作者：Tadhg Kelly

让我们来谈谈游戏设计师。“游戏设计师”是发电站，是梦想家，是将改变游戏的人。“游戏设计师”代表一项事业，一个理念，一个关于游戏将何去何从的愿景。“游戏设计师”设定了游戏行业下一阶段的发展。“游戏设计师”过着讨论和采访这种令人兴奋的生活，并且从事超级酷的工作。

我们为什么要用这种方式来讨论“游戏设计师”呢？因为游戏设计师的形象是一个虚构之物。它是一个适用于大预算工作室或单人独立团队领导者的全方位标签。它是一个人人都可以用于简称自己能够“制作很棒游戏”的标签，就像人人都可以自称为创业者一样。它实际上并没有描述什么内容，但听起来就是很像一回事。

游戏设计作为一项手艺却并没有那么酷，通常被低估和误解。人们的一个长期印象就是设计更像是一种无所不能的职业。实际上并非如此。多数游戏设计师擅处理游戏的机制，将其详细编撰成文档，并不辞劳苦地去平衡它们。

它通常只是中型或大型团队中的一个辅助型角色。极少设计师能够担任创意权威，他们的职责是折衷而非创新。机制在游戏开发过程中要扮演一个关键角色，但要制作一款好游戏可绝不止如此。他们仍然必须通过原型和执行来论证自己的做法是否可行。

杰出的设计师可以帮助而非决定开发进程。所以“游戏设计师”是一个关于功能的角色，关于降低主要风险和找到确认风险的最佳方法的人。

game designer(from becker.edu)

尊重设计

但由于人们对“游戏设计师”的印象主要取决于人格而非技能，所以开发者倾向于他们的价值。例如，一名习惯于讨论经验和梦想的模糊游戏设计师通常就是低效率的。他实际上会将机制的困难环节推给团队，而自己却表现得像一个出色的元老，这是多数团队所鄙视的行径。在由元老级开发者组成的工作室可以见到大量设计疲劳现象，有些工作室甚至以不招聘设计师为荣。他们认为自己更像实干派而非空想者。

他们的说法确有几分道理。游戏设计师是一个思考和理论型人才，经常说一些高深莫测的术语。对于设计师来说，设计精通度是一个具有持久争论性的话。我们可以找到许多关于这个话题的书，它们争论的是游戏的本质或关于设计的深度思考。但开发者通常都不会去看这些文本，况且它们看起来有点空洞无物和没有意义。

因此游戏作为一个学科在某些场合受到极高的尊重，但在其他场合则遭到严重鄙视。它与游戏制作者（例如许多独立开发者）的理念关系更为密切，问题就在于这其中是否迷失了什么？它难道不正反映了有些设计师比其他人更具主动性，能够创造自己的权威吗？他们需要争取这种尊重？

我们可以给予部分肯定回答，但在更广泛的层面上，我认为当前的游戏设计现状阻碍了发展。

设计的价值

我数年前曾在一个大会上遇到一名诚恳的年轻人，他花了很长时间创造自己梦想中的游戏设计。他撰写了长达200页的设计文档，并打算将其出售给一家工作室。我当时告诉他这只是在浪费自己的时间，因为游戏并非好莱坞电影。缺乏执行力的理念在这一行并没有什么市场。

传统上游戏开发是由专业工作室主宰的领域。他们的普遍观念就是制作游戏很困难，创意很廉价，所以他们自己已经有足够的创意了。平心而论，200页的文档通常都没有什么用处，但原因并不在于创意很廉价。只是他们用错了方法，我认为他们其实可以找到正确的门路。

你想想看，像游戏领域这么大的行业，认为所有创意都必须来自内部资源，这是一种相当狭碍的观念。它说明这一行中的交叉授粉情况并不乐观。大家并不是将机制视为可以整合在一起制作原创游戏的一系列技巧，而是将工作室克隆或复制源游戏视为一种常态。当然《Threes》是克隆游戏，因为此类游戏似乎很抢手，但另一层面来看，这种克隆现象的成因却是开发者只看到了这种游戏可行却并未分析其中原因。这种缺乏技巧的精通度是一种发展瓶颈。

更具移植性的设计

拥有制作者仅关注具体细节的思维固然是一件好事，但这也是有代价的。优秀游戏设计的优势在于视角。例如一名优秀的设计师，就会习惯于从无数游戏中提取智能手用户界面惯例，而非设计师则会犯一些幼稚的错误。优秀设计师理解共鸣，非设计师则通常纠结于为何自己的游戏不可行。优秀设计师理解自然主义，非设计师通常得为一切制作原型才能摸索情况。

我想说的是，人们对所有层面的开发者的可移植性技巧存在争论，但设计的挑战在于令其本身更有用处。我怀疑游戏设计并不会因其脚本而变得更像好莱坞电影，但也许它会变得更像建筑艺术。设计顾问并非新兴事物，但也许我们将会看到游戏设计代理机构，或者设计市场等类似事物的崛起。

游戏开发每个领域的成本都在上涨，甚至是移动领域这种低端市场也不例外。这其中的风险还会更高，所以精明的管理层总在寻找降低风险的出路。如果设计师可以找到让自己的作品更具实用性和较少理论性的设计方法，也许他们就再次发现自己发挥了必不可少的作用。（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）

Finding Game Design

by Tadhg Kelly

Editor’s note: Tadhg Kelly writes a regular column about all things video game for TechCrunch. He is a consultant, game designer and creator of leading game design blog What Games Are. You can follow him on Twitter here.

