though it’s what I have tended to look for in over 50 years of game playing. Regardless of my preference, this discussion is a recognition of reality, what IS, not a criticism of the change.

(At this point I hope it’s obvious that I’m talking about trends and tendencies, about majorities, not about every hobby game player.  Of course there are many, many exceptions in a group as large as ours.)

I’m talking here about hobby gamers, about people who play games frequently as a hobby.  Family gamers are a very different group, and have never been people who looked for depth in a game.  Nor did they look for variety, 30-40 years ago, their purpose in playing games was and is to socialize with their families and friends.

What do I mean by depth and variety?  I’m working on a very long piece discussing gameplay depth and other kinds of depth in games.  For our purposes here I’ll say that deep gameplay requires players to make many significant decisions, decisions that make a difference in the outcome of the game, and those decisions have multiple viable choices so the player can pick a better choice rather than a worse one, but more than one choice has a good chance to be successful.  (A “viable” choice is one that, at least a reasonable part of the time, can lead to success, as opposed to “plausible” but not viable choices that look like they might work out well but rarely if ever will.)  There is often an element of emergence in such games, choices (and sometimes decisions) that players don’t even recognize when they first play the game.  This is often associated with decision trees, decisions that lead to others that lead to others and so on in a sort of tree shape, that give a good chance of success in the game.  Yet perhaps paradoxically, if a game has *too many* decisions and *too many viable choices*, then it loses depth as each individual decision and choice becomes insignificant to the outcome of the whole.

Variety, on the other hand, is doing lots more of the same kinds of actions and related activity without providing additional significant decisions and viable choices.  Variety occasionally replace one decision with a different one, or more often replaces a choice or choices with different ones, but the volume of significant decisions and viable choices, and the depth of the decision trees, remains the same.  Variety can be added by additional scenarios or levels, variable maps, different character classes, and random events (among others).

How things have changed

So much for brief definition.  How (and why) have things changed?  40 years ago we didn’t have video games, nor did we have CCGs, we had board and card games and we had RPGs just about to emerge.

The development of RPGs reflects the 30-40 year fundamental change.  Many of the players of original, first, and second edition D&D wanted gameplay depth.  In third edition D&D the emphasis changed to ways of optimizing characters using a stupendous variety of published classes and skills and feats, a striving to make the perfect one man army for tactical combat.  D&D became fantasy Squad Leader.  It was much harder to die and in fact the “fear of death” was slowly being removed from the game.

In computer RPGs this was happening much more strongly.  If you died then at worst you just loaded your saved game and continued.  In many computer MMO (massively multiplayer online) RPGs you don’t even need to save your game, you just respawn and continue.  After all, the makers of the MMOs do not have gameplay depth as an objective, their objective is to keep you playing the game as long as possible so that they can collect the monthly fees.  (Now monthly fees are much less common because we’ve gone to free to play games, but the objective is still to have people play as long as possible so that they will spend money on virtual goods and other advantages.)   In order to retain players, many online video games reward players constantly rather than make them responsible for earning their advancement and advantages.  If there’s no responsibility for earning advancement, decisions become much less significant, and choices matter much less.  Social networking games have taken this to the extreme.  Engagement has replaced gameplay.  (See http://whatgamesare.com/2011/04/how-engagement-killed-gameplay-language.html for more.)

Not only responsibility for your actions but the fear of death has been removed from electronic RPGs, and with it most of the gameplay depth has been removed.  If it doesn’t really matter whether you die, if you can try again when you fail, then your decisions no longer make a difference to what happens in the long run, so they are no longer significant in the gameplay depth sense.  World of Warcraft is a game with so little gameplay depth to it that professional “pharmers” can, in an economically feasible period of time, play characters up to high levels and sell them to other people who don’t want to *bother* to play the game to get to the maximum level.  “The grind” characterizes play, and for many people playing the game is “like work.” (See http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/ .) I’ve said that variety has been substituted for depth in games but in WoW there doesn’t seem to be much interest from the players in variety until after you’ve reached maximum level.  As characters work their way up there’s little interest in the journey, only in the destination of maximum level.  For those at max level, variety is essential to maintain interest in the game.

Even at maximum level, big raids amount to characters doing the same thing, their “role” (DPS, healer, etc.), for extended periods of time.  By all accounts it’s regimented and  repetitively automatic, and does not involve making significant decisions with multiple viable choices.

In some video games we have the phenomenon of “mini-games”, completely different games that have been inserted into the main game for players to play when they get bored of the main game.  Again it’s variety that is the attraction, not depth.

