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游戏设计也需要多种生活积累和沉淀

发布时间:2012-01-19 09:08:22 Tags:,,,

作者:Lewis Pulsipher

我想全世界真正以写小说谋生的人其实并不多。我最近阅读了一篇关于Glen Cook——我最喜欢的科幻小说作者的采访。他说道:

“在我风华正茂的30岁时,写作也只能勉强作为一种业余爱好而不足以提供养家糊口的费用。在过去5年里,我通过写作而获得的酬劳也仅能够维持自己清贫的文艺生活罢了。当然不能够支撑整个家庭以及3个上学的儿子。”

Glen Cook是通用汽车一名退休的员工,曾经利用业余时间撰写小说,并发行了许多优秀的著作。而因为现在的他已经退休了,便可以将所有精力投入于写小说中。

比较起来,完全依赖桌面游戏设计谋生的甚至不足100人,较出名的桌面游戏设计师包括Reiner Knizia,Klaus Tauber(《卡坦岛》之父),Alan R. Moon(《车票之旅》开发者),Richard Borg(创造了《Liar’s Dice》以及《Memoir ’44》等游戏),以及那些效力于孩之宝等公司的人。

比起游戏领域,现在的年轻人更难以在小说界获得一定的名声。《龙骑士》的作者是个例外(他获得了许多他人的有益帮助),你根本很难列举出几个低于30岁,且能够以写小说谋生的成功作家的名字。当然了也有不少做出成绩的桌面游戏设计师不足30岁,但是我上述所提到的都是30岁以上。因为在获取一定名气之前,你都需要投入一定的努力,而在小说界中,则需要沉淀一定的个人经验。真正优秀的小说作者身上总是具有丰富的生活经验:他们可能经过了恋爱,死亡,失望,背叛等各种丰富的情感体验。

Writing keyboard(from elc.polyu.edu.hk)

Writing keyboard(from elc.polyu.edu.hk)

在即时满足盛行的年代里,年轻人更难以意识到实践的重要性。特别是对于小说创作以及游戏设计领域里的年轻人。Cook给予新手作家的建议就是:

“这个问题非常简单。不要再高谈阔论你的作品,你的故事灵感,或者无数的‘有朝一日’。你只要老老实实坐下来思考,敲打键盘,将你的想法表现出来即可。如果你真的拥有的天赋,那么不管你英语是否流畅,你终究也能够表现出这种才能。但是你也必须学着去使用这种文字表达工具。就像工匠必须知道如何使用铁锤,锯子等工具一样,你也需要知道如何使用写作工具。因为没有一名编辑会帮你修改文章。他们只会任其淹没在一大堆文章里,继续看其他表达更连贯的文章。”

Jerry Pournelle过去曾经说过,如果你愿意抛弃最初撰写的那些文字,你也可能成为一名小说家。《时光之轮》系列游戏的Brandon Sanderson与早前一些不幸的作者一样,在真正卖出一篇小说之前他都已经尝试着写了无数文章。而他以前的这些文章也不大可能得到真正的发行。

幸运的是19岁的我已经真正开始写作,而不只是夸夸其谈。还有一个能够激励19岁青少年成为小说家的方法,也就是参加每年11月所举办的“世界写作月”活动。如此他们不仅能够得到别人的帮助,也能够参与适当的竞赛,看清楚自己的实力。但是这种方法却不是长远之计。

也许电子游戏产业中有好几百人将设计游戏和关卡当成了谋生工具。但是这些人在走出学校时却很少想着去找一份设计师的工作。就像一位有抱负的小说家必须拥有一份能够谋生的稳定工作一样,游戏设计师也必须掌握其它技能,让他们能够在游戏产业中谋得一份好工作。大多数人会选择程序或美术设计,当然了也有一些游戏设计师或作家在一开始并未选择与游戏创造直接相关的工作,如游戏测试,或者在邮件收发室,IT部门,市场营销部门等任职。

就像Cook所说的,如果你想要成为一名游戏设计师,你就必须努力设计出更多游戏。而且你还必须努力去完成游戏制作,如果你只是不断寻找游戏灵感或者不断完善游戏理念,那么对于此时的你来说却没有多大的帮助。你首先需要创造一个可玩性强的游戏原型。

电子游戏产业里存在的一大问题是创造一个可玩性强的游戏原型需要花费很多时间。

当然了,修改并完善现有的游戏比起从头创造一款新游戏更简单。在我10几岁以及20岁早期时候,我便设计了模仿《Risk》以及《Diplomacy》的游戏。我同样也会自己设计游戏来玩,我曾经在很年轻的时候接触了一款商业化战争游戏,一开始就是一场冲突,以及各个城市的战争画面。但是我并不想设计一款商业化游戏:例如我设计了一个大规模的太空战争游戏,而我一个人进行着游戏,游戏中涵括了许多实际元素,还会出现了烟雾弹爆破等战争画面。但是游戏中却不存在着明确的游戏机制,我只是假装自己在和每一个帝国抗争着,但是我却看不到对手的身影,也不知道他们在做些什么。

所以当我在给游戏设计新手授课时,我首先会跟他们谈论《大富翁》这款游戏的不足之处(特别是对于成人玩家来说)以及原因,然后让他们想出适当的方法进行完善。并且让他们尝试自己修改后的游戏,提醒他们结果其实往往不是想象中的那么简单。

游戏邦:原文发表于2011年2月18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

Game designing and writing as professions

Lewis Pulsipher

I was at a local game shop the other day to try out 4th edition D&D seasonal adventures. One of the players had played Warhammer 40,000 but had never played D&D. I discovered on further acquaintance that she likes to write fiction. This seems to be the most common hobby cum professional objective of people in their late teens or early 20s, after wanting to make video games, though that observation comes from my own experience rather than surveys. (Before someone comments that surveys show that teens want to be doctors, lawyers, teachers, and sports people, I’m talking about what they really want to do, not what they think they ought to want to do, or think that others think they should do, or what they think they will have to do.)

