Greg Kasavin是Supergiant Games的创意总监，也是热门独立游戏《Bastion》和即将发行的《Transistor》的创造者。在帮助创建Supergiant Games之前，Greg曾在艺电担任《命令与征服》的制作人，并也曾是Gamespot的总主编。这是在2012年5月所进行的一次访谈。

Bastion(from supergiantgames)

EL：你认为什么是游戏设计？

GK：概括说来，游戏设计是关于创造游戏的艺术。它伴随着能够与玩家产生互动体验的系统和输入内容，并将创造出某些感受。所以这是一个开放性问题。，我想这也是你为什么会问这一问题的主要原因，对吧？

EL：（笑）

GK：显然它代表许多不同的事物，即基于你所谈论的游戏类型。让我感兴趣的是，在艺电有一个被称作“游戏设计师”的工作群体，而这类群体的级别却往往都是在制作人以下。但从理论上看这些人却是在创造所有的游戏内容。从某种方式来看是他们赋予的存在—-尽管从事实上说这应该是工程师的功劳。

EL：刚开始创造《Bastion》时，基于该提供给玩家怎样的体验，你和团队将关注焦点放在哪里？

GK：一开始创造《Bastion》时我们并未侧重哪一方面，或者说那时候我们还未拥有任何总计划。我们只是根据最终想要的结果而明确了一些较高级别的理念。我们的对话便是源自这里，这也是我们在离开艺电后从头开始讨论的一大内容。

我们早期的想法是创造一款不只是有趣的游戏。这也是我经常使用的一种表达，因为我认为乐趣很棒。这是大多数游戏的追求，但是我也认为乐趣是短暂的。因为一旦你离开了乐趣，你便会快速忘记它。

这是一种很快消失的感觉。这与疼痛感有点相似。事实上你不会去记住一些糟糕的伤痛。而乐趣便是这同一条线的另一端。

我们想要创造一款玩家直到最后都能有所感受的游戏，并能够围绕着这种感受做出相关决定；贯穿游戏去回应他们的体验。这便影射了我们构建游戏结局的方式，即你将在最后做出一些选择。

其次，我们想要以一种只能借助于游戏的方式去传达故事，因为如果我只是想要写一个故事而已，我便可以写本书或剧本之类。但是我们想要创造一款只会让别人感觉到这是一款游戏的游戏，而不像我们想要创造其它内容那样。

EL：你们是如何想着创造出一些不只有乐趣的内容，你们将如何在《Bastion》中将高级别的引导理念转变成真正具体的时刻？你是如何设计这些标志性的时刻？

GK：我认为当我致力于一个带有熟悉主题的故事时，我便会自动从一个特定的角度着手，我不知道自己可以编写一个只是关于乐趣的故事。

EL：（笑）

GK：我只是不想这么做。我认为故事的吸引力在于，它们之所以会存在是因为人们想要理解，想要合理地思考，而故事则能够通过一种简单的方式将一些无关的内容整合在一起并赋予其完整性。这是由一连串的事件编织在一起，一件事将引出另一件事，并且现在也存在有关你所面对的游戏世界的许多相关知识。

我认为在《Bastion》中会让大家兴奋到站起来的一个时刻便是，当你首次发现一个歌手并听她唱歌时。创造出与叙述者形成鲜明对比的角色很重要，我们便尝试着这么做，所以在游戏中的某一时刻，你将假设不存在任何其他人。在那时你将习惯于听到这个人的声音，而你最后期待听到的便会是完全不同类型的声音。

EL：回想起来，当去年我在玩这款游戏时，听到那首歌的确是最让我印象深刻的时候。

GK：谢谢。

EL：在游戏中你是否还想要传达某种叙述设备，但却不能以有效的方式表现出来？

GK：我能够很自豪地说，我们喜欢自己在创造故事时所做的一切事。我们是连续地创造游戏，这便意味着我们创造了最初的内容与最后的内容。而关于最后内容的理念则是始终就存在的。

因为所有的编写内容是基于不同关卡，所以我们尝试了许多内容，而内容编写一直都是较为复杂的环节。我们尝试着让每个关卡都是不同的，并尝试着各种新内容。

所以关于特定关卡我们尝试并否决了一些特定的叙述理念，就像我们编写，记录并执行了几百个叙述幻灯片，但是我们最终却采取了不同的方法。不过我并不后悔做出这么多的尝试，因为在尝试的过程中我们发现了一些更棒的内容。

但是我们的目的仍是保持一样的。这只是围绕着保证执行和编写足够明确并能够传达我们想要传达的内容。再一次的，我真的非常感激我们能够在具有可能性的环境下工作。

作为一名作家，你最大的希望便是有时间进行迭代，直到作品最终能够传达你希望读者所感受到的真正体验。这是关于交流，如果交流对象能够拿走你希望它们拿走的“东西”，这便是再完美不过了。