Let’s talk about game designers. The “game designer” is the powerhouse, the visionary, the one who’s going to change up games. “Game designers” represent a cause, an idea, a vision of what games will be. “Game designers” set the next stage of the games industry’s evolution. “Game designers” live exciting lives of talks and interviews, being interesting and working on super cool things.

Why wrap quotes around “game designer” in this fashion? Well because that image of the game designer is a figment. It’s a catch-all label that applies to leaders of big-budget studios or tiny one-man indies. It’s a label that anyone can self-appropriate as shorthand for “I make cool games,” just as anyone can call themselves an entrepreneur. It doesn’t really describe anything, but it sounds awesome.

Game design as a craft isn’t nearly so cool, often undervalued and misunderstood. A long running impression (propagated by game designers as much as anyone else) is that design is more of a jack-of-all-trades kind of position. Not exactly. Mostly a game designer specifies the mechanics of a game, documents them in detail and laboriously works through balancing them.

It’s also commonly a supporting role in mid or large sized teams. Creative authority is rarely bequeathed to the designer, instead staying at the team level, and the designer’s job tends to revolve around synthesis rather than invention. Mechanics play a key role in the development of a game, but there’s more to making a great game than that. They still need to be acid-tested through prototype and implementation to find out if they really work.

A great designer helps facilitate rather than dictate that process. So “game designer” is a role about function, about zeroing down on the key risks and figuring out the best ways to validate them without costing a project a fortune.

Respecting (Or Not) Design

Yet because of the impression of the “game designer” as persona more than skill base, developers tend dubious of their worth. A vague game designer who thinks and talks in terms of experience and dreams, for example, is often ineffective. He essentially foists the difficult work of mechanics onto his team and acts more as a quality vet, which most teams grow to despise. There’s a lot of design-fatigue to be witnessed in studios made of veteran developers, and indeed some studios make a point of pride in saying that they don’t hire designers. They consider themselves doers rather than thinkers.

And they have a point. Game designers are a thinky and eggheaded bunch, often speaking in what sound like arcane terms. The general familiarity or literacy of design beyond designers is poor, and among designers it’s perpetually quarreled-over. There are many smart books on the subject, often debating the nature of games or deep approaches to thinking about design. But those texts are often not read by developers and they sound fluffy and ineffectual.

As a result game design as a discipline unto itself is highly respected in some venues and highly disrespected in others. It gets rolled in more with the idea of the game maker (such as many indie developers), democratized to an extent and considered informally.  The question is whether anything is lost in that? Doesn’t it just reflect, for example, that some designers have greater initiative than others and create their own authority? That respect needs to be earned?

In part yes, but on a wider level I think the state of game design is a roadblock to progress.

The Value Of Design

A few years ago I encountered an earnest young man at a conference who had spent a long time creating a design for his dream game. He had written a 200-page design document chock full of material, and was looking to sell it into a studio. I was in the position of having to tell him he had wasted his time because the games isn’t like Hollywood. There’s no market for ideas separate of execution.

Instead the tradition has long been that game development is dominated by insular studios. Their common refrain is that making games is hard and ideas are cheap, so they have enough of their own to go on. In fairness, 200-page design documents are usually useless, but not for the reason that ideas are cheap. They’re just the wrong approach, but I think there is a right approach out there.

When you think about it, for an industry as big as games the notion that all ideas should come from in-house sources is pretty narrow. It indicates that cross-pollination isn’t happening well. Rather than thinking of mechanics as sets of techniques that can be pulled together to create original games, it is far more common to see studios clone or heavily copy source games. Sure Threes is cloned because it seems that games of that nature are hot, but on another level the reason such clones happen is because developers can see that the game works but not meaningfully analyze why. That lack of technique familiarity is a roadblock.

A More Portable Design

It’s all well and good to have a maker’s mentality, to be focused solely on nuts and bolts, but it comes at a cost. The advantage of a good game design is perspective. A good designer, for instance, tends to be familiar with smart user interface conventions from numerous games whereas non-designers make naive mistakes. A good designer understands resonance, but non-designers tend to struggle with why it is their game isn’t working. A good designer understands naturalism where non-designers tend to have to prototype everything out to find that out.

What I’m saying is that there is an argument for the portability of technique for developers of all levels, but the challenge for design is to make itself more useful. I doubt that game design will ever really be like Hollywood with its scripts, but maybe it will evolve into something more like architecture. Design consultancy is nothing new, but maybe we’ll see the emergence of game design agencies, or markets for design, or similar.

Sound far fetched? Maybe. The cost of game development all across the spectrum is rising, even in usually low markets like mobile. The risks are perceived to be higher, and so smart executives are always looking for ways to reduce risk. If designers can figure out how to design their work to have more utility and less eggheadedness, they may find themselves filling a much-needed role once more.（source：techcrunch）