作者：Daniel Solis

我是一个桌游设计师。这是一份有趣同，有创意，但同时也很可怕的工作，并且与我之前在企业广告的工作也有极大差别。但这两个领域都很重视创意，尤其是“新”创意。没有人希望自己的想法被窃取，无论是广告活动还是桌面游戏，你都想成为提出某个创意的第一人。

所以，你也许会奇怪我为什么在过去10年还要在博客发布自己的游戏设计过程，向所有人公开我每个粗心的理念和完全成形的原型。

我最常收到的问题是：“难道你不怕别人窃走你的创意吗？”

会提这种问题的人，他们多半害怕别人窃走自己的创意。

没错，你确实很为自己的新游戏机制、原创主题或其他与你的IP相关的东西而自豪。为自己的作品而骄傲是件好事！因为这可以让你在困难和困惑中继续前行，永不言弃。

但这种骄傲却会给你一些奇怪的想法，例如其他人都像你一样关注你的想法。这并不是要侮辱你的想法，它只是创意领域的一种必需品。如果真有人几乎像你一样关注你的游戏理念，那么他们可能耗费了好几个钟头熬夜测试、开发、修改以及再测试你的游戏理念，直到证实它具有成为一款合格游戏的可行性。

别急，你还没有投入这么多个小时对吗？不要告诉我，你还没有投入开发时间就在担心有人会窃走你的创意。不要告诉我你在玩法测试前就已经研究过专利、版权、NDA（保密协议）和商标相关的资料。不要告诉我你只同自己最亲近的人测试游戏（这些人最容易照顾你的玻璃心，不会提出太多批评性建意）。你没有这么做吧？当然没有，因为这种做法确实不高明。不要将这种被害妄想症作为迟迟不肯动工的借口。

以下是我在公开场合设计游戏时所掌握的一些经验，希望这些观察结果对你的工作有所帮助。

release_early(from opensource)

关于创意的真相

创意并没有那么特殊。

严格来说，一个很棒的理念本身并不能算是游戏。Antonie Bauza最近获得了德国Essen游戏节的最佳年度游戏奖，他是因《Hanabit》这款合作型的卡牌游戏而获奖，该游戏要求玩家手指纸牌背面，依靠对方来获知自己手上纸牌的准确信息。他并不只是说说“我想制作一款你拿纸牌的背面，需要双方合作的游戏”就获得了成功。在《Hanabi》真正获得成功之前，Bauza付出了大量的心血，推出了两个版本的游戏。

创意并非偶然的产物。

即使你的创意100%是原创的，其理念本身也并没有价值，呈现其突现性的作品才是令其具有意义的存在。再以Bauza的《Hanabi》为例，你知道要制作一款体面的游戏，每一个设计决定都需要投入大量时间。该游戏机制这么少，它的每个元素就显得更为重要了。例如，每组中要有几套牌？牌组中每一列又需要多少张牌？一百次游戏的平均得分是多少？人们在游戏时如何同对方交谈？除非游戏“理念”真正落实，没人可以解答这些问题。你要测试过后才能发现游戏理念的突现属性。

你的创意其实是从他处“窃取”的。

我曾经收集了许多未能制作出成品的不完整创意。创意无处不在。我们获得了创意，但很可能它们并非都是原创的。我的不是，你的也不是。我们无法摆脱自己所处时代的设计环境，我们只能对其作出回应，对其加以迭代和改造。我们的设计风格会有意无意地随着潮流而变动。举一个简单的例子：想象一枚新的象棋棋子，它也许可以像一个象那样移动，但仅局限于两个地方？也许它像国王一样移动，但如果前向只能去两个地方，并且只能通过对角线去抓获它？现在看看成百上千个棋 子，想想你是否还能找到空白的探索空间。这是不是件严肃的事情？没错。它令人沮丧吗？根本不是。

