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解析游戏中计算机制与资源平衡问题

发布时间:2013-05-07 17:17:10 Tags:,,,,

作者:Daniel Accardi

我想应该很少人会将计算当成一种兴趣吧。这并不是说计算本身不存在乐趣,或者是我们中的许多人未曾发现其中深层次的乐趣——仅仅只是因为它不能让我们联想起喜欢的活动或培养起的技能。特别是对于玩家而言,当大片场景充斥着快节奏且逼真的射击画面,独立场景体现出像《亲爱的艾斯特》那样中等曲折的体验时,他们是不可能停下来说道:“你知道吗?我真的希望能够花时间去计算一些数值大于或小于其它数值!”可以说计算并不是推动游戏乐趣的主要机制。

DearEsther(from plughead)

DearEsther(from plughead)

而这种认知将一直伴随着你,直到某一天你终于意识到自己也在通过数字挖掘乐趣。我想这包含了某种程度的选择偏见;毕竟电子游戏就是一种数字事件,而因为计算机的本质便是基于与语法和语义价值间的逻辑关系,所以我们只能推测游戏也具有同样的依赖关系。也许你会对现实感到惊讶,但是人们却很少会意识到这一点。FPS玩家学着对火力的可量化元素做出本能的决定,并以此去调整战术:我可以选择具有长射程且巨大破坏力,但是弹夹容量较小且加载时间较长的武器,或者具有短射程且较小破坏力,但却带有较大弹夹容量和较短加载时间的武器。如果你玩过任何驾驶类游戏,你便能够轻松找到处理,加速和单纯的速度之间的有利关系。甚至连体育类游戏也尝试着为团队中的个体玩家量化技能和能力:这一玩家是个厉害的踢球者,但却也是个糟糕的接球者,他不能快速移动,但却能带球越过重围。实际上,不管你玩的是怎样的电子游戏,你都必须做出这样的决定,而最简单的物理事实则是:你只能携带这么多战利品,因为这些物品也是有重量的。

如果要列举哪款游戏将这些机制整合到镜头上去理解人们所关注的内容,那么《模拟人生》便是最典型的例子。这是一款特别简约的游戏,即基于简单的输入和输出系统;其理念中有一种让人吃惊的决定论,如果你身体健全并拥有一些好友,你便会在此感受到乐趣。尽管如此,努力优化幸福,或通过创建一个被壁炉和木椅填满且没有门的小小房间而混淆了系统也是一种乐趣。它呈现出了拟人化的UI,但从根本上来看它就是一款有趣的数字游戏。

它同时也在我心中留下了生动的记忆。我能想起在面对一个特殊Sim时的场景,不管是巧合还是特定设计,我的Sim拥有非常低落的情绪。我需要努力执行一些理性行动,帮助他走出痛苦,但是因为他的低落情绪太过严重,从而导致我的所有温柔都无济于事。我计划了一系列幸福行动,包括了食物,睡觉和乐趣,但是不管我做了什么该Sim都袒露出了无视的态度,并默默地看自己的电视节目。最终我便感到了深深的绝望:这个Sim到底是怎么了?出于某些原因,他完全打破了我所相信的系统规则。他对于幸福的理性排序存在免疫力。同时他的行为也告诉了我,代理拥有与系统完全不同的规则和关系理念,而这将很大程度地影响着游戏世界中系统的表达。

这些规则系统将作为一种先验事实,帮助我们更好地定义游戏世界的真理。价值的选择和规则的陈述将有效地影响着他们。例如一些关于RPG世界的假设便是源于优势统计,承载能力和物品重量之间的关系:这些数值的存在及其关系将告诉玩家在这个世界中收集物品是可能的,重要的且有利的。该理念在不同游戏中拥有不同的效果;举个例子来说吧,基于不同枪支的统计和数值都能含蓄地告诉玩家射死其他人是可行,重要且有利的,并且也存在能够优化玩家杀人能力的方法,他们必须花时间去执行。关于《模拟人生》不存在所谓新鲜价值还有一个原因,即游戏认为新鲜度对于人类的幸福来说并非绝对必要。其它价值的存在也暗示着相应判断的执行。

