作者：Damion Schubert

什么程度的“现实”是“太现实”？

你可以拿这个问题问《极地特快》的制作者。尽管拥有大投入、名导演，甚至有Tom Hanks为其中角色的倾情献声和献身（动作捕捉），这部于2004年感恩情上映的圣诞节动画电影在票房上实在不给力，居然被先于它5天上映的另一部动画电影《超人特工队》踩在脚下。差不多就是在那个时候，大众开始了解“恐怖谷理论”这个概念（游戏邦注：这是日本机器人专家森政弘于1970年提出的一个关于人类对机器人和非人类物体的感觉的假设—-如果一个实体充分地“不够拟人”，那它的类人特征就会显眼并且容易辨认，产生移情作用。相反地，要是一个实体“非常拟人”，那它的非类人特征就会成为显眼的部份，在人类观察者眼中产生一种古怪的感觉。“恐怖谷”一词用以描述人类对跟他们有某程度上相似的机器人的排斥反应。而“谷”就是指在研究里“好感度对相似度”的关系图中，在相似度临近100%前，好感度突然坠至反感水平，然后回升至好感的那段谷状区间。）

虽然现在大部分游戏开发者（特别是建模师和动画师）都熟知所谓的“恐怖谷理论”，但过去可不是这么个情况。大约与《超人特攻队》在票房上力压《极地特快》同时，许多艺术总监相信，游戏要成功，就必须模仿现实。然而，《魔兽世界》反其道而行，其卡通风格的美术设计不仅打破人们的期待，而且从激烈的竞争中脱颖而出。三年以后，曾经对现实主义迷恋至疯狂地步的《军团要塞2》也以同样的做法打开射击游戏市场。

现实主义是一条出路，无论是对于美工还是设计师—-但也可能是一个陷阱，而且是一个非常容易让人掉进去的陷阱。对于美术，追求写实是昂贵的—-虽然现在的技术可以创造逼真的视觉效果，但仍然是非常费成本和时间的；并且最终导致的结果是，一款写实主义游戏的截图与其竞争对手几乎相同，因为它们的目标都是追求现实主义。现实主义不仅是美工的陷阱—-游戏设计师也轻率地把现实主义当成游戏机制的灵感来源，以致于游戏设计中经常出现令人不解的含意。

现实主义的陷阱

草率的设计师可能会因为太过追求现实而惹上麻烦。对于美工，把画面做得逼真不一定会让视觉效果更加漂亮或迷人。类似地，对于游戏设计师，高度模仿现实的游戏机制也未必能使游戏有趣。

我们能在游戏设计原则中明显地感受到这一陷阱便是在沙盒游戏的兴起之时。游戏机制曾经很大程度地受限于严密的模拟仿真，直到《侠盗猎车手》的成功才让游戏设计师纷纷转向沙盒设计原则，几乎所有类型的游戏中都可以看到那些硬塞进来的东西。在沙盒游戏中，玩家可以自由地走动，以任意顺序处理内容，而不是始终遵循线性游戏路径、被失真的障碍或“看不见的墙”挡住去路。确实，沙盒让游戏显得更真实了，但制作和测试这种游戏的成本也更高了。

即使成本控制住了，沙盒玩法也有可能与其他设计原则互相冲突。例如，当游戏放手让玩家自由地去寻找和发现乐趣时，大多数玩家会觉得困惑不解和不知所措，他们还是需要现成的系统引导他们怎么体验游戏。又例如，沙盒游戏更难把深刻的故事叙述好，因为设计师失去对顺序和流程的控制权。有时候沙盒玩法造成的危害甚至更大：《Burnout: Paradise》的开放世界结构导致玩家难以连续两次体验同样的比赛或挑战，这违背了许多竞技玩家的希望。

沙盒本来就很糟糕吗？不是的—-有些优秀的游戏就是沙盒的。但把这种程度的现实放到游戏中，对成本和设计有非常直接的影响，这是设计师必须谨慎的地方。

什么时候“现实”会导致“不现实”？

Everquest(from thatvideogameblog)

