作者：Ernest Adams

几年前，情感是游戏设计圈中十分流行的一个元素，即在休闲游戏出现并开始用钱来分散我们的视线前。这在当时是个流行词，许多人认为如果电子游戏能够呈现更多情感，它们便能够吸引更多用户的注意。索尼甚至将PlayStation 2的CPU命名为情感引擎，虽然这有点过，但要知道市场营销者都是不要脸的。

最简单的游戏并不是拥有最少情感的游戏。抽象游戏通常会创造两种情况：对于胜利的欢呼以及对于受挫或失败的咒骂。有时候还会引起其它情感：怀疑，厌倦和安慰等。更具代表性且较不抽象的游戏会通过游戏角色，情境和故事唤起其它情感—-对于优秀图像的审美享受以及对于悲伤结局的同情。

多人游戏会唤起人们的更多情感，因为在这里玩家将与真人进行互动：嫉妒，愤怒，保护意识等等。尽管现在人们已经不再将情感作为创造销量的最佳方法，但游戏却始终都在变得更加丰富。

不过对于我来说这就好像漏掉了些什么。我将使用来自其它媒体的例子进行说明。

回到1963年，Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band遭遇了一次变革。学生们将其带离了大学。

Band_in_the_Stands(from gamasutra)

他们摆脱了传统的Sousa音乐和准军事制服（行军乐队是拿破仑战争最后的遗迹）并用摇滚节目和非统一的服装取代了这些元素，其中一个元素便是“你可以系上最丑的领带。”新的仪器出现了：现在的鼓乐包含一个停止标志，一个啤酒桶和一个菜盆。

LSJUMB所缺少的便是对于情感的弥补。在飞机上，他们喜欢模仿飞行人员进行安全说明的样子。他们会到处跑，并毫无征兆地出现在某些意外的地方。

他们的自主选择信号曲是Free的《All Right Now》，这也成为了大学足球中最不具有侵略性的“斗志”曲。该乐队的吉祥物是一颗跳着舞的松树，这是源自大学的logo，这再次与常见的熊，斗牛犬和特洛伊士兵相矛盾。他们高声地大叫着，并且不是游行，而是跳舞。

Stanford的乐队是关于音乐和快乐。电子游戏中有许多音乐，但却很少是关于乐趣。我记不起上一次在玩游戏时体验到纯粹的快乐是什么时候的事了。

快乐是一个纯粹的欢乐。而乐趣则更加复杂。它可能包含黑暗面和危险。人们认为看恐怖电影是有趣的，但恐怖电影却不会让人感到欢乐。娱乐非常丰富；但是它却没有乐趣可言。像《辛德勒名单》等严肃的电影以及像《Lolita》等严肃的书籍并不有趣，缺少欢乐元素，但是它们却具有娱乐性。电子游戏似乎夹在中间。

什么会毁掉欢乐？几乎所有东西：它真的很脆弱。在游戏中，任何Twinkie Denial Condition都会毁掉欢乐，行军会毁掉欢乐：刷任务，受挫，反复。消极性会毁掉欢乐：丑陋之物，残酷的行为，恐惧，死亡。这些都是与硬核游戏以及面向青少年所创造的游戏联系在一起的特性，对于这类型玩家来说，欢乐便是一种土里土气的情感。

你可能会问，难道有欢乐就够了吗？如果很难的话为什么还要付出更多努力去创造欢乐？第一个问题的答案便是来自我最喜欢的一句名言，即《PaRappa the Rapper》和《Vib-Ribbon》的创造者Masaya Matsuura所说的：“做些古怪且困难的事。”Matsuura便是通过做这些事赚了许多钱。

除了具有挑战性这一事实外，为了意识到完整的媒体潜能，我们还必须探索一些少见的区域。

几年前我在《My Perfect Game》系列中写了一些有关GameSetWatch的内容，在那里我描述了充满欢乐的游戏会是怎样的。其中的一个评论将其称为是海洛因和一些迷幻剂的混合物。