如此看来,考虑数据捣弄用于无价值系统上的频率完全是在浪费时间了。玩家将花费好几个小时的时间去创造角色,为特定地图选择特定枪支,为特定路线选择特定汽车——我们中的许多人还会花费大量时间去盯着各种生命值仪表。但是我们能否回到《模拟人生》所建议的那样?我们能否使用价值平衡去模拟人类的行为,或更深入的人类情境?我希望从自己的Sim中感受到:我在游戏世界中操纵着某个对价值,可能性和对与错拥有不同判断的人。如果我们采用了一些较为虚构的情感,并强迫玩家根据与自身情况不同的价值做出决定,我们便会走向更加糟糕的情境。

我真正开始认真设计的第一款游戏是关于三十年战争(游戏邦注:1618至1648年间发生于欧洲的一连串战争,始于德国天主教与德国信教之争)期间弗洛伦萨一个吸血鬼的故事,即一个天主教徒一直在努力寻找帮助自己摆脱吸血鬼身份的方法。而他之所以会这么做是因为想要再次回到之前的天主教生活方式。游戏中的行动是关于探索受到瘟疫袭击的佛罗伦萨,解决问题并探索治疗方法,但是从物理性质上来讲则是关于信仰仪表。玩家拥有一个生命值仪表,其数值会因为玩家遭到身体上的伤害,饥饿,站在十字架附近,祈祷,遭遇其它吸血鬼而减少;并且会因为玩家吃了生肉或其他人类而增加。相反地,信仰仪表是指人类的理性理解,即关于宇宙是好的,上帝是存在的,生活是有价值的等等。当人类吃了生肉,吃了其他人,感到沮丧或扯上罪恶事件时,该仪表上的数值便会减少;而当人们越接近十字架,进行祈祷,支持中世纪天主教信仰并观看美丽的日出时,其数值便会相应增加。游戏故事是关于一个天主教徒一直努力以天主教的规则约束自己,但他却越来越难做到这点;而游戏故事便是关于平衡这两种仪表,尝试着去解决吸血鬼之谜并避免让自己陷入绝望的情绪中。

我希望玩家能够做出选择——何时去推动其中的一个仪表而非另外的仪表,以及这么做有何价值?当一种行动同时带给我积极和消极影响时,我该怎么做?而我希望他们做出的选择是基于抽象概念。更确切地说是,我希望玩家能够觉得一些具体的行为(游戏邦注:如吃东西,承受伤害)与抽象概念(即拥有信仰,坚持世界和平)一样有价值且必要;有些人会将那些对于大多数人而言非常重要的事物看得毫无价值。作为一个基于天主教背景的无神论者,我经常会因为遇到那些从未考虑过是否存在上帝的人而沮丧不已。我希望创造一款与我们对于世界的理解完全不同的游戏体验,即是基于那些不具有宗教背景的好友的理解。我希望玩家将在此理解描述基本真相的不同价值观。生活将带着我们朝不同方向前进,游戏从不会超越计划阶段和关卡的开始阶段。我只想跟玩家说:“这是非常复杂抽象的理念,许多人害怕去正视它,而它是由卡通似的红矩形所代表的价值。所以请一定要搞定它!”

为什么我们不频繁地这么做?我们理解中的游戏和界面是具有代表性的,所以为什么我们不在乎到底是怎样的代表性呢?有时候,真相能够如形式允许般坦率地呈现出来。特别是当我们在面对一些有关形式和内容的严肃问题时,如霸权国家,游戏的定义,以及我们在创造游戏和玩游戏的行为对于人类境况是否重要等——这都值得我们往回走并想办法进行简化。尽可能分解词汇并思考某一表达是否足够简单:这些内容都很重要,但却彼此矛盾,而我们想要尝试着去解决这种矛盾。我住在一个受限的世界中,其他人可能感觉不到这点,但是这对于我自身的体验却很重要。我们不一定总是需要创造出带有声音解释(关于哲学问题)的第一人称射击游戏,有时候选择适当的数字进行加工反而会取得更好的效果。

