作者：Daniel Clark

年中的时候，Vince Vaughn（美国男演员）和Jennifer Aniston（女演员）针对自己出演的电影《分手男女》参加了一次脱口秀表演。有趣的是，他们坚决地纠正着那些认为这部电影是爱情喜剧的人的看法，并辩解道：“这其实是一部带有喜剧效果的爱情剧。”

鉴于Vaughn曾经在网络上发表过煽动性言论，他们所强调的这一区别将会被当成调动疲惫群众的一种心理刺激方法。也许这只是源自创造性努力考验的哲学区 别：“世界上有数千万带有无数爱情元素的喜剧，但是我们所创造的简直就是一部游戏改造作品。这是一种嵌合体，一种混合物，即一部带有喜剧效果的爱情剧！”

The Break-Up（from ign）

不管起源是哪里，好莱坞的这种奇怪命名法一直萦绕在人们心中，因为它与审美基调中引人注意的问题密切相关：创造性决策赋予了电影外观，让人印象深刻的时刻，还有灵魂。毫无疑问它会唤醒那些最休闲的电影观众的感受，并且经过不同导演的诠释而变成一些完全不同的电影。脚本只是一个框架，它将建议一个模型，而围绕着它创建的主题可能会与作者的设想相背离。

这种颠覆（YouTube）证实了大多数紧凑的剧情可以通过使用不协和的音效，录音或某种删减，以及带有预兆性的笑点而转变成神经喜剧——实际上这也证实了电影的脆弱性：在任何时候，场景的成功是基于数百个经济，技术，创造性决策，能力和意外等基本元素。尽管游戏是一种不同体验类型，具有互动性，能够基于音频–视觉技术等优势去丰富游戏体验，但是我们也不能忽视创造能够凸显游戏玩法的审美基调的必要性。

游戏设计是两个领域的产物：机制[物理输入（如向前的四分之一循环+猛击）和他们的结果（如火球撞击敌人并削减他的能量）]和美感（这些如何处理外观和声音；可能的感受，基于Wii遥控器和隆隆声）。监管玩家体验的最大份额是受到机制的驱动，但是美感威力的放大让它可以不再区别于游戏机制而将自己整合到游戏体验中。游戏再也不会基于一种特定的方式呈现出来。单独的机制和美感并不能决定游戏整体的质量。相反地，这两个领域是否和谐将影响着游戏的成败。

举个例子来说吧，用经典的8位体音效替代《战地3》中枪的逼真音效将彻底改变游戏体验。尽管结果仍是相同的，但是感觉却出现了很大的变化。效果也没有更好！当然这么做会有怀旧感，如果是用于代表过去25年的发展可能会好些。但是如此《战地》的体验也就不见了，尽管这一点都不让人意外，但却指出了管理美感的复杂性，一个元素的失败有可能破坏整体，而不管你是如何小心翼翼地完善其它部分。

很明显，《战地》系列背后的团队清楚自己想要呈现给玩家怎样的体验。图像美感的状态并不只是让人印象深刻或轻松愉悦，还要基于某种方式与游戏机制结合在一起，就像《Nerf》中所表现出的那种“战争感”——而这一切的最大功臣便是游戏的音频–视觉现实性。换句话说，《战地》并非取决于它们的机制或算法，或者它们的外观和声音，而是受到发生了什么事件以及这些事件带给玩家的感受之间的和谐的影响。

这可能看起来很明显，但是在如今的游戏设计中我们却不能有效地处理机制和美感的结合。考虑到除了描述并传达情感，美感领域的存在是没有其它原因的，而它的发展要求设计师不仅需要思考自己希望玩家做些什么，同时还要琢磨玩家在做某些事时的感受。这不只是关于游戏的“表演”时刻，还是关于游戏中的每一时刻，以此防止玩家的离开。电影编剧和剧作家一直在研究叙述艺术是一种随着时间发展的紧张管理模式这一说法。而游戏设计师始终相信，只要能让玩家有事做，他们就会感到满足。也许这在过去是合理的，但是从现在开始却不再是这样。