通常情况下，特别是在大公司中开发游戏，你很少会获得第二次机会。你必须在第一次尝试时便做到最好，也许你会收到一些反馈帮助你做出更好的调整，但那时候往往都已经太迟了。

EL：从更广的范围上来看，关于游戏设计最让你感到兴奋的元素是什么？

GK：关于游戏设计最吸引我的便是这些互动体验巨大的潜能及其作用。不管是对于生理上还是心理上。

我已经玩了很久的游戏了。但是我却一直能够看到其中的无限潜能。我对于有关游戏是否应该拥有经过授权的叙述内容这一讨论一直都很感兴趣。或者说是玩家的故事是否真的重要？游戏是否应该强加一个故事到玩家身上？

我从未看过游戏是将两个元素对着干的。我喜欢的游戏便做到了两者兼顾。它们找到了有效的方式去做到这点。我喜欢没有故事的竞争游戏，或者那些呈现出与你的多人游戏不相干的故事的游戏。

EL：另一方面，关于游戏设计过程你最觉得最让人受挫的是什么？

GK：我觉得游戏设计过程中最让人受挫，但也是最好的一个环节是尝试着创造一些真正有趣的内容。如果你费尽全力但却做不到自己预想的效果，那便会非常受挫。但之后你要想想，现在我要做什么？我该如何做到这点，我对此并不满意，怎么做才能去完善它？

我认为从根本上来看游戏设计就是一种交流形式。因为游戏意味着将被玩，如果你创造了一款游戏但是玩家的体验与你的设想完全不同，那你就会手足无措吧。

也许对于某些特定游戏来说，这样倒是无所谓。但是我们现在所说的是大部分游戏。

EL：这听起来就像是，在这种小型工作室里你就可以创造出一些真正优秀的作品了。你是否认为自己在不同的环境下也能够创造这样的游戏？

GK：我想如果在完全不同的环境下我们可能就不能创造出这样的游戏了。我们也会进行尝试，但最终可能就不是这样的游戏，但是在我们离开艺电前，我们正尝试着完成一款行动RPG游戏。我们真的在认真尝试着。但却并不奏效。只能说这种对抗力量太过强大了。

团队规模发生了变化，一下子窜升到好几百号人，你的游戏变成是由500乃至1000人所创造的AAA级项目。

但是在很多情况下这种大规模的团队也会被分割成一些较小的团队。我真的很喜欢我们现在所面临的环境，即所有的一切都是并存着，并且它们都有自己的优势。

兜了一圈我们又回到了原地，即在80年代和90年代，即使是基于较小的团队你也有可能创造出非常优秀的游戏。你可以面向一个巨大的利基市场创造游戏，那里有许多人都在玩游戏。所以创造一款只有5万人会尝试的古怪游戏也具有财政意义。

但对于这5万多人而言，这有可能是他们玩过最棒的游戏。这是一种很棒的感觉，不同于几年前AAA级游戏所面临的挑战，即创造出数千万人会喜欢的游戏。我不知道你会如何处理这种情况。

（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）

On Game Design with Greg Kasavin

The following are excerpts from a conversation with Greg Kasavin, Creative Director at Supergiant Games, makers of indie blockbuster Bastion and the upcoming Transistor. Before helping found Supergiant Games, Greg worked as a producer at EA on Command & Conquer  and served as the editor-in-chief for Gamespot. This conversation originally took place in May of 2012.

EL: What is game design?

GK: Game design is the art of making games, put broadly. It’s coming up with the systems and the inputs that will lead to an interactive experience with a player that hopefully creates some kind of feeling. So, yeah, it’s an open-ended question. I suppose that’s why you ask, more to kind of stump us, right?

EL: [laughs]

GK: It can obviously mean any number of different things, depending on the type of game you’re talking about. I think it was always interesting to me that, at Electronic Arts, there’s a job family in quotes called the “game designer” who, on the totem pole, is usually below the producer. But this is a guy who in theory is making all the content for the game. He’s what makes the game exist in a way, though, really that’s the engineer.

EL: At the onset of Bastion, what did you and the team focus on in terms of what the player would experience?

GK: Bastion didn’t start with any focus, there was no sort of grand design at the beginning. There were really just those types of high-level ideas in terms of what we wanted the end result to feel like. That’s kind of where our conversation started from and one of the things we were talking about from the very beginning after quitting EA.

The idea early on was that we wanted to make a game that was more than just fun. That’s the expression I always use, because fun, I think, fun is fine. It’s what most games aspire to be, but I think fun is very fleeting. Because, as soon as you stop having it, you kind of forget about it.

It’s a very immediate feeling that goes away. It’s a little bit like pain. You can’t remember how bad something hurt, really. And I think fun is the opposite end of that spectrum.

We did want to make a game where players could feel something about it at the end and then basically decide; be given an opportunity through the game to respond to their experience. That’s alluding to the way that we structured the ending of the game, where you get to make some choices at the end.

