作者：Rob Lockhart

Daniel Kahneman在《Thinking， Fast and Slow》一书中解释了人们的理性程度比他们自己想象中的低。当他首次提出这一观点时，经济学家正在模拟完全理性的人，用于制定他们的市场行为理论。Kahneman因提出对立观点而荣获诺贝尔经济学奖。

我认为游戏设计师现在也处于相似的境地。因为某些证据，我们假设大多数玩家如果有机会，就会最大化或最小化获得成功的方法。虽然我同意避免游戏中的优势策略是必要的，但我认为玩家的行为并不比我们通常所想象的那么理智。

在此，我罗列了几个认知偏差，解释如何将其作为额外的信息渠道、挑战来源或引导玩家的方法运用于游戏设计。

Cognitive Biases(from kazira.com)

1、激发效应。好好吸收学习“激发效应”的经验。先做一道题：在括号中将词语补充完整：吸（）。你可能会填“收”，或者你也可能填“引”。我认为你更可能填“收”，因为我刚刚用过“吸收”这个词了。

激发是一个调整难度的隐蔽方法。不是将挑战难度降低，而是用某种方式激发玩家找到解决方案。关卡设计的公认方法已经通过提前出现难度更低但相似的挑战，来减轻玩家挑战的压力。激发与之存大微秒的区别，因为激发不是引入更简单的相同挑战，而是引入一种玩家完成该挑战所需的思考。例如，玩家的目标是BOSS的眼球，那就要在关卡标签上提醒玩家“务必随时戴好护目镜”。

另外，你可能希望通过激发效应提高挑战难度。利用该方法的好处在于，玩家可能永远不会觉察到受到激发是他们觉得挑战难度加大的原因所在。玩家只会觉得“我怎么之前没有想到呢？！”。

2、易获得性偏差。人们往往认为容易想到的东西就是更普遍更重要的。经典的例子是街头犯罪。美国的街头犯罪率呈稳步下降趋势，但在相同时期内的报道越来越多。正是因为媒体的广泛报道，人们产生一种错误印象，认为街头犯罪远比实际上的更普遍。

在游戏环境中，许多东西非常“容易获得”，特别是在游戏中循环使用的东西。一个常见的例子是，在涉及大量战斗的游戏中，要通过一道上了锁的门，玩家的第一反应是用刀砍或用枪射，因为砍或射的破门方法非常“容易获得”。游戏设计师可以根据需要决定迎合或颠覆玩家的期望，或完全重塑。

3、锚定效应（游戏邦注：也称为参照效应或粘结效应；在决策时，人们在整个思考过程中过分强调某一特定的信息，因此产生错误或有偏差的结果）若我们已知南北战争于1861年爆发，那么《葛底斯堡演说》（游戏邦注：林肯在宾夕法尼亚州葛底斯堡的葛底斯堡国家公墓揭幕式中发表的演说，哀悼在长达5个半月的葛底斯堡之役中阵亡的将士，成为美国历史上最伟大的演说之一）发表于哪一年？1862年？不对，是1863年。在这里，锚定是指人们用某些底线来估计使用多少资源。人们几乎总是不能准确想出底线和新值之间的差距有多少。

资源管理是当下大多数游戏的一个重要方面。比如，游戏中的子弹和和法力可能变得相当稀缺。玩家经常会接受他们其实没有资源可用的挑战。这到底合适或不合适要取决于你所设计的游戏。

游戏的底线资源类似于玩家的命值。玩家与怪物搏斗时会减损命值。如果两只怪物的长相接近，只是其中一只更强一些，玩家可能会单纯地因为怪物的长相而低估了这两只怪物在攻击力上的区别。许多游戏设计师会对怪物的长相作一定调整，这样可让玩家的轻视与现实情形相协调。外表在强调和低估锚定效应中起到非常大的作用。

4、成见效应。人们会用他们所知道的某人的一个小方面概括他们所不知道的其他方面。例如，一个艺术学生并不适合服兵役，但他无论如何都要坚持上战场，并最终成为战争英雄。这是对希特勒的准确描述，很让人震惊吧？

玩家会对游戏中的所有NPC形成这样的成见。不幸的是，大多数游戏的NPC在各方面都达到了这些期待。好消息是，像这样受到其他游戏偏好所支持的期待，颠覆了玩家对角色的看法，产生了非常出人意料的效果，如《传送门2》。

外表在此起到什么作用呢？也许最大的成见就是，好看的人比不好看的人在品德、工作、生活等各个方面都表现得更好。如果你再仔细想想，这显然不是真的，但每个人都把外表当成第一条推测法。

5、长期忽视和峰终定律。前者指的是偏好短期内的高强度乐趣，而不是长期内的适量乐趣；相比于忍受长期内适量的痛苦，这也会让我们更害怕短期内强烈但尚可忍受的痛苦。

这是一个更普遍的效应。设计一款线性游戏时，这个效应可以运用于强度曲线。如果是设计模拟游戏或其他非线性游戏，那就要让玩家体验到突然强烈的惊喜和突然强烈的失望。如果对玩家的惩罚具有轻微的消极作用，即玩家产生长时间的伤害，那么你的玩家不会感觉到这点，他们只会认为挑战变得困难了。如果玩家没有得到显著的奖励，但在长期内感受到温和的喜悦，那么你做的就是艺术游戏。

这是我从书中学到的最重要的理念。当然，游戏测试都会考虑到这些，因为真正的人在玩游戏时正常情况下就会表现出这些心理偏差。另外，在游戏测试阶段时再引入这些理念可能就太迟了。你必须先用理智质疑自己的不理智。你可能得先自问：“你到底是怎么想的？”（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）

Top Five Cognitive Biases In Game Design

by Rob Lockhart

Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow” is all about how people are less rational than they think they are.  When he first did this work, economists were using models of people who were perfectly rational to formulate their theories of how markets behave.  Kahneman’s contradictory work earned him the Nobel Prize in economics.

