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游戏媒体应该避免盲目地模仿电影

发布时间:2013-04-07 17:20:59 Tags:,,,,

作者:Leigh Alexander

著名游戏策划师Warren Spector指出,在结构和叙述方面,游戏经常借鉴其他媒体,但我们必须重新考虑这种模仿了—-我们往往所关注的是应该向其他媒体学习什么,而忽略了不应该学习什么。

Spector表示:“摆在我们眼前的是各种诱惑,但是如果我们能够轻松地成为一种媒体,那么发展之路必会受到阻隔。模仿似乎是一件理所当然的事,甚至是任何媒体在发展过程中的必经阶段。在其他媒体打下的基础上成长,实在是正常又自然的。”

电影本身也是来自对戏剧的模仿。电子游戏比其他任何媒体提供了更多“故事叙述的构建材料”。他表示:“所以游戏怎么能不讲故事?当听到人们说‘游戏不应该讲故事’时,我经常感到困惑—-我认为这种说法既愚蠢又可笑。”

Heavy Rain(from reelloop)

Heavy Rain(from reelloop)

但是游戏当然不只是“具有互动活动的电影”。“如果游戏只是其他媒体常规的混合物,那么我们就麻烦了。”游戏叙述当然还有更大的进步空间,甚至像《暴雨》这样以故事叙述为焦点的游戏也还没达到极致。

游戏和电影之间的共性就是在屏幕上移动的图象和与之配合的声音,从而创造生活中的同步幻象。在Spector看来,这一共性实在太明显了,几乎不值一提。

“从文化上讲,游戏与电影具有许多共同点;诞生于20世纪的电影改变了一切。正是因为电影,世界上的所有人才可能接收相同的文化信息。”

Spector表示:“我认为所有人都会同意,游戏已经超越了电影。”无视电影和游戏之间的“显著区别”是非常危险的。比如,主导电影体验的编辑技术和观众获知角色不知情的信息的方式,创造了一个结构,而那种结构在游戏中是行不通的。

“我们必须放弃一些‘显著区别’。那种‘区别’会破坏幻象,夺走玩家想成为自身经历的导演的体验。在大多数游戏中,拍摄活动是持续性的……我们要么控制拍摄本身,要么将拍摄权让给玩家。”

玩家不只是在看,同时也能够实时参与体验。“电影是非线性,而游戏则是线性的,并且要同时处理时间和空间。”

游戏的进展节奏也与电影不同。显然,电影的演出时间只是无尽的游戏时间中的一小片段。观众习惯于电影的惯例,但有时候,游戏开发者可以在不到一分钟时间内便吸引玩家的注意。

“如果你的游戏动作不够快,不能体现真正的动作性,或至少算得上吸引人,那么你的玩家就会离开。”对话方式必须是不同的,因为对话往往要重复利用。玩家可能在游戏中的相同区域停留相当一段时间:“你必须找到上百种方式说,‘我想我听到了一些事。’”而电影编剧在一瞬间就可以传达这种必要的体验。

游戏时刻也必须设计成可重复利用的。在镜头前飞过天空的鸽子,第一次看来非常棒—-但如果这种场面每一次都出现,那就显得很愚蠢了。让玩家制造他们自己的“魔法时刻”更有价值,而不是将这种任务交给视觉编辑技术。

游戏也仍然对自己的修辞负有责任—-受《龙与地下城》中的规范的困扰(游戏邦注“有谁想玩一款关于摇骰子的电子游戏?”)。Spector常常强调自己并不想成为“讨厌电影系游戏的家伙”。

但他认为在不使用其他媒体建立的成文惯例的情况下,我们还可以采取更多方法—-如研究AI除了战斗是否还有其他用途,或考察游戏专家和玩家在纸笔游戏中的呼唤和回应,以及更深入地理解为什么某些在电影中可行的技术在游戏中却毫无功效。

“我们现在面临的关键问题是,我们必须开始寻找什么才是突显游戏的东西。我们可以将玩家带到他们想象中的世界。游戏是人类历史上唯一能对玩家行为产生回应的媒体。其他媒体从未达到这样的程度。大概除了临场动作角色扮演游戏,不过它们不算。”

“在确立游戏的独特媒体身份的过程中,我们已经取得了很大的进步,借鉴其他媒体只能让我们实现一半的目标……但我们现在应该停止模仿了。我们需要一些原创精神。游戏作为一种媒体诞生已有30年了,你可以决定游戏的发展方向了,现在为时未晚。”

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

Spector: Games need to borrow from film less

By Leigh Alexander

Games often look to other media for lessons on structure and narrative, but imitation needs to be considered — we talk often about what we should take from other media, but not often about what we should not, argues Warren Spector.

