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分析游戏重玩性之机制篇(2)

发布时间:2014-08-21 15:30:54 Tags:,,,,

作者:Ernest Adams

上回我讨论了游戏叙事对游戏重玩性的影响。这次我将查看游戏机制本身对重玩性的影响。

显然,对游戏重玩性具有最大贡献者首先就是游戏本身的可玩性。如果游戏平衡性极差,用户界面也很差,如果它缺乏实质的功能,那它就不会太好玩,更不可能让人们再次体验。但还有特定的设计考虑会影响游戏的重玩性,这些就是我打算在此讨论的内容。

让我们先从基本的单人电脑游戏说起吧。玩家是否认为某款游戏具有重玩性,要取决于他们自己是哪种类型的玩家。比如我有两位好友,一个是硬核玩家,一个是休闲玩家。由于硬核玩家的主要动机就是打败游戏,只要玩法有趣并且具有挑战性,他就会继续重玩直到打败游戏为止,即便每一回的玩法都非常相似。硬核玩家对《吃豆人》这种游戏也不会有意见,因为即便你每回玩这款游戏的方法都一样,它也还是能提供大量玩法。《吃豆人》包含256个关卡,极少数人能够玩遍这些关卡。硬核玩家并不在乎每次都以相同方式玩游戏,只要他获得了具有娱乐性的挑战即可。

Pac-Man(from gamasutra)

Pac-Man(from gamasutra)

这正是街机游戏为何针对硬核玩家而设计,以及它们为何能够大量盈利的原因。多数街机游戏提供大量关卡和渐进增长的难度,许多游戏还拥有决定性的玩法。这种决定性的玩法允许硬核玩家轻松通过早期关卡,并且适应更困难的挑战。多数街机游戏也极难打败,它们会变得越来越快,直到没有人能够跟上其速度。这意味着其中目标实际上并非打败游戏,而是打败你自己的个人最高得分,你可以一直尝试,试多少次都没有关系。硬核玩家会在厌倦玩法或者到达自己的瓶颈时放弃街机游戏,并且当他们打败一次游戏时,就不会再继续投入其中了。这种快乐来自胜利,只要他知道如何获胜,游戏就会失去其挑战性。

而休闲玩家却并不是为了获胜的快感而玩游戏,而是为了乐趣玩游戏。你不仅仅是为其提供困难的挑战,寄希望于他们自得其乐,必须让他们获得趣味,吸引他们重返游戏。休闲玩家所需要的是多样性,他们每次玩游戏时必须都有不同的体验。

多样性的来源

游戏中的多样性有数个来源:

变化的初始条件

多数简单的桌游,如象棋、西洋棋、西洋双陆棋等每次都是以相同的初始条件开始。双方玩家拥有相同数量的棋子,在棋盘上处于对称的位置。但并非所有游戏都要求绝对的对称性。例如,在桌游《Stratego》中,玩家是以相同数量相同威力的棋子开始,但他们可以用自己所喜欢的方式确立自己在棋盘上的位置。这种初始条件的自由为玩家创造了多样性。

chess(from gamasutra)

chess(from gamasutra)

初始条件还可以随机确立,这当然是多数卡牌游戏的基础。洗牌的时候会随机分配牌组,之后每位玩家都得到特定数量的纸牌。桥牌和红桃就是完全依靠玩法初始条件变化的纸牌例子——所有纸牌都分配出去了,玩家可以根据自己的判断来出牌。

运气也是玩法的一部分

即使初始条件是相同的,游戏也可以在其规则中包含一些随机元素。西洋双陆棋和《大富翁》就是这方面的优秀例子。棋子从相同的位置开始,但它们的移动由抛骰子来决定。

任何让玩家从牌组中抽取纸牌的游戏都会在玩法中同时使用随机初始条件和随机性来创造多样性。

非决定性的对手

在象棋这类拥有相同的初始条件和非随机性元素的游戏中,提供多样性的是对手的玩法。这通常(但并不总是)意味着人类是一个比电脑更有趣的对手。电脑一般是用决定性、以数据为中心的算法来编程并找到最佳策略。电脑程序会用决定性算法在特定情况下选择相同的招术。人类玩家则可掌握和利用这种可预测性,但也会觉得这相当无趣。

人类竞争对手更有趣,因为他们除了能够带来富有变化的策略和战术能力外,他们在侵略性或防御性,直接性或迂回性,谨慎性和冒险性的程度上也有所不同。当然,你还可以同他们对话。对他人过招具有与电脑较量所不具有的社交意义,这一点会让游戏更具重玩性。

