作者：Dean Takahashi

电子游戏的杰出人物聚集在Dice Summit上，这是本周于拉斯维加斯所举办的电子游戏大会。今天早上，我们听到了一些来自大会上的讲话内容，并在下面总结了一些优秀的评论。

CCP Games的首席执行官Hilmar Veigar Petursson通过谈论自己的公司如何想要创造出比现实生活更有意义的虚拟生活而拉开大会的帷幕。作为多人在线游戏《星战前夜》（其科幻宇宙具有自己的虚拟经济）创造者，他们认为它可以通过意外元素或玩家控制的游戏创意的出现而改变每个人的游戏体验。

10年前，CCP发行了一个带有玩家可以利用的漏洞的虚拟游戏世界。比起完善它们，CCP选择通过玩家创造的内容而推动世界的发展。在2011年，CCP在尝试着通过微交易销售虚拟产品时面临了一次反叛。CCP让玩家自己做决定。该开发商同样也将自己的成就和故事记录在漫画书中。

这些玩家创造的故事在巨大的空间战斗中达到了顶峰，就像1月28日有个人购买了价值30万美元的虚拟商品。在空间战斗中，玩家破坏了他们花了许多时间和游戏货币所创造的巨大太空船。但玩家并不会介意。他们的用户粘性不断增加，所以这便是订阅式游戏的乐趣。

有些玩家甚至比Veigar Petursson获得了更多关注。其中一位玩家甚至渴望变成游戏角色中那样的肌肉男。

作为艺电的创始人同时也是新初创公司If You Can的负责人的Trip Hawkins问道：“你是否曾经觉得我们所创造的内容像是色情文学一样。我想公众，特别是老师们会觉得我们是社会问题的所在。也许我们真的有点这样。”

他提到了游戏是如何具有上瘾性以及如何垄断孩子们的注意。他正致力于创造面向年轻的在校生而教授社交和情商的游戏——以此去反驳一些消极元素并更有效地传达感情。这是在尝试着教游戏开发者“我们该如何避免被当成一种社会问题。”

他预测到游戏开发者将明确如何在手机上赚钱，将运气或艺术过程转变成科学。当这种情况发生时，他相信游戏产业一年的收益将达到1000亿美元。

来自初创企业Anki的Boris Sofman分享了一些很酷的技术，如人工智能“受困于政府实验室”等。所以他的团队选择了A.I.并花了7年多的时间去创建其消费者技术，加上他在获取计算机科学博士学位期间所学到的知识而创造出一款名为《Anki Drive》的赛车游戏。他的团队基于A.I.创造了《Anki》的平台并赋予虚拟角色，甚至是赛车生命力，就像半智能体般。

Sofman询问游戏开发者：“你们将如何使用这一技术而赋予角色生命力？”

Ridiculous Fishing(edge-online)

Vlambeer（游戏邦注：创造了iOS上的热门游戏《搞笑钓鱼》的一家小型荷兰独立工作室）的联合创始人Rami Ismail继续他对于游戏复制的抱怨。但他同样也肯定了那些帮助让游戏设计变得更加轻松的工具创造者。

他说道，自己与Jan Willem Nijman中途辍学并开始创造游戏。他们在2010年创建了工作室Vlambeer，并使用Flash制作了一些游戏。他们创造了《Crates From Hell》原型并于2010年以《Super Crate Box》正式发行。之后他们有创造了《疯狂钓鱼》和《英雄萨姆：随机遭遇》。

Ismail继续说道，之后发生了一些不好的事。即有些人抢在Vlambeer发行游戏前复制了《疯狂钓鱼》并在iOS发行了游戏。该公司便停止开发然后对复制者发起诉讼。

之后他们继续iOS版本的开发并于2013年3月发行了《搞笑钓鱼》。这款游戏成为了一款大受欢迎的游戏，并且是2013年最受好评的游戏之一。（我们将其添加到年度10大游戏的列表中）。

Ismail说道：“这是一个美好的故事。两个人离开了学校，并共同经历了起起落落。这简直是一部带着潇洒配乐的电影。”

但他表示如果没有廉价游戏工具的出现，即帮助人们更轻松地将自己的创意带向市场，那么他的游戏以及游戏设计整体的民主化便不可能实现。他做出的一大贡献是为其他独立开发者创造了一个新闻资料宣传包（dopresskit.com）。

Unity Technologies的首席执行官David Helgason在接受GamesBeat的访问时说道，他的公司正在通过自己的Unity 3D游戏引擎朝着游戏开发民主化的目标前进着。

每个月大约有50万开发者使用这一引擎，至少有2万款Unity游戏在这一市场中。每一天在Android，iOS和PC上，这些游戏的安装次数超过了1500万。一个月大约有9.1%的Google Chrome基础用户使用Unity。

Unity Asset Store同样也有11000个道具。这里有开发者能够购买并用于自己游戏中的道具。第一人称射击游戏相机模组便是一个受欢迎的道具。这需要一名优秀的程序员花3天时间进行创造。

这些道具被售出了5000次。其本身就为开发者节省了57年的开发时间。Helgason估算Unity的开发者通过使用Unity App Store共节省了10亿美元的游戏开发成本。

他说道：“这是一种协作经济。我们想要民主化游戏开发。这一行动能够获得巨大的势头。”

（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 state of the art on video game design — the best comments from the Dice Summit so far

Dean Takahashi

LAS VEGAS — The luminaries of the video game industry are gathered at the Dice Summit, the video game conference in Vegas this week. This morning, we heard a bunch of talks from some of them, and we’ve summarized the best moments so far below.

