作者：David

如下图所示，向右移动似乎是最符合逻辑的选择。没有其他提示告诉我们应该做什么。《超级马里奥兄弟》的开头是，叫作马里奥的角色站在屏幕的左端，面朝右。一只长着两脚的蘑菇向他走来，玩家别无选择，只能朝着大部分屏幕空间出现的方向前进。这个概念出现得几乎没有任何语境，尽管如此，我们就是知道要做什么。《超级马里奥兄弟》的开头以如此清楚明白的方式为玩家指明方向，然而我们往往认为它（以及许多其他类似的时刻）是理所当然的。

nintendo-new-super-mario-bros(from ign.com)

我们极少欣赏和感谢这些“显而易见”的设计。不仅如此，我们还嘲笑它们为糟糕的设计、简单到不需要考虑的东西。只要有人指出显而易见的东西，他或她得到的回答往往是“谢了，早看出来了”或者不屑一顾的笑。我们标榜微妙的设计是因为它太隐藏得太好了，发现它的过程给我们机会赞扬自己的观察力多么敏锐。在过去的五十年，微妙的设计很大程度上已经成为媒体和学术批评的标准。寻找作者有意掩藏起来的东西或散落在小说的各个章节里的秘密是让人很有动力做的事，这是可以理解的。或者简单地重复观看我们最喜欢的电影和电视剧，希望能发现我们第三次看才觉得合理的视觉隐喻。

这种“解读”游戏的风气似乎已经弥漫到游戏批评界。我们赞美诸如《The Last of Us》或者《Gone Home》，因为游戏中的元素表达得不露骨—-营造氛围的墙上涂鸦，藏在一叠书里的笔记等等。我们这么做没错。寻找揭露这些含蓄表达的时刻会让我们觉得自己的观察力真不错，并且证实了制作者们的美学观。虽然我们永远不会贬低微妙设计的巧妙，但我们却把显而易见的设计当作偷懒或傲慢。有时候，显而易见的东西的存在就是为了逼我们去思考它，为它的作用感到惊叹。

last-of-us(from ign.com)

因为游戏是一种交互性、动态的媒体，所以它们能够以尽可能清楚明白的方式展示它们的机制。在早期的游戏机时代，指导手册帮助玩家理解操作细节，但数量有限的按键极少需要这种说明——至少在后来的16位机时代以前是如此。因为指导手册已经不实用了，所以游戏开始越来越依靠公然的机制教程，这些教程要么无聊到令人痛苦，要么清楚（游戏邦注：比如《刺客信条》），要么匠心独运但令人困惑（比如《黑暗之魂》——我仍然不知道那些符号是什么意思）。尽管指导的方法不同，它们都一定程度上具有明显的语境。

《超级马里奥兄弟》是“显而易见”的纪念碑之作，它的每一个移动和跳跃都有完全合理的语境。指出为什么你要踩乌龟壳和把它踢到敌人来的路上，是毫无意义的。我们这么做是因为，游戏让我们看到一队跳踢踏舞的蘑菇后面跟着一只呆头呆脑的乌龟，这正是找踢的节奏啊。这个暗示太明显了，我们几乎本能地就会那么做，根本不需要寻找机制上的微妙之处。

游戏训练我们如何与这些显而易见互动时，有一些非常搞笑的地方。引入画面告诉我们“按‘开始’开始”，似乎还有其他按钮更适合执行这个任务似的—-不过我承认，我总是按“A”看看会怎么样。游戏结束画面出现在我的角色的尸体上，即使被清空的血槽和血淋淋的角色已经让玩家很清楚怎么回事了。老套的“想继续吗？”弹出窗口搞得像还有其他选项似的，非常像嘲笑我们笨拙的表现。这讽刺得太明显了。

TESV_Ragnvald(from ign.com)

现在，我们看到显而易见通过玩法更加有组织地结合到场景和角色模型中。散布着及胸高的围墙的战场似乎粗声粗气地喊我们去找掩蔽物，红色的滚桶有意和一大波敌人一起出现，正是提醒我们用它爆敌人。敌人以可预测的方式移动，让我们知道哪一个要发动攻击了；尽管我们可能错过这个暗示17次后才终于在第18次时意识到什么时候应该跑去疗伤。我们知道那些健康背包的作用，我们知道要查看每一个该死的盒子、碗柜或垃圾桶，可能会找到一些能帮助我们逃生的道具。开发者以显而易见的结构布局地下城，使我们总是知道宝藏就藏在最华丽的地下城里，因为帝王的墓穴只能在这里——尽管把魔法剑藏在闹鬼的地穴并不太合理。