单纯的创意并非游戏。

如果一款游戏不具有可玩性，它还是游戏吗？只有具备可玩性才能算是游戏对吗？如果你更在意别人会觊觎你的创意，而非将游戏展示给更多人试玩，那你就要先回答这些问题。你的创意并非游戏，只有你的游戏才是游戏。甚至可以说，只有当人们愿意玩时，它才能算是游戏。这意味着你必须动手做原型，编写规则，并亲自面对央求陌生人试玩游戏的这种社交尴尬。这才是能够让你的创意具有价值的做法。而如果你的游戏很有趣，你的胜利果实也就会更甜蜜。

只有时间才能验证价值。

我并不担心有人偷走我的创意。如果我真有这种顾虑，就不会在博客公开我的游戏设计过程了，这个习惯已经保持了十多年。但我开始时还真有点担心。

我是1999年开始设计一款由粉丝制作的与僵尸有关的RPG游戏《Zombie:the Coil》。我在其中加入了每个我认为一款体面的RPG应该具有的元素，我只是仿制了现成的White Wolf框架，在这些约束条件中编码，并将结果发布到网站上。

之后我担心White Wolf窃取我的创意。我听说他们发布了《Hunter:the Reckoning》，该游戏也是以僵尸为主题。当时我心情糟透了，觉得自己的辛勤劳动付诸东流了。这种幼稚的想法令人惊讶吧？我从White Wolf从书中获得灵感，反而担心他们剽窃我的东西？毫无疑问，White Wolf在那个年代不需要我任何微小的贡献也能自己创造出那款游戏。但克服这种恐惧，向他人展示自己的作品并虚心听取批评建议的做法才有价值。

不存在所谓的天才、成功奥秘，扎实的工作才是王道。

不要迷信天才秘诀这类说法。也许真有一些人是天才，但你不可认为自己也是其中之一。这就好像是生活在一种认为自己会中彩票的假想中一样。只有作品才能创造价值。请为你的游戏测试者买份比萨，抛弃3个原型并从头做起。这些是游戏设计的工艺，重新开始吧！（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）

Afraid someone will steal your idea?

by Daniel Solis

I’m a board game designer. It’s a fun, creative, scary job and worlds away from my former career in corporate advertising. In both fields, there is a high value placed on ideas, especially “new” ideas. No one wants to get scooped. Be it an ad campaign or a board game, you want to be the first out the door with it.

So it may seem odd that I’ve spent ten years blogging my game design process. Every one of my harebrained concepts and fully-formed prototypes go up live, viewable by everyone.

The question I get most often is: “Aren’t you afraid someone will steal your idea?”

To those who ask, the real thing I hear you saying is: “I’d be afraid of someone stealing my idea.”

I get it! You’re really proud of your new game mechanic or your original theme or some other thing about your precious IP that is gonna be worth bajillions. Pride in your work is good! It keeps you going in the dark times when you wonder whether you’d be better off with some other hobby, like tortilla golf.

But that pride can also give you some weird expectations, like that anyone else cares nearly as much about your idea as you do. That’s not meant as an insult against your idea, it’s just a necessity of the creative field. If anyone cares as much about your game idea as you do, they’d already be spending the late nights and long hours it takes to playtest, develop, cry, revise, cry, and playtest again until the idea is a proper game.

Wait, you are putting in those long hours, right? Please don’t tell me you’re worried about someone stealing your idea before you’ve put in that development time. Please don’t tell me you’ve researched patents, copyrights, NDAs, and trademarks before you’ve even tried playtesting. Please don’t tell me you’re only playtesting with people closest to you, who therefore have a vested interest in not breaking your heart. You’re not doing all these things, right? Of course not, that would be foolish. That paranoia is just an excuse not to do the work.

Here are a few things I’ve learned from years of designing games in public. I hope some of these observations are relevant in your own creative field.
The truth about ideas

Ideas aren’t that special.

Seriously, a cool idea isn’t a game in and of itself. Antoine Bauza was recently awarded the Game of the Year award at the Essen game festival in Germany. He won it for the tiny cooperative card game Hanabit, in which players hold their cards backwards and rely on each other to get accurate information about their own hands. Now, he didn’t just roll up and say, “Hey, I want to make a game where you hold your cards backwards and have to work together!” and get the Spiel de Jahres handed to him. No, there was a ton of work and two separate publications before Hanabi got recognized for its brilliance and became a commercial hit.