我将这当成是一种称赞。但我认为电子游戏可以不需要危险的化学品并创造出欢乐。

借鉴Stanford乐队的方法，以下是关于我们如何创造出欢乐的游戏：

1.保持跳舞。当Stanford团队输掉时，LSJUMB还保持着很多能量。为什么？因为这里的要点是玩，而不是获胜。如果玩家在游戏中的某个挑战遭遇了失败，不要让它破坏了游戏的乐趣。继续向前。继续游戏，保持节奏与韵律。

2.拥有许多很棒且欢乐的内容。许多行军乐队只知道一些音调，他们只是反复地演奏着这些音调。Stanford乐队的另外一个特性便是它带有一个包含了69首歌的文件夹，并以每天不会重复同样的歌曲两次而自豪，除了《All Right Now》之外。

太多游戏反复提供着同样的游戏玩法。如果你想要创造一款欢乐的游戏，那就用一些奇妙的内容将其塞满——这是我尝试着在GameSetWatch的文章中所呈现的。许多开发项目花费了好几年的时间去创造各种形式的丑陋内容。如果我们将同样的努力置于创造乐趣的话会是怎样的情况？

3.提供大的情感奖励。Stanford乐队非常喧闹—-只有摇滚乐队并未使用扩音器。许多游戏都很吝啬奖励的派放，特别是情感奖励，但这么做却是愚蠢的，因为它们并不会消耗多少成本。如果你等到任务最后提供一个巨大的财宝，你将需要再次平衡剩下的游戏内容，但如果是提供巨大的情感奖励的话便不会有任何损害。当玩家表现好的话，就庆祝起来吧！

4.鼓励新手。大多数乐队要求成员都必须是具有技能的音乐家。LSJUMB的网站表示，如果你不知道如何使用一种乐器，这没关系——他们会教你。这多棒啊！

虽然结果可能不那么完美，但这种具有包容性的氛围却能够创造出活跃的音乐。许多游戏呈献给新手一种威胁性，好像只是为资深玩家而准备。游戏也需要具有同样的态度：不知道如何玩游戏？没关系——我们会教你！执行任何简单的模式，并确保这真的很简单。不要让网站看起来很逊色，而是要让它们看起来具有亲和力。

5.允许定制—-更多更好。当Stanford乐队在体育节目中演奏时，他们对制服没有太多要求，音乐家们可以穿自己想要穿的衣服。而在游戏中，如果你能够玩自己选择或为自己定制的角色，你便会更加欣喜。

6.奖励玩笑。Stanford乐队的非官方格言是“音乐便是用来玩的，不是听的”。换句话说，音乐家的表演乐趣比听众的聆听乐趣更重要，LSJUMB便是如此去娱乐自己。

这一方法的有点是富有争议的——适合免费演奏的大学乐队的方法不一定适合带有营利性的专业乐队，但这却是适合于电子游戏。它们就是为了玩家的乐趣而游戏。

如果你想要创造欢乐，那就奖励可游戏的体验和一些滑稽的行为。如果玩家表现得很奇怪，不要惩罚他，应该鼓励他并再次进行尝试。

7.你不能销售欢乐。欢乐是你能够盈利并说服人们在微交易机制中花钱的元素。为了创造出欢乐的游戏，你必须发自内心并发挥慷慨精神去做好它。

销售软件，销售订阅服务，或任何能够为游戏赚钱的内容——但是当你在思考欢乐元素时就不要去想着钱。Stanfor乐队便是如此，不管其成员是否交钱，都会将欢乐带给他们。

音乐是欢乐游戏的必要功能，因为很少有什么东西能够像它这样轻松且直接地碰触到我们的灵魂。从我个人来讲，我认为《吉他英雄》和《热舞革命》有点太注重成就而忽视了纯粹的情感。说实话，在玩《热舞革命》时，我觉得自己更像是在行军而不是在跳舞。但也许这是因为我太不协调了所以不能有效地玩这些游戏。《PaRappa the Rapper》便同时整合了音乐和游戏。

我并不是意味着游戏就必须有关音乐，但是只有音乐能够添加欢乐性所需要的活力与色彩。当然游戏也不一定始终都是欢乐的——就像《怪物史莱克》那样，直到游戏最后才呈现出欢乐感，而在此之前还有许多其它的兴奋元素。但当时间到来时，请尽情地释放身心！如果你不关心Stanford乐队所采取的方法，那就听听Three Dog Night演唱的《Joy to the World》或者莫扎特的《Marriage of Figaro》前奏曲。

