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游戏谜题应更重传达信息而非刺激兴奋感

发布时间:2013-03-20 11:19:12 Tags:,,,

作者:Hamish Todd

游戏谜题的乐趣来自何处?人们通常都会说“当我们意识到不得不做某事的那一时刻。”

一款谜题游戏比其它谜题游戏突出的原因是什么?以下是大多数人心中的答案:

“谜题解决的逻辑性很重要”

“如果复杂问题具有简单的解决方法那就太棒了,如此你那小小的领悟便会变成真正有用的内容”

“我需要花很长时间去找到解决方法”

我希望人们能够意识到其它评估谜题的方法。即我希望人们能够问:“这些谜题能够传达给我什么内容?”

以下是Marc Ten Bosch(正致力于一款有关四维空间世界的谜题游戏《Miegakure》的创造)所说的内容:

“关于谜题游戏,人们是否会停止说‘当最终找到解决方法时,我们便会产生一种满足感’?‘当成功完成游戏的部分内容时,我真的觉得很舒坦。’——但这都只是意味着人们将快感看得比谜题还重要。”

Marc的价值系统与我一样。我们都认为:快感纵然很棒,但这只是玩家学到一些重要内容而受到的部分影响。《Miegakure》虽然充满乐趣,但是其真正突出之处还是能让玩家的大脑充斥着各种重要且美丽的空间和形状元素。

在2012年我最喜欢的一款游戏便是《Incredipede》,即玩家可以为动物设计肢体,并基于各种方式去使用这些肢体的谜题游戏。关于《Incredipede》所传达的内容让我来举个例子:这款游戏让我学到小鸟是怎样通过翅膀去控制飞行。我还意识到在这个过程中出现了2到3个谜题,也就是游戏能在非常短的时间里传达许多内容。

puzzle(from gamasutra)

puzzle(from gamasutra)

大多数优秀的谜题游戏都包含了某种程度的信息传达;但是比起《Incredipede》,其它游戏所传达的信息大多较为抽象,或者就是不够直接。传达信息并不意味着游戏需要告诉我们一些有关“现实”世界的信息。这是名为“数论”的数学题,即以不存在实际应用而广为人知,尽管它所提供的定理非常深奥且让人惊讶。

重要的是,谜题的解决方法最好能够包含一些意想不到的内容。下次当你解决谜题时可以问:“这个意想不到的内容的本性是什么?它是否能够呈现出游戏中许多不同的可能性?它是否能够呈现出我所居住的宇宙中的各种不同的可能性?”

我还从Tim Rogers那里学到了其它表述方式。Eiji Aonuma曾经说过,一款优秀的谜题游戏必须“让玩家觉得自己是聪明的”。Tim Rogers认为,《时空幻境》中的谜题“要求玩家变成真正聪明的人”。也就是说:你必须喜欢一些你之前并不知道的全新事物。

Portal(from gamasutra)

Portal(from gamasutra)

《Portal》是我一直以来都很喜欢的一款游戏。这款游戏让玩家能够连接空间中的两个遥远的点;这是一种非常独特的方法,而游戏的关卡设计也能够传达许多有趣的启示内容(游戏邦注:虽然游戏中的物理学原理大多是错误的,但这却不意味着它不能呈现出有趣的机制)。我希望你们注意到《Portal》中的两点内容:

1.《Portal》的创造者并未说“我们想要传达许许多多内容。”他们只是说:“我们想要尽可能创造出一款最有趣的电子游戏。”传达和乐趣并不是相对立的。实际上,我们有理由相信合理的传达也会非常有趣。

2.《Portal》中的谜题并不“复杂”,也就是“并不需要玩家花费大量时间去解决”。这是因为谜题较为“集中”—-不存在可能转移注意力的内容,复杂的行动也被划分成一些简单的行动,还有一些小细节能够提示玩家该做什么等等。要点在于,《Portal》所传达的是一些非常复杂的内容,所以为了能够清楚地进行传达他们便尽可能地简化各种内容,并确保不会影响到解决方法的效能。这便导致了玩家在获得解决方法时将不会感受到太过强烈的“兴奋感”,因为赋予这种兴奋感太多的价值将不能有效地呈现出传达内容。

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

Against orgasmic puzzle design

by Hamish Todd

What makes a puzzle fun? People will usually say “that moment where you realize what you have to do”.