我们往往不理会这些细节，因为它们太稀少了，太高雅了（如果有过的话）。我们把它们归因于“游戏主义”，带着有点太轻蔑的态度。把这些事情当作是“游戏才会做的事”，贬低了他们对游戏如何向玩家传递信息的重要作用。电子游戏的语言是复杂的，有动态的，推开它最普遍的方面，阻碍了我们对它们的欣赏。

如果不忽视这些显而易见的时刻，我们要怎么接受它们？毕竟，显而易见偶尔也有如诗歌般美好的地方。我们私底下和在公共场也那么做，比如提醒大家暴雨将至，即使我们周围的人都已经看到黑云密布了。游戏也是这么做的，当我们与明显比我们等级高的BOSS作战时，告诉我们爆炸会把敌人激怒。等到我们在“这个关卡太困难”的关卡中挂了，我们就对自己说“我不敢相信我竟然挂了”，我们正是在重申游戏已经告诉过我们的话，这才意识到最显而易见的设计竟然最意味深长。

dark-souls(from ign.com)

显而易见是游戏做得最好的一件事情，不要用尽可能简单的方式解释事情，而是以逼迫我们与之互动的方式告诉我们信息。在我们对抗强过我们N倍的敌人或遇到非常危险的关卡时告诉我们“你最好有备而来”。从敌人的高级装备和高大的身躯上，我们知道它有多可怕。我们看到海洋的边界或地图边边缘的高山，就知道那是不可经过的区域。游戏强行为我们指出这些事，因为它是需要互动的媒体。

更经常的是，玩游戏是一种享受显而易见的活动。游戏怎么对我们说、喊它们的机制，通过告诉我们即将面临什么来操纵我们的游戏方式，即使我们只是表面上认识到它的暗示。不管角色和场景中隐藏了多少倍受赞扬的微妙设计，游戏的最大优势可能就是强迫我们自己去认识显而易见的障碍，而不是由游戏自己来解释它们，提醒我们为什么我们要玩游戏：去邂逅另一个世界、迎接和探索虚拟世界之外不可能出现的挑战和可能性。

所以我们做了显而易见的选择。我们的路径是显而易见的，就是一路上跳过蘑菇和乌龟，到达插着小旗的城堡，最终救出公主。所以，我们向右走。（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）

Appreciating the Obvious in Game Design

by David

It only seems logical to go right. There’s no other indication on what to do, really. Super Mario Bros. begins with the titular character on the left side of screen, facing right. A mushroom with feet hobbles toward him, leaving no option but to travel in the direction wherein the most screen space appears. The concept arises with little context, but we nevertheless know exactly what to do. The beginning of Super Mario Bros. telegraphs the player’s direction with such clarity that we often take it (and many other moments like it) for granted.

We lack an appreciation for the obvious. We smirk at it like it’s a bad thing, something so plain it hardly warrants consideration. As soon as someone points out the clearly visible, he or she is met with a derogatory “Thanks, Captain Obvious” or something equally derisive and uncreative. We’ve learned to prize subtlety because it’s so carefully concealed, and the prospect of discovery gives us a chance to acknowledge our own skills at astute observation. Such has been the standard for media and academic criticism at large in the past fifty years. It’s an understandable impetus to turn over pages and look for that one thing the author has tucked away, hiding in the shadowed alleys of the novel. Or to similarly approach repeated viewings of our favorite films and television shows in hopes they’ll reveal visual metaphors that only make sense the third time we’ve seen them.

This practice marks a has become the recent trend of ‘reading’ games at the onset of a fairly new movement in games criticism. We prize games like The Last of Us or Gone Home for those elements that aren’t as blatantly assertive — a message scrawled on a wall to build atmosphere, a note hidden in among a pile of books. And we’re right to do so. Hunting to uncover moments of quiet exposition rewards us for our observation as often as it validates the aesthetic values of the creators. While we should never devalue the deftness of subtlety, we should also hesitate to mistake the obvious for laziness or assertive arrogance. Sometimes, the obvious appears because it forces us to consider it, to deal with its presence how best we can, and to (if we’re lucky) marvel at its function.

