游戏邦在:
杂志专栏:
gamerboom.com订阅到鲜果订阅到抓虾google reader订阅到有道订阅到QQ邮箱订阅到帮看

开发者应制作尊重但不迎合女性的休闲游戏

发布时间:2012-10-15 14:25:56 Tags:,,,,

作者:Leigh Alexander

硬核玩家可能对寻物解谜游戏漠不关心,但仔细观察这类游戏我们不难发现一个有趣的设计理念,以及它同传统行业甚少关注的用户——休闲成年玩家(大部分为女性)之间的关系。

全球休闲游戏公司Big Fish在过去10年已推出3000款游戏,如今每天能够在主机和移动平台上发行一款游戏,它聚集了一批忠实粉丝,他们用其逃避现实生活——大多数玩家都是在晚上7-11点这段时间内玩游戏,这同游戏回合的设计十分吻合,因为他们不可能耗费玩《魔兽世界》般的大量时间。

Mahjong towers(from bigfishgames.com)

Mahjong towers(from bigfishgames.com)

Big Fish的首款游戏为《Mahjongg Towers》——但目前该公司主要关注游戏的主题与情节。Lisa Brunette领导的叙事团队主要设计师合作构造故事情节,他们尤其关注寻物解谜题材。由于人们偏爱故事,所以这类游戏出现了包含更多叙事元素的倾向。

游戏最先采用日志模式,即在屏幕上以文字形式呈现故事,但现在诸如《Shiver Poltergeist》这类游戏囊括更多电影元素。Brunette表示,在简单的游戏中增添更多故事情节,该游戏高销量就会更高。

Brunette指出:“在游戏中构造故事时,我们同开发者经常发现设计师在游戏中沿用自己喜爱的主题。”也就是说大部分时候,传统游戏开发者所设计的游戏很难吸引Big Fish的核心成人女性玩家。这种问题无法通过“女性化游戏”而得到解决。

Brunette表示:“通常,他们会在游戏中添加适合女性的闪光与粉色饰品:这种做法十分做作。如果你一开始并未考虑到这一用户群体,她们迟早会知晓。”尽管他们普遍认为女性喜欢有关时尚与服装的游戏,但Big Fish在调查玩家时发现,她们对时尚主题的期望值很低——仅次于运动主题。西方和神秘主题同样归属较低的期望范畴。

尼尔森收视率数据显示,25岁以下的男性与25岁以上的女性喜爱的电视节目类型截然相反,Brunette怀疑这也能反映他们喜爱的游戏类型上的差异。因此,Big Fish的玩家似乎更倾向神秘游戏、成人幽默、类似《Mad Men》这类节目的剧情或超自然的恐怖片。他们更偏向《飘》这种作品,而不是《现代启示录》。

Brunette指出:“幻想是指,如果我认为它是别人的东西,那我自己就无法进入。”

Brunette认为,关系、面部特征与体型无法吸引玩家同NPC坠入爱河,玩家喜欢根据个性与行动来判断角色。当浪漫成为更大故事情节的一部分时才能发挥最佳效果,而Big Fish在爱情题材方面并未取得多大的佳绩。

Skunk Studios的《King of Thieves》被认为“过度幼稚”,因为没有人打算扮演小偷角色。Brunette团队将其重新定义为间谍故事,并赋予一些全新的美术视角——游戏画面不再是隐藏在黑暗中的蒙面男子,取而代之的是温暖的昏暗灯光下触手可及的书桌这些有趣物品。该游戏采用全新名称《Raven’s Flight》。其中的魅力女老板带有更加成熟与职业的表情(游戏邦注:先前设计的任务指挥官更具传统意义上的性感元素)。

ravens-flight(from 29soft.com)

ravens-flight(from 29soft.com)

虽然间谍仍是个危险主题,但编者尽量让它更具趣味性,以便吸引Big Fish玩家。这款游戏并未如Big Fish其它游戏般成为热作,但它的效果比《King of Thieve》更棒,玩家们称赞其为“侦探小说”。

