作者：Kevin Gliner

我已经说了许多有关在游戏中有效使用意外性的内容，从执行方面来看这是一个不平凡的问题。如果沿着这条路走下去，开发者将遇到一些挑战。

平衡

许多能够提高玩家粘性的可能空间也有可能不利于平衡。鉴于所有排列太过广泛，我们很难对其进行测试。

才能，经验和迭代能够有效地处理这一问题，但更简单的一种方法是重新思考平衡的意义。如果出现异常情况，不平衡的情况将被重置作为体验的一部分，玩家将发现它们是有趣的而不是让人受挫的。

作为一个实时的产品也是有帮助的——任何太过极端的内容将快速被调整过来（游戏邦注：如果它对游戏具有重要影响的话）。

杂音

拥有一个巨大的空间不一定总是好事，如果玩家很难在此找到有趣的部分便不是如此。同样地，如果玩家不能区别不同方法，那么意外内容便不可能提升用户粘性。

在这些情况中它都能够帮助我们近乎垂直地创造出游戏核心元素——能够在游戏过程中创造不同结果。拥有一个+1剑，+2剑以及+3剑作为选择并不是垂直的。更好的方法是更加二进制的属性：剑vs.没有剑，AOE vs.非AOE，DOT vs.非DOT，远程vs.近程等等。结合任何这些元素的能力将为玩家创造更加独立，可理解且有用的排列组合。

呈现和视觉保真

意外性是依靠不同方式结合核心元素而运行，但在巨大的可能空间中，我们却不可能为所有排列创造独特的资产。我们通常是基于视觉效果结合一些较小的内容去呈现意外元素。这里所存在的挑战是如何确保所结合的元素能够获得玩家的快速理解，即使他们之前从未看过这一特殊的结合。

因为玩家只需要学习相关功能而不是所有的排列，所以只有少量的核心，垂直元素能够起到帮助作用，即基于任何结合方式限制元素的数量。真正强大的艺术指导也能够创造出区别，特别是基于核心元素也很小的小型游戏设备上。

poker(from queenjackofspades)

让我们以扑克为例。纸牌本身便是核心元素，手是意外元素。每只手的独特性是源自结合一些纸牌，而不是一个新资产。一只手上的纸牌数是有限的，每张纸牌的外观是不同的，而可能的手的数量是巨大的。但玩家有可能立刻便意识到自己拥有什么牌，即使他们之前从未遇到这样特殊的纸牌组合。

（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）

Key Challenges Creating Emergent Games

by Kevin Gliner

As much as I’ve been touting greater use of emergence in games, it’s a non-trivial problem in terms of execution.  Developers face a few challenges if they go down this path.

Balance

The massive possibility space that’s so beneficial to player engagement also happens to be impossible to balance.  It’s simply too large to test all the permutations.

Talent, experience and iteration go a long way toward dealing with this issue, but a simpler approach is to re-think what it means to be balanced.  If unusual, lop-sided situations are re-cast as part of the experience — and the build-try-fail loop is short — players will find them entertaining instead of frustrating.

Being a live product also helps– anything too extreme can be quickly adjusted if it’s having a large impact on play (and by large impact, I mean it’s driving all players to pursue a single strategy, thereby undermining the benefits of an emergent system).

Noise

Having a large possibility space isn’t much good if it’s hard to find the interesting bits.  Similarly, if players can’t differentiate one approach from another, then being emergent isn’t going to increase engagement.

In both cases it helps to make the core elements of the game — the ones that can be combined during play to produce different results — as orthogonal as possible.  Having a +1 sword, +2 sword, and +3 sword as options is not being orthogonal.  A better approach would be attributes that are more binary in nature:  sword vs. not-sword, AOE vs. not-AOE, DOT vs. not-DOT, ranged vs. not-ranged, etc.   The ability to combine any of those together creates a much more discrete, understandable and useful set of permutations for the player.

Representation and Visual Fidelity

Emergence works by combining core elements in many different ways, but in a large possibility space it’s not possible to create unique assets for all permutations.  Emergent elements are often represented by simply visually stitching together smaller bits.  The challenge is making the combined element quickly understandable, even if the player has never seen that particular combination before.

Having only a handful of core, orthogonal elements helps, since the player only has to learn their function and not all the permutations, as does limiting the number of elements in any combination.  Really strong art direction makes a big difference too, particularly on smaller gaming devices where core elements might be very small.

Take poker as an example.  The individual cards are core elements, and a hand is an emergent element.  The uniqueness of each hand comes from stitching together a few cards, not a new asset.  The number of cards in a hand is constrained, each card is visually distinct, and the number of possible hands is very large.  But the player can immediately recognize what they have, even if that particular set of cards is new to them.(source:gamasutra)