作者：Zubayr Bhyat

我曾受访出席一个由Andrew S.Walsh（游戏邦注：他曾参与开发《光晕3》、《极品飞车》和《波斯王子》等游戏）主持的学习班，听他分享了许多关于如何创造一款出色电子游戏的建议。以下就是我从这个长达16小时的学习班中所摘录的8个重要原则。

1.游戏并不一定需要故事，但需要优秀的文案——这正是优秀的文案和叙事的作用，它们可以让游戏更吸引那些寻找有趣体验的玩家。

Andrew S. Walsh (from mweb)

2.呈现而非讲述故事——这方面的典型例子是《生化奇兵》。该游戏世界讲述了失乐园的故事。Rapture原本是一个充满50年代风格的亚特兰蒂斯，但在之后陷入没落。我们从中可以看到Splicer如何丧失心智和追求ADAM（《生化奇兵》中的升级资源）。所有的一切都在新年之夜陷入混乱。更有趣的是《生化奇兵》所分享的故事。敌人和NPC会以自己的角度来讲述事件，这一点更为游戏故事增色。有位名为Rose的敌人讲述了自己怀念丧失神智之前在Rapture的高品质生活。故事能够为我们讲述了身边世界的详情。在叙事中微小的细节甚为关键。

3.微小的细节很关键——想想游戏角色，你是怎么知道某人很穷困？你如何知道他们过得富足？这存在于环境中小小的暗示，着装、行动和其他视觉提示。我们知道《古墓丽影》中的Lara Croft没有洗过澡，这从她的蓬头垢面和满身污秽中就可以看出来了。虽然游戏存在连贯性这个严重的问题，她突出的外表却向我们传递了充分的信息。这里的连贯性问题就是，她如何从一个相对无辜的人转变成连环杀手。也许这款游戏在发布之前砍掉了相当部分的内容，导致游戏故事看起来比原本更单薄。

Lara Croft(from mweb)

（《古墓丽影》中的Lara Croft以其过硬的视觉设计讲述了角色的个人故事）

4.究竟是我们的看法还是游戏文案写作导致故事或情节显得格外薄弱？——这是玩家和评论员必须警惕的方面。我们很容易因自己不喜欢某个情节元素就对该游戏产生反感。一些著名游戏的铁杆粉丝尤其如此，但根据个人的情绪反应来判断一款游戏好坏可能是个严重的错误。游戏设计师和作家会更改故事轴，以令其不同于该系列的其他游戏。但这并不意味着它就是个糟糕的故事，只能说明续作不同于前作。《最终幻想：雷霆归来》在该系列的粉丝中就出现了严重的两极分化现象。有些铁杆粉丝对它极为推崇，有些粉丝却只怀念之前游戏的故事结构。开发者当然想制作有所不同的故事，而不是反复制作同一款游戏。

Lightning Returns(from mweb)

（有些《最终幻想》粉丝对《雷霆归来》甚为反感）

5.糟糕文案/故事的症状-—–我们还必须清楚什么是糟糕的文案写作。任何使用不当的语调，拼写或不必要的描述都在此列。我们甚至可以说如果某个角色的表现方式不自然，那么就是一种糟糕的写作表现。关于男性和女性比喻的常规用法就是一个例子。还记得当《战争机器2》中Marcus Fenix团队的一名成员杀死自己的妻子，但却若无其事地走出去的场景吗？尽管他在该系列首款游戏自始至终都在谈论妻子，但Epic还是添加了这幕场景。这种情况数不胜数。

Gears of War 2(from mweb)

（《战争机器2》中的Dom杀死妻子的一幕就是糟糕的游戏故事写作的典型）

6.什么情况下才是游戏设计的责任？——游戏设计和文案写作是两个不同的学科。游戏写作包括创造游戏的叙事内容。游戏设计则包括视觉、音频和玩法方面的开发过程。虽然每一者都有不同的要求，但都要彼此同步，以便故事和玩法相匹配。当游戏设计师和文案写手在开发过程一开始就相互合作时，就有可能诞生一个过硬的故事。Ken Levine和Bioware的作品就是写作与玩法相兼容的绝佳典型。在我之前提到的《生化奇兵》中也可以看到这种情况。

《质量效应》和《龙腾世纪》也属于这种典型。没错，游戏本身有大量文本，这项工作本身也是个繁琐的任务，但却诞生了史上最杰出的电子游戏之一。一开始就找到正确的方向是关键，这是因游戏不同于电视和电影的交互属性所决定的。这正是为何《Beyond:Two Souls》能够收获如此两极分化的反馈的原因。玩家习惯于操作，而故事必须能够与之相对应。玩家通常不愿意干坐着观看长达15分钟的过场动画，只是为了等待之后仅仅10分钟的游戏玩法。

7.写作应该具有多少现实感？——实际上玩家并不想要极为现实主义的东西。Tauriq Moosa曾在他的文章《为何游戏中的现实主义并不受欢迎》中提到这一点。这方面的典型例子就是受越战启发的直升机游戏。在现实生活中，飞行员经常会宣誓和恐慌。因为有人想杀死他们并且很可能成功。而在游戏中，你的虚拟角色会受到袭击，但却不可能杀死你。作为玩家这会让你的预期与现实生活有所不同。你希望游戏角色经历相对平静的故事而不是精神崩溃。

在《Outlast》中，玩家会收到一个可在夜间使用的摄影机。现实生活中，这种摄影机已在2002年投入使用，而不是12年之后才问世。玩家对该道具呈现积极反应，这也为角色添加了第一人称视角。游戏开发者需要结合现实主义和艺术自由主义来制作游戏。作为开发者，你想执行“游戏主义”还是“现实主义”？这要取决于你的用户群体。

8.了解你的用户——了解目标得到户的需求和期望是游戏成败的一个关键。虽然这一原则也适用于其他媒介，但对游戏来说尤其重要。这是因为游戏允许我们进行操作而不仅仅是观看。这正是为何我们需要出色的文案而不仅仅是故事的原因。我们周围的世界远比我们所叙述的更精彩。（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）

8 Principles of video game design by Andrew S. Walsh

by Zubayr Bhyat

I was invited by the Writers’ Guild of South Africa to attend a workshop hosted by the extremely talented Andrew S. Walsh (he worked on Halo 3, Need for Speed and Prince of Persia, to name but a few.). If you want to know more about him, then read, “MWEB GameZone interviews the multi-talented Andrew S. Walsh from Fable Legends.”