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

Why Doesn’t Anything Mean Anything?: Thoughts on Resource Balancing in Games

by Daniel Accardi

I’d imagine that relatively few of us, if asked, would cite accountancy as a passion. That’s not to suggest that accountancy is inherently un-fun, or even that many of us don’t find a surprisingly deep-seated pleasure in performing it well – merely that it doesn’t spring to mind as an activity we enjoy, or a skill we cultivate. Especially for gamers, in a time when the blockbuster scene is dominated by fast-paced photorealistic shoot-‘ems-up and the indie scene produces medium-bending experiences like Dear Esther, it might seem odd to stop and say, “You know? Making sure certain numbers are smaller or larger than other numbers in a finite amount of numbers is really what I want to spend my time on!” All jokes about Eve Online aside, accounting is not the primary mechanic that drives excitement in games.

Yet the realization creeps and creeps, breathing over your shoulder (or more likely, over the upper-left hand corner of your screen) until you find yourself face-to-face with the tragic realization that yes, you often derive fun from crunching numbers. I suppose there’s a degree of selection bias involved; after all, video games are generally a digital affair, and since computers depend so intrinsically on the logical relationships of values for their syntax and semantics, it’s only to be expected that games would share the same dependency. Perhaps the surprise is in how bold the fact can be, despite the fact that people rarely recognize it in those terms. FPS players learn to make instinctual decisions about balancing the quantifiable factors of firepower, and tailor their tactics to that balance: I can choose a weapon with long range and high damage, but a low clip size and long reload time, or a machine gun with short range and low damage-per-shot, but a huge clip and relatively little reloading time. If you play any driving game, no doubt you scroll through a roster of cars trying to find the most advantageous relationship between handling, acceleration and pure speed. Even sports games often attempt to quantify skills and abilities for individual players on a team: this player is a great kicker but an abysmal receiver, this one can’t move quickly but will hold the line against all odds. In fact, the chances are decent that no matter what kind of video game you’re playing, you’ve had to make these kinds of decisions, even if it comes down to nothing but the simplest of brute physical facts: you can only carry so much loot, because objects have weight.

The Sims would probably be the most citable example of turning this essential mechanic into a lens for understanding human concerns. It is exceptionally reductive, in framing the Sims as relatively simple input-output systems; there’s a certain startling (indeed, oddly accusatory) determinism in the idea that yes, if you’re physically healthy and have a few friends and aren’t standing in a puddle of your own urine, you’re probably pretty happy. Still, it’s fun – working to optimize happiness, or utterly confounding the system by building a tiny doorless room full of fireplaces and wooden chairs. It’s got an amusing anthropomorphic UI, but ultimately, it’s a numbers game, and a darn pleasant one.

It also created some astoundingly vivid memories for me. I can recall dealing with one particular Sim who, by accident or design, had found himself in a particularly black mood. I was queuing up a series of fairly rational actions, trying to wean him off the teat of misery, but he was sucking so insistently that all my gentle firmness came to nothing. I would plan an action queue of happiness-inducing activities – food, sleep, fun – and no sooner had I done so than my Sim would willfully disregard my plan and go watch TV. I ultimately found myself in a baffled depression of my own: what was going on with this Sim? For some reason, he was breaking what I believed to be the rules of the system. He was immune to a rational prioritization of happiness. In so doing, he was also teaching me that sometimes, agents have entirely different conceptions of rules and relationships in a system, and that can have serious consequences on the expressions of a system in the world.

Those rule systems, which are given to us as a priori fact, go a long way towards defining the truth of a game world. Just the choice of values and the statements of rules can carry an intense gravity to them. There are certain assumptions about RPG worlds, for instance, which arise from the relationship between strength stats, carrying capacity, and item weight: the mere existence of those numerical values and their relationships communicates to a player that in this world, collecting items is possible, important, and powerful. The notion can have a darker timbre in different games; the existence of stats and figures on different guns, for instance, implicitly suggests that killing other players is possible, important, and powerful, and that there are ways to optimize your killing ability, and that you should spend time doing so. These sorts of implications are generally marginal, rather than focal, but this doesn’t make them less present. There’s a reason that The Sims didn’t have a value for, say, greenness; the game enforced the judgment that greenness is not essential to the happiness of a (more or less) human being. The presence of other values suggests the enforcement of corresponding judgments.