玩家角色和战略的选择

如果玩家可以扮演不同角色来玩游戏,即使游戏内容一样也会让他们获得不同体验。《龙与地下城》中的角色种族、职业和阵营就是这方面的完美典型。你可以作为一名正义的人类战士来玩电脑游戏,之后再重玩时也可以扮演邪恶的巫师。虽然你第二次时遇到的是相同的人,怪物和危险,你与它们打交道的方法却明显不同,尤其是在设计师构建了可用多种方法克服的障碍的时候。

绝对大小

你可以从头到尾地玩像《Baldur’s Gate》这种大型游戏,但却仍然无法看到每个地点或接受每个任务,尤其是在你关注主线故事,并且不允许自己分心的情况下。这令《Baldur’s Gate》获得了相当可观的重玩性。它的规模值得玩家再次重该游戏,体验第一次错过的那些冒险机遇。

其他考虑因素

最具持续重玩性的电脑游戏当属《单人纸牌》(Solitaire)了,微软Windows平台就有它的Klondike版本。那么它究竟魅力何在?

Solitaire(from gamasutra)

Solitaire(from gamasutra)

1.它直接来源于现实生活中的游戏。多数人已经知道玩法,对他们来说这并不存在什么掌握难度。

2.对于那些并不了解游戏的人来说,其规则也相当简单。该游戏的帮助文件中仅有131个文字。

3.你可以在5分钟内从头到尾玩完游戏。它并不需要投入大量的时间和精力。

4.其用户界面很平常。

5.它是免费的。

其中有些特征对我们有帮助,有些则不然。例如第1点,就并不常用。我们多数人都想设计新游戏,所以将现实生活中的现成游戏编译成电脑游戏对设计师来说并没有什么吸引力(游戏邦注:但对于AI程序员来说,这可能很有趣。许多现成的游戏可以创造有趣的编程挑战——象棋是一款极为简单的游戏,没有随机性和隐藏信息,但为象棋游戏编程却需耗费大量资金)。

第5点亦是如此,它对我们也没有多大帮助。《单人纸牌》是免费游戏这一点对我们的意义不大。我们多数人都想让自己的游戏畅销,这意味着游戏中必须有足够玩家掏钱的内容。不幸的是,内容的制作很昂贵,它通常会延长和复杂化游戏。这里存在一个有趣的关系,我认为我们可以从中获得一点经验:最具重玩性的游戏也是执行成本最小的游戏。

第2、3和4点最重要。我们可用一个词分别进行总结,它们分别是简单性,简短性和易用性。EA创始人Trip Hawkins曾经指出游戏要具有“简单、刺激和深度”的特点。简单性和深度(如微妙性或多样性)都有利于创造重玩性。他所指的“刺激”是指兴奋感,但它在此与重玩性没有多大关系。《单人纸牌》并不具有太大兴奋感,但仍然极具重玩性。

我个人并不认为《单人纸牌》是一款非常有趣的游戏。它太随机了。你输的次数远多于赢,并且你无法通过思考来扭转这一局面。Windows平台的《Free Cell》是一款更棒的游戏。它需要投入更长的时间,但提供了一种《单人纸牌》所缺乏的脑力挑战。它的规则也很简单,其用户界面也与前者相同。但与《单人纸牌》不同的是,它奖励的是玩家的耐心和坚持。

为重玩性而设计游戏对游戏设计师来说是一个纯粹的考验。重玩性要求简单、富有吸引力,成瘾性的挑战,以及最为自然、无缝的用户界面。而Patrick Stewart所说的壮观的图像、无数设备型号,15个不同的摄像视角,以及配音等这些我们认为游戏开发应该具备的大型、昂贵而有趣的东西却并不重要。游戏要回归其最初本质:挑战以及克服挑战的方法。如果我想设计一款极具重玩性的游戏,我可能就会从纸牌或多米诺入手。它们未必需要像纸牌或多米诺一样,只要玩法可行,它们的外观怎样并不重要。

总结

重玩性并非电脑游戏的绝对必需品。正如我在Deep Red Games的好友Jeff Wofford所指出的那北塔,许多游戏提供了大量玩法——40或50个小时玩法也挺普遍,许多玩家第一次甚至都没有全部玩遍游戏,更少人会不断重玩游戏。如果你们以1小时1美元的代价为顾客提供快乐,那就已经很好了,这甚至比电影做得更好,即使他们只玩一次游戏。如果我要设计一款大型游戏,我可能就不会太担心这个问题。

但是,重玩性仍然是每个设计师在游戏设计的初始阶段需要自问的一个问题。所有玩家,无论是休闲还是硬核类型,都希望自己花的钱有所回报。如果游戏能够在数分钟或数小时内玩完,你最好据此定价,或者确保它的设计具有重玩性。(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

Replayability, Part 2: Game Mechanics

by Ernest Adams

Last month I looked at the way narrative affects game replayability. This time I’ll be looking at how replayability is affected by the game mechanics themselves.