Fortunately this 19-year-old recognizes that she isn’t likely to make a living from writing; unfortunately she doesn’t really have any idea of what else she might want to do.

I guess that the number of people who make a full living from fiction writing worldwide is in the hundreds rather than the thousands. I recently read an interview with Glen Cook, who is one of my favorite fantasy authors, who said:

“Even in my best years of the first thirty it was never more than hobby money. The last maybe five I’ve made enough to support myself in genteel poverty. Certainly not enough to support a family and put three sons through college.”

This is a man who worked full-time and retired from General Motors, and wrote in his spare time, but had a lot of books published. Now that he’s retired he does about two a year.

In contrast the number of people who make a full living from tabletop game design is very likely less than 100, total, no more than a quarter of those freelancers. The obvious freelancers are Reiner Knizia, Klaus Tauber (Catan), and Alan R. Moon (Ticket to Ride), and likely Richard Borg (Liar’s Dice, Memoir ’44 etc.), plus people who work at Hasbro and a few other companies.

Perhaps even more in fiction writing than in games, it’s very rare for young person to become well-known. Despite the exception of the author of Eragon (who got a lot of help), how many successful fiction authors, people who make enough to make a living, can you name who are less than 30 years old? There’s probably somebody in tabletop game design under 30, but the ones I’ve named above are much older than that. Part of this may simply be that you need to do quite a few things before you become well-known, but in fiction writing I also think it’s a matter of personal experience. The authors of really affective [sic] fiction can draw upon a wealth of life experience: they’ve personally experienced love and death and disappointment and betrayal. (When I talked about experience to my 19-year-old acquaintance she pointed out all the things she had *done* (such as skydiving and horse riding) rather than all the emotional experiences she had had.)

In the age of instant gratification it’s now even harder for young people to recognize that practice makes a difference, THE difference. This is true for fiction writing and it’s also true for game design. This is what Cook had to say about fiction writing when asked “Do you have any advice for beginning writers?”

“This is the easiest answer of all. Write. Don’t talk about writing. Don’t tell me about your wonderful story ideas. Don’t give me a bunch of ‘somedays.’ Plant your ass and scribble, type, keyboard. If you have any talent at all, it will leak out despite your failure to pay attention in English. And if you didn’t pay attention, learn. A carpenter needs to know how to use a hammer, level, saw, and so forth. You need to know how to use the tools of writing. Because, no, the editor won’t fix it up. S/he will just chunk your thing in the shit heap and go on to somebody who can put together an English sentence with an appropriate sprinkle of punctuation marks.”

Jerry Pournelle used to say you too can be a novelist if you’re willing to throw away your first million words. Brandon Sanderson, who is finishing the Wheel of Time series following the unfortunate death of the original author, wrote something approaching a dozen novels before he sold one. Glen Cook apparently wrote a great many novels before he sold one. And none of those old novels will ever be published.

Fortunately my 19-year-old is writing rather than just talking about writing. I know another 19-year-old who wants to be a novelist who can only make herself write as part of National Novel Writing Month every November. With the support provided by others then and the aspects of a contest she can do it; the rest of the time it doesn’t seem to happen. That’s not going to work in the long run, is it?

Perhaps several hundred people work as game and level designers in the video game industry and make a living. But very few of them came out of school to get a job as a designer. Just as it’s necessary for an aspiring fiction writer to have a fallback career in mind that will enable them to actually make a living, it’s necessary for an aspiring game designer to gain other skills that can make them a desirable employee in the game industry. This would usually be programming or art, of course, although many people in game design and even game writing started out doing something for game companies that was not directly involved with game creation, such as game testing, working in the mailroom, working in the IT department, working in marketing, and so forth

Just as Cook says that you have to write I tell students that if you want to be a game designers you’ve got to design games. And you’ve got to take them all the way through to completion, it doesn’t help just to get ideas or to flesh out the ideas a bit and then stop. A playable prototype is only the beginning.

One of the problems with video games is that it takes a long time to produce a playable prototype. It’s much more practical to begin by designing tabletop games, where you can make a playable prototype in a few hours or less.

Of course, to begin with it makes a lot of sense to modify existing games to improve them rather than to do games from scratch. When I was a teenager and early 20 something I designed Risk variants and Diplomacy variants. But I had also designed games to play by myself, once I’d been exposed to commercial wargames beginning with Conflict when I was very young, then American Heritage Broadsides, and then especially Stalingrad, Afrika Korps, and other Avalon Hill games. But I tended to design games that were not commercially viable: for example I designed a massive space wargame that I played solitaire with many many sides, far too many to be practical, and also it used fog of war but there was no mechanism for it, I just pretended as I played each Empire that I couldn’t see where the opposition was and didn’t know what they were doing.

So when I teach beginners game design, one of the first things I do is talk about what an inadequate game Monopoly is (especially for adults), and why, and then have them try to come up with ways to improve it. And I have them actually play their variant to see that it usually won’t turn out the way they think it will.(source:pulsiphergamedesign


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