在早期的《无尽的任务》中，你经常会在野外看到一名玩家一次又一次地跳下某个小山崖，同时说着让其他路过的玩家无法理解的话。基于使用的进步是原因：虽然大多数《无尽的任务》中进步模式是按照经典的关卡进步系统制作的，但还存在一些作为角色的游戏内动作的非战斗技能如“说话”和“安全下落”。因此，诡异的跳崖疯子正是那些正在学习新技能的玩家。

然而讽刺的是，这些系统的设计目的正是为了让游戏更接近现实—-熟能生巧。有些玩家和设计师为“你可以通过杀地精升级来学习如何说兽人语”这个想法感到烦恼。通过实践学习的系统对他们来说再合理不过了。

但实际上，通过实践学习系统是一种可怕的游戏机制设计。在基于使用的系统中，要取得有效的进步，玩家通常被迫反复执行奇怪的玩法，但在过程中并不能得到什么乐趣。这种游戏机制不能让人觉得自然而得体，而是生硬和做作，甚至更糟，把玩家的注意力吸引到机制本身。通过杀死而了解兽人可能不算太差的现实主义，但要求玩家做一些他们不想做的事，无论如何也是说不通的。

现实主义vs.一致性

《高谭市重案组》有许多可圈可点的地方。这部DC漫画中的侦探故事发生在高谭市，描述了侦探的工作以及清理蝙蝠侠和小丑屋顶大战后的现场。这部漫画发表了40期，虽然销量不高但口碑很好。考虑到这个系列仍然以穿着蝙蝠紧身衣的男人打击犯罪为中心，喜欢它的人却表扬该系列逼真的细节，这确实很有趣。

很多时候，人们以为自己想要的是一种现实主义，而事实上他们渴望的却是游戏世界中的内部一致性。《高谭市重案组》非常像《黑暗骑士》和写实警匪电视剧《光头侦探》的结合体。这么做的目的是使《高谭市重案组》的其他部分尽量显得真实，最终效果是，蝙蝠侠在漫画世界中仍然是神秘和迷人的，而世界本身也并不显得愚蠢或荒唐。读者觉得他是有可能存在的—-即使他并不存在。

沉浸感是目标。你的世界和体验应该吸引玩家。如果能支持沉浸感，那么现实主义就是好的。例如，在游戏中的大多数单人房都是很宽敞的，地板通常距离天花板18英尺。这是不真实的，但玩家很少会注意到这个细节。相反地，在小房间时，玩家总是能注意到摄像头什么时候拉得太近或太远。

跳跃是另一个游戏和现实主义产生分离的地方。大多数具有跳跃动作的游戏都允许角色跳得异常地高—-角色从静止的状态跳跃，通常可以跳到6英尺高。但最近，有些动作游戏如《战争机器》，已经开始尝试禁止跳跃，因为像发情的兔子那样跳来跳去显得太不真实了。在很大程度上，这些做法是成功的—-直到玩家发现一个他在现实生活中能跳过而在游戏中却不能跳过的障碍。甚至更糟，这种障碍在允许跳跃的游戏中，玩家跳高5英尺就能越过了。玩家会明显地感觉这种障碍是不真实的。之所以会成为问题，是因为它破坏了沉浸感。

一定程度上，我们追求的现实主义不是由现实生活决定的，而是我们的游戏先驱。命中发展成一个概念是因为大多数游戏告诉我们，你通常会命中你所攻击的目标，但战斗不应该太快结束。当NPC叫你“快点”，他不是真的催促你，除非计时器显示在你的屏幕上。火箭炮不仅是强大的武器，还是一种可靠的开路工具。但不只是游戏—-射击游戏中的大多数枪支效果听起来更像是发生在电影中的，而不是现实生活，因为电影院才是大多数玩家知道自动枪的枪声是怎么样的地方。

在所有这些例子中，遵循非现实的惯例反而比采用更加现实的方法更能产生理想的效果。打破常规有可能导致游戏失真，但更通常的情况是，玩家觉得更真实了。

现实主义的归宿

当然，设计师一直在对现实主义妥协。在现实世界中，杀死一个人只要用一把冲锋枪发一颗子弹。用生铁制作一件胸甲不可能不到10秒就完成。如果你差点被飞机的喷火器弄死，你不可能稍稍治疗后马上返回战场。在内化我们所构建的世界的幻想以后，这些都变成真实的了。以免我们联想到世俗生活—-除了《虚拟人生》以外，没有游戏要求你的角色上厕所。