这并不意味着放下其它类型的游戏。我只是希望看到更多能够在我脸上留下微笑的游戏。不要只是行军，要舞动起来！

（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 Designer’s Notebook: Don’t March, Dance!

by Ernest Adams

Emotions were all the rage in game design circles a few years back, before casual gaming came along to distract us with big pots of money. It was the buzzword du jour; many people thought that if video games exhibited, or elicited — they’re closely related — more emotions, they would attract bigger audiences. Sony even named the PlayStation 2′s CPU the Emotion Engine, which was excessive — but marketing people are shameless.

The simplest games aren’t emotionally subtle. Abstract games normally produce only two: the “Yahoo!” of triumph and the “Damn!” of frustration or failure. There are sometimes others: suspense, boredom, relief. More representational, less abstract games evoke additional emotions through the games’ characters, situations, and stories — aesthetic pleasure from great artwork, pathos from sad endings.

Multiplayer games arouse still more because they involve interactions with real people: jealousy, anger, protectiveness. Even though nobody sees emotions as the best way to make bigger sales any longer, games are becoming richer all the time.

But it seems to me as if there’s one that’s missing. I’ll illustrate it with an example from another medium.

Back in 1963, the Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band underwent a revolution. The students took it over from the university.

They got rid of the traditional Sousa music and quasi-military uniforms (marching bands are the last remaining vestige of the Napoleonic wars) and replaced them with a huge rock ‘n roll repertoire and a decidedly non-uniform getup, one element of which is “the ugliest tie you can get your hands on.” New instruments arrived: the drum section now includes a stop sign, a beer keg, and a kitchen sink.

What the LSJUMB lacks in precision it makes up for in exuberance. Aboard airplanes, they’re fond of imitating flight attendants’ safety instructions en masse. They run everywhere, and turn up without warning to play in unexpected places.

Their self-chosen signature tune is Free’s “All Right Now” (with a little of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy thrown in), which has to be the least aggressive “fight” song in college football. The band’s mascot is a dancing pine tree taken from the university’s logo, which again contrasts sharply with the usual bears, bulldogs and Trojan soldiers. They are irreverent and incredibly loud, and above all, they don’t march, they dance.

The Stanford band is about music and joy. There’s plenty of music in video games, but there doesn’t seem to be much joy. I can’t remember the last time I experienced unalloyed joy when playing a video game. Too much marching and not enough dancing.

But isn’t joy just fun by another name? Not quite. Joy is unmixed pleasure. Fun is more complicated. It can include the dark and dangerous. People think it’s fun to go to horror movies, but horror movies don’t elicit joy. Entertainment is richer still; it doesn’t have to be fun at all. Serious movies such as Schindler’s List and serious books such as Lolita aren’t fun, much less joyful, but they are entertaining. Video games seem to be stuck in the middle.

What kills joy? Almost anything, really; it’s fragile. In games, any Twinkie Denial Condition will kill joy (and speaking of Twinkie Denial Conditions, December’s column is the annual No Twinkie roundup, so send ‘em if you got ‘em). Marching kills joy: Grinding. Frustration. Repetition. So does negativity: Ugliness. Cruelty. Fear. Death. These are qualities we associate with hardcore games and with games made for teenage boys, to whom joy is a distinctly uncool emotion.

You might be asking, isn’t fun enough? Why go the extra mile to create joy if it’s difficult? The first answer is that we should precisely because it’s difficult — one of my favorite quotations for game designers comes from Masaya Matsuura, creator of PaRappa the Rapper and Vib-Ribbon: “Do weird and difficult things.” Matsuura-san has made quite a lot of money out of doing exactly that.

But apart from the fact that it’s a challenge, to realize the full potential of the medium we have to explore the seldom-seen areas.

A few years back I wrote a little piece for GameSetWatch in its My Perfect Game series, in which I described what a joyous game might feel like. One of the comments afterwards suggested it sounded like a mixture of heroin and some sort of hallucinogen.

