作者：Jon Shafer

我知道你在说什么。

“限制玩家能够造就更杰出的作品？你疯了吧？游戏应该融入更少的限制，而不是更多的限制！”

应该让玩家觉得自己总是享有选择——但拥有无限制的选择内容显然不是什么好事。首先让我们先来看看一个和游戏无关的故事。

你去杂货店，因为朋友要你帮忙买面粉。而这是家非常特别的杂货店，它有40种面粉可供选择。面对众多的麦制产品你发现自己变得手足无措。我该如何选择？这是否会有影响？我的朋友想要烤饼干，这是否采用特殊的面粉？为了避免手足无措的情况，你奔向最近的紧急出口，逃离这一处境。

你的下个目的地是更传统的杂货店，这次你发现自己有3种面粉可以选择：通用类型、适用面包和蛋糕的类型。你思考了下自己的选择，但显然饼干既不属于面包，也不属于蛋糕，所以你很快就选定通用型面粉，满心欢喜地结束自己的购物之旅。

虽然这个故事有点幼稚，但显而易见的是，和预期看法相反，向某人呈现众多选择并没有给予他们更多“自由”——事实上这会让他们招架不住。这早已成为优秀界面的设计原则。

界面设计的一个“原则”是用户注意力不应分散于7个以上的物品。人脑只能够同时权衡若干可能性元素。

我相信大家都打开过某些包含过多运行项目的随机网站。你多半不会这么想：“天啊，我迫不及待地想要探究所有这些元素，我应该从哪里着手！”只要跨过这一无形门槛，最终的结果都是心生沮丧。

也就是，有人喜欢置身“难以招架多种选择”的境地。开放世界的RPG游戏之所以变得如此受欢迎的原因是，它们给予玩家丰富的操作内容。

我们完全能够呈现丰富的有深度元素，而且不只是单单迎合硬核玩家——这里的关键在于适当的节奏。在玩法头一分钟丢给新手玩家40个潜在关卡是个糟糕的做法。应该先从3个关卡着手，然后逐渐繁衍出9个，接着再逐步扩展成27个，这个做法更吸引人。

尤其是策略题材，对单位移动的限制很好地说明限制元素如何造就更杰出的游戏作品。陆地单位无法进入水中促使船只变得弥足珍贵——这棒极了。接触具有独特“能量”的新单元是提高许多玩家游戏积极性的一大因素。和经济学一样，稀缺性促进价值的提高——多数单位无法执行特定操作，这令少数单位变成颇具趣味。

活动限制意味着游戏还存在永久限制。例如在《文明》系列中，《文明4》的山峰首次变得无法逾越。这是个微妙的变化，但即便是诸如此类的细微元素也能够给地图带来生气。山脉不再只是地图上附带轻微活动惩罚的组成部分，它们如今已变成真正的障碍，需要我们认真对待。

Civilization 5 from hotdl.com

我设计《文明5》时面临的一个困境是，如何处理策略资源。我知道我希望游戏拥有“量化”资源模式（游戏邦注：其中你可以拥有众多资源或者是少量资源），但我不确定如何从此继续前进。

我坚持的一个理念是，让资源提高特定单元的的生产率——例如，铁&剑士，但确保未能接触到铁资源的玩家能够训练剑士，这主要出于平衡原因。进行测试后，我发现有些内容略欠妥当——我最终发现，没有对建造内容加以限制会让单位和资源都变得不再那么有趣。

阻碍玩家但不完全阻塞他们的“软”限制扮演着微妙而重要的角色。在4X游戏中，随机地图是软限制的主要来源。在一款游戏中，你也许会先从资金旁边的铁资源着手，而在另一款游戏中，15个方格中也许并没有这些元素。缺乏触手可及的铁资源是一种限制类型，能够将玩家引导至最佳战略，远离有些欠妥的方案，但这并无法阻止他们完全摆脱这些方案。

我喜欢左右玩家在地图中所采取的策略。虽然这里存在权衡关系，但这种类型的限制能够将玩家的选择具体化。假设你在玩一款4X游戏，你想要让某座城市专门从事货币制造。若这也能够在其他城市实现，那么也就不存在任何特殊注意事项——毕竟如果各个城市都具有同等的可行性，那你大可通过扔硬币决定。这并不是非常有趣。

相反若理想货币城市是在靠近金矿的地点，这就向玩家呈现系列基本预期。玩家知道，若周围存在许多黄金，在此创建货币制造基地就是个值得考虑的策略。玩家知道存在资金流问题的邻居也会觊觎他边界附近的黄金，所以也许尽快在此创建城市是个好主意。但也许玩家还需要铁矿——我们的玩家如今陷入两难选择。显然，相比赋予玩家决定城市角色的绝对“自由”，这种软资源更易造就一款更杰出的游戏。

限制元素的最后一个优点是，它们能够让新玩家轻松参与游戏。开发者大多过于亲近自己的游戏作品，忘记新手玩家学习新内容的畏惧之情。

若玩家知道自己的首要目标是发现和收获某种资源，或者他需要获得某块地图，这样他们就能够集中自己的注意力，不会被过多的选择内容吓到。玩家的另一选择就是屈服于众多产品选择，放任自己孤注一掷。

但也不要鲁莽行事，消除玩家的所有控制权。这是许多游戏指南所犯的错误。你想要教授玩家，但你也希望他们能够在学习规则的同时投入其中，获得乐趣。劣质的指南通常比没有设置指南影响更糟糕，因为这些被浪费掉的开发时间原本可以用于完善游戏的其他要素。

如果你打算制作指南，那么要确保自己设计得当。最后，优秀游戏作品应该设置多个完成目标的方式。如果无法做到这点，让玩家的焦点聚集在单个功能上只会暴露设计存在的其他问题。（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）

Make a better game: Limit the player

by Jon Shafer

[In this piece reprinted with permission from Stardock producer Jon Shafer's blog, the former Civilization lead designer explains the benefits of keeping limits in your game, pulling examples from his own design decisions with Firaxis' strategy series.]

