作者：Lewis Pulsipher

“普遍法则是：大家都觉得自己能够设计游戏。但就史特金定律和现实情况来看，他们多半无法做到。”           ——Richard Aronson

“据我观察，多数人都是在他人浪费时间时获得进步。”      ——Henry Ford

天资

我喜欢听音乐，古典和流行音乐都喜欢，我收集很多CD。

虽然作为门外汉，我可以谈论有关音乐的话题，但我没有什么音乐天赋，也不是什么音乐家，虽然我懂得读乐谱，懂得弹奏简单乐器。我从没有谱过曲。我想如果我集中进行学习，长期投身于此，我也许可以谱出曲子，但多半不会有什么成就。

也许多数喜欢听音乐的人士都是属于这种情况，他们在作曲方面很难有什么成就。而这在大家看来也是习以为常。

同样，我读过很多科幻小说，但我缺乏成为杰出小说家的内在潜质。

若我不是老师和游戏设计师，我希望自己能够变成杰出的交响乐作曲家或小说家。但这几乎没有什么可能性。

所以为什么许多人，尤其是青少年觉得非常吃惊，同样的道理也适用于电子游戏领域？一个人也许只是喜欢玩游戏，但在游戏设计方面没有什么天赋。热衷玩游戏的必备条件和擅长制作游戏截然不同。这是个正常情况，但许多着迷于玩游戏的玩家都觉得自己能够变成杰出的游戏设计师。我觉得这是一厢情愿的想法，希望自己能够通过从事同爱好有关的职业谋生。

热爱游戏的人士完全能够通过些许外部协助制作出一款还过得去的游戏作品。但我们不应发行尚且过得去的作品。

但我从来不会和他人说，他们没有天赋。这需要靠他们自己发现。而且，我无法判断他们是否真的有天赋；我不确定自己是否愿意在算不上朋友的对象身上花费更多时间。我游戏团体的若干大学生曾设计出他人愿意进行体验的游戏作品。我无法确切判断他们是否有天赋。天赋通常需要经过很长时间方能显现出来（游戏邦注：或者我们方能获悉某人没有天赋）。诸如下述生产取向之类的元素会从中作梗。

体验电子游戏的不良习惯

我曾教授大学生和高中生电子游戏设计和游戏制作。年轻人通常在此存在诸多错觉，老师有责任消除他们的这些幻觉，这样大家就会更好把握游戏设计。

最大问题也许根植于“电子游戏体验”。很多人体验电子游戏都是出于打发时间。还有很多人玩这类游戏是为了逃离现实生活。这在刚入门的游戏设计学生中更是如此，他们通常属于“硬核”玩家，大多不是“非常适合”，虽然我不会说他们不适合。所以参加课程的学生通常带着这样的固有观念：觉得游戏属于非生产性，倾向投入大把时间进行完全没有创造性、旨在逃避现实的操作。

但游戏设计师必须高效运用自己的时间，他们应该以创造成果，而非浪费资源（游戏邦注：他们的时间和精力）为目标。简单来说就是，电子游戏学生需意识到，玩游戏完全不同于制作游戏。生产取向对团队成员有利，尤其是对那些纵览全局的角色。若大家把玩游戏的天赋转移到游戏制作上，多半会表现糟糕。

我认为之所以有这么多电子游戏工作室依靠“关键时刻”完成游戏作品的一个主要原因是，团队成员浪费众多时间，而不是创造性地进行游戏制作，每周投入40小时以上。

玩游戏时，学生需要学会从游戏设计师的角度进行思考，而不是以游戏玩家的身份，探究游戏为什么富有吸引力。这也许会降低他们的“纯”游戏体验乐趣，但非常有必要。

生产取向

撰写本文的原动力来自于2011年同科幻小说作家Glenn Cook（作品有《Black Company》、《Garrett P. I.》和《Dread Empire》）的一次采访。Cook每年创作3部小说，同时还是General Motors流水线的全职员工，而且还同妻子共同担负养育3个儿子的责任。他合理分配自己的时间，他在访谈中表示，他现在创作的小说变少了，因为他已经退休，孩子们也已经上大学，都长大成人，他无需再对自己的时间进行安排。在极端情况下，他会利用自己在流水线不到28秒的工作间歇写小说。他利用工作时间思考写作内容，然后在休息时间动手写下，然后回家再将内容转移到打字机或电脑上。

Angry Birds from androidnoodles.com

如今游戏玩家都利用这些短暂休息时间做什么？他们会拿出自己的手持设备或智能手机玩《愤怒的小鸟》或其他休闲游戏。我喜欢《愤怒的小鸟》，但这显然只是消遣时间的一种方式；这带来的意义不大。若我在某处进行短暂等待，我会思考游戏设计，若我知道这将是一段很长的时间，我会阅读书籍。

