作者：Chris Hecker

技术在游戏中是什么角色？

游戏行业中的传统观点是，游戏和游戏设计不应该以技术为基础，特别是如果我们还打算追求真正的艺术形式的话。我准备挑战传统。

我认为，游戏是或至少有潜力成为与文学、电影、音乐和视觉艺术并列的一种艺术形式。游戏可能浪费了这个机遇，但我相信，游戏是有这种潜力的。正如以前许多人说的，20世纪初游戏模仿电影：被贬低为一愚蠢的流行娱乐。可悲的是，我们总是辜负那个期望。然而，有一天，有人会设计出相当于D.W. Griffith的《Birth of a Nation》的游戏，世人将会看到游戏的真正潜能——就像他们在1915年时看到电影一样。

computer programmer(from malachifortune)

音乐完全不同于绘画，就像游戏也不同于其他艺术形式。这就是为什么好莱坞的人试图抹黑我们却总是未果：他们不理解游戏这种媒体，以及它的优势和劣势。

游戏有什么不同？答案是陈腔滥调，在许多商业计划书上都能找到，但它就是真理：交互性——能够动态地响应玩家行为，那是其他艺术形式所能想象的。

如果交互性是游戏的典型特征，那么我们就必要理解它。我不打算探讨什么是交互性或非交互性，更别说什么是好的交互性或差的交互性，但很明显，交互有其内在的算法。有一系列输入（游戏世界的当前状态、玩家的动作等等）、决定输入产生什么结果（NPC亲吻玩家、NPC打玩家等）的系统和一系列那些结果（告诉玩家“你死了”的文本等）。

决定什么时候要做什么的算法必须描述给电脑。取决于算法的复杂度，有许多做法，从高级的视觉流程系统（游戏邦注：设计师用框图表示输入和输出）到在DSP上写汇编码。然而，这些描述看似简单，它们都是计算机编程，这就是接受交互性和游戏的必然真相：你必须告诉计算机如何响应各种输入，如何通过程序做事情。

回到传统观点：游戏不应该以技术为基础。如果我把“技术”当作“程序”，那么游戏就是以技术为基础，因为这是必须的。我不是说游戏应该以精巧的图像把戏为基础，虽然这通常就是现状。然而，设计和调节游戏的算法——游戏如何回应玩家和如何前摄，应该是游戏设计的基础任务。这些算法决定了玩家对玩这款游戏的感觉。

这让我想到另一条异端论断：游戏设计师必须学习程序。

还同意我说的吗？我不是说所有游戏设计师都必须成为C++的好手，但游戏设计师必须能够在算法层面上思考和解决问题，并且非常清楚计算机做什么容易做什么困难。当然，游戏设计师可以告诉程序员执行什么，但是，因为所有程序员都知道，“执行什么”和“如何执行”是两个非常不同的概念。“什么”的描述越含糊，“如何”的决策就越麻烦。这些决策直接影响游戏的玩法。设计师给出的描述越准确，他本人对真正的程序越了解，他对游戏设计本身的控制权就越大。学习在算法层面上思考并不是增加了游戏设计师的负担。相反地，它使设计师从程序员的抱怨中解放出来。

正如我的同事Jon Blow曾说的，程序是游戏设计的最后一段路程。当我们开始把游戏设计当作不是以简单的、硬代码的路线而是本质上是程序的，那么这就不只是最后一段路程了。

最终，图形引擎不会是把游戏与其他媒体区别开来的决定性因素。最重要的是把不同的游戏玩法区别开来的算法。那些算法必须是设计出来的。对于那些希望自己的工作不只是调整武器伤害值的设计师，希望把游戏变成叙述互动剧情和更能激发玩家情绪反应的体验的设计师，我要说：学起来。这种艺术形式需要你学习程序。（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）

Yes, you should understand code – even if you’re not a programmer

By Chris Hecker

What is the role of technology in games?

There is conventional wisdom in the game industry that games and game designs should not be based on technology, especially if we are ever going to be seen as a true art form. I’d like to challenge this wisdom.

I take it as a given that games are or at least have the potential to be an art form on par with literature, film, music, visual arts, and the rest. We might squander this opportunity, but I am confident we have the potential. As many have said before, we resemble film in the early 1900s: disrespected as mindless popular entertainment. Sadly, we live down to that expectation all too often. However, someday, someone will design the game equivalent of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, and the world — like it did with film in 1915 — will take notice of what’s really possible with games.

Music is completely different from painting, and games will be different from the other art forms as well. This is why the Hollywood people who occasionally try to overrun us always fail: they don’t understand our medium and its strengths and weaknesses.

What is so different about games? The answer is cliched and appears in a lot of dot-com business plans, but it’s the truth: interactivity. The computer underlying all of our games offers us the ability to dynamically respond to the player, and that’s something no other art form can touch.

If interactivity is the key differentiator of our form, then it behooves us to understand it. I’m not going to step into the morass of defining interactive and noninteractive, and certainly not good interactivity versus bad interactivity, but it’s clear that interactivity is inherently algorithmic at its core. There is a set of inputs (the current state of the world, the actions of the player, and so on), a system that decides what outputs to produce from the inputs (have an NPC kiss the player, have an NPC shoot the player), and a set of those outputs (the rendering of the smooch, a bit of text saying, “You’re dead”).

The algorithm that decides what to do at any given moment has to be described to the computer. Depending on the complexity of the algorithm, there are many ways of doing this, ranging from having some high-level visual flowchart system where designers connect boxes with inputs and outputs, all the way down to writing assembly code on a DSP. However simple these descriptions may seem, they’re all computer programming, and this is the inescapable fact of embracing interactivity and games: You must tell a computer how to respond to the various inputs, and you tell a computer how to do things via programming.

Getting back to the conventional wisdom that games shouldn’t be founded on technology, if I regard “technology” as “programming,” then games are founded on technology, as they must be. I’m not saying games should be founded on fancy graphics tricks, as is so often the case these days. However, designing and tuning the algorithms at the heart of the game how it reacts to the player and how proactive it is should be the fundamental task of game design. These algorithms determine how the game feels to play.

Which leads me to my next heretical statement: Game designers must learn to program.

Still with me? No, I don’t mean that every game designer has to be a C++ wizard who dreams in curly braces, but game designers must be able to think and solve problems algorithmically and have a very clear understanding of what’s easy and what’s hard to do on a computer. Sure, game designers can tell programmers what to implement, but, as all programmers know, there’s a world of difference between “what to implement” and “how to implement.” The more vague the description of the “what,” the more decisions get made during the “how.” Those decisions directly affect the gameplay. The more precise the designer is with the description, the closer he or she comes to real programming, and the more control he or she has over the game design itself. Learning to think algorithmically is not a burden for game designers. On the contrary, it liberates designers from the whims of programmers.

As my colleague Jon Blow once put it, programming is the last mile of game design. It grows to be much more than just the last mile when we begin to consider game designs that are not built of simple, hard-coded paths but are procedural by their very nature.

Eventually, the graphics engine will not be a differentiating factor. All that will matter is the algorithms that make one game play differently from another. Those algorithms must be designed. To the game designers who want to do more than tune the damage a weapon inflicts, to designers who want to take games into the realm of interactive storytelling and richer emotional experiences, I say: Study up. The art form needs you.(source:gamasutra)