“即使你大幅修改了整款游戏,但设计出的游戏主题仍无法吸引用户,它就是个败笔。”

针对《Shiver》这款游戏,俄罗斯开发者Artogon表示“它完美地迎合了目标用户的口味”,该游戏充满神秘与诡计,其中玩家会遇到一个熟悉的神秘女孩,她本人无故消失了,但却在车子后面落下了一只泰迪熊,把玩家独自留在Hitchcockian这座幽静的城镇中。

该游戏给人以毛骨悚然和诡异之感。Brunette表示:“这种诡异元素主要来自故事与玩家的发展方式,以及音乐和画面。”但恐怖血腥风格的游戏却并不是很畅销。

我们错误地认为Big Fish的妈妈级用户会同孩子一道体验游戏,或玩家们都偏爱成人元素。但该工作室另一款以机器人与巫师为题材的游戏并未大获成功。

“我不能指责Artogon尝试不同元素,因为我们确实擅长哥特式恐怖。我们内部开发的《Mystery Case Files》在使用这一元素上效果显著,并引来了上千款仿制品……但是,这种方法的作用十分有限,我们的玩家会厌倦同种元素;他们现在产生了一些主题疲劳感。”

在《The Surface: The Noise She Couldn’t》中,玩家扮演的是一个能进入病人思想,帮助解决现实世界难题的通灵师。游戏中包含的隐喻性玩法互动与Jane Doe(游戏邦注:他是个神秘角色,他被发现时处于无意识状态,并带有一把带血的刀)身上发生的事件有关。开发商Elephant Games在创作情感幻想世界时留有不少余地,由于游戏场景发生在人们的思想中,所以该游戏获得巨大成功。

Surface-The-Noise-She-Couldn-t(from mac.softpedia.com)

Surface-The-Noise-She-Couldn-t(from mac.softpedia.com)

虽然玩家会贬低幼稚游戏,但Brunette解释到:“以我们经验来看,他们很可能拒绝这类看起来像为她们女儿打造的童话类游戏,或是看起来比较适合她们儿子的机器人游戏。”成年休闲玩家想要的是“中性、复杂、成熟、构造精致的故事情节。”

Brunette建议,最好制作出你认为真正的女性玩家可能会喜欢玩的游戏,而不是拘泥于“40岁的中年女性”这些理念,或是与她们喜好有关的刻板印象:当你制作游戏时,要考虑生活中的真实女性,关注她们的独特需求。

她指到:“我们应该尊重她们,不该屈就地迎合或者轻视她们,也不要用老套印象看待她们。不要假想适用于其他用户的方法也能套用到自己游戏上。应该根据合适的主题构建强大的故事情节,而且不要忘记内容的发展。”(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

Respecting women players without ‘girling it up’

by Leigh Alexander

Core gamers might not think twice about the hidden object genre, but a close look behind the scenes of these explosively-popular games reveals fascinating design wisdom, and a close relationship with an audience little-understood by the traditional industry — casual adults, most of whom are women.

With a back catalog of 3,000 titles over ten years, global casual game company Big Fish now publishes a game a day on computing and mobile platforms, and enjoys a base of loyal fans that look at games as an escape from their daily routine — most of the company’s players play between the hours of 7 and 11 PM, fitting sessions in between other obligations where they’re unlikely to spend World of Warcraft-level hours.

The company’s first game was Mahjongg Towers — but now the company invests a good deal of time and attention to theme and plot. Lisa Brunette leads narrative teams who work with designers on a plot graph, and the studio has invested particular attention in the hidden object genre. Because people like story, the popular object-spotting games have quickly ramped up to include more of a narrative.

At first the games began implementing journals that fleshed out the story through text on a screen, but now games like Shiver Poltergeist include more cinematic elements. The more story Big Fish added to the fairly simple format, the better the games sold, says Brunette.

“When it comes to building story into the games, though, what we see with our developers often is that they’re stretching for the themes they naturally like in their own games,” says Brunette — which means a lot of times games designed by traditional game developers end up having a harder time appealing to Big Fish’s core player base of adult women. This isn’t a problem that can be solved by “girling it up.”