Cook的经历是极端的生产取向范例，但它清楚呈现，典型硬核电子游戏玩家的行为习惯和生产取向人士存在天囊之别。所以电子游戏教师需要说服学生改变自己的行为习惯，变成真正的成年人。这非常艰难，我们知道很多已步入成年行列的人士多数时候依然没有成年人的风范，这一行为差距似乎随时间的流逝变得越来越普遍。

改变取向的一个方式是学会制定计划，进行深谋远虑。21世纪的生活方式通常鼓励我们分秒必争地过生活，而不是制定计划。大家通过手机弥补计划的缺失。很多学生都需要改变自己的生活方式（游戏邦注：若他们真的想要有所成就）。

就我的社区大学经验来看，很多想要制作游戏的孩子很快就意识到，这是工作，不是游戏，自己并不适合这项工作，进而选择尝试其他工作。

自我放纵

随着电子游戏行业的变化，新手学生需要面临一个问题。

电子游戏行业已经成熟，游戏玩家已经成熟。成功电子游戏不再关于“我”（设计师），大家不再出于想要融入设计师的构想购买游戏，游戏不再是自我表达方式。成功的游戏需要同潜在玩家进行沟通，需要符合玩家的预期、题材和社区意识。简单表述就是，你基于他人而非自己设计游戏，在行业的初期阶段，设计师可以基于自己设计游戏，然后获得成功。再次说明，我们是生产取向，而不是“艺术家”取向，不是围绕“我”或“看看自己可以变得多有趣”。行业大腕依然可以放任自己制作预期的游戏作品，但学生还没有获得如此高的公信度。

换而言之，设计师需要学会不要自我放纵。这也是成熟的一个标志，是吧？在游戏设计中，自我放纵极具破坏性，因为游戏设计的一个基础条件就是能够进行自我批评。自我批评和自我放纵鲜少能够和平共处。

下面是David Brin对于小说创作的看法，这同样也适用于游戏设计：

“提防自我放纵。大家对于创作行业的传奇性存在几大误解：需历经沧桑方能富有创造性；得爱吵架，爱争辩，方能保持睿智；自我意识比技能重要；作家有资格让读者滚开。若你脑中存在这些误区，将自食恶果。”

“若你觉得自己可以靠创作谋生，那你已有足够的自我意识。”

（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 Designers: Aptitude, Productive Orientation, and Self-Indulgence

by Lewis Pulsipher

“The general rule is: everybody thinks they can design [games]. But Sturgeon’s Law and practical reality means most of them can’t.”  –Richard Aronson

“It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste.”  –Henry Ford

Aptitude

I like to listen to music, both popular and classical, and I have some hundreds of CDs (and LPs) in my collection.

But while I can talk about music as a layman, I do not have much musical aptitude, and am not a musician though I did once know how to read music and play a simple instrument.  I’ve never composed any music.  I suppose if I intensely studied, and made myself work at it, I could compose SOMETHING, but I don’t think it would amount to anything.

And that’s probably true for the vast majority of people who like to listen to music, that they’d never amount to anything as composers.  And I don’t think this idea is surprising to many people.

Similarly, I have read a great many fantasy and science fiction novels, but I don’t have the internal makeup that is (I think) required of a successful novelist.

If I were not a teacher and game designer, I would be happy to be a successful orchestral composer or novelist.  But the possibility just wasn’t there.

So why is it surprising to so many people, especially teens, that the same kind of thing applies in (video) games?  A person may just *love* to play games, but still have no aptitude for designing games.  What’s required to love playing games (to excess, in many cases, for video games) isn’t what’s needed to be good at making games. This is the norm, yet so many young people who love to play games think they’d make wonderful game designers.  I suppose it’s a form of wishful thinking, the hope that we’ll be able to do something to make a living that’s closely related to what we love.

I do think it’s possible for anyone who loves games to design a halfway-decent game, with a little help.  But halfway decent games shouldn’t be published (though they often are).

However, I would never tell someone they don’t have the aptitude.  This is something they need to figure out for themselves.  Furthermore, I can’t really tell whether they have the aptitude or not; I’m not sure I could even with much more time than I have with anyone who isn’t a friend.  There are college-age people at one of my game groups who have designed games that folks play.  I cannot judge with any certainty whether they have aptitude or not.  In any case, it may take much time (years) for the aptitude to really show, or not show.  Other things, such as the productive orientation I discuss below, get in the way.

Bad Habits of Playing Video Games

I have some experience teaching video game design and game production to college and high school students.  Young people often have many delusions about these topics, and it’s part of a teacher’s job to eliminate delusions so that people really know what they’re getting into.  (For example see “Student Illusions About Being a Game Designer”  http://gamecareerguide.com/features/701/student_illusions_about_being_a_.php .)

