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在2015年创造独立游戏所面临的挑战

发布时间:2015-08-12 15:50:25 Tags:,,,,

作者:Paul Kilduff-Taylor

现在的我们正处于游戏产业中充满挑战的时期,似乎所有人也都愿意正视这样的情况。

下面的插图能够有效地呈现出我们当前的状况:

game releases(from gamasutra)

game releases(from gamasutra)

在本文中我将着眼于商业境况并分析游戏开发者当前所面临的三大创造性挑战。

境况

去年游戏产业并未发生什么太大的变化,从而导致不确定性变得更加明显。

没有人能够遇见未来的变化。关于游戏开发的一般建议就像是痴人说梦话一样。

伴随着自我毁灭式的警告,以下是我所认为的对于不确定性的有效回复:

确保即使你现在的项目只能赚到预期收益的一小部分,你的工作室/个人仍然可以生存下去

确保你是在做着具有创造性的工作

确保你不会放弃

这便是独立业务策略。

现在我也是IndieFund的一份子;我看到了许多早期的游戏和提案。很多人是以团队规模和预算为目标,而这也为他们自身和投资者创造了巨大的挑战;我希望能够看到更多基于低预算和小型团队规模但却充满野心的游戏的出现。两个人也可以基于较低的外包美术成本去创造出属于自己的游戏。

让我们看看像《瘟疫公司》,《无厘头太空战争》,《赛车经理》,《大型制药公司》,《她的故事》和《无限工厂》等游戏。许多这类型游戏都是由一个人所完成的:如果你是一名可靠的程序员兼优秀的设计师,但却只有少量的财政支持,那么你可能需要经历一条很长的道路。

我并不是说较有野心的项目很难获得成功,最近像《暗黑地牢》和《Victor Vran》等“3I”独立游戏便采取了更具风险性且基于较高预算的方法。

再一次地,没人能够猜到结果,但在这种情况下,我们可以保证如果你能够更频繁地滚动筛子,你便更有可能获得成功。

但这也不代表“创造10款无限奔跑的iPhone游戏然后再抱怨自己未能得到媒体的宣传。”你可能做出的最糟糕的事便是浪费时间去创造一些再平凡不过的内容。

需要牢记的是,当我们在尘土中翻滚着的同时,像DeNA等发行商正在从游戏中赚取巨大的收益。即使你的独立游戏获得了几百万的收益,但在这样的商业背景下你的成就其实不算什么。

实际上很多不确定性是件好事,因为它能够推动你去发挥创造性,它能够避免独立游戏深陷那个受品牌驱动,且以市场为中心的手机市场中。

在某些方面,平均信息量就是你的朋友。

创造性挑战

1.交谈层面

2.有限的批判方法

3.冲突的意识形态

喧哗与骚动

一种饱和的创造性结果便是每个人都能够不断进行交谈,不管是通过游戏还是像本文这样的开发者文章。

从我个人来讲,我发现像这样的情况总是会让我闭上嘴并不再参与对话,因为我正投入大量时间去处理人们所说的内容。

让我们举个例子来说:现在Steam上的生存游戏的优势让我觉得莫名其妙。显然所有关于PC用户的理论都是错误的,从根本上来说他们只想要一件事。在观察了几周的数据流后,我花了些时间去了解《DayZ》:最终证明它只是将某种实际的自由与奇怪的社交因素结合在一起罢了。玩家总是希望能够征服与故事相关的游戏环境,而这些游戏便为玩家提供了这样的内容,这是非常具有吸引力的,且不受到任何技能或进程的影响。你可以花好几年的时间不断搞清楚这一点。

虽然这样,但仍有许多其它类型游戏诞生。整个产业就像一个充斥着类似理念的大熔炉,只有偶尔才会出现能够带来一两周新鲜感的疯狂内容。

此外,产业的权威意见达到了一个新高峰。似乎所有发行过游戏的人都能提供别人意见。所以现在的我开始约束并正视自己给予新人的意见。

Twitter同样也是一块不毛之地。

交谈压力势不可挡,而最恰当的回应方式便是沉默。DeNA便是如此。

一方面,从设计角度看来,了解游戏何时能够解决一个像你现在所遭遇的问题是非常有帮助的。同样地,如果能够根本了解玩家的需求,你便能够有效缓解他们对于游戏的偏见。不管怎样你至少需要了解事情的当前状态。