At the workshop Walsh shared a lot about the building blocks of creating a really good video game. Here are eight highlights for me from the 16 hour long workshop.

1. Games don’t always need a stories, but they do need good writing – That’s what good writing and narrative does. They makes a game infinitely more appealing for players looking for an interesting experience.

2. Show me the story, don’t tell me – A great example of this is BioShock. The game world told the story of paradise lost. Rapture brimmed with potential. It was a 1950s-inspired Atlantis, yet it fell. We saw it in how Splicers lost their mind and hunted ADAM, Bioshock’s resource for levelling up. Everything went wrong, and it all went wrong on New Years’s Eve. Party masks lay littered all across the ground. Rapture as a city lived up to its name in the little details like debris strewn all over. What was even more interesting was Bioshock’s sharing of narrative. Enemies and NPCs added to its story by telling their own version of events. One enemy called Rose spoke about how much she missed the high life she led in Rapture before losing her sanity. Narrative tells us details about the world around us. Small things matter in storytelling.

3. It’s all in the finer details – Consider a game character. How do you know someone is poor? How do you know they’re well off? Little things like cues in the environment, clothing, movement and other visual indicators. We knew that Lara Croft took no showers in Tomb Raider because of the grime and dirt buildup all over her body and clothing. While continuity was a serious issue in the game, her appearance stood out and told us all we needed. The continuity issue, by the way, was how she turned into a serial killer from relative innocence. There was probably a fair amount of content cut from the game before release that made the game’s story weaker than it should have been.

Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft showed just how much could be told about a character with solid visual design

4. Is a game’s storyline or plot weak because of our opinion, or is the game’s writing rubbish? – This one’s where we as gamers and reviewers need to be wary. It’s too easy to look at an element of plot and decide we don’t like it, and proclaim a story to be rubbish. Dedicated fans of franchises are often at fault here. Judging a game by your emotional response can be a serious misstep. A game designer and writer will change a story arc to differentiate it from others in its series. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad story, it just means that the follow-up differs from its predecessor. Final Fantasy: Lightning Returns had a huge split between fans of the series. Some loved every minute, others wanted to have the old structure of FF games brought back. Developers also want to be different and not produce the same games over and over again.

Some fans of Final Fantasy showed a serious dislike for Lightning Returns

5. Signs of bad writing/weak story – We also have to be aware of what bad writing may be. Anything from incorrect use of tone, wrong spelling or unnecessary verbalisation of narrative qualify. One can even go as far as saying that if a character reacts in an unrealistic way, they could be badly written. The use of typical male and female tropes are common examples. Remember when one member of Marcus Fenix’s team killed his wife in Gears of War 2 and just walks on like nothing happened? Epic included the scene despite him talking about her throughout the first Gears game. The list goes on and on. We can think of enough examples to motivate this argument.

Dom mercy killing his wife in Gears of War 2 was an example of dodgy writing

6. When is game design to blame? – Game design and writing are two different disciplines. Game writing involves creating narrative for a game. Game design involves the rest of the development process including visual, audio and gameplay. Although each have different requirements, both have to be in-line with each other for narrative and gameplay to match. When game designers and writers work with each other from the beginning of a game’s development, the result is a solid story. Ken Levine’s and Bioware’s works are great examples of how writing melded with gameplay. We saw it in BioShock as I mentioned earlier.

We also saw it in Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Yes, there were tomes of text to go through and that was a chore in itself, but the reward was one of the most loved video games stories of all time. Doing this right from the start is critical because the interactive nature of a game as opposed to television and theatre. This is why games like Beyond: Two Souls received such divided feedback. Gamers are used to doing things, and stories have to match that. It’s often frustrating to have to sit through 15 minutes of a cutscene, only to have 10 minutes of gameplay to follow it.

7. How close to reality should writing be? – The truth is that gamers don’t want to have ultra realism. The talented Tauriq Moosa talked about this in his article ‘Why realism in game isn’t always desirable’. A solid example of this is in a vietnam-inspired helicopter game. In real life pilots and swearing and panicking at every instance. This is because someone’s trying to kill them and is close to succeeding, at that. In a game your avatar gets attacked, but the consequences are much less likely to kill you. That changes your expectations as a player. You’re now expecting calm narrative from your in-game avatar instead of psychotic breakdowns.

In Outlast, the player received a camcorder to see through the darkness. In reality, this camera would’ve seen use in 2002, not twelve years later. Player response to this item was positive and this tradeoff meant that it added some character to a vanilla first person view.  It comes down to a mix of realism and artistic freedom for game developers. As a developer, do you want to implement “game-ism” or realism? Depending on your audience that is a serious question to consider.

8. Know your audience – Also, knowing what your audience wants and needs is critical to the success of a game. While the same principle applies to other media, it’s especially important to games. This is because games allow us to do things instead of merely watch them. This distinction alone adds several layers of complexity to making a great one. That’s why we need good writing and not always story. The world around us tells us more than we can say.（source：mweb）