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分析《Mafia Wars》给予其他游戏的教训

发布时间:2013-09-30 16:24:20 Tags:,,,

作者:Tadhg Kelly

尽管它不是Facebook上第一个基于文本写成的角色扮演游戏(《Mob Wars》才是),我仍然认为Zynga的《Mafia Wars》在游戏设计史上具有里程碑性的意义。

在许多方面,它是一款标志性社交游戏,它定义了Facebook游戏的属性。它让从来没听过D+D的高管们知道了关卡和经验点的通用术语。但更重要的是,《Mafia Wars》是一款不可思议的游戏。

就我们大部分人对游戏的兴趣来看,它的成功是没有道理的。这么多人居然会这么长时间地沉浸于这么一款这么基础的游戏中,真是让人不能理解。无论如何,《Mafia Wars》给我们上了重要的一课:我们认为玩家会怎么玩游戏和他们实际上会怎么玩游戏,是不同的。

mafia wars(from insidesocialgames)

mafia wars(from insidesocialgames)

RPG特点

早在《Mafia Wars》之前,就已经有成千上万RPG了:有以战斗为主的《暗黑》,有偏冒险的《博德之门》,还有以世界观庞大著称的《魔兽世界》,等等。这些游戏的结构都有一个共同点。

玩家在游戏中都有一个玩偶,也就是我们通常所说的玩家角色。你可以培养它,装扮它,通常把它当成表现自我的方式。玩家对它的成长方向有很大的控制权,通常以自己的节奏让角色做主线任务或打副本。而任务和副本通常有故事背景。

RPG的玩法基本上可以分为战斗、探索、收集和养成这几类。无论是升级战士还是更新飞船,玩法总是大同小异的。在联网的游戏中,通常有更多的“刷”活动。玩家加入公会后,游戏就变得更像团体运动或扩大的战争。

在所有这些玩法中,战斗被认为是最重要的。正是这些挥刀舞剑、魔法咒语、射击投弹等诸如此类的战斗成为其他机制的基础。如果达到目的地了,为什么还要探索?如果用不上,为什么还要收集掉落物品?谁会那么玩游戏?

大约3千万玩家会。

做工

Facebook的RPG游戏起源于网页游戏如《Erepublik》、《Urban Dead》和《Planetarion》,等等。网页RPG往往与游戏粉丝经营的玩家社区关系紧密。它们有一个非常古老的祖先——90年代和80年代的邮件游戏(用邮件玩的游戏)。

谁也没有料到网页RPG会在商业上大获成功。它们被认为是给那些手头上有大把时间、懂数字和数值的网虫玩的东西。对于休闲网页浏览者,它们是复杂的,需要阅读大量格式糟糕的维基页面,才能知道怎么玩。这样的游戏绝对不可能产生重大影响。然后《Mafia Wars》出现了。

Zynga游戏与前辈有如下三个主要区别:

1、对玩家初始体验的引导工作做得更好

2、与早已存在的社交网络相结合,通过让现有玩家充当推广员,大大降低开发新玩家的难度

3、打破了战斗玩法的古板惯例

第三点对我来说是最难解释的。在《Mafia Wars》中,你可以收集掉落物品,可以建造,可以办立公会。然而,游戏中可以探索的实际空间是极小的,只有一连串的锁,大多数时候你是不用战斗的。你要做的基本上是集合团队、收集到足够的掉落物品,然后就获得做某事的资格。你只要点击“做工”,等着游戏告诉你,你赢了。

在做工时,你既没有训练身体的技能也没有强化心理的技能。你不用探索、不需要策略、不必关心设置。客观地说,这种游戏只是一个斯金纳盒。花精力、组队团队、做工。叫朋友加入你的帮派,做工。购买虚拟产品以作弊,做工。就这么多。

这么基础的东西怎么能这么长久地吸引这么多玩家花时间和花钱呢?

退化的游戏?