《武装突袭II》的僵尸模组，也就是DayZ便是使用创造性张力的一个主类。僵尸是一种神奇且让人恐惧的生物。尽管在现实中我们也知道僵尸病毒，但是惊奇元素却是排在疯狂尖叫之后。《武装突袭》创造者的厉害之处就在于他解释了《武装突袭》世界的潜能远比其团队所挖掘到的还要大（至少在受欢迎程度上来看）。从根本上来看，玩家想要玩游戏，而游戏能够激发同样的情感与心理反应，超越战斗平庸与压抑的本质并进入一个超自然领域中，这比简单的军队模拟能够吸引更多人的注意。

有段时间这款发行了3年的游戏的销量提升了500%。这并不是说其质量成就了名气，更确切地说应该是当游戏机制能够成为游戏情感基础之时，游戏的用户粘性便会大大提高。让普通人只通过想象力将自己置于士兵的角色中是件很困难的事——而这对于《武装突袭》的复苏却非常重要。基本上，战争是关于生存，实际或感知，尽管我们很难结合模糊的地理政治关注点和执行命令去穿越乌克兰的荨麻地，但是每个人却都能与紧张感连接在一起。

DayZ（from ign）

这一模组的出色之处便在于能够突出一个理念（幸存）和一些机制（现实战斗模拟），并将其与美感环境（僵尸病毒）结合在一起而创造出体验最初理念的方法。毕竟游戏是需要情感投入的。而这也不只是经历情感。如果游戏的图像并不能将玩家带进本质核心中，它便会被迅速搁置在一旁——考虑到开发者在创造游戏时所投入的大量资源，时间和激情，这对于玩家和开发者来说都会是一大打击。

从整体上来看，美感的完善并不只是让游戏看上去或听上去更“棒”。完善是取决于对于现实中的资源的保真度。但是开发者经常忽视的一点是这样的保真度的利益性，因为现实会提供给我们最大程度的用户粘性和刺激性。现实性并不只是感受到的外观或声音。随着下一代硬件和引擎的出现，新的美感正逐渐逼近，它将通过结合机制与美感去造就游戏世界的新图腾而提升用户粘性，所有这些内容结合将创造真正吸引玩家的游戏体验，就像《分手男女》那样。

（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 Importance of Holistic Game Design

by Daniel Clark

Midyear, ‘06, Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston did the talk show rounds to peddle their movie The Break-Up. Curiously, they insisted on correcting anyone who referred to the film as a romantic-comedy. ‘No, no, no,’ they demurred. ‘It’s a comedy-romance.’

Given that Vaughn has a trolling pedigree that pre-dates the internet, the distinction may have been conjured as a psychological irritant to mobilise the jaded masses. It could have been a wink to his adoring bro legion, aggrieved by the possibility he’d sold out to a chick-flick. Or maybe it was a heartfelt philosophical distinction that emerged from the crucible of creative endeavour: “Bob, there’re ten million comedies out there with lashings of romance, but what we’ve cooked up here is nothing short of a game-changer. It’s a chimera… a hybrid… the comedy-romance!”

Wait, what does this have to do with video games? Bear with us…
Whatever its origin, this quirk in Hollywood nomenclature sticks in mind because it relates to the fascinating issue of aesthetic tone: the tapestry of creative decisions that give a film its look, its memorable moments, its soul. No doubt it has occurred to even the most casual movie-goer that the same screenplay, interpreted by different directors, could be developed into wildly different films. The script is a skeleton, and while it suggests a shape, the body built around it may scarcely resemble what the writer envisaged.

That cauldron of subversion, YouTube, frequently demonstrates that the most taut drama can be twisted into a screwball comedy through the use of dissonant sound effects, overdubs, or mischievous cuts, and the most fey laugh-riot loaded with portent – a fact that aptly demonstrates the fragility of cinema: at any given moment, the success of a scene rests upon a foundation of literally hundreds of financial, technical, and creative decisions, capabilities, and accidents. While gaming is a different type of experience, being interactive, given the increasingly advanced ways in which audio-visual technologies flesh out the gaming experience, the imperative to create an aesthetic tone which compliments gameplay has become inescapable.