Obviously, the single most important contributor to a game’s replayability is its playability in the first place. If a game is badly balanced, if it has a poor user interface, if it seems to be lacking essential features, then it’s not going to be much fun to play, much less to play again. But there are specific design considerations that influence a game’s re-playability, and those are the ones I’ll be talking about here.

Let’s start with your basic single-player computer game. Whether a player perceives such a game as replayable depends to some extent on what kind of a player he or she is. Consider our two old friends, the core gamer and the casual gamer. (See my earlier column, “Casual versus Core” for a discussion of these folks.) Since a core gamer’s primary motivation is beating the game, as long as the gameplay is interesting and above all challenging, he will continue to play that game repeatedly until he has beaten it, even if the gameplay is very similar every time. The core gamer has no problem with a game like Pac-Man, because even though Pac-Man is a deterministic game that behaves exactly the same way every time you play it, it offers a huge amount of gameplay. Pac-Man contains 256 levels, and very, very few people have ever played them all. The core gamer doesn’t mind a game that plays the same way every time, as long as he’s got an entertaining challenge to overcome.

Pac-Man contains 256 levels, and very, very few people have ever played them all.

This is why arcade games are designed for core gamers, and why they make so much money. Most arcade games provide large numbers of levels and progressively increasing difficulty, and many have deterministic gameplay. The deterministic gameplay allows the core gamer to move swiftly through the early, easy levels, and get up to the harder ones where the real challenge is. Most arcade games are also ultimately unbeatable; they simply get faster and faster until no human being could possibly keep up with them. This means that the object is not actually to beat the game, but to beat your own personal best score, and that’s something you can always try for no matter how many times you have played the game. Core gamers give up on arcade games once they become tired of the gameplay or they reach a point beyond which they simply cannot improve, and once a core gamer does beat a game once and for all, he’s seldom interested in playing it any more. The pleasure comes from winning, and since he now knows how to beat it, the challenge is gone.

The casual gamer, on the other hand, plays not for the exhilaration of victory, but for the joy of playing the game. It’s not enough to simply supply the casual gamer with a tough challenge and let her go at it; she has to be having a good time, and to lure her back again, one thing the casual gamer needs is variety. The game has to be different the next time she plays it.

Sources of Variety

Variety in a game can come from several places:

Varying initial conditions

Most simple board games like chess, checkers and backgammon start with the same initial conditions every time. Both players have the same number of pieces, placed in symmetric positions on the board. But not all games require absolute symmetry. In the board game Stratego, for example, the players start with equal numbers of pieces of equal strength, but they may set them up in their own areas of the board any way they like. This freedom in the initial conditions creates variety for the players.

Initial conditions can also be established randomly; this is of course the basis of most card games. The deck is randomized by shuffling, and then a certain number of cards are dealt out to each player. Bridge and hearts are good examples of card games that depend entirely on varying initial conditions for its gameplay – all the cards are dealt out, and the players play them as they best see fit.

Chance as a part of gameplay

Even if the initial conditions are identical, a game can include random elements as part of the rules of the game. Backgammon and Monopoly are good examples of this. The pieces start in identical positions, but their movement is determined by throwing dice.

Any card game in which you draw cards from a shuffled deck in the course of play (gin rummy and most forms of poker, for example) is using both random initial conditions and randomness during gameplay to create variety.

Non-deterministic opponents

In a game like chess, with identical starting conditions and no random elements, what provides the variety is the opponent’s gameplay. This usually (but not always) means that a human being is a more interesting opponent than a computer. Computers tend to be programmed with deterministic, number-crunching algorithms to find the best move, according to some metric for measuring the quality of a given move. With a deterministic algorithm, a computer program will always choose the same move in a given situation. In time, human players can learn to take advantage of this predictability; they also tend to find it rather dull.

In a game like chess, with identical starting conditions and no random elements, what provides the variety is the opponent’s gameplay.

Human opponents are more interesting because in addition to having varying strategic and tactical abilities, they differ in the degree to which they’re aggressive or defensive, devious or forthright, cautious or risk-takers. And of course, you can talk to them. There’s a social aspect of playing against other people that is completely absent when playing against a computer, and that tends to make the game replayable even if nothing else does.