你同样也需要参与其中:除非你的游戏非常成功,否则你所具有的唯一优势只有人们勉强知道你是谁。如果没有交谈,那么对于你来说唯一重要的便是下一款游戏足够优秀。沉默是只有超级成功的人才能够享受得起的奢华。

有很多具有创造性的人留下了一些很棒的建议。我非常喜欢Faithless的制作人在几年前回答杂志所询问的他会听什么样的音乐的答案。他说道:“除了我们自己的歌,我并不会去听其它任何歌。因为我没有时间这么做,并且这么做会让我分心。”

如果我们过于贪心还想要满足拥有有趣的创造性想法的要求,我们可能会不断栽跟头吧?也许游戏开发者会花费所有时间去听取媒体人和其他游戏开发者的意见,那么我们那普通的“周期”从内在看来是否是无帮助的?

致命失误

执行创造性工作的一大动机便是别人的期待感。我们之所以会因为不是DeNA而庆幸是因为我们觉得自己正在做着一些具有创意和价值的事。

就像我之前所提到的,我认为游戏的批判性赏析是处于一种非常极端的状态。关于“批判性赏析”,我并不是指只有学术批判或媒体上的评论:还包含了我们准确理解游戏的能力。

游戏文化几乎难以抵挡女性主义批评以及自1792年便存在的思想派别的侵入。1917年Duchamps在一次展览中展出了一个尿壶,但即使是现在你仍然能够从任何呈现出少量创造性的作品旁边看到几页关于“这是否是一款游戏”的争议内容。

urinal(from gamasutra)

urinal(from gamasutra)

当我们设定更高的目标时,我们只能基于其社交结果,环境关联性或主题去讨论作品的价值:这都是一些非常低价的内容。创造和批判总是伴随着放弃或愚蠢的借口。我们只能再一次地从最初的原则中想出任何批判性方法。交谈的质量变得如此廉价,大多数创造者都在想办法脱离它,从而导致一些争论变得那么无力。

这创造了一种不成熟且具有约束性的角度去看待游戏能够做什么。我们拥有一些非常简单的想法,即游戏可能是“艺术”,但我们却不确定这到底意味着什么。很多时候我们希望游戏是“有趣的”,但我们却不能为了呈现深度而分散它的潜能。

关于游戏的整体观点其实是矛盾的。它们可以意味着一切,也可以什么都不是。它们既是愚蠢的,也是聪明的。为什么我们很难进行理解呢?因为人类每天都处于一种愚蠢的生存悖论中:我们得到一种经验,所以我们就应该去使用它。

我认为情况最终会发生改变。最近我尝试了Rich Stanton的《Earthbound上》,并备受鼓舞。他成功地将让人感到亲切的口语和个人指导法与微妙的批判性意识结合在一起。

我建议你们也能够尝试整款游戏,而他也提供了一个能够引出自由人文主义结论的例子:

“当某一方成员被KO时,你们便可以使用更具综合性的UI技巧。《Earthbound》的核心主题是关于友情的重要性,所以这种效果并不是偶然的。”

对于批判性我认为它需要具有生存优势:没有一种学派拥有所有问题的答案。如果你能够结合后结构学派理论或结构主义思想,自由人文主义“主题”,关于社交关联性的现代学术女权主义理念,Amiga Power的笑话以及发生在你身边的故事,你便能够更进一步地谈论游戏到底是关于什么了。

我并不是要求你们进行过度的思考:只是需要你们能够进行基本的综合阅读;就像一个具有功能性的人类与外界刺激物相联系那样。

哲学家的足球比赛

当下游戏所面临的最后一种创造性挑战便是冲突的意识形态。

我们所知道的游戏是带有深刻的叙述,但同时却也没有人愿意阅读文本。我们知道“从哲学上来讲,电子竞技开发与面向所有玩家开发游戏间不存在多少区别”,从经验上来看,我们也知道基本的多人游戏功能与游戏在社区中的发展是不相干的。我们不断接收到体育游戏在Steam上表现糟糕的信息;但是现在Steam上排名第一的却是一款体育游戏。每个人都有着自己关于游戏应该怎样或者不应该怎样的看法。

再一次地,我认为我们可能已经到达了讨论不再具有实际意义的阶段。现在的我们唯一能够做的事便是在允许失败的商业背景下尝试着开发出在个人层面上变得更加重要的游戏。

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

Signifying Nothing: Making Indie Games in 2015

by Paul Kilduff-Taylor

We’re at a uniquely challenging time in the games industry, as nobody seems tired of pointing out.

