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Leigh Alexander:现阶段该如何重新定义玩家

发布时间:2014-09-11 15:40:14 Tags:,,,,

作者:Leigh Alexander

我经常说自己是个电子游戏文化作者,但最近我却越来越不清楚这到底意味着什么。就像我们所了解的,“游戏文化”本身有点尴尬—-它甚至不能说是一种文化。它是关于购买东西,反复传递meme和内部笑话,如今它在互联网上快速发展着。

gamerguy(from gamasutra)

gamerguy(from gamasutra)

这是关于年轻人为了豪华的蘑菇帽和背包以及宣传海报而排队。在世界各地的活动中为了看到市场营销者想要他们看到的东西而排好几个小时的队伍。为了明确他们是否应该购买东西。他们并不知道如何装扮或表现。电视摄像机穿梭于这些无精打采的队列中,并经常会捕捉到不知道自己为何站在那里的人们的表情。

“游戏文化”是关于那些不了解人类社交互动和专业生活如何运行的人的培养皿,即他们能够捏造关于社交公正或“游戏新闻伦理”的在线“战争”,并创造真正的人类结果。一切的一切都只是因为电子游戏。

最近我发现自己经常纳闷自己在这里做什么。并且我知道并不是只有我有这种想法。

我们所有人都应该变得更好。你应该认真问问自己的生活选择,如果这是你的业务呈现给世人最突出的公众形象的话。

这是世人对于你的产业的认识—-这是关于数十亿美元的战争模拟器或者那些携带着触屏糖果的贩毒者。不管怎样,你都应该变得比这更好。

你并不希望“被孤立?”谁是被孤立的,除了那些能够适应劣等行为的诱饵文化的人,而谁又不是?我们需要“争论”的是什么?

好吧,少数人并不能代表多数人。大多数人,从独立开发者到产业领导者都对过去几周里产业对话方向感到愤怒。这与有信誉的商店发布一些理性的文章去支持高调的一方并不相同。不要再为骚扰者进行宣传。不要因为一些烂苹果便去指责整个产业。

然而,否认责任并不能带来任何帮助。带有巨大社区中心(他们的粉丝总是与一些直接的Twitter厌恶言论有关系)的游戏网站总是会说“我们删除了真正糟糕的内容,我们还能做些什么”以及“那些人并不能代表我们的社区”—-但实际上,这些人的确代表了你们的社区。这便是你们社区出名的原因,不管你是否喜欢。

当你拒绝在你的领域创造一种文化时,你便需要对真空中所诞生的一切事物负责。这便是游戏中所发生的事。

这并没有多让人惊讶。尽管电子游戏本身是由那些奇怪但却明朗的流浪先驱所发现—-它们认为街机将让酒吧游戏变得更有趣,或者MUD将创造惊人的跨文化聚会空间,但这中商业形式是从市场营销高端技术产品跃向“早期采纳者”。你知道的,拥有可支配收入的年轻白人帅哥总是想要购买东西。

突然间,那些来自地下室的孤独孩子们迎来了市场营销者在自己的耳边述说着他们是最重要的商业目标群体。突然间,他们开始穿上绚丽的衬衣并在他们所创造的任何内容上都添加了比基尼美女,然后开始创造承诺带给孩子们男子气概的游戏。

在世纪之交,这只是游戏唯一的主要文化标记:有钱。你需要成为一个流浪者。并为此去庆祝。打败任何威胁你的人。你并不需要文化参考。除了游戏你并不需要其它东西。公共交谈是由游戏媒体所带动的,他们的角色主要是告诉人们该买什么,为产品进行评分,并围绕着创造者和公司去调动“团队行动”氛围。

这创造了一种奇怪的感觉,即当时的电子游戏将成为道德恐慌,以及年轻白人帅哥在资本主义的美国所犯下的暴行的替罪羔羊—-游戏本身与这些悲剧并没有多少关系,但它们带有一个共同的焦虑,即无形的文化形态在外部是是阴暗且喧嚣的,但在内部却是空洞虚无的。

然而在2014年,产业发生了改变。我们仍然认为愤怒的年轻人是商业电子游戏的主要目标—-然而来自商业领域的平均软件收益却逐年收缩,如今只有少数一些纯正的品牌享受着可预测的成功。

很明显,大多数在过去推动这些收益增长的人都长大了—-不管他们是离开了游戏还是进入更加富饶的领域—-即那些小型且多样的游戏能够得到发展,社区可以围绕着创造性,自我表现和互相支持而不断壮大的地方。这里也出现了一些新用户和新创造者。不管是从文化上还是经济上,传统的游戏就像虫子的躯壳一样,正在逐渐被褪去。