It seems, as such, something of a waste to consider how often number-crunching is applied to arguably valueless systems. Gamers might rack up hours of number-play in determining a build for a character, choosing certain guns for certain maps, choosing certain cars for certain tracks – and tons of us spend some time with our eyes on a health bar of some kind. But can we get back to what The Sims suggested we might do? Can we use the balancing of values to model human behavior, or the human condition more deeply? I want that feeling I got from my Sim: that I was operating in a world where someone had fundamentally different judgments about what was valuable, what was possible, and what was right. Especially with an increasing interest in marginal voices and the need to include them, we might do worse than beginning by exercising a little bit of fictional empathy, forcing ourselves to make decisions according to values essentially different from our own.

The first game I really began designing in earnest was a game about a vampire in Florence during the Thirty Years’ War, a Catholic nobleman who was trying to find a cure for his vampirism. However, his compulsion for a cure had a very specific motivation: namely, his desire to return to a moral, Catholic lifestyle. The action of the game was in exploring the plague-stricken city of Florence, solving problems and searching for a cure, but the real meat of it, mechanically speaking, was the faith meter. The player would have a health meter, depleted by physical injuries; by not feeding; by standing near crucifixes; by praying; by any of the other vampire stereotypes; and it could be replenished by eating raw meat and feeding on people. The faith meter, on the other hand, was as basic a representation I could imagine of a person’s measured, rational understanding that the universe was good, God existed, and life was worth living. It would be depleted by eating raw meat; by feeding on people; and by standing within a certain radius of depressing or sinful events; or it could be replenished by standing near crucifixes; by praying; by upholding medieval Catholic values; by viewing the beauty of a sunrise. The story of the game was about a Catholic, struggling desperately to live as a Catholic while it became nearly impossible to do so; the story of playing the game was balancing these two meters, trying to solve the riddle of vampirism without succumbing to either wasting away bodily or falling into a fatal, rabid depression.

I wanted a player to have to make a choice – when and how is it worth it to boost one meter and not the other? what do I do when a single action affects me positively and negatively at the same time? – and I wanted that choice to be based on an abstract. More specifically, I wanted a player to feel as though the concrete (eating food, sustaining injury) was as valuable and necessary as the abstract (having faith, being at peace with the world); that for some people, certain judgments and values can be as ruthlessly binding as the need for nutrition is for all of us. As an atheist with a Catholic background, I’m often frustrated and baffled by meeting people who have simply never considered whether or not God exists. I wanted to make a game about understanding that experience, living in a world utterly inconsistent with my own understanding of it, and the understanding maintained by my friends without any religious background. I wanted the player to have to understand a different set of values which dictated basic truths. Life took me in a different direction, and the game never got far beyond the planning stages and the beginnings of a level, but the idea has never left me. Why not just…put it all out there? “Fuck it!” I wanted to tell the player. “It’s an incredibly complicated abstract concept which many people are afraid of ever addressing seriously, and it’s a value represented by a cartoonish red rectangle. Figure it out!”

Why don’t we do that more often? We understand that games and their interfaces are representational, so why do we care exactly how representational? Sometimes, the truth is best stated as bluntly and brashly as the form allows. Especially when we’re dealing with serious issues about form and content – hegemonic power, the definitions of what is and isn’t a game, and the very real question of what we’re all doing making and playing games and carrying on as though that’s important to the human condition – it may be worthwhile to take a step back and try to simplify. Strip down the vocabulary and think in terms as simple as you can: these things are important, but they are in conflict with each other, and I want to try and resolve this conflict. I live in a world, and it is bound by strictures which are invisible to others and essential to my own experience. It isn’t always necessary to make a massive first-person shooter with eloquent voice-acted disquisitions on philosophy to discuss philosophical issues, and indeed, it’s often better not to. Sometimes, choosing the right numbers to crunch gets the job done just as well.(source:gamasutra)


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