但现实主义也可以丰富游戏。具有手工制作机制的MMO的经济可能显得更加真实，即使手工制作机制本身是不真实的。可以交易毒药的刺客让人觉得更真实，即使游戏平衡要求毒药的伤害是缓慢轻微的而不是立即致命的。《疯狂橄榄球》的一个回合最终得分为30比27，让人觉得真实，即使它保持比分这么低的方式并不真实。

说到底，玩家玩游戏是为了逃避现实世界，所以设计师们不需要再为他们创造另一个现实世界了。玩家希望在游戏世界中寻找幻想。优秀的游戏会把这种幻想变成沉浸感，但并不总是靠把游戏做得逼真来达到这个目的。有时候，太现实反而是阻碍。

（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）

Do we always have to strive for ‘realism’?

By Damion Schubert

How Realistic is Too Realistic?

One can ask the makers of The Polar Express, the animated Christmas film released just in time for Thanksgiving in 2004. Despite huge investments, a big-named director, and Tom Hanks providing the voice and mocap animation for several roles, the film struggled at the box office, getting swamped by another animated film, The Incredibles, released five days prior. Around this time, the concept of the Uncanny Valley entered the public mind.

The Uncanny Valley is a theory that most game artists (especially modelers and animators) are well aware of now, but it wasn’t always the case. Around the same time The Incredibles was trouncing Polar Express in the box office, too many art directors believed real games made for gamers had to chase photorealism in order to be successful. World of Warcraft eschewed all of that for a cartoony appearance, and in doing so blew past all the competition and expectations. Three years later, Team Fortress 2 would do the same for a shooter market that had previously obsessed over realism to an insane degree.

Realism is a choice, both for artists and for designers — but it can also be also a trap, and one that is perilously easy to fall into. In art, chasing realism is expensive — technology can provide incredibly lifelike visuals now, but it’s also increasingly expensive and time-consuming to generate that content, and the end result is a screenshot that looks not all that different from competitors who are also chasing realism as an end goal. But realism isn’t just a pitfall for artists — game designers also flirt with realism as a source of inspiration for their game mechanics, often with staggering implications to their game designs.

The Realism Trap

The unwary designer can get into trouble by trying to follow realism too closely. Making a scene look realistic doesn’t necessarily make it look more beautiful, fantastic, or intriguing. Similarly for designers, a game mechanic that is realistic doesn’t necessarily make the game fun.

A common way that this makes itself evident inside our game designs is the rise of sandbox games. Once a mechanic largely limited to strict simulations, the success of Grand Theft Auto has resulted in game designers trying to shoehorn sandbox design principles on almost every genre of gaming. In sandboxes, players are free to go anywhere and tackle content in almost any order, rather than be drawn along a linear game path with unreachable areas blocked off by unrealistic obstacles or invisible walls. True, it’s more realistic, but it’s also more expensive to build and test that world.

And even if it weren’t, sandbox gameplay may fight with other tenets of the design. For example, most players get confused and overwhelmed when told to find their own fun, and systems need to be devised to lead them to interesting activities. Compelling narratives are harder to tell, because designers lose control of the order and flow. Sometimes issues are more insidious: Burnout: Paradise’s open world structure made it difficult for players to attempt to do the same race or challenge twice in a row, as many racing game players want.

Are sandboxes inherently bad? No — some of the finest games in the world are sandboxes. But injecting this level of realism into a game has very direct repercussions on the cost and design of the game that the designers must be mindful of.

When Realism Creates Unrealistic Behavior

In the early days of Everquest, it was not uncommon to stumble upon another player in the wild who was throwing himself off a short cliff over and over again while spewing gibberish indecipherable to passers-by. Use-based advancement was to blame: While most of Everquest’s advancement model was centered around a classic level-based advancement system, the non-combat skills like “Language” and “Safe Fall” advanced as the character performed in-game actions. Thus, our mysterious cliff diving tonguespeaker was someone whose character was, ostensibly, learning new trades.

