作者：Tom Battey

现在我已经完成了《Broken Age Act 1》。但不要担心，我不会透露任何信息，除了说“结局”很棒之外，如果你对冒险游戏感兴趣，你便可以尝试看看。

似乎大多数游戏媒体都会同意我的看法。不过有一个前提。来自Edge：“摸索着到达冒险游戏粉丝及其动机的中间点并向前推动该类型——即使只是较小的增长。”

来自Eurogamer：“那些期待着因为颠覆冒险游戏而成名的开发商能够提供更困难且更具实验性的内容的粉丝是可以得到谅解的。”

来自Gameplanet：“但它结束得太快了，没有足够的挑战去满足玩家，或者足够的创意去推动类型向前发展。”

我的特别强调。除了长度和难度外，人们关于《Broken Age》的主要抱怨似乎是缺少足够的进步。对我来说这是对基于经典的指向点击冒险游戏的关卡的一个奇怪批评，它做出了巨大的承诺但却未呈现出适当的发展。

Antharion（from gamasutra）

目前有一些评论暗示着Kickstarter已经成为推动更多游戏走上怀旧之路的平台。开发者将通过承诺回归某个“黄金时代”，附属某个“逝去的”类型，突出可爱的16位体图像或怀旧的芯片音乐而提升获取投资的机会。

在Rock Paper Shotgun上的一篇文章更好地总结了这种情况：http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/10/04/kicking-it-old-school-the-peril-of-kickstarter-nostalgia/。尽管我同意作者关于现今Kickstarter开发的看法——但我自己却对投入一些钱于某些突出“早旧”条款的项目感到内疚，当然我并不是觉得这是件坏事，也不觉得这将危害游戏产业。

首先，这些项目能够快速获得这么多投资意味着存在一些用户对这些非进程游戏充满渴望，所以从纯粹的业务角度来看，我们中的哪些人会因为它们不具有创造性而认为其缺少价值呢？

其次，我反驳的是创造性理念，或者至少是关于创造性天生就是对的事物，是所有开发者都苛求的内容的理念，创造性是个可爱的流行词，但是随着时间的发展它变得更加模糊，并倾向于呈现整体的游戏媒体应该努力奋斗的理想进程。

当然你们也不要误解我的意思，创造性的确很棒没错。创造性是任何艺术媒体保持文化有效性所需要的元素。然而并不是媒体中的每个任务都必须具有创造性，也不应该如此。先进性并非一种艺术形式的全部。

The Monkey Island HD（from gamasutra）

如果每一步小说都是进步的小说，那么坐在度假山庄泳池边上的人便会非常沮丧。这样Dan Brown（游戏邦注：美国作家，《达芬奇密码》的作者）便会破产。如果每部电影都尝试着创造新突破，那么夏季的观影人数将大大减少。Michael Bay也将失业。这是一种有得有失的情况。

我认为对于整体类型的游戏，即使不使用创造性也存在许多空间。为了创造性的创造性是不必要的。“新”并不总是意味着不同。

游戏产业总是沉迷于进步。我认为这应该是关于技术而言——游戏与运行着它们的技术紧密结合在一起，技术是一个不断进步的产业。当技术变得更加强大，范围更大且更深时，游戏的创造性便会提升。

但这却并未考虑到类型。文本冒险游戏之所以会衰败是因为，当我们能够渲染图像的时候有谁还会愿意阅读大量无聊且古老的文字呢？然后图像冒险游戏便被强大的技术推向了3D平台—-当我们能够操纵多边形时谁还会需要像素图像背景呢？在这几十年里，“新奇”与“伟大”被划上了等号。

但如果只是因为技术允许我们为游戏创造让人兴奋的新内容，那么渲染之前的类型是否就变得不再重要了？因为我们能够渲染全色的图像，这是否就意味着我们说过所有的一切内容都能够通过文本冒险游戏媒体而实现？围绕着Twine冒险游戏所创建起来的社区并不会认同这一观点。

很明显人们仍然想要玩与过去同样形式的游戏。为什么我们要讨厌这么做呢？

我们最终站在一个点上，即技术是跨越广泛的范围而存在的，是得到广泛使用的，你将不再需要最前沿的装备去玩游戏。所以同样地，人们现在所玩的游戏也不需要通过前沿的创造性所定义。

关于当前的游戏状态我所喜欢的一点是，我们可以具有非常强大的创造性，可以体验基于可穿戴技术的游戏以及基于虚拟现实的游戏，然后我们也可以转身去选择1992年期间所风靡的指向点击冒险游戏。如果所有的这些体验都是愉快的，为什么我们还要去怪罪那些不具有足够进步感的内容呢？

Cthulu Saves The World（from gamasutra）

创造性真的很棒，也很重要。我也喜欢玩具有突破的创造性游戏。但这只是我玩游戏的一半原因；只是为了看看那些全新且让人兴奋的领域能够将我带向何处。与此同时我玩游戏也是为了放松，寻找乐趣，感受故事，而创造性与这些特殊的体验并不具有直接的联系。

创造性并不是游戏存在的唯一原因。即使没有创造性，游戏也会很伟大。“伟大”和“新奇”并不是同义词。简而言之，我们需要克服创造性，并开始享受游戏真正带给我们的乐趣。

（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）

We Need to Get Over Innovation

by Tom Battey

I have now finished Broken Age Act 1. Don’t worry, I won’t spoil it for you, except to say that the ‘ending’ is pretty great, and that if you have even a passing interest in adventure games you should definitely consider playing it.