What makes one puzzle better than another puzzle? Here are a couple of things that I think most people would say:

-”It’s important that the puzzle solution is logical [for some definition of "logical"]”

-”It’s nice if there’s a simple solution to something that seemed complicated, so that your small realization becomes REALLY useful”.

-”It should have taken me a long time to get the solution”

I want to people to become more aware of another way of valuing a puzzle. I want people to ask: “what does this puzzle communicate to me?”.

Here’s something that was tweeted by Marc Ten Bosch, who is making Miegakure, a puzzler about world with four spatial dimensions:

“Can people stop saying “once a solution finally reveals itself, there is an immense sense of satisfaction to be had” about puzzle games? “Once I successfully beat part of the game, I felt good.” – No shit! They are implying they value the pleasure more than what the puzzle is about.”

Marc has the same value system that I do. We say: the pleasure is pretty good, but it is only a pleasant side effect of the player learning something important, which is the bigger point. Miegakure is full of pleasure, but what makes it great is that it fills your brain with important and transcendentally beautiful facts about the nature of spaces and shapes.

My favourite game of 2012 was Incredipede, a puzzler where you design limbs for animals, and use those limbs in various ways. To give a small example of something Incredipede communicates: it made me realize things about how birds’ wings manipulate air. I learnt that over the course of only two or three puzzles, so the game was communicating a lot in a very short space of time.

Most good puzzles involve some degree of communication; it’s just that usually the thing that is communicated is a little more abstract or has a less immediate bearing on the world than in Incredipede’s does. Communication doesn’t necessarily mean you have to tell us something about the “real” world. There’s a branch of mathematics called “number theory”, which -for a while- was famed for having no practical application, even though the theorems it gave us felt extremely profound and surprising.

At the heart of it, the solution to a puzzle has to involve something unexpected. The next time you solve a puzzle (that you may feel very good about) ask: “what is the nature of this unexpected thing? Does it illuminate lots of different possibilities within the game’s engine to me? Does it illuminate lots of different possibilities in the universe in which I live?”

There’s another way of saying all this which I learned from Tim Rogers. Eiji Aonuma once said a good puzzle should “make the player feel smart”. Tim Rogers says that a puzzle in Braid “demands that you become actually smart”. Which is to say: you must cotton on to something genuinely new that you didn’t know before.

My joint-favourite game of all time is Portal. Portal lets you connect two distant points in space; that is a very unique thing to do, and the game’s level design communicates its many interesting implications (the physics of it is mostly wrong, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t show you interesting mathematics). I want you to notice two things about Portal:

1. Portal’s makers did NOT sit down and say “we want to communicate a load of stuff”. They just said: “we want to make the most fun video game we can”. Communication and fun do not seem to be opposed. In fact we have reason to cautiously believe that decent communication is always fun.

2. Portal’s puzzles are not “hard”, as in “they do not take most people a lot of time to solve”. This is because the puzzles are “focused” – there are no red herrings, complex actions are broken down into simple actions, small details are used to give you clues about what you should do, etc. The point is that Portal communicates quite complex things, and so to make the communication clear they simplified things as much as they could without compromising the solution’s coolness. This resulted in less intense “orgasms” of solution-getting; but attributing too much value to orgasms is a little immature, in light of decent communication.

If you’d like to know more about how communication works, I recommend this lecture by Marc Ten Bosch and Jonathan Blow about mechanics. I gave a lecture of my own about communicative level design, and that should appear on the internet soon. Personally I am looking at many different avenues for communication in level design; some of my results appear in my games Music of the Spheres and The Stranger Loop.(source:gamasutra)


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