Here’s the most effective illustration which currently exists:

Thanks to EEDAR for permission to use this slide. I’ve used it before, and I shall use it again.

I’m going to look at the commercial situation and then move on to three creative challenges which game developers currently face.

The Situation

Nothing has changed in the last year other the fact that uncertainty has become greater.

Nobody knows anything. General advice about game development is always a tale told by an idiot. The Situation (pictured) might as well be telling you about the situation.

Now, with that self-destructive caveat, here is what I believe are the only valid responses to uncertainty:

Make sure that if your current project does a tiny fraction of its expected revenue, your studio / you personally can still survive

Make sure you are doing creatively significant work

Make sure you don’t give up

That’s it. Indie business strategy complete.

I’m now a part of IndieFund; I get to see a lot of early stage games and proposals. So many people are aiming for team sizes and budgets which represent a huge risk both for themselves and for investors; I would love to see more ambitious games with low budgets and low team sizes! Two people can do an enormous amount on a game with some relatively low-cost outsourced art.

Look at games like Plague Inc, Gratuitous Space Battles, Motorsport Manager, Big Pharma, Her Story and Infinifactory. Many of these games were made almost entirely by one person: if you are a solid programmer and a great designer, you can still go a massive way with very little in the way of financial backing.

I’m not saying that more ambitious projects can’t work well: recent “triple-I” indie games like Darkest Dungeon and recently Victor Vran have taken a higher risk, higher budget approach.

Again, nobody knows anything…but in that context it’s surely true that the more times you’re able to roll the dice, the greater your chance of winning?

That doesn’t mean “make 10 iPhone endless runners and then complain about why you didn’t get press coverage” either. The worst thing you can do is spend your time making something unremarkable.

It might also be worth remembering that while we’re all scrabbling around in the dust publishers like DeNA are making hilariously enormous amounts of money from games. Even if your indie game has pulled in a couple of million you are effectively nothing in this commercial context: hooray!

A large amount of uncertainty is actually a good thing because it puts the onus on creativity; it stops indie games as a whole turning into the brand-driven, marketing-centric mobile market.

Entropy is, in some respects, your friend.

Creative Challenges

1.High noise levels

2.Limited critical approaches

3.Conflicting ideologies

Sound and Fury

One creative consequence of saturation is that everyone is talking constantly, both through their games and through vacuous developer screeds like this one.

Personally, I find situations like this largely cause me to shut down and stop taking part in the conversation at all, mostly because I’m spending time trying to process everything that people are saying.

Here’s a singular example: the current predominance of survival games on Steam is absolutely baffling to me. Apparently all of the theorising about the PC audience is wrong and they only, fundamentally, want one thing. It took me quite a while to understand DayZ after watching streams for several weeks: it turns out that it boils down to a kind of pragmatic freedom to roam coupled with an odd combination of social factors. The fundamental human desire to master an environment in concert with the stories that these games generate for the player seems to be utterly compelling, independent of any idea of skill, progression…or even the game being actually finished and fully playable. You could lose years trying to figure this out fully.

While that’s been happening, there’s been an absolute storm of titles released in many other genres. The entire industry seems like a mad blizzard of extremely similar ideas swirling around, with the occasional out-of-left-field madness which somehow captures excitement for a week or two.

On top of that, industry punditry is at a new high. It seems like everyone who has ever released a game is now telling everyone else what they should be doing. I’ve now started to specifically confine my advice to things which are generally helpful to complete newcomers or else prepend a caveat that there is a good chance anything I say will be completely wrong.

Twitter also is a wasteland, as we all know.

The constant pressure to talk is overwhelming, and the most apt response is perhaps not to talk at all. I don’t see DeNA talking.