A choice of player roles and strategies

If a player can play a game in several different roles, the game will feel different even if its content is the same. The character classes, races, and alignments in Dungeons & Dragons are a perfect example of this sort of thing. You might play an entire computer game as a lawful good human fighter, then decide to replay it again as a chaotic evil elf magic-user. Although you encounter the same people, creatures, and dangers the second time around, your approach to dealing with them will be significantly different, especially if the designers have constructed obstacles that can be overcome by a variety of methods. (Unfortunately, in far too many role-playing games the only method available is “whack it until it’s dead.” But at least there are a variety of ways of whacking it.)

Sheer size

You can play an enormous game like Baldur’s Gate from beginning to end and still not see every location or undertake every quest, particularly if you concentrate on the main storyline and don’t allow yourself to get sidetracked often the first time through. This gives Baldur’s Gate considerable replayability. It’s just so big that it’s worth going back and playing again to follow up on adventuring opportunities that you missed the first time around.

Other Considerations

The most consistently-replayed computer game in the world has got to be Solitaire, the version of Klondike that is included with Microsoft Windows. So what’s its appeal?

It’s taken directly from an existing game in the real world. Most people already know how to play; for them it has no learning curve whatsoever.

The rules, for those who don’t know them, are extremely simple. In the help file that comes with Solitaire, the game is explained in only 131 words.

You can play a complete game from start to finish in less than five minutes. It doesn’t take a big commitment of time and mental energy.

The user interface is trivial.

It’s free.

Some of these characteristics are helpful to us and some of aren’t. Item one, for example, isn’t much use. Most of us want to design new games, so computerizing existing games from the real world doesn’t have a great deal of appeal to us as designers. (It can have a great deal of appeal to those of us who are AI programmers, however. Many existing games make interesting programming challenges – chess is an extremely simple game, with no randomness and no hidden information, but look how much money has been spent on chess programming!)

Item five, too, doesn’t help us much. There’s not a lot we can do about the fact that Solitaire is free. Most of us want to get paid, so our games have to sell, and that means that there has to be enough content in them for players to justify opening their wallets. Unfortunately, content is expensive to make, and it often lengthens and complicates games. There’s an interesting relationship here, one that I think we can learn from: the most replayable games are also the smallest and cheapest to implement.

Items two, three, and four get to the heart of the matter. Summed up in one word each, they are simplicity, shortness, and ease. Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts, used to insist that games be “simple, hot, and deep.” Simplicity and depth (i.e. subtlety or variety) both contribute to replayability. By “hot”, he meant exciting, which is neither here nor there as far as replayability is concerned; it helps if that’s the sort of game you like. Solitaire isn’t very exciting, but it’s still highly replayable.

Replayability requires a simple, compelling, addictive challenge and the most natural, frictionless user interface possible.

Personally, I don’t think Solitaire is a very interesting game. It’s too random. You lose far more than you win and no amount of thinking you can do will change that. Free Cell, which also ships with Windows, is a much better game. It takes a little longer to play, but it offers a mental challenge that Solitaire lacks. Its rules are almost as simple and its user interface is identical. And unlike Solitaire, Free Cell rewards patience and persistence; it isn’t that hard to solve to begin with, and in fact all but one of the 32,767 deals of Free Cell can be solved with enough effort. The knowledge that it can be done encourages you to continue to try.

Designing for replayability is the purest test of the game designer. Replayability requires a simple, compelling, addictive challenge and the most natural, frictionless user interface possible. All the big, expensive, fun things that we think game development is about – spectacular graphics, hundreds of unit types, fifteen different camera angles, and voiceover narration by Patrick Stewart – are irrelevant. The game is reduced to its barest essentials: the challenge and the means of overcoming it. If I were trying to design a game for high replayability, I might actually start with cards or dominoes, something I can shuffle around on a tabletop. They wouldn’t necessarily end up as cards or dominoes in the game; they could end up as genies or giant worms just as well. Their surface appearance doesn’t make much difference as long as the gameplay works.

Conclusion

Replayability is not an absolute necessity for computer games. As my friend Jeff Wofford at Deep Red Games points out, many games offer so much gameplay – forty or fifty hours is not uncommon – that a lot of players don’t even finish them the first time through, much less play them again and again. If we’ve given our customers an enjoyable time for a dollar an hour or so, we’re doing pretty well; certainly better than the movies do, even if our customers only play the game once. If I were designing a large game, I probably wouldn’t worry about it much.

Still, the question of replayability is one that every designer should ask herself in the initial stages of game design. All players, casual or core, want good value for their money. If the game can be played to its conclusion in a few minutes or hours, then you had better either set the price accordingly, or make sure that it’s replayable by design.(source:gamasutra


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