退化的游戏是指向玩家索取比贡献给玩家的更多的游戏。赌博游戏就是退化的游戏中的典型例子,因为获胜的必然是赌场。在那种语境下,大多数游戏设计师都赞同扑克牌是游戏,但他们很难认可老虎机也是游戏。这些设计师的问题不是赌博与游戏之间的经济模型是类似的,而是玩法活动是那么不同。

在扑克牌中,你要做大量选择。你用你的才能和精力对抗其他玩家和赌场的固然优势。这看起来似乎是不公平的,但扑克粉丝认为有挑战性、令人兴奋,更别说还有一些新手很容易输——一定程度上为老手重新平衡了赌场经济。

但是老虎机呢?谁都知道只要有足够的时间,老虎机会让任何玩家玩到破产。当然稍微有一点理性的人(除了嗜赌成性的人)都会远离老虎机吗?老虎机的成功是不可思议的,可是无论是在现实世界还是虚拟世界,它们都非常成功。

老虎机告诉我们一个深刻的道理:玩家远比我们想象的更加不理性。玩家通常会自得于自己的选择,“接近胜利”的感觉和实际获胜的感觉对他们有相同的刺激作用。他们与自己最爱的游戏有一场内部交流,他们开始相信运气、征兆等。他们的价值观与我们这些冷静的专业人士的所想的是不同的。

“做工”为什么有效?因为玩家渐渐相信自己所做的事是积极的、有技术含量的,只要有足够的耐心和实践,最终能够获胜。他觉得游戏系统是可以战胜的。然后,也许他与游戏中的其他玩家形成社交网络,这进一步延长了他的游戏寿命。谁知道,这样的玩家最终可能成为电话会议中的主席、公会中的王后,公开称自己在游戏中花了1万美元并且不后悔花了这么多钱。

教训

《Mafia Wars》的世界仍然生机勃勃。尽管它已经失去往日的辉煌,但日活跃玩家数仍然高达10万。我猜,留下来的玩家大多是老手,可能已经在游戏中建立了复杂的人际关系网。他们还将继续玩下去。

在某些方面,《Mafia Wars》可能已经退化了,它可能曾经是一款比任何人都懂得复杂社交网络的游戏,它也可能是早期的Facebook广告受益者,最后变成混杂了各种Zynga游戏机制的沙盒世界。然而,一定程度上那些教训都是短暂的。

《Mafia Wars》给我的主要启示是,迷恋法则非常像公平和平衡之间的区别。也就是意识到玩家的主观体验和游戏的客观行为是非常不同的。当主观比客观更加重要时,游戏就面临最危急的关头了。

无论你的目标是高尚的还是卑微的、纯赚钱的还是纯兴趣的,这个教训你永远不应该忘记。(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

The Lesson of Mafia Wars

by Tadhg Kelly

Although it’s not the first of its type (that honor belongs to Mob Wars) I’ve come to regard Zynga’s Mafia Wars as a milestone moment in game design.

It was in many ways the signature social game, the one that defined what Facebook games were likely to be. It established the common parlance of levels and experience points among executives who’d never heard of D+D. But more than that, Mafia Wars was an unbelievable game.

It was a success that made no sense in the vein of how most of us thought of games. The idea that lots of people would engage in a game so apparently basic, and for so long, was incomprehensible. Love or hate it, Mafia Wars taught us something very important about the difference between how we think players play, versus how they actually play.

RPGs Are…

Prior to Mafia Wars there were thousands of roleplaying games. There were big combat-focused games like Diablo, more adventuresome faire like Baldur’s Gate, miles of JRPGs and huge worlds like the World of Warcraft. The structure of all of these games had a commonality.

The player had a doll, commonly an avatar, in the game,. She customized and built it endlessly, often identifying with her doll as a form of self expression. She exercised a lot of control over the direction in which her doll grew, often choosing to engage in primary or sub-quests at her own pace. There was also often a story attached.

Mostly the gameplay of the RPG boiled down to fighting, exploring, looting and building. Whether in the form of a fantasy warrior levelling up or ship being upgraded, it was always much the same. And then in the games that connected players together there’s one more “ing”, guilding. She joined clubs and her game became more like a team sport or an extended war.

Of all of the gameplay the fighting was classically thought to be most important. It was the bashing, casting of magics, shooting of lasers and whatnot that was the point of all of the other mechanics. Why explore if there was nothing to do once she got there? Why loot if she never really used her stuff? Who would play that?

Around 30m players would and did.