对于那些喝了kool aid的人来说,基于快速发展且越来越复杂媒体的过时文化标志去明确自己的身份真的很难。他们很难听见自己并未拥有任何内容,或者自己并不是世界上最特殊的消费群体。

我们同样也必须仔细考量这些丑闻间许多内容创造者让人困惑的沉默,或者发生于业务和产业网站上的顽固且目光短浅的评论的事实。对于老派的开发者来说,不管是从文化上还是表面上,他们都很难去处理新用户或引起轰动的电影和漫画书外部的参照点,因为他们的传统领域已经坠入大海了。这对于某些年轻的孩子以及年长的人来说可能是一件让人痛苦的事。

但这是无法阻挡的。新一代的粉丝和创造者最终致力于任命一个有益的文化词汇,一个在“玩家骄傲”的时期被遗漏的社区语言以及由一个产品引导方法引领的与假定目标用户群体进行对话的特殊利益集团。

这意味着在过去几年里,为专注于个人体验和独立创造者的游戏编写内容并不能满足强大的公司的需求。这并不是关于“作为一名评论者”。这也不是关于告诉人们该买什么,这是关于提供给人们空间去讨论他们该支持什么(和谁)。

“‘玩家’并不只是一个大多数人都不想使用的过时的目标用户标签。玩家已经是过去时。这也是他们如此疯狂的原因。”

这些“稻草人”已经在之前拥有了主要的领域,即当我们所做的一切只是协商广告协议和评论分数,并被称为所谓的“报道者”,因为我们与用户面对同样无能为力的复杂性。而现在,在具有创造性的人类媒介中,作者的一部分工作便是帮助培养一个创造性社区和一个包容文化—-缺少对此的承诺是不合拍的,这就像是对于那些清楚“伦理”是他们攻击进化和包容的最后一面旗帜的人的妥协。

开发者和作者都希望游戏能够涉及更多内容,并有更多人尝试游戏。我们想要悲喜剧,装饰图案,音乐剧,梦想世界,家庭故事,民族志,抽象艺术。我们将获得这些,因为现在的我们正在创造文化。我们不会让任何参与者觉得自己被排斥。

这些迟钝的骗子,这些哭泣的超高消费者,这些孩子气的网络争辩者,他们都不是我的用户。他们也不需要成为你的用户。这里不存在“支持”,这里也不需要具有“争辩”。

我们都知道过去有什么,也清楚现在出现了什么。而你能做的便是选择自己在未来想要扮演的角色。

本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,拒绝任何不保留版权的转功,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

‘Gamers’ don’t have to be your audience. ‘Gamers’ are over.

By Leigh Alexander

I often say I’m a video game culture writer, but lately I don’t know exactly what that means. ‘Game culture’ as we know it is kind of embarrassing — it’s not even culture. It’s buying things, spackling over memes and in-jokes repeatedly, and it’s getting mad on the internet.

It’s young men queuing with plush mushroom hats and backpacks and jutting promo poster rolls. Queuing passionately for hours, at events around the world, to see the things that marketers want them to see. To find out whether they should buy things or not. They don’t know how to dress or behave. Television cameras pan across these listless queues, and often catch the expressions of people who don’t quite know why they themselves are standing there.

‘Games culture’ is a petri dish of people who know so little about how human social interaction and professional life works that they can concoct online ‘wars’ about social justice or ‘game journalism ethics,’ straight-faced, and cause genuine human consequences. Because of video games.

Lately, I often find myself wondering what I’m even doing here. And I know I’m not alone.

All of us should be better than this. You should be deeply questioning your life choices if this and this and this are the prominent public face your business presents to the rest of the world.

This is what the rest of the world knows about your industry — this, and headlines about billion-dollar war simulators or those junkies with the touchscreen candies. That’s it. You should absolutely be better than this.

You don’t want to ‘be divisive?’ Who’s being divided, except for people who are okay with an infantilized cultural desert of shitty behavior and people who aren’t? What is there to ‘debate’?

Right, let’s say it’s a vocal minority that’s not representative of most people. Most people, from indies to industry leaders, are mortified, furious, disheartened at the direction industry conversation has taken in the past few weeks. It’s not like there are reputable outlets publishing rational articles in favor of the trolls’ ‘side’. Don’t give press to the harassers. Don’t blame an entire industry for a few bad apples.