Ideas don’t reveal emergence.

Even if your idea is 100% original, the idea alone isn’t valuable, it’s the work of revealing emergent properties that makes the idea valuable. Taking Bauza’s Hanabi example again: For a game that elegant, you know there was a lot of time put into every design decision. With so few mechanics, everything becomes that much more important. How many suits should be in the deck? How many cards of each rank should be in the deck? What’s an average score across one hundred games? How do people communicate with each other in play? None of these questions get answered unless the “idea” becomes a reality at the table. There are uncountable emergent properties that just don’t reveal themselves until you playtest.

Your ideas are stolen… from someone else.

I’ve got a closet full of unfinished ideas that never made the final cut for whatever reason. Ideas everywhere! Seriously, here, have some, I have too many. We’ve all got them, and chances are that not one of them is at all original. Not mine, probably not yours. We can’t escape the design milieu of our times, we can only respond to it, iterate it. We are adrift on the flow of style, whether we realize it or not. A simple example: Try thinking of a new chess piece. Go ahead, maybe it moves like a bishop, but limited to two spaces? Maybe it moves like a King, but two spaces if it moves forward, and can only capture diagonally? Okay, now take a look at the hundreds of chess pieces out there and see if you can find some empty space left to explore. Is this sobering? Yes. Is it discouraging? Hell no.

Your idea alone is not a game.

Let’s get zen for a bit. If a game goes unplayed, is it still a game? Is it only a game while being played? These are the questions I have for you if you’re more concerned about jealously guarding your precioussss instead of actually putting it in front of as many people as possible. Your idea is not a game. Only your game is a game. Even then, it’s only a game if people are playing it. That means you have to actually make prototypes, write rules, and face the social awkwardness of asking strangers to play this thing with the added caveat that it may not even be fun. That is what will make your idea valuable. And guess what? When the game is fun, the victory will be so much sweeter.

Value takes a while. A long while.

All that to say… No, I’m not worried about someone stealing my ideas. Exactly the opposite, in fact. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t so open and public about my design process. I’ve been doing this in public for over a decade now. But when I started? Yeah, I was worried about it.

It started in 1999ish when I designed a fan-made World of Darkness RPG about sentient zombies, called Zombie: the Coil. There was a gap in the WoD mythos that I thought I could fill. And boy, did I fill it with every contrived faction, inconsistent mechanic, punk-rock posturing, and gothic whininess that I thought a proper RPG was supposed to have. I just copied the structures from existing White Wolf properties of the time and wrote within those constraints and posted the results on my crap website.

Then I got worried about White Wolf stealing my idea. I heard they were releasing Hunter: the Reckoning and that it featured zombies. Oh no, zombies in the World of Darkness? Crap! All my writing was for naught! Nevermind that I didn’t even try properly pitching it to White Wolf in the first place. Can you imagine the naive audacity? I crib wholesale from White Wolf’s books and then I get worried about them looking at my stuff? Get it together, teen Daniel. Zombie: the Coil sucks. But, keep at it, you’ll find your design mode in about 15 years. (Also, teen Daniel, stop wearing a trench coat in Florida. You look like an idiot.) Needless to say, White Wolf did just fine for itself in the 90s without my tiny contribution. But working through that fear, just getting comfortable showing my work to other people and holding it up for critique: that was valuable. And, then I went on to design plenty more rubbish games.

No genius. No mystique. Only work.

Don’t buy into the genius mystique. It is a mirage. Maybe there are geniuses out there, but you can’t go assuming that you’re one. That’s like living as if you’re going to win the lottery on a regular basis. No, the value comes from the work and no one’s going to do more of it than you. Buy a pizza for your playtesters. Agonize over game terms. Completely scrap three prototypes in a row and start over again. That is the craft, the work, of game design. So get back to it!（source：opensource）