I take that as a compliment, especially as my inspiration for the piece was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But I think video games can create joy without dangerous chemicals.

Borrowing from the Stanford band’s approach, here’s how we create joyous games:

1. Keep on dancing. The LSJUMB plays with just as much energy when the Stanford team loses as when it wins. Why? Because the point is the playing, not the winning. If the player fails at a challenge in the game, don’t allow that to destroy the pleasure of playing. Move on. Keep the game going, keep up the pace and rhythm.

2. Have lots of great, upbeat content. Many marching bands only know a few tunes that they play over and over. Another of the Stanford band’s peculiarities is that it carries a folder of 69 songs at all times (out of a library of over 1000), and prides itself on never playing the same song twice in one day, except for “All Right Now.”

Too many games offer the same gameplay over and over. If you want to make a joyous game, fill it chock-full of wondrous things to see and do — this was something I tried to show in the GameSetWatch piece. Many development projects spend dozens of man-years creating various forms of ugliness. What might we get if we put the same effort into creating pleasure instead?

3. Give big emotional rewards. The Stanford band is loud — the only rock band that doesn’t use amplification. A lot of games are stingy with their rewards, especially the emotional rewards, which is kind of stupid because they don’t cost anything. If you give too big a treasure at the end of a quest, you’ll have to rebalance the rest of the game, but there’s no harm in giving big emotional rewards. When the player does well, celebrate!

4. Encourage novices. Most bands require that members be skilled musicians before they can join. The LSJUMB’s web site says that if you don’t know how to play an instrument, that’s okay — turn up at practice and they’ll teach you. How awesome is that?

The result is necessarily ragged, but the inclusive atmosphere just enlivens the music. Too many games are threatening to novices and intended only for experts. Adopt the same attitude: Don’t know how to play? That’s okay — buy the game and we’ll teach you! Implement an easy mode, and make sure that it’s truly easy. Don’t make newbies feel inferior; make them feel welcome.

5. Allow customization — the more, the better. When the Stanford band is playing at sporting events, it wears a minimal uniform, but the musicians customize this considerably and nobody gets sent home for having something missing. When they’re out and about, just about anything goes. It feels good to play with an avatar you’ve chosen and customized for yourself, particularly if you’re allowed to get crazy with it.

6. Reward playfulness. The Stanford band’s unofficial motto is, “music is meant to be played, not heard.” In other words, the musicians’ pleasure of performing outranks the listeners’ pleasure of hearing, and the LSJUMB does all kinds of things to please itself.

The merits of that approach are debatable — what works for a college band playing for free doesn’t work for professional band playing for money — but it is absolutely true of video games. They’re meant to be played for the player’s own enjoyment.

If you want to create joy, reward playful experimentation and zany behavior. If the player gets weird, don’t punish it, encourage it and get weird right back.

7. You can’t sell joy. Joy is not something you can monetize and persuade people to pay for in microtransactions. To make a joyful game you must do it freely from the heart, from a generosity of spirit.

Sell the software, sell subscriptions, or however you earn money from your game — but don’t think about money when you’re thinking about joy; you’ll only get some horrible saccharine caricature of the real thing. The Stanford band brings joy with it whether its members being paid or not.

Music is an essential feature of joyful games, I think, because few things touch our souls so easily and so directly. Personally, I find Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolution put a little too much stress on achievement and not enough on sheer exuberance, and to be honest, playing DDR feels more like marching than like dancing to me. But maybe that’s because I’m too uncoordinated to play them well. Both, along with PaRappa the Rapper, were revolutionary in the way they integrated music and play.

I don’t mean to say that the game has to be about music, though, only that music adds the vibrancy and color that joyfulness needs. Nor does a game have to be joyous all the way through — like the movie Shrek, which was deeply joyous at the end, there can be a lot of other excitement before it gets there. But when the time comes, let loose! If you don’t care for the Stanford band’s approach, listen to Three Dog Night singing “Joy to the World” (no, not the Christmas carol), or Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro” overture.

This isn’t meant to be a put-down of other kinds of games. I would just like to see more games that leave me with a smile on my face. Don’t march, dance!(source:gamasutra)