Game design has always been a product of two spheres: mechanics [physical inputs (e.g. quarter circle forward + punch) and their consequences (e.g. a fireball hits an opponent and reduces his energy)], and aesthetics (how these processes look and sound; possibly feel, given Wii-motes and rumble cores). However, while the lion’s share of the player’s experience was once driven by mechanics – games’ “skins” being so similar – the amplification of aesthetic power has caused it to insinuate itself into our gaming experiences in such a way that it’s no longer separable from a game’s mechanics. Games don’t just look and play a certain way anymore – they look-play. Mechanics and aesthetics, in isolation, don’t determine a game’s overall quality. Rather, it’s by virtue of the harmony or disharmony between the two spheres that a game sinks or swims.

For example, replacing the realistic sound-effects of Battlefield 3’s guns with classic 8-bit sound effects (fish it out of the aforementioned cauldron of subversion if you’re so inclined) changes the experience entirely.  So, while what is done remains the same, how it feels to do it, changes entirely. And not for the better! It’s nostalgically amusing, certainly, and as an indicator of the past twenty-five years’ progress, it’s a treat. But the Battlefield experience is lost, and though that isn’t surprising, it does point to the complexity of aesthetic arrangement, and the way in which a failure of one aspect can drag down the whole, no matter how carefully refined its other parts may be.

Clearly, the team behind the Battlefield series has a firm idea of the experience they intend for the player. The state of the art aesthetics are not merely impressive, or a pleasure, but combine with the mechanics of gameplay in such a way as to make “playing war” feel like the ecstatic balls to the wall Nerf combat of childhood – a feat which is all the more impressive for the games’ audio-visual realism. In other words, Battlefield games don’t hinge upon their mechanics or algorithms, or on the other hand, the way they look and sound, but rather upon the harmony created between what takes place, and how it feels to see and hear it unfold.

This might seem obvious, but the marriage of mechanics and aesthetics is the most mismanaged imperative of game design today. Given that the realm of aesthetics exists for no other reason than to describe and provoke emotion, its rise has entailed that designers must engage not only with the question of what they want gamers to do, but what they want them to feel as they do it. And not only at a game’s grandstand moments, but at every single moment, lest the player disengage. Screenwriters and playwrights are well drilled in the maxim that narrative art is the management of tension over time. Game designers have grown up believing that so long as the player has some busywork to do, they’ll be content. Maybe we have been, in the past, but not anymore.

The zombie mod for ArmA II, DayZ, is a master class in the use of creative tension. Zombies are wondrous and terrifying creatures. Though, were the zombie plague to confront us in reality, the wondrous aspects would take a backseat to the frenzied screaming. The genius of DayZ’s creator is that he interpreted the potential of ArmA’s world better than its development team did (at least insofar as popularity goes). Ultimately, gamers want to play, and while provoking similar emotions and psychological implications, by travelling beyond the banal and depressing (in reality, killing is the most depressing thing in the world) nitty-gritty of combat into the realm of the supernatural to do so, engages far more people than a military sim.

For a time, sales of the three year-old game increased 500%. This isn’t to say that quality is married to popularity, but rather to illustrate how much more engaging a game can be when its mechanics underlie something we can become emotionally invested in. It’s extremely difficult for a civilian to place themselves in the role of a soldier through imaginative means alone – something which would be necessary to bring ArmA II to life for the uninitiated. Ultimately, war is about survival, actual or perceived, and while it’s very difficult to connect obscure geopolitical concerns and executive orders to crawling through some nettle in the Ukraine, everyone can connect to a severe case of the heebie-jeebies!

DayZ – an incredible mod.

The genius of the mod was in taking a concept (survival), and some mechanics (realistic combat sim), and combining them with an aesthetic context (zombie plague) to create a way of playing with the original concept. Playing, after all, is being emotionally invested. It’s not simply going through the motions. If the art of a game doesn’t draw the player into its substantive core, then it’ll be shelved very quickly – and given the amount of resources and time and passion that goes into creating it, that’s a great shame for players and developers alike.

All things considered, the improvement of aesthetics is more complicated than simply looking or sounding “better.” Improvement is conventionally assessed by fidelity to a source found in reality. But what is often overlooked is the fact that such fidelity is of interest because reality provides us with the greatest level of engagement and stimulation. Reality doesn’t merely look or sound – it feels. With a new aesthetic leap approaching through the next-gen hardware and engines, it will be the games which maximise engagement through the melding of mechanics and aesthetics that become the new totems of the gaming world, the sum of these parts creating the overall experience that players walk away with – or walk away from…  like, The Break-Up.(source:ign)