The ironic thing, of course, is that these use-based systems are designed to be realistic — practice making perfect, and all. Some players and designers are bothered by the idea that you can learn how to speak Orcish by killing kobolds until you gain a level. A learning-by-doing system makes perfect sense to them.

But in practice, learning-by-doing falls into sort of an uncanny design of game mechanics. Efficient advancement in a use-based system often nudges people to perform odd gameplay that is frequently repetitive as well as not particularly fun. Rather than feeling natural and elegant, the game mechanic feels unnatural and contrived, and worse, draws attention to itself in the process. Learning Orcish by killing kobolds may not be terribly realistic, but at least at no point is the player being asked to do something he didn’t want to do anyway.

Realism vs. Consistency

There’s a lot to like about Gotham Central. The DC comic was a police procedural set in Gotham city, and tried to describe what it was like to be a detective and have to clean up after Batman and Joker slugging it out amongst the rooftops. The comic ran for 40 issues, earning meager sales but strong critical praise. Those who loved it often cited the series’ gritty realism. Which is interesting, given the series still hinges on a man who fights crime dressed as a bat.

A lot of times, people think they want realism when what they really crave is internal consistency within a given universe. Gotham Central feels a lot like what happens if you merge the classic Dark Knight with gritty TV cop fare like The Shield. The goal is to make the rest of Gotham as real as possible, and the end result is a world where Batman is still amazing and mysterious, without becoming silly or ludicrous. He feels possible — even though he’s not.

Immersion is the goal. The player should be drawn into your worlds and experiences. Realism is good when it supports immersion, and bad when it gets into the way. For example, most single roomed buildings in games are huge, often with 18 foot ceilings. It’s not realistic, but the player rarely notices. On the other hand, he always notices when, in a small room, the camera moves in too close to see or do anything.

Jumping is an interesting place where realism and gaming diverge. Most games that have jumping allow ludicrously high jumps — often a character can leap 6 feet high from a dead stop, because it feels right (see Inner Product November 2009). But recently, some action games — such as Gears of War — have been experimenting with not allowing jumping, since jumping around like a jackrabbit in heat isn’t particularly realistic. For the most part, these experiments have been successful — until the player finds an obstacle that he can’t jump but could in real life. Even worse, he could clear it by five feet in a game that allows jumping. The obstacle feels unrealistic, and worse, noticeably so. It’s a problem because it breaks immersion.

To some degree, the realism we are bound to is determined not by real life, but by our forerunners. Hit points linger as a concept because most games teach us that you usually hit what you swing at, but fights shouldn’t be over instantly. When an NPC tells you to “hurry,” he doesn’t mean it unless a timer appears on your screen. Rocket launchers aren’t just great weapons, they’re also solid ways to propel yourself up to a hard-to-reach ledge. But it’s not just games — most gun effects in shooters sound more like they do in the movies than they do in real life, because the theatre is where most players learn what automatic gunfire sounds like.

In all these cases, following unrealistic conventions can make the games feel better than taking a more realistic approach that breaks player expectations. Worse, breaking convention can make the game feel less realistic, even though it is more so.

The Place of Realism

Designers make concessions to realism all the time, of course. In the real world, it only takes one bullet from an assault rifle to kill a man. Building a breast plate from raw iron doesn’t happen in less than 10 seconds. If you get brought near death by the jet of a flamethrower, you aren’t likely to be hopping back into battle after a couple of first aid kits. This is before we get to the inherent fantasy of the worlds we build: worlds full of dragons, gangsters, or battle cruisers. And lest we cut out the mundane — short of The Sims, no games require your characters take bathroom breaks.

But realism can enrich a game as well. An MMO that has crafting can have a much more realistic economy than one that doesn’t, even if the mechanics of crafting aren’t realistic. An assassin that trades in poisons feels more real, even if game balance requires that poison be a minor damage over time effect instead of being immediately lethal. Bouts of Madden that end with scores like 30–27 feel more real, even if it takes five minute quarters to keep the scoring that low.

At the end of the day, players play games escape the real world, so designers shouldn’t be such a slave to it. Players are hoping to live a fantasy provided by the game designer. Good games make those fantasies as immersive as possible, but they don’t always do that by making them realistic. Sometimes, too much realism gets in the way.(source:gamasutra)