作者：Leigh Alexander

如今的技术让我们能够跨越多个新平台而玩游戏，但是如果我们想要得到的不只是娱乐的话，它们又该怎么做。作为《Critical Play》（2009年）的作者，Mary Flanagan相信，着眼于设计的创造性方法不仅会引导着游戏去表达价值，同时也将把游戏更好地传达给公众，并且也仍将维持着本身的乐趣与真正的游戏性。

她的实验室Tiltfactor已经迎来了十周年纪念日了，他们不仅专注于游戏创造，同时还致力于研究如何创造出更加公平的社会。在本周于纽约理工大学举办的Different Games大会上，她与我们分享了工作中的一些案例，并希望美术人员和设计师们能够从中吸取经验教训。

在解释实验室的工作（即包含角色扮演游戏，体育类游戏，桌面游戏，“与游戏相关的内容”以及传统数字游戏）时她说道：“对于我来说，这是一种文化接触。”她很想搞清楚将游戏当成一种娱乐，以及将游戏当成一种反思或分析体验的区别，特别是涉及到如何使用游戏去分析社会结构，即以牺牲某些人为代价而赋予其他人相关特权。

游戏产业是否将变成“包容性设计？”Flanagan根据她从20世纪80年代以来对游戏产业的观察而引用了相关文化改变：几乎一半的家庭主机用户为女性，可以说女性是街机时代的早期贡献者。

直到20世纪90年代，第一种第一人称射击游戏类型诞生了。她说道：“从那时起它便占据了主导地位，并成为最具创造性且让人兴奋的游戏。”但是关于第一人称射击游戏代表典型“游戏”的看法却逐渐淡却，而“我们刚好可以利用这一特殊时刻去寻找新的出路。”

引自Donna Haraway，女性用户主要探究的是如何“相亲相爱而非暴力。”Flanagan想知道游戏该如何做才能让用户基于有效的方式对彼此负责？

settlers of catan(from amazon)

她的工作便是围绕着游戏与系统和模型间相互信任的理念进行创造。举个例子来说吧，《卡坦岛》一方面是关于商品，竞争和复杂的交流与协商程度。变量可以平衡游戏领域—-但是在关于殖民主义的《卡坦岛》中，当扮演强盗的角色被攻克时，游戏才会达到平衡。

这只是游戏传达内部信念的一个例子。独立游戏玩家可能不喜欢被提及有关其价值的问题，但是Flanagan相信这一点很重要。她建议：“我们需要在设计时更加深入，将真正的价值添加到游戏中。我认为我们可以处理人类世界中的一些情感问题。我们真正在意的是什么？如果能够谨慎处理的话，这都有可能成为游戏中的核心原则。”

不管是面向社区还是基于哲理，价值都能够适应迭代设计模式，所以它们便能够在作品以及创造过程中有效地表达出来。他们能够出现在奖励结构中，在视角中，在叙述前提上，在玩家奖励和策略里，以及在包括游戏社区和体验环境的任何元素中。

真正听从各种不同玩家的想法并不是件易事；她说道：“如果你想成为一名兼收并蓄的设计师，那么你需要做的一件事便是，想办法让那些与你拥有不同想法的人去玩游戏。因为大多数人其实都是在为自己制作游戏。”

Flanagan说道：“我们能够与某些用户进行交谈，但是真正让我感到兴奋的还是该如何去扩展自己的行动。”

游戏改变是怎样的？根据人们对接种疫苗的偏见的调查，Flanagan的团队创造了一款名为《Pox》的游戏（也是僵尸版本），并在相关研究后将全职的社交心理学家带到了他们的Tiltfactor团队中。

游戏测试中的玩家研究是针对于系统思维，玩家对于接种疫苗的理解，有关疾病和病人的社交视角等等。玩“僵尸”游戏版本的群组拥有最佳结果，尽管从机制来看这与非僵尸版本游戏非常相似：“在面对虚构的疾病时，人们关于接种疫苗的态度将发生改变，玩僵尸版本的《Pox》的玩家将大大提升系统思维，并更好地理解接种疫苗。”