Yet disclaiming liability is clearly no help. Game websites with huge community hubs whose fans are often associated with blunt Twitter hate mobs sort of shrug, they say things like ‘we delete the really bad stuff, what else can we do’ and ‘those people don’t represent our community’ — but actually, those people do represent your community. That’s what your community is known for, whether you like it or not.

When you decline to create or to curate a culture in your spaces, you’re responsible for what spawns in the vacuum. That’s what’s been happening to games.

That’s not super surprising, actually. While video games themselves were discovered by strange, bright outcast pioneers — they thought arcades would make pub games more fun, or that MUDs would make for amazing cross-cultural meeting spaces — the commercial arm of the form sprung up from marketing high-end tech products to ‘early adopters’. You know, young white dudes with disposable income who like to Get Stuff.

Suddenly a generation of lonely basement kids had marketers whispering in their ears that they were the most important commercial demographic of all time. Suddenly they started wearing shiny blouses and pinning bikini babes onto everything they made, started making games that sold the promise of high-octane masculinity to kids just like them.

By the turn of the millennium those were games’ only main cultural signposts: Have money. Have women. Get a gun and then a bigger gun. Be an outcast. Celebrate that. Defeat anyone who threatens you. You don’t need cultural references. You don’t need anything but gaming. Public conversation was led by a games press whose role was primarily to tell people what to buy, to score products competitively against one another, to gleefully fuel the “team sports” atmosphere around creators and companies.

It makes a strange sort of sense that video games of that time would become scapegoats for moral panic, for atrocities committed by young white teen boys in hypercapitalist America — not that the games themselves had anything to do with tragedies, but they had an anxiety in common, an amorphous cultural shape that was dark and loud on the outside, hollow on the inside.

Yet in 2014, the industry has changed. We still think angry young men are the primary demographic for commercial video games — yet average software revenues from the commercial space have contracted massively year on year, with only a few sterling brands enjoying predictable success.

It’s clear that most of the people who drove those revenues in the past have grown up — either out of games, or into more fertile spaces, where small and diverse titles can flourish, where communities can quickly spring up around creativity, self-expression and mutual support, rather than consumerism. There are new audiences and new creators alike there. Traditional “gaming” is sloughing off, culturally and economically, like the carapace of a bug.

This is hard for people who’ve drank the kool aid about how their identity depends on the aging cultural signposts of a rapidly-evolving, increasingly broad and complex medium. It’s hard for them to hear they don’t own anything, anymore, that they aren’t the world’s most special-est consumer demographic, that they have to share.

We also have to scrutinize, closely, the baffling, stubborn silence of many content creators amid these scandals, or the fact lots of stubborn, myopic internet comments happen on business and industry sites. This is hard for old-school developers who are being made redundant, both culturally and literally, in their unwillingness to address new audiences or reference points outside of blockbuster movies and comic books as their traditional domain falls into the sea around them. Of course it’s hard. It’s probably intense, painful stuff for some young kids, some older men.

But it’s unstoppable. A new generation of fans and creators is finally aiming to instate a healthy cultural vocabulary, a language of community that was missing in the days of “gamer pride” and special interest groups led by a product-guide approach to conversation with a single presumed demographic.

This means that over just the last few years, writing on games focuses on personal experiences and independent creators, not approval-hungry obeisance to the demands of powerful corporations. It’s not about ‘being a reviewer’ anymore. It’s not about telling people what to buy, it’s about providing spaces for people to discuss what (and whom) they support.

“‘Gamer’ isn’t just a dated demographic label that most people increasingly prefer not to use. Gamers are over. That’s why they’re so mad.”

These straw man ‘game journalism ethics’ conversations people have been having are largely the domain of a prior age, when all we did was negotiate ad deals and review scores and scraped to be called ‘reporters’, because we had the same powerlessness complex as our audience had. Now part of a writer’s job in a creative, human medium is to help curate a creative community and an inclusive culture — and a lack of commitment to that just looks out-of-step, like a partial compromise with the howling trolls who’ve latched onto ‘ethics’ as the latest flag in their onslaught against evolution and inclusion.

Developers and writers alike want games about more things, and games by more people. We want — and we are getting, and will keep getting — tragicomedy, vignette, musicals, dream worlds, family tales, ethnographies, abstract art. We will get this, because we’re creating culture now. We are refusing to let anyone feel prohibited from participating.

These obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers — they are not my audience. They don’t have to be yours. There is no ‘side’ to be on, there is no ‘debate’ to be had.

There is what’s past and there is what’s now. There is the role you choose to play in what’s ahead.(source:gamasutra)

 


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