Since games are an interactive, dynamic medium, they reveal their mechanics with as much clarity as possible. In the early days of console gaming, instruction booklets helped detail controls, but limited buttons rarely required such elucidation—at least until the latter part of the 16-bit era. Since instruction booklets have more or less gone the way of the mammoth, games rely more on blatant mechanical tutorials ranging from the painfully boring, but clear (Assassin’s Creed), to the strangely inventive, but vague (Dark Souls — I still don’t know what all those symbols mean). Though methods of instruction vary, they must rely somewhat on readily apparent contexts.

Super Mario Bros. is nothing if not a digital monument to the obvious, as each move and jump makes perfect contextual sense. To point out why you should stomp on a chomping turtle and kick its shell into an enemy’s path would be pointless. We do it because the game telegraphs this path right in front of us with a line of tap-dancing mushrooms behind that hard-shelled bastard, waiting to be knocked over. It’s a concept so plain to see that we engage with it almost mechanically, acting on the world without a need to find nuance in the mechanic.

There’s something undeniably fascinating about how games train us to interact with the obvious. Introductory screens tell us “Press ‘Start’ to Begin,” as if there’s another button more appropriate for the task — though I admit, I’ll always press ‘A’ to see if it works. Game Over screens appear over our digital corpses, even though it’s pretty clear by the depleted health bar and bloodied character that we have to start over again. The old “Continue? “prompts never really felt like options at all, rather like goading jabs at our fumbled attempts. The insinuation was always clear.

Now, we see the obvious more organically merged in environments and character models in ways that dictate gameplay. The chest-high walls littering a digital warzone scream at us with military vulgarity that we had better fucking duck and cover, while red barrels appear conspicuously by groups of enemies, peppering the area with fire. An enemy moves in calculable ways to let us know which attack is coming, and though we may have fallen for it seventeen times, by our eighteenth try we know when to roll away to heal. We know what those health kits will do, and we know to check every damn box, cupboard or trash can in hopes we can find some innocuous item to help us out. They lay out obvious formal structures in the way we always know that there’s treasure in some clearly-marked dungeon because the ornate tomb wouldn’t be there otherwise—even if it doesn’t make much sense to hide an enchanted sword in a haunted crypt.

We tend to dismiss such elements because they are so rarely, if ever, elegant. We attribute to them terms like “gameisms,” and do so a bit too pejoratively. Considering these idiosyncrasies as just “things games do” takes away from their significance to how games relay information to the player. The language of video games is a complex and dynamic one, and pushing aside one of its most prevalent aspects shortchanges the varied ways we appreciate them.

What if, instead of disregarding these moments of telegraphed clarity, we embrace them? After all, there’s something accidentally poetic about stating the obvious.  We all do it in private and public moments, like remarking on the way a storm comes even though everyone around us already sees the clouds. It only follows that we do it with games as well, remarking about how badass that explosion is that sends enemies flying or cursing in rage when we try to fight a boss that’s so clearly beyond our skill level. Somewhere amid the “This level’s too hard,” the “I can’t believe I just fucking died,” and the “Holy crap, that worked” we restate in our own words what a game’s already told us, acknowledging how the most transparent moments can turn into the most meaningful.

The obvious is one thing that games do best, not to explain something in the simplest way possible, but to give us information in such a way that we are forced to interact with it. Games pit us against giant enemies or impossibly treacherous platforming sections to say “You had better come prepared.” We know our enemies for their threatening armor and imposing stature. We see a world’s boundaries in the oceans or mountains that border the map, insisting on impassible terrain. Games forcibly point on such things out to us because it’s a medium that requires confrontation.

More often than not, playing games is an exercise in relishing the obvious. It’s how games speak, whisper, or scream their mechanics at us, steering the way we play by telling us what we’re about to face even if we only superficially recognize what that means. Despite all those prized subtleties buried in characters and environments, the medium’s greatest strength may indeed be how it forces us to acknowledge the obstacles in plain sight, not to show itself off, but to remind us why we came to play: to encounter worlds, challenges, and possibilities unavailable outside of virtual space.

So we make the obvious choice. We plan our route to the princess, jumping over mushrooms and turtles to reach the castle clearly marked with a flagpole. We move right.(source:ign)