换句话说，僵尸故事是游戏中唯一能够强化玩家的元素；虽然用户不能真正感受到疾病的危险，但却能够理解僵尸故事的发展。

针对于那些希望玩家能够掌握相关信息或与其他玩家产生情感交流的设计师来说非常重要。Flanagan说道：“故事越偏离现实生活，我们便会越开放并对故事中的角色或情境具有更多认同感。这似乎违反了我们的直觉，但是只有故事越古怪，玩家才会更容易受到吸引。”

Tiltfactor的纸牌游戏《Buffalo》提供了像“世界最高领导者”或“华裔美国籍运动员”等描述，并提示玩家根据描述为各种角色命名。Flanagan表示从未看到《Buffalo》玩家为“女科学家”之类的描述取名字，除了Marie Curie。

游戏想要推动玩家去反应他们内在的刻板印象，并学习设计社会身份的复杂性。Flanagan的研究表示玩家在玩游戏时的领悟超越了不能命名的窘迫，就像西班牙律师，实际上名字可以有效地影响人们对于其他玩家的看法。

Flanagan表示：“游戏可能引起玩家对于多样性问题的态度的巨大转变。”

在纸牌游戏《Awkward Moment》中，像为那些说“数学真难！”的女孩找到一件T恤并夹杂着其它情境将会让年轻人感到窘迫，但同时也能推动着他们去选择反应。

在游戏中，Flanagan将有关情境偏见的纸牌和有关普遍窘境的纸牌相混合。这将推动着玩家将偏见当成是一种情境，就像是对头上粘了口香糖产生同感。这同样也会降低年轻人对于训练的偏见。通过玩游戏将提高玩家将“科学家”职业与女性联系在一起的可能性。这款游戏在2012年赢得了Meaningful Play最佳非数字游戏奖（游戏邦注：《Pox》也同时赢得了最佳数字游戏奖）。

Flanagan说道：“游戏不能作为任何社会问题的‘权宜之计’，它们只能作为一种自我表达系统。但如果游戏能够拥有那种技能（就像其普遍存在的性质一样）的话，那该多有趣。”

设计师也可以使用现有的系统去利用那种能力：“我可以将这些游戏变得像是聚会游戏。但是我却从未想过创造任何一款聚会游戏。”不过当她意识到使用聚会纸牌游戏模式所具有的潜能时，她最终决定尝试看看。

“我在这个领域中创造着许多模拟游戏，但是我也希望创造出一款能够比艺术实践接触到更多用户的游戏，这是作为艺术家和设计师的我非常感兴趣的艺电。”

（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）

How can games contain and convey values?

By Leigh Alexander

Technology is enabling play across multiple new platforms, but what do they become when we want more from them than entertainment? Dr. Mary Flanagan, author of 2009′s Critical Play, believes creative ways of looking at design can lead to games that not only express values, but can convey them to others — while still maintaining their sense of fun and genuine playfulness.

Her lab, Tiltfactor, is now in its ten-year anniversary, and focuses on games as agents of meaning and intervention — and investigates how they may lead to a more equitable and just society. At the Different Games conference at NYU Polytechnic this weekend, she shared examples from her work she hopes artists and designers alike can learn from.

“It’s really about cultural engagement, for me,” she explains of the lab’s work, which includes roleplaying, sports, board games and “game-related things” as well as traditional digital games. She’s fascinated by the balance between play as whimsy, and play as introspective or analytical experience — and in particular, how games can be used to deconstruct the social structures that often privilege some at the expense of others.

Is the game industry ready for “inclusive design”? More than ever, Flanagan suggests, citing the culture shift she’s observed since the 1980s industry: Almost half the audience for home consoles were women, and women were some of the early innovators in the arcade age.

Yet by the 1990s, the first person shooter genre arrived. “It dominated, and I daresay robbed gamers of innovative and exciting and different games,” she says. But the idea that first person-shooters represent the quintessential definition of “game” is surely fading, a relic of “a particular time I think we can finally shake our way out of.”

Feminist inquiry, according to a quote from Donna Haraway, is about how to “love each other less violently.” How can a game keep people accountable to one another in meaningful way, Flanagan wonders?