The recent fourth edition (4e) of D&D reflects this change of emphasis.  Some responsibility is still there, but the fear of death has been almost entirely removed through lots of beginning hit points, healing surges, easy ways to come back into the action when you’ve been incapacitated, cheap healing potions, and so forth.  Characters no longer have much capability to gather strategic (or tactical) information through spells.  In the past D&D players had to speak in character to gather information, or figure out how to use spells to gather information: now they roll dice.  Some of this may derive from video games where the referee–the computer–is nowhere close to smart enough to deal with a wide variety of dialogue and a wide variety of player intentions, so everything is reduced to dialog trees and numbers and dice rolls.  4e is now, in its “natural” form, almost entirely tactical battles without much long-range planning and consequently with very little strategy.

The blog commenters I mentioned above talked about players complaining about secret doors in 4e D&D.  This appeared to be regarded as a “nasty DM trick”.  As a counter-comment a 4e DM said he didn’t use secret doors because he knew where he wanted his players to go and what he wanted them to do and there was no point in hiding the path.  In other words, in a game where variety and linear narrative is the objective then secret doors only get in the way.  In a game where gameplay depth is the objective then secret doors can be a differentiator, and the choice to look for secret doors or not look for them can be significant.

RPGs are now arranged much more for players to experience variety, rewards, and winning rather than to experience gameplay depth and the possibility of losing.  They are becoming more entertainments (something like movies) than games, if by games we mean something where there’s a significant opposition that requires thoughtful reaction.

I also think it’s much more common in RPGs nowadays that the referee devises a story and makes the players conform to that story.  As Monte Cook observed several years ago at Origins, the published tabletop adventures tend to be much more story-based than in the past.  The old-style alternative was to set up a situation and let the players make a story rather than forcing them to follow a linear path.  In video RPGs, the Japanese/console style has been to force the players to follow along a particular linear story.  (The American/PC style is more like WoW.)  In fact some people have characterized the famous Final Fantasy series as stories punctuated with repetitive episodes of exploration and combat that make virtually no difference to what actually happens in the stories.

Favorite Games

30-40 years ago most game players had one or a few favorite games, ones that they wanted to play over and over again.  This is far less common now.  Ask younger gamers, especially video gamers, what their favorite game is and most will be unable to tell you or will simply name the game they’re currently playing.  Some are even surprised at the idea of having a favorite game.  They want to name a dozen or more as their favorites, if they can narrow it down that far.  The very idea of playing a game a hundred times or 500 times (I know people who have played my 4 to 5 hour tabletop game Britannia more than 500 times), or the video game equivalent, playing the same game for many hundreds of hours, is foreign to most contemporary gamers.  Many of the younger people who do have a favorite game that they play over and over have settled on Magic:the Gathering or Yu-Gi-Oh.  Yet the very nature of CCGs is to change the game over time (providing immense variety) in order to persuade players to buy new cards; sometimes the game rules are changed as well.

Many AAA video games involve a puzzle or a story, and once you solve the puzzle or experience the story there is no reason to continue.  Some of the games will give you several different characters to play so that variety is added to the game.  But there is little gameplay depth.  A game with deep gameplay can be played again and again while revealing new aspects and possibilities.  Puzzles tend to be solved, and once solved hold little interest.

This fundamental change may reflect all forms of leisure activity these days.  There are many more distractions and many more opportunities for entertainment than 30-40 years ago.  Now we have the World Wide Web, we have hundreds of TV networks, we have movies and TV programs on recordable media and available through instant download, we have smart phones and texting and free long distance and iPads and MP3 players and so forth, none of which was available 30 or 40 years ago. People just don’t seem to stick to one thing the way they used to and that applies to games as well as everything else.

Playing a game with deep gameplay usually requires patience and a commitment to planning.  These characteristics are in short supply nowadays as people rely on their cell phones to provide both distractions (time killing) and a way to compensate for poor planning or lack of interest in planning.

We have become “entertainment bathers.”  Sound/music bathers like to have 1000 or 10,000 songs on their MP3 players but likely don’t listen to any one of the songs very much.  (Clearly of an older generation, I can listen to the same song over and over for an hour sometimes, if it’s a really good song; how many young people would even dream of doing that?)  Game bathers like to have lots and lots of games to play but don’t play any one of them very much.  Variety is the goal.  We’ve become a jaded society.

This is not the only fundamental change over that period.  Even among many who want to fully use their brains when playing games, puzzle-solving (which rarely involves gameplay depth, it is a different kind of skill) has displaced gameplay depth.  And in the video game world, engagement has tended to replace gameplay as the objective of designers.  But those are topics for another time .（Source：pulsiphergamedesign）