I think game designers are in a similar place now.  We assume, with some evidence, that most of our players, given the opportunity, will minmax their way to a boring victory.  While I agree that it’s essential to avoid dominant strategies in your game, I believe that players do not act as rationally as we often think they would.

Here I list some cognitive biases and how they can be used in your game design as additional channels for information, additional sources of challenge or additional methods for manipulating your player.

1. Priming Slurp up this hearty example of priming: Fill in the missing letter: SO_P.  You probably said ‘U,’ though you could also have said ‘A.’  The reason I think it’s more probable that you said ‘U’ is that I used the word ‘slurp’ in the beginning, thus ‘priming’ your mind for things that are slurped, like soup.

Priming is a great covert way to adjust difficulty.  Rather than making a challenge easier, try to prime for the solution somehow.  It’s a subtle distinction, because accepted methods of level design already ease the player into challenges by presenting less difficult but similar challenges beforehand.  Priming is slightly different, though.  Rather than introducing an easier version of the same challenge, you can introduce the type of thinking the player would need to complete the challenge.  For example, you might want the player to aim for a boss’ eyeball, and prime them with signs around the level saying “Safety Goggles Must Be Worn at All Times.”

The other side of the coin is that you might want to make a challenge more difficult by priming the player for other solutions.  The beauty of this is that the player may never pinpoint what it was that made the challenge seem so deceptively difficult.  It can induce those “Why didn’t I think of that before?!” moments.

2. Availability Bias  The idea here is that people assume that things which are easy to think of are more common or more important.  The classic example is street crime, which has been decreasing steadily in the US, but has been reported on more and more during the same period.  Because of the impression given by the media, people assume that street crime is far more common than it is.

There are a lot of things which become very ‘available’ in the context of a game.  In particular, everything which is part of the main game loop.  A common example, in a game which involves a lot of combat: when the player encounters a locked door which they want to enter, his/her first instinct will be to cut through the door with their sword, gun or whatever.  The solution of chopping or shooting is very ‘available.’  A game designer can decide to meet or subvert the player’s expectations, or recreate them entirely.

3. Anchoring  Given that the Civil War started in 1861, what year was the Gettysburg Address?  Nope, not 1862.  It was 1863.  Anchoring is when people use some baseline to estimate how much of a resource to use.  People almost always undershoot how much difference there should be between the baseline and the new value.

Resource management is a big part of most games these days, and bullets and mana can get pretty scarce.  It’s often possible that a player will take on a challenge they simply don’t have the resources to complete.  Whether that’s desirable or undesirable depends on the game you’re designing.

The game’s baseline resource requirement might be something like how much health a player usually loses in a typical encounter with a monster.  If you create a monster that looks similar, but a bit more powerful, chances are the player underestimate the difference in power between these two monsters.  Many designers compensate by making their monsters look more powerful than they actually are, so that the player’s underestimate will match up better with the reality of the situation.  Appearances can play a big role in accentuating or downplaying the effects of anchoring.  Appearances also play a big role in…

4.  The Halo Effect  This describes people’s tendency to caricature others, using what little they know about one aspect of a person to make generalizations about aspects they know nothing about.  For example, picture a struggling art student who is found unfit for military service, but insists on serving anyway and becomes a war hero.  It may shock you to realize that this is an accurate description of Adolf Hitler.

Players form stereotypes like this for all the NPCs in a game.  Unfortunately, most games’ NPCs meet these expectations in every way.  The good news is that expectations like these, bolstered by the tendencies of other games, make reversals of character, like the one in Portal 2, quite unexpected.

What role do appearances play in this?  Probably the biggest stereotype is that good looking people are better than less-attractive people, in various ways; morally, at their jobs, in bed, or whatever.  If you take a moment to think about it, this is obviously not true, but everyone uses this as a first pass heuristic.
You can use this in your game.  You can go against the grain and make better-looking characters and items which are less effective, or you can go with the flow and use appearance as an accurate gauge of utility.  Which you choose depends, again, on the game.

5. Duration Neglect and the Peak-End Rule  “A bias that favors a short period of intense joy over a long period of moderate happiness [and causes us to] fear a short period of intense but tolerable suffering more than we fear a much longer period of moderate pain.” (Kahneman 409)

This is a more general effect.  If you’re designing a linear game, then this applies mainly to your intensity curve (I recommend you read the linked article).  If it’s a simulation, or other nonlinear game, then you need to plant opportunities for sudden intense gratification, and use sudden and intense discouragement.  If your punishments are slightly-bad effects which hurt you over long time periods, your player won’t get the message — they’ll just think it’s gotten more difficult.  If you have no punctuated rewards, but rather a long drawn-out feeling of mild pleasantness, then you’ve made an art game.

Those were the most important ideas I took away from the book.  Of course, playtesting (done right) takes all of these into account, because it’s real people playing the game as they normally would.  On the other hand, the playtesting phase may be too late to introduce some of these ideas.  You may have to use your rational mind to question your irrational mind.  You may ask it “how do you play?”(source:gamasutra)