“There are things that are sort of seductive and obvious that I think will hold us back as we become the medium we’re cpable of becoming,” Spector says. “Imitating other media seems to be a natural, maybe even necessary stage in every medium’s development. Building on a foundation provided by other media is pretty normal and natural.”

Movies themselves were born from attempts to emulate theater. Video games offer more of the “building blocks of storytelling” that any other medium has ever offered. “So how can we not tell stories? I often get confused when people say ‘games shouldn’t tell stories’ — I find that silly and amusing,” Spector says.

Yet games are more than “movies with interactivity,” of course. “If we’re nothing but an amalgam of conventions from other media, we’re in a world of trouble,” he says. There are yet more strides to be made in game storytelling even beyond games like Heavy Rain in which it’s a primary focus.

The similarities between games and movies — moving images on a screen, both with synchronous sound, creating a synchronous illusion of life — are so apparent they’re almost not worth mentioning, in his view.

“Culturally speaking, we share a lot with movies; movies were the medium of the 20th century that changed everything. It was the first time that everybody in the world could experience the same… cultural messages.”

“I think everyone can agree that games have overtaken those media,” Spector suggests. We ignore the “significant differences” between film and games at our peril, he continues. The editing techniques that dictate the experience of a film and how audiences are privy to information that the characters aren’t, for example, create a structure that doesn’t work in games.

“We need to jettison some of those,” Spector says. “It breaks the illusion; it wrests the experience away from players who want to be directors of their own experience. In most games the action is continuous… we either take control of the camera ourselves, or we leave control of the camera to the player.”

Players aren’t just watching, they’re actually engaged in real time with an experience, repeatedly. “In a weird way movies are not linear, and games are linear, in the way they treat time and space.”

The way games are paced is quite different from films, too. Clearly the runtime of a movie is only a fraction of the potentially-infinite time players can expect to play. Audiences are accustomed to the convention of film, but game developers sometimes have less than a minute to get players engaged.

“If you don’t get to your verbs quickly, and make them really action-y, or at least make them compelling in some way, your player’s going away,” he says. Approach to dialogue is also necessarily different, since dialogue is often designed to be reusable. A player may remain in the same area of the game for quite some time: “You have to find a hundred ways to say, ‘I thought I heard something,’” he notes, while a screenwriter can convey the necessary experience within a moment.

Game moments, too, must be designed to be reusable: The first time doves fly in front of a camera in a film, it looks cool — but if that happens every time a gun goes off, it becomes silly. It’s more valuable to let players make their own “magic moments,” rather than recuse that responsibility to visual editing.

Games are still beholden to their own tropes, too, burnened by Dungeons and Dragons conventions (“who wants to play a [video game] about rolling dice?”) The effusive Spector, who frequently joked at his own expense about the challenges of talking only for twenty minutes, stresses he doesn’t want to be “that guy who hates cinematic games.”

But he believes there’s more we can do without using established conventions from other media — like exploring plausible AI for applications other than combat, or by looking at the call and response in pen-and-paper games between the game master and the players– and by better understanding why techniques that work in film are often unique to it.

“There’s a point where we have to start looking at what makes us unique… we can transport players to worlds they can only imagine… We’re the only medium in history that responds to what players do. No one’s ever been able to do that,” he says. “…Except maybe LARPers, and they don’t count.”

“We’ve made progress, and we can get partway to where we’re capable of going by borrowing from other media… but we can only go so far. We need some original ideas,” Spector adds. “30 years after the creation of this medium, you have the opportunity to determine what it can become. It’s not too late.” (source:gamasutra)


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