Okay, okay, I know what you’re saying.

“Limiting the player makes a better game? Are you crazy? Games should have fewer limits, not more!”

Players should always feel like they have options — but having limitless options is definitely not a good thing. To kick things off, let’s start with a little story completely unrelated to games.

You go to the grocery store because a friend asked you to pick up some flour for a recipe. Now, this happens to be a very unique grocery store with forty varieties of flour to pick from. You find yourself rattled standing before this Great Wall of Ground Wheat Product… What should I pick? Does it even matter? My friend wants to bake some cookies, is there a special kind of flour for that? Before fully succumbing to a panic attack, you race for the nearest emergency exit and make your escape.

Your next destination is a much more typical grocery store, and this time around you find but three different kinds of flour: all-purpose, bread and cake. You think about your options for a few seconds, but it’s pretty clear that cookies are neither bread nor cake, so you quickly settle on the all-purpose flour and return from your shopping trip flush with victory.

While this story is a bit silly, the obvious lesson is that contrary to what you’d expect, presenting someone with a huge number of options does not give them more ‘freedom’ — in fact all it does is overwhelm them. This has long been a tenet of good interface design.

There’s a bit of a ‘rule’ which states that a user’s attention should be split between no more than seven items. The human brain is equipped to weigh only a handful of possibilities simultaneously.

I’m sure at some point all of you have opened up some random website that had waaaay too much going on. And you probably weren’t thinking, “Oh boy, I can’t wait to dig into all of this, where should I start!” Once someone passes that invisible threshold, the end result is nearly always frustration.

That said, there are definitely a few individuals who do love being “overwhelmed.” The reason why open-world RPGs have become so popular is because they offer players so many things to do.

It is possible to provide an immense amount of depth without catering to only the hardcore — the key is proper pacing. Throwing a list of 40 possible quests at a new player within the first minute of gameplay is bad. Starting them with three quests, which then branch into nine, which then branch into 27 and so on is much more inviting.

With regards to the strategy genre in particular, restrictions on unit movement is one of the best examples of how limitations can make a game better. The inability of land units to enter water is why ships are so valuable — and just plain cool. Gaining access to new units with unique “powers” is a major motivation for many players. Just like in economics, scarcity is what drives value — the fact that most units are unable to perform certain actions is what makes the few that can so much fun.

Movement restrictions also show that there’s a place for even permanent limits. An example from the Civ series is how mountains became impassable for the first time in Civ 4. It’s a subtle change that very few players would point to as a major innovation, but even something small like this helps breathe life into the map. Instead of mountain ranges being just another part of the map with a slight movement penalty, they suddenly transformed into true barriers that now require serious consideration.

A dilemma I faced while designing Civ 5 was what to do with strategic resources. I knew that I wanted the game to have a “quantified” resource model where you can have a lot of something or a little bit (in earlier Civ games you either had a resource or you didn’t), but I was unsure exactly how to proceed from there.

One idea I played around with was having resources increase the production rate of certain units — say, iron for swordsmen — but still allow players without access to iron the ability to train swordsmen, mainly for balance reasons. After some playtesting, I came to the realization that something was off… I eventually figured out that the lack of limits on what you could build made both the units and the resources less interesting.

“Soft” limits that hinder the player but don’t completely block him also have a subtle but still very important role to play. In 4X games, a randomized map is nearly always the main source of soft limits. In one game, you might start with iron next to your capital, while in another there might be none within 15 tiles. The lack of convenient iron is a type of limitation which helps direct a player toward the best strategies and away from the non-ideal ones, but this doesn’t preclude him from committing to get it one way or another.

I’m a big fan of nudging the player towards and away from strategies with the map. When there’s a web of trade-offs to consider, limits of this sort help crystallize what the player’s options are. Let’s say you’re playing a 4X game and want to specialize a city for the production of money. If this can be done equally well in any city then there’s really no special considerations to make — after all, if every city is just as viable you might as well just flip some coins to decide. Which, for the record, isn’t terribly interesting or fun.

If instead an ideal money city is built next to a gold deposit, this provides the player with a basic set of expectations. He knows that if there’s a lot of gold around then a strategy built around generating tons of money is worth considering. He knows that a neighbor with cashflow problems is going to have his eye on that gold right next to his border, so maybe it’s a good idea to build a city there sooner rather than later. But maybe there’s an iron deposit he really needs — our player now has a tough choice to make. It’s obvious that this kind of soft limit makes for a much better game than giving the player complete “freedom” in deciding which city does what.

The last benefit of limits that I’ll talk about is their ability to help ease new players into a game. Developers nearly always get too close to their games and forget how intimidating it is to learn as someone picking it up for the first time.

If the player knows his first goal is to find and harvest a particular type of resource, or that he needs to capture a certain part of the map, it helps focus his attention and keep him from becoming intimidated by a vast array of options. The alternative is abandoning him in front of the dreaded Wall of Wheat Product, leaving him to sink or swim on his own.

Just don’t go overboard and eliminate all of the player’s control. This is the mistake many tutorials make. You want to teach players, but you also want them engaged and having fun while learning the rules. A bad tutorial is often worse than no tutorial at all, because the wasted development time could have been spent on improving other aspects of the game.

If you’re going to bother, do it right! Ultimately, every good game should have multiple ways to complete any one goal. If there’s not, then focusing the player’s attention on a single feature will only bring to light other issues with the design.

Now then, go forth and limit thy players!（Source：gamasutra）