Her work is built on the idea that games carry beliefs in their systems and representations. For example, Settlers of Catan is on one hand about commodities, competition and a complicated degree of cooperation and negotiation. Variables can equalize the playing field — but in Catan, a game about colonialism, the robber character that creates that equalization represents the “conquered” people, and its playing piece is always brown or black.

This is just one example of how games express beliefs inherently, she says. And fans of an individual game might not like when questions about their values are raised, but Flanagan believes it’s important nonetheless. “We need to look a little bit deeper when we’re designing things… at the values we’re designing into our games,” she suggests. “I don’t think we can afford not to address the very human world of emotions. What do we care about? If crafted well, these can become core principles in a game.”

Values, whether community-specific or philosophical, can fit into an iterative design model so they’re continuously expressed both in the work and in the creation of it. They can appear in the reward structures, in the point of view, the narrative premise, player rewards and strategies, and in any other aspect including community of play and the context of the experience.

Truly listening to diverse players isn’t easy; “One of the things you need to do if you want to be an inclusive designer is have people play the game who aren’t like you,” she says. “Most people make games for themselves.”

“We know we can speak to certain audiences, but I’m really excited about how we can expand what we do,” Flanagan adds.

What does playful change look like? Investigating prejudice against vaccinations, Flanagan’s team made a game called Pox — as well as a zombie version — followed by a study that eventually brought a full-time social psychologist to the Tiltfactor team.

Studies of players of the games tested for systems thinking, players’ understanding about vaccination, and social perspectives on disease and ill people in particular. Groups that played the “zombie” version of the game had the best result, even though it was mechanically alike to the non-zombie version: “People’s sentiments on vaccinations changed even when faced with a ficticious disease, and people playing zombie Pox … had significant gains in systems thinking, and understood vaccinations the most.”

In other words, the zombie fiction was the only factor proven to enhance players’ interest in the game; audiences couldn’t relate to the danger of 50 year-old diseases, but understood the drama of popular zombie stories.

This is an important takeaway for designers wanting players to engage with information or experience empathy for others. “The further away a story is from one’s own lived reality, the more we can open up and identify with that person or that situation,” Flanagan says. “It seems counterintuitive, but the more outlandish the story is, the more open the player can be [to] actually absorb it.”

Tiltfactor’s card game Buffalo gives descriptors like “Tall world leader” or “Asian-American athlete” and prompts players to name world figures who fit the descriptors. But the names people do and don’t think of in conjunction with certain descriptors is telling; Flanagan says never in her presence has a Buffalo player called out any other name for “woman scientist” besides Marie Curie.

The game is intended to prompt people to reflect on their internalized stereotypes and to study the complexity of one’s own social identity. Flanagan’s studies have shown that players’ realizations from playing the game go beyond the embarrassment of being unable to name, say, a Hispanic lawyer — that in fact the game can positively affect the way people view others.

“The game can cause a statistically-significant shift in players’ attitudes about questions of diversity,” Flanagan says.

In the card game Awkward Moment, situations like finding a T-shirt for girls that says “Math Is Hard!” are mingled with other situations that may embarrass young people, and encourages them to select a reaction.

In the game, Flanagan mixed cards about situational bias in with cards about garden-variety embarrassment. This encourages players to see prejudice as a situation that requires empathy just as much as, say, having gum stuck in one’s hair. It also has the material takeaway of reducing young people’s trained biases. Playing the game actually tripled the likelihood that a player studied would associate the career of “scientist” with a picture of a woman. The game won Meaningful Play’s best non-digital game award in 2012 (Pox won that year’s best digital game award, incidentally).

“Games may not serve as some kind of ‘quick fix’ to any social issue — they can just be systems for self expression,” Flanagan says. “But it is interesting if we think of games as also able to have that power… as games are so ubiquitous.”

And designers can use existing systems subversively to leverage that power: “I can make these games that look exactly like party games… I have never wanted to make a party game in my entire life,” she says. Yet once she realized what might be possible by using the party card-game format, she decided to try it out.

“I’m in a space where I’m doing a lot of analog games, but I’m also trying to work in this situation, where this game might reach a lot more people than my art practice has, and that’s interesting to me as an artist and a designer.” (source:gamasutra)