“It takes a lot more than putting some glitter and pink on something to make it right for women: It’s disingenuous. If you don’t start with your audience in mind at the outset, they’ll know,” Brunette says. Despite the perception that women like games about fashion and dress-up, a survey of Big Fish’s players found fashion was actually the least-desired category, second only to sports. Western and occult themes also ranked quite low.

According to Nielsen ratings, men under 25 and women over 25 have polar opposite taste in television, and Brunette suspects something similar is at work in games. With that in mind, Big Fish players seem to want more mystery games, mature humor, drama at the level of programs like Mad Men, or supernatural thrillers. History means something more like Gone With The Wind, less like Apocalypse Now.

“The thing about fantasy is that if I perceive it’s for someone else, I can’t enter it myself,” Brunette says.

When it comes to relationships, facial features and body types are actually not compelling reasons for players to engage in romances with NPCs, she suggests — players like to judge characters in the game world by their personality and action. Romance may work best when it’s a realistic part of a larger storyline, as Big Fish itself hasn’t had much success with romance games per se.

Skunk Studios’ King of Thieves was perceived as “too boyish,” and nobody wanted to play as a thief. Brunette’s team had to repurpose it as an espionage story, and some of the art was given a new perspective — rather than a title screen with a masked man descending into the dark, instead a warm, tactile low-lit desk of intriguing objects was substituted. Raven’s Flight was the new title. The attractive female boss was given a more mature, professional look (the previously-designed mission commander was much more traditionally sexy).

Espionage was still a risky theme, but the edits made it more likely to be interesting to Big Fish’s players. The game didn’t do as well as some of Big Fish’s other games, but performed much better than it would have as King of Thieves, and players praised it as a good “whodunit.”

“Even if you polish it all the way if you set out with a theme that wasn’t going to work with this audience it’s still going to hurt you.”

In another case study, with Shiver, Russian developer Artogon “hit the theme perfectly for our audience,” full of mystery and intrigue as the player picks up a mysterious, familiar girl who leaves a teddy bear behind in the car before vanishing, leaving the player alone in a Hitchcockian spooky town.

It goes for creepy and eerie, not spooky. “The creep factor comes from the way that the story and the player integrated, and the music and the art,” Brunette says. Bloody slasher-style fear would not have played well.

It’s a mistake to conceive of Big Fish’s audience as mothers that will play with their kids, and players loved that all the elements were sufficiently adult. But the studio’s next game ended up featuring a robot and a wizard — to moderate success.

“I can’t fault Artogon for trying to do something different, because we got really good at doing gothic horror. Our in house series, Mystery Case Files, did really well and launched a thousand imitations… however, that can only work for so long. Our players get tired of the same thing; there’s a bit of a theme fatigue going on right now.”

The Surface: The Noise She Couldn’t Make casts the player as a psychic who enters a patient’s mind to solve what’s ailing her in the real world. There are metaphorical gameplay interactions that relate to what’s happening to the character, a mysterious Jane Doe who’s been found unconscious with a bloody knife. Developer Elephant Games had a lot of leeway with creating emotional fantasy worlds, since the worlds were inside someone’s mind, and the title was incredibly successful.

Players respond poorly to anything that seems juvenile, though: “They’re just as likely to object, in our experience, to a game, maybe it’s a fairytale game, that looks like it was made for their daughter, as a robot game that looks like it was made for their son,” Brunette notes. Adult casual players want “gender-neutral, sophisticated, mature, well-writen storylines.”

Brunette’s best advice is to make games that the real women you know might like to play, rather than targeting some idea of the “40 year old woman” or the stereotypes associated with things people like: think about the real women in your lives when you’re making games, and pay attention to their unique needs.

“Respect them, don’t pander to them, don’t talk down to them, and don’t give them stereotypes,” she says. “Don’t assume that what works for other audiences is going to work for yours. Craft strong storylines with the right themes, and don’t forget to evolve.” (source:gamasutra)


上一篇:

下一篇: