作者：John Hanke

上个月，谷歌发布了其首款移动游戏《Ingress》。该游戏的故事背景是地球上发现了一种外星能量，于是Enlightened和Resistance这两大派系就分头培养或压制这种能量。这听起来有点像老套的科幻故事，但其新颖卖点就在于游戏玩法：玩家选择了自己效忠的派系之后，就要走向现实世界访问不同的目的地，为自己的团队收复失地。这听起来像是地理寻宝、《魔兽世界》和J.J. Abrams电影的合体——一种发生于我们周围而非虚拟世界中的大型多人体验。

没错，这是有点不同。谷歌钦定的项目主管John Hanke认为，这款游戏代表着未来的手机游戏方向，一种让真实世界的活动凌驾于沉浸式虚拟体验的新范式。以下是其开发团队制作《Ingress》过程中所遵循的三个核心原则——也是可能改变未来移动游戏的理念。

Ingress(from allthingsd)

1.让大家动起来

电子游戏一直以来局限于让人们长期久坐的特点。但Hanke认为这主要归咎于技术的局限于，而非游戏这种媒体本身的劣根性。他说：“游戏主机不得不与你的电视和电源插座相连接，此外你还得让设备连网。”但布我们已经拥有随处可连网的移动设备，所以游戏和现实世界也可以产生交集。如果说Wii和Kinect的设计方式就是让人们离开沙发，那么《Ingress》就是让人们彻底走出室内。

实际上，正是这种简单、打破常规的理念推动着整个游戏开发过程。“整个团队的入手理念就是‘我们如何让人们走向户外，看看自己之前从未注意过的世界’”，其目标就是用技术让人们与现实世界互动，而不是与之隔绝。

Hake称目前我们所看到的多数手机游戏都是基于“围绕用户创造一个泡沫”这种理念，让用户与自己周围的人群、风景和声音相隔绝。“我们希望扭转这种局面，看看我们能否用技术手段诱使人们离开桌案和沙发，走向户外看看真实世界的风景。”

这是一个很棘手的事情。沙发的确很舒服。但Hanke相信像《Ingress》这类游戏可以在融合另一个维度的满足感之时，保留游戏本身的趣味性——即它给予人们的成就感，并希望将电子游戏那种克服障碍，获得进展的基本特征与用户四处移动所激发的快感，在现实世界中获得的锻炼及出色体验相结合。据其所称，“我认为这些特点融合在一起更棒，”，尽管这并不意味着人人都该从《光晕》等游戏中解脱出来，参与这种高科技的夺旗游戏，但相信许多玩家确实难以抵挡这种现实世界所激发的肾上腺素。

尽管《Ingress》团队一开始就坚定了用户应该四处走动玩游戏的理念，但他们也意识到不可忽视休闲游戏在人们生活中所扮演的角色——这种游戏并非既定的消遣方式，而是一种随时随地的活动。这是团队第二个核心原则的基础：它必须是一种消磨时间的东西。Hanke认为这种游戏“必须是你可以在站着排队时所玩的体验”。必须承认，现在的人总是很难抽出时间玩游戏，因此成功的手机游戏必须是可让人们忙里偷闲的活动。

2.突破手机的局限性

当前我们所使用的手机的确是实现Hanke这一现实世界游戏理念的核心所在。但这并不意味着它们就必须是这种游戏体验的中心元素。Hanke并不希望你只是坐在公园中拿着手机玩游戏，他所想象的游戏应该能够真正发生在公园，手机只是让你到达该地点的一个工具。

因此，《Ingress》的设计着眼于让玩家不要紧盯着手机屏幕，而是将目光转向周围的环境。Hanke称不止是视觉效果，设计师在游戏的声音设计上也投入了大量精力，采用了高保真度的音效，以及叙述游戏动作的全面音轨。“这款游戏最笨拙的地方在于，你还是得看手机屏幕，有时候还是得划动手指才能玩游戏。”

他们希望游戏采用的高科技视觉效果更具实用性，更不只是纯粹的美观而已。Hanke解释道，“我们发现你在户外很难看到手机屏幕，因为在外面屏幕会反光，室外的光照并不理想。我们希望保持画面像素。这并不像主机游戏（你可以真正沉浸于画面的视觉效果）。这种游戏几乎得像一个GPS应用一样，指引你从A点走向B点。”

但对《Ingress》团队来说，开发游戏并不只是简单地想出让玩法脱离手机的方式，过要设想如果我们离开了智能手机游戏又该呈现哪种面貌。Hanke反复强调的一个主张就是“应该让手机淡出视野”，但他并不是指让手机在我们的生活或所玩的游戏中退居二线，而是指移动设备像棒棒糖一样可让我们放在口袋和钱包中随处携带这种理念的弊端。

他称“我们不久前才刚形成移动设备应该成为随身携带物品这种理念，但我认为随着我们身上可配带的小型物件越来越多，手机便携性优势将日益削弱。”与之相似的东西，例如Nike和Jawbone的健康手链，或者Goolge Glass等未来主义式的可配带显示器。Hanke解释称，“我们确实是以类似Google Glass这种理念来设计游戏，即真正扩大用户对世界的认知范围，而不只是在屏幕上简单地显示内容。”

inline-ingress(from fastcodesign)

3.创新游戏需要创新广告

《Ingress》目前正处于仅受邀可参与的公开测试阶段，可免费下载，但其中并不含有可让开发者获得真正收益的游戏内部经济系统，你也不会遇到催促你收集能量的插页广告。从一开始，Hanke团队就很谨慎地应对让游戏自我维持发展这一挑战。

他们原先考虑采用虚拟商品模式——即Zynga游戏所利用的免费增值模式，但最终该团队还是放弃了这一选项。Hanke表示，“我个人觉得这种模式有点走到死路了，你可以看到许多这类游戏越来越不好玩。它们实际上只是引诱你不断为其掏钱。”

Hanke团队选择了一个更具试验性的方法，选择同一些广告商合作，这样设计师就得围绕这一模式创造游戏故事。其合作广告商有大有小，既有汽车租赁服务Zipcar，也有旧金山箱包配饰公司Chrome（游戏邦注：这与谷歌Chrome产品并无关系）。他们最近向游戏推出了一种更为微妙有意义的广告方式，其目标是将玩家引向Zipcar办公室和Chrome商店去兑换游戏内置物品。

毫无疑问，找到这种不干扰游戏玩法，但同时仍可让赞助商获益的广告绑定方式确实很棘手。可以想象，这种不但推广了品牌，而且还将消费者引向商店的模式，更容易得到赞助商的认同。虽然这些用户与广告互动可能只是为了升级自己的能量扫描器，但他们到达指定商店时也可能会顺带买下一个新斜挎包。

理想情况下，这种新型广告对游戏而言会成为一种自然而具有积极附加值的内容。Hanke称“我认为我们能够以一种令游戏更有趣的方式植入广告。”没错，他们还可以根据地理位置向《Ingress》用户呈现相应的商店品牌，Hanke对此表示，“这种方法并无不妥……只要它不会破坏游戏体验就行。”（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）

3 Principles For The Future Of Gaming, From A Google Game Designer

John Hanke, the man at the helm of Google’s experimental game, Ingress, charts the course for the future of mobile gaming.

Last month, Google unveiled its first mobile game, an ambitious, experimental thing called Ingress. The experience hinges on the narrative that an exotic energy has been discovered on Earth, and two factions, the Enlightened and the Resistance, are respectively scrambling to cultivate it and/or suppress it. It’s kind of boilerplate sci-fi, but the novelty lies in the way the game is played: After players choose their allegiance, they’re tasked with going out into the real world and visiting various destinations to claim territory for their squad. It’s something like what you’d get if you threw geocaching, World of Warcraft, and J.J. Abrams in a blender–a massive multiplayer experience that transpires not in a virtual world but in a slightly warped version of our own.

So, yes, it’s a bit different. But John Hanke, the man Google tapped to head the project, thinks it represents nothing less than the future of mobile gaming, a new paradigm that will privilege real-world activity above immersive virtual engagement. Here are three core principles his team followed while creating Ingress–ideas that could well change mobile gaming as we know it in years to come.

1. UPROOT THE COUCH POTATO

Video games have long been the province of the sedentary. But Hanke sees that more as a consequence of the limitations of technology than something inherent in the medium. “The game console had to be hooked up to your television and a power outlet,” he says. “After that you had to have your connection to the Internet.” But now, with devices that keep us connected no matter where we are, Hanke believes that gaming and the real world are ready to mingle. If Wii and Kinect were designed to get us up off the couch, Ingress aims to get us out the door entirely.
“Mobile games thus far have been based on “creating a bubble around people.”"

In fact, that simple, convention-demolishing ambition drove the development of the entire game. “The whole group started with this idea of, ‘How can we get people out into the world and seeing things that are there but they didn’t notice before,’” Hanke says. The goal was to use technology to bring people in touch with the real world, rather than distracting them from it.

Most of the mobile games we’ve seen thus far have been based on “creating a bubble around people,” Hanke says, cutting them off from the people, sights, and sounds surrounding them. “We wanted to flip that around and see if we could use technology to kind of lure people away from their desks and off their couches out in the world and get them to look up and notice things.”

It’s a tough proposition. Couches are comfy. But Hanke’s confident that games like Ingress can preserve what we truly enjoy about games–not their veg-out factor but the sense of achievement they give us–while combining it with another dimension of fulfillment altogether. The hope is to take that fundamental video game thrill of overcoming obstacles and making progress and marry it with the endorphin rush you get from moving around and getting exercise and having cool experiences in the real world. “I think they’re stronger together,” Hanke says. That doesn’t mean that everyone is going to retire from their Halo career in favor of a global game of high-tech capture the flag, but Hanke might be right in that real-world adrenaline will be hard for players to resist.

While the Ingress team was adamant from the start about users having to move around to play, they realized that they couldn’t ignore the role casual games are increasingly playing in our lives, not as concerted pastimes but as here-and-there distractions. That was the basis for the team’s second core principle: It had to be a time-waster. “It needed to be something that could be done while you’re standing in line,” Hanke says. It’s a recognition that people can’t always make time for gaming, and thus a successful mobile game has to be something people can use to occupy the lulls when they do come around.

2. THINK BEYOND THE PHONE

It’s true that the amazingly capable mobile phones we have today are central to realizing Hanke’s idea of real-world gaming. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they should be the central component of that gaming experience. Hanke doesn’t simply want you to be sitting in a park, playing a game on your phone; he envisions a game that actually takes place in that park, with the phone merely serving as a tool for getting you there.

“It’s a recognition that people can’t always make time for gaming.”

Thus, Ingress was designed to keep players’ eyeballs off the phone and on the sights around them. Hanke says the designers put just as much effort into the sound design of the game as its visuals, laboring over elements like high-fidelity sound effects and a comprehensive audio track that narrates the game’s action. “In a way, the most awkward thing about the game is the fact that you still have to look down at your screen and in some cases tap the screen in order to play,” he says.

The spartan, high-tech aesthetic of the game’s visuals were intended to be more utilitarian than graphically impressive. “What we found is that it’s hard to see your screen outside,” Hanke explains. “There’s a glare; the light’s not optimal. And we wanted to keep the pixels we were putting on the screen clean. It’s not like a console game, where you’re really immersed in the visual that’s in front of you, and that’s the full experience. This needs to be almost like a GPS application that’s helping you get from Point A to Point B.”

But for the Ingress team, development wasn’t simply a matter of trying to think of ways to move gameplay off the phone. It was about trying to conceive of how games might look in a future when we’ve left smartphones behind entirely. One of Hanke’s common refrains is that “the phone should melt away,” but when he says that it’s already in the process of doing so, he’s not talking about the phone taking a secondary role in our lives or the games we play. He’s talking about the erosion of the entire idea of the mobile device as a candy-bar-sized object we carry around in our pockets and purses.

“It’s a relatively recent occurrence that we think of the mobile experience as being this little brick that you hold,” he says. “But I think that’s going to become less and less important as various pieces of that become wearable adornments on your body,” things akin, perhaps, to the connected fitness bracelets we’re seeing from Nike and Jawbone, or beyond that, futuristic wearable displays like Google Glass. “We’re really designing with the idea that there will be things like Google Glass in the future,” Hanke explains, “where you’re really augmenting the user’s perception of the world rather than simply portraying things on a screen.”

3. INNOVATIVE GAMES REQUIRE INNOVATIVE ADS

Ingress, which is currently in an invite-only public beta, is free to download, but there’s no in-game economy that lets the developers collect real-world dollars, and you won’t encounter interstitial ads that jerk you out of the energy-collecting action. Still, from the beginning, Hanke and his team were mindful of the challenge of making their experiment a self-sustaining one.

They had considered a virtual goods model–the type of freemium system that Zynga has exploited so effectively with its big titles–but ultimately the team decided it wasn’t the way to go. “I personally feel like that model is kind of at a dead end,” Hanke says. “You’re seeing games that are less and less fun to play. They’re really just hooks to get you to that point where you have to start plugging in quarters for more.”
“Designers have been working with a half-dozen advertising partners, to integrate them into the narrative.”

Instead, his team opted for a more experimental approach, tapping a half-dozen advertising partners that the designers have been working into the narrative. The brands are big and small, from the forward-looking auto rental service Zipcar to a San Francisco-based bag and apparel outfit called Chrome (no relation). They recently rolled out their first efforts to work a more subtle, meaningful style of advertising into the game, with objectives that directed players to Zipcar offices and Chrome stores to redeem in-game objects.

Finding that balance of integration that’s unobtrusive to gameplay while still being worthwhile to sponsors will be tricky, no doubt. But it’s hard to imagine companies not getting a little excited about a model that not only gets their name out there but actually puts bodies in their stores. Though those individuals might’ve come just to upgrade their energy scanner, there’s always the chance that they’ll cop a new messenger bag once they’re there.

Ideally, this new type of advertising will be something that’s not only neutral but a positive addition to the game. “I think we’re able to offer it in a way that makes the game more interesting,” Hanke says. Yes, they’re also necessarily exposing Ingress’s demographically desirable consumers to the brands of these businesses, but, Hanke says, “that’s fine too … as long as it doesn’t take away from the game experience.”（source：fastcodesign）