Hilmar Veigar Petursson, chief executive of CCP Games, opened the conference talking about how his company wants to make virtual life more meaningful than real life. The maker of the massively multiplayer online game Eve Online, a sci-fi universe which has its own virtual economy, believes it can do so through emergence, or the rise of player-controlled game inventions that change the game experience for everyone else.

A decade ago, CCP launched the virtual game world with bugs that players exploited. Rather than fix them, CCP rolled with it and let the world evolve through player-created content. In 2011, CCP faced a revolt when it tried to sell virtual items through microtransactions. CCP let the players have their way. The developer is also chronicling their accomplishments and stories in comic books.

These player-created stories have culminated in giant space battles, like one on Jan. 28 that consumed the equivalent of $300,000 in damage on virtual goods. In that space battle, players destroyed giant spaceships that they had spent enormous amounts of time and in-game money creating. But the players don’t mind. Their engagement is growing, and so is interest in the subscription-based game.

And some of the players are even getting more attention than Veigar Petursson. One player is even aspiring to become as muscle-bound as his own game character.

Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts and chief of the new startup If You Can, asked, “Do you ever feel like what we’re really inventing is a lot like pornography. I get the feeling that the public, teachers, think that we’re a social ill. And we kind of are.”

He noted how games are addictive and are monopolizing the attention of kids. He is making a game, dubbed If, that aims to teach social and emotional intelligence — such as being able to stand up against bullies and express feelings properly — to young school children through games. It’s an attempt to teach game developers “what we can do to stop being viewed as a social ill.”

He predicted that game developers will figure out how to make money on mobile, turning that process from luck or art to a science. When that happens, he believes the game industry will top $100 billion a year in revenues.

Boris Sofman of the startup Anki shared that cool technologies such as artificial intelligence were “trapped in government labs.” So his team took A.I. and over seven years built its consumer technology, a racing game called Anki Drive, that uses what he learned while getting a doctorate in computer science. His team has created the Anki platform with A.I. that can bring virtual characters, even race cars, to life as semi-intelligent beings.

“How would you use this technology to bring characters to life?” Sofman asked of game developers.

Cofounder Rami Ismail of Vlambeer, a small Dutch indie studio that created the smash hit Ridiculous Fishing on iOS, continued his campaign against the cloning of games. But he also praised tool creators who are making game design easier.

He said that he and Jan Willem Nijman dropped out of school and started creating games. They founded their studio Vlambeer in 2010 and made a few games using Flash tools. They created Crates From Hell, a prototype, and published it in May 2010 as Super Crate Box. They then created Radical Fishing and Serious Sam: The Random Encounter.

Then something bad happened, Ismail said. Someone cloned Radical Fishing on iOS before Vlambeer could release its own version of the game on it. The company stopped development and then campaigned against game cloners.

And then they resumed development of the iOS version and released Ridiculous Fishing in March 2013. That became a smash hit and one of the most critically acclaimed games of 2013. (We included it on our list of the top 10 games of the year).

“It’s a great story,” Ismail said. “Two guys drop out of school. They go through ups and downs. It could be a movie with a cheesy soundtrack.”

But he said his games and the whole democratization of game design wouldn’t be possible without the release of inexpensive game tools that make it simple for people to bring their creative visions to market. One of the things he contributed back was making a press kit package, dopresskit.com, available to other indie developers to use

David Helgason, the chief executive of Unity Technologies, said in an interview with GamesBeat that his company is making progress in its goal of democratizing game development through its Unity 3D game engine.

Around 500,000 developers use the engine every month, and at least 20,000 Unity games are on the market. Those games are being installed more than 15 million times a day on Android, iOS, and the desktop PC. Roughly 9.1 percent of the Google Chrome base uses Unity at least once a month.

The Unity Asset Store also has 11,000 items. It has virtual items that developers can purchase and use in their games. One popular item is a first-person shooter camera module. That might take three days for a good programmer to make.

That item has been sold 5,000 times. By itself, it has saved developers about 57 years of development time. And Helgason estimates that Unity developers have collectively shaved off $1 billion in costs of developing their games by using the Unity App Store.

“That’s collaborative economics,” he said. “We want to democratize game development. And that movement is gaining momentum.”(source:venturebeat)