There is a tension here…

On the one hand it’s incredibly helpful in design terms to know when a game has solved a problem similar to one you are currently experiencing. Also, the heavy weight of preconceptions that the gaming audience brings to bear on a given title can only be mitigated by a good fundamental understanding of their wants and needs. You’ve got to play games and you need to at least be aware of the current state of affairs.

You also have to take part: unless your game is enormously successful one of the only advantages you have is that people vaguely know who you are. Without talking, you will drop back to square one where the only thing that matters is the strength of your next game. Silence is a luxury that only the super-successful can afford.

However, so many creative people are best left to their own devices. I loved a quote from Faithless’ producer I read years ago when a magazine asked him what he was listening to. He said, “I’m not listening to anything other than our stuff. I don’t have time and it’s distracting.”

By awkwardly straddling a desire to stay relevant with a requirement to have interesting creative thoughts, maybe we’re all doing ourselves a disservice? Maybe game developers spend all of their time listening to journalists and other game developers…so our general “circle” is inherently unhelpful?

Critical Miss

One of the main motivations for doing innovative creative work is an expectation that someone, somewhere might “get it”. The reason we’re happy to not be DeNA is because we feel like we’re doing something more creatively worthwhile, surely?

As I’ve discussed before, I think critical appreciation of games is in a fairly dire state. Also, to clarify, by “critical appreciation”, I don’t just mean academic criticism or journalism: I mean our ability to read games correctly.

The culture around games has barely been able to withstand the introduction of feminist criticism, a school of thought which has existed since 1792. Duchamps submitted a urinal to an exhibition on 1917, but you can still read pages of arguments about “is this a game” next to anything displaying even the slightest formal innovation.

When we do aim a bit higher, we’re seemingly only able to discuss the worth of work based on its social consequences, contextual relevance or subject matter: all very low-ball stuff. Creation and criticism are both attempted with either resignation or witless pretension. We cannot escape having to work out every single critical approach from first principles all over again, even though there are literally centuries of discussion to draw from. The quality of the conversation has become so poor that most creators back out of it and let the arguments burn themselves out.

This has resulted in a very immature and constrained view of what games are able to do as a form. We have some extremely simplistic idea that they might be “art” but we’re not really sure what that might imply in any meaningful way. A lot of the time, we want them to be “fun” but we can’t reconcile their role as fleeting distraction with their potential for profundity.

The entire point of games is that they are paradoxical. They can mean everything and nothing. They are stupid and intelligent. Why is that so hard to grasp? Humans inhabit a daft existential paradox on a daily basis: we’ve got the experience so we should be applying it.

I think things might eventually change, though. I was massively heartened to read this recent piece on Earthbound by Rich Stanton. He manages to combine an approachably colloquial, personal approach with a nuanced critical awareness.

I recommend reading the whole thing, but here he gives a structural example leading to a liberal humanist conclusion:

“ A more comprehensive UI technique is used when a party member is KO’d… One of Earthbound’s core themes is the importance of friendship, so the effect is not accidental.”

One of my strongest beliefs about criticism is that it needs hybrid vigour to survive: no one school of thought is going to have all the answers. If you can combine post-structuralist or deconstructionist thought, liberal humanist “themes”, modern academic feminist ideas about social relevance, bum jokes from Amiga Power and a story about something that happened to you on a bus…then you’re probably getting close to talking about what a game really is.

I’m not calling for over-wrought, cigarette-twirling artwank either: just basic reading comprehension; just a way of relating to an external stimulus like a fully functional human being.

We need to get beyond the length of a character’s skirt or fawning over retrograde and predictable pulp narratives if we’re ever going to get anywhere.

Philosophers Football Match

The final creative challenge that games are facing at the moment is one of conflicting ideologies.

We’re told that games should be narratively profound but also that nobody reads text. We’re told that “philosophically there’s little difference between developing for esports and all players” and also shown empirically that even basic multiplayer features are irrelevant to a game’s ability to grow a community. We were told endlessly that sports games do badly on Steam; a sports game is currently Number 1 on Steam. Everyone has an opinion about what games should be or shouldn’t be.

Again, I think we may have reached a point where the discussion has become moot. The only thing we can do now is try to develop games which matter profoundly on a personal level in a commercial context of permissible failure.(source:gamasutra)

 


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