Do Job

Facebook roleplaying games originated from browser-based games like Erepublik, Urban Dead and Planetarion (and many others). Browser RPGs tended toward tight-knit communities whose players had to discover one another, and were often largely fan-run. They had ancestors that went as far back as the old play-by-email (or even play-by-mail) games of the 90s and 80s.

Nobody ever really considered that browser RPGs could be ripe for major commercial success. They were held to be rudimentary “Excel-in-space” machines, for stat and number nerds with far too much time on their hands. They were dense, often arcane to the casual observer, requiring one to read tons of rules on badly formatted wiki pages to figure out how to play. There was no way that they would ever really make a big impact. Then came Mafia Wars.

The were three primary differences between Zynga’s game and its predecessors:

They were much better at guiding players through the initial experience

They were plugged into a pre-existing social network, which inverted the difficulty of finding new players by turning existing players into advertisers

They broke with the mechanical convention of fighting

This third part was the hardest for me to grok. In Mafia Wars you looted and you built, and if you were determined enough to overcome some restrictions you could also guild after a fashion. However there was little physical space in the game to explore, just a series of locks, and most of all you did not fight. What you did was essentially assemble teams and packs of loot enough to be allowed to engage on a job. Then you simply clicked “Do Job”, and the game told you wou’d won.

You exercised neither physical nor mental skills in the execution of jobs. You navigated nothing, needed no tactics and didn’t really even need to care about configurations. Objectively speaking it was just a Skinner box, a set of hoops to jump through over and over. Spend energy, build team, do job. Bug friends to join your gang, do job. Buy virtual goods to cheat a little, do job. That was all.

How could something so basic could induce some people to spend time and money? Were they out of their minds?

Degenerate Games?

A degenerate game is a game which sucks more out of players than it gives back. Gambling games are the classic example of degenerate games in that they are all inevitably stacked toward the house. Most game designers accept poker in that context, but they have a harder time accepting that slot machines are also games. The designer’s problem is not that the economic model of both is similar, but rather how the activity of play is so different.

In poker you make a lot of choices and although the game may be stacked there is the sense of trying to overcome. It’s you and your smarts and stamina versus every other player and the house’s rake. It may seem negative but to poker fans it is competitive and exciting, fueled by novice marks who part with their money easily and – in a sense – rebalance the game economy for the vets.

But slots? Who doesn’t see that slots are stacked and will always bankrupt any player on a long enough timeline? Surely anyone with a lick of sense (with the exception of gambling addicts) would stay away? Slots’ success is inconceivable, and yet in both physical and virtual form they are very successful.

Slots teach an important lesson about how players are a lot less rational than we consider them to be. Players are often exuberant about their chances, motivated by the feel of the near-win as much as the actual win. They have something of an internal dialog with their favorite games and start to believe in luck, omens and so on. Their values are not what we, the cool and calm professionals, think they should be.

How is “Do Job” effective? Because the player comes to believe that what she is doing is active and skilful, that with enough patience and work she will eventually win. She finds the system of the game as she perceives it to be winnable. Then over time perhaps she builds social connections and that keeps her playing for a long time. Who knows, eventually she may become like a lady I once met on a conference call, a queen of a Mafia Wars clan who openly admitted to having spent over $10,000 in the game and was happy to have done so.

Lesson To Learn

Mafia Wars is still live. Although long past its height it’s still estimated to draw over 100,000 DAU. My guess is that those users are mostly veterans now and probably have a highly complex social structure. They will keep playing right up until the lights are turned out.

Mafia Wars may have been degenerate in some respects, and it may have been the game that understood social networking and pinch points before everyone else. It may also have been an early beneficiary of advertiising like crazy on Facebook, and finally a kind of sandbox for a variety of mechanics that appeared in later Zynga games. Yet in some respects those lessons are transient.

The primary lesson that Mafia Wars taught me was that the law of fascination is much like the difference between fairness and balance. It’s about realizing that the subjective experience of the player and the objective behavior of a game are very different. And that when push comes to shove the subjective is more important than the objective.

Whether your objectives are noble or ignoble, purely fiscal or because of passion, this is a lesson that you should never forget.(source:gamasutra)


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