Secondly, we wanted to deliver story in a way that was only possible through the medium of games, because otherwise if I just wanted to write a story I could write a book or a screenplay or something. But we wanted to make a game specifically in something that felt like it could only be a game, not like we had aspirations of making some other thing.

EL: How did that desire to make something that is more than fun, how does that high-level guiding concept turn into some of the concrete moments in Bastion? How do you design, those hallmark moments?

GK: I think when I’m working on a story that has a theme that is something that feels personal to me, then I’m automatically going to approach it from a certain perspective, and I don’t know that I could write a story just about fun.

EL: [laughs]

GK: I’m just not wired that way. I think the appeal of stories is that, stories exist because people want to understand, people want to rationalize and stories are a neat way of taking things that are unrelated and making them feel complete and whole. It’s a chain of events, one thing led to another and now there is a germ of knowledge about the world that you gain out of the end of this.

One of the moments that I think stands out to people in Bastion, is the part where you discover the singer for the first time and you hear her song. It was important in establishing that character as this contrast to the narrator, so we build it up so that, by this point in the game, you assume that there’s going to be no other. You’re so used to hearing this guy’s voice by then that, hopefully, the last thing you expect is to hear a totally different and polar opposite type of voice.

EL: That song was I think the most memorable moment in games last year that I can think of…

GK: Thank you.

EL: Were there any narrative devices that you really wanted to express in the game, but could not manifest in a way that worked?

GK: I’m happy to say we like all the stuff that we wanted to do with the story we did. We built the game serially, meaning we built the beginning first and the ending last. The idea for the ending was there pretty much all along.

There’s a lot of stuff that we tried because all the writing happened on a level to level basis, so the writing was difficult all the way through. We treated every level uniquely and tried to do new things with.

So there were certain narrative concepts for certain levels that we tried and threw out, where there’s like a hundred-plus slides of narration that we wrote, recorded, implemented and then were like, no, we’re going to do this differently. But I don’t regret any of that, because we did, we tried it and we found a better thing to do.

But the intent was still the same. It was just around making sure that the performance and the writing were as clear as possible and conveying what we intended. Then again, I feel incredibly grateful to have been able to work in an environment where that was possible.

As a writer, the best you can hope for is having time to iterate until it gets to where your sort of mental idea of what the person will experience is. It’s all communication, and if they are taking away from it what you intend for them to take away from it, that’s perfect.

Usually things, especially game development in big companies, you don’t really get second chances. You have to get it right the first time and you’ll even get really good feedback about something that you could tweak to make it way better, but it might already be too late.

EL: To go a little bit broader, what excites you most about game design?

GK: What excites me most about game design is just the incredible potential of having these interactive experiences and what they can do. Both physically and emotionally.

I’ve been playing games for as long as I can remember. I’ve just always seen like an unlimited amount of potential in that. It’s always sort of funny to me that the debates, you know, the debates rage on about, should games have authored, narrative content at all? Or is the player’s story the one that really matters. Should games impose a story on the player?

I’ve just never seen it as being that confrontational. My favorite games do both. They find a way, or some of my favorite games do anyway. I love competitive games that have no story to them whatsoever. Or those games where you do get a story out of your multiplayer matches.

EL: On the flip side, what do you find most frustrating about the process of game design?

GK: The most frustrating process of game design is, I think, is also kind of the best part, which is trying to make something good. It’s the frustration of doing your best and having that quality still not be enough. And then thinking, well, what is it going to take? How do I make this, I’m not happy with this, what’s it going to take to make it even better?

I think game design ultimately is a form of communication. Because games are meant to be played and, if you make a game and the player takes away something wildly different from what it was you intended, then… I don’t know.

Maybe for certain games, that’s okay. But I think you’re trying to communicate something with most games. At least with how I think about them.

EL: It sounds to me like being in this small studio afforded you the opportunity to make something that was truly great. Do you think you could have made this game in a different environment?

GK: I don’t think we could have made this game in a different environment at all. We actually tried to, not this game, but before we quit EA, we were trying to get an action RPG off the ground. We really, really tried. It just didn’t work. So the forces of antagonism were too great.

The team sizes have evolved, which is that they ballooned up into hundreds of people where you have games made by 500 or even 1,000 people on the AAA projects.

But it also sort of imploded, in a lot of cases, and turned into these much smaller teams. And I really love that that now, that those things exist side by side. I think they all have their merits.

It’s sort of come full circle to how it was in the 80s and 90s, where you could have small teams actually create pretty good and, in many cases, superior games. There are so many people playing games out there that you can make a game for a niche and that niche can be huge. So it can make fiscal sense to make that weird, specific game, that only 50,000 people are going to play.

But to those 50,000 people, it’s going to be the best game those people ever played. And that’s an awesome feeling, as opposed to I think how it felt a few years ago where AAA games had the challenge of making a game that ten million people are all going to love, and I don’t know how you really tackle that.(source:famousaspect)