The biggest problem may be inherent in the “video game experience”.  Many if not most people play video games at least part of the time to kill time.  And many (especially non-adults) also play them in order to escape from everyday life.  This is certainly true for typical beginning game design students, who are usually “hard core” and often don’t quite “fit”, though I won’t call them misfits.  So students come to the curriculum with long experience that games are completely unproductive, and with a tendency to spend vast amounts of time doing something that is completely unproductive and that avoids reality.  (I recall in particular a student, 27 years old rather than 18, who had played a game for 40 hours over a long weekend and found when he went back to work that he’d been fired because he was supposed to be working during that time–he’d simply lost track of time.)

Yet game designers must spend their time productively, they must aim toward creating something rather than wasting something (their time and effort).  The simple manifestation of this is that video game students need to recognize that playing games is completely different from making games, but it goes further.  A productive orientation is always good for any employee but especially for someone who shapes what many other employees are doing.  If students bring typical attitudes from game playing to game making, they will fare poorly.

I’m convinced that a major reason why so many video game studios have resorted to “crunch time” to finish games is that the employees waste a lot of time instead of working productively on games upwards of 40 hours a week.

When students do play games, they’ve got to learn to think as a game designer, not a game player, and figure out why a game is attractive (or not). This may actually reduce their “pure” enjoyment of game-playing, but it’s necessary.

Productive Orientation

The immediate impetus for writing this piece was to a 2011 audio interview with fantasy and science fiction author Glenn Cook (Black Company, Garrett P. I., Dread Empire).  Cook wrote as many as three novels a year while working full-time on an assembly line for General Motors, also raising (with his wife) a family of three sons.  He allocated his time very carefully, in fact he said in the interview he writes less now that he’s retired and his kids are college age and older because he doesn’t have to budget his time.  In the extreme case he worked on an assembly line where he had intervals of up to 28 seconds when he had nothing to do, and in any case he had nothing he had to think about as he worked, and he used the opportunity to write novels.  He would think about what he needed to do as he did his work, and write by hand in the available intervals, and then transfer to typewriter or computer when he got home.  (http://www.aldmachine.org/2011/11/milehicon-43-glen-cook-interview.html)

What does the typical game player does with short intervals of time nowadays.  They pull out their handheld device or smartphone and play Angry Birds or some other bagatelle.  Mind you, I like Angry Birds but it is clearly just a way to pass a little time; there’s very little to it.  If I find myself waiting somewhere for a short time I’ll think about game design, and if it’s for a long time I have probably anticipated it and have a book (fiction or nonfiction) to read.

Cook’s experience is an extreme case of a productive orientation, but it points out the yawning gap between how the typical hard-core video game player behaves and how a productive person behaves.  So a video game teacher has the really enormous challenge of persuading students to change their behavior, in effect to become adults.  This is really tough, we all know lots of people well into chronological adulthood who still don’t behave as adults most of the time, and this behavior gap seems to be more and more common as the years pass.

Part of the change in orientation is learning to plan, to think ahead.  Life in the 21st century tends to encourage living by-the-minute, rather than planning.  People rely on their cell phones to compensate for lack of planning.  It’s harder to design games by-the-minute than by planning.  Many students have to change how they run their lives, really, if they want to do well.

In my experience in community colleges many of the kids who think they want to make games will rapidly realize that it’s work not play, and that they’re not cut out for it, and they’ll try something else.

Not “About Me”–Self-Indulgence

As the video game industry has changed there’s a related problem that beginning students must face.  Taghd Kelly has described the change in a blog post at http://whatgamesare.com/2012/03/marketing-stories-are-not-about-you.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A
+WhatGamesAre+%28What+Games+Are%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

The video game industry has matured, and game players have matured.  Successful video games are no longer about “me” (the designer), people don’t buy games to participate in the designer’s vision, games are no longer self-expression.  A successful game has to speak to the potential player, must meet the player’s expectations and his sense of genre and community.  The simple expression of this is that you design games for other people not for yourself, whereas in the early days of the industry you could design games for yourself and be successful.  Once again we’re looking for a productive orientation, not an “artist’s” orientation, not “me” or “look how interesting I can be”.  The big names of the industry can still indulge themselves by making games they like, but students have not attained the recognition (and track record) to do so.

In other words, designers have to learn not to be self-indulgent.  Which is another characteristic of growing up, isn’t it?  In game design self-indulgence is particularly damaging, because one of the foundations of game design is the ability to be self-critical.  Self-criticism and self-indulgence rarely coexist.

In the following, sf/f author David Brin is talking about writing novels, but it also applies to game designers:

“Beware of self-indulgence. The romance surrounding the writing profession carries several myths: that one must suffer in order to be creative; that one must be cantankerous and objectionable in order to be bright; that ego is paramount over skill; that one can rise to a level from which one can tell the reader to go to hell. These myths, if believed, can ruin you.

If you believe you can make a living as a writer, you already have enough ego.”    — enough ego（Source：gamasutra）