It would seem that most of the gaming press agrees with me. With one caveat. From Edge: ‘…feeling its way to a comfortable mid-point between the desires of adventure-game fans and its own motivation to move the genre forward – even if only by a small increment.’

From Eurogamer: ‘…fans will be forgiven for expecting something a little more chewy, a little more experimental, from a developer who made his name by turning adventure games upside down.’

From Gameplanet: ‘But it’s over all too quickly, without enough challenges to satisfy, or enough innovations to drive the genre forward.’

Emphasis mine. Concerns about length and difficulty aside, people’s primary gripe with Broken Age seems to be that is isn’t progressive enough. Which seems to me to be a strange criticism to level at a game that was conceived as a love letter to the classic point-and-click adventure genre, that made millions on a promise that it quite specifically wasn’t going to be progressive.

There’s a vein of criticism at the moment that suggests that Kickstarter has become a platform for little more than gaming nostalgia trips. That developers can greatly increase their chance of reaching funding by promising a return to some sort of ‘golden age’, by resurrecting a ‘dead’ genre, by featuring some lovely 16-bit pixel art or nostalgia-stirring chip-tune music.

This article at Rock Paper Shotgun sums up the situation rather well. While I agree with the author’s view of Kickstarter development right now – I myself am guilty of chucking a fair bit of money at projects that lead with the term ‘old school’ – I don’t necessarily agree that this is somehow a bad thing, a ‘peril’ for the games industry.

Firstly, the fact that these projects garner so much funding so quickly implies there’s a hungry audience for these non-progressive games, so from a purely business point of view, who are we to argue that these projects are somehow of less value simple because they aren’t innovative?

Secondly, I take issue with the idea of innovation, or at least the idea that innovation is inherently good and something that all games developers should aspire to. Innovation is a lovely buzzword, one that over time has been rather muddied in meaning and come to represent some ideal of progression that the entire games medium ought to be striving towards.

Now don’t get me wrong, innovation is great. Innovation is something that any artistic medium requires to remain culturally valid. However, not every piece of work within a medium can be innovative, nor should it be. Progressiveness is not the be-all-and-end-all of an art form.

If every novel was a work of progressive fiction, then people sitting poolside at holiday resorts would look really upset. And Dan Brown would be broke. If every movie was tying to break new cinematic ground, cinemas would be pretty sparsely populated around summer time. And Michael Bay would be unemployed. Hey, it’s swings and roundabouts, stick with me here.

My argument is that there is plenty of room for games, hell, for entire genres, that exist without innovating at all. That innovation for innovation’s sake is unnecessary. That ‘new’ does not always have to mean different, or even really all that new at all.

The games industry has always been obsessed with progression. I think that’s a technology thing – games are tied to the technology that runs them, and technology is a rampantly progressive industry. As technology gets more powerful, the scope for bigger, deeper, more innovative games increases.

Genres get left behind. The text adventure died because, hell, who wants to read a load of boring old words when we can render graphics now? Then the graphical adventure was vanquished by the big tech push into 3D – who needs pixel art backgrounds when we can manipulate polygons? For decades, ‘newness’ has been synonymous with ‘greatness’.

But just because technology allows us to create exciting new avenues for games, does that render the genres that came before irrelevant? Because we can render full-colour graphics, does that mean we’ve said everything it’s possible to say through the medium of the text adventure? The burgeoning community building up around Twine adventure games would suggest not.

Clearly people still want to play games that exist in the same form they did in the past – they’re not Kickstarting these things out of sheer ignorance, I assure you. Why should we resent them for doing so?

We’re finally at a point where technology exists across a broad enough spectrum, and is so widely available, that you no longer need the most cutting-edge equipment to play games. And it follows that the games people are playing now don’t have to be defined by the cutting edge of innovation either.

What I love about the current state of gaming is that we can be wildly innovative, we can experiment with wearable technology games and actual virtual reality, then we can turn around and pick up a point-and-click adventure game that plays like it was made in 1992. If all of these experiences are enjoyable, why should one be considered less worthwhile on the grounds of not being progressive enough?

Innovation is great. Innovation is important. I love playing innovative games that break new ground. That’s half the reason I play games, after all; to see what new and exciting places they can take me next. But I also play games to relax, to have fun, to enjoy a story, and innovation is completely irrelevant to those particular experiences.

Innovation is not the sole reason for games to exist. It is possible for a game to be great without being innovative. ‘Greatness’ and ‘newness’ are not synonymous. In short, we need to get over innovation, and start enjoying games for what they bring to table in their own right.(source:gamasutra)