作者：Asher Einhorn

当游戏刚出现时，它们大多非常复杂。这主要是因为那时候的游戏只是想呈现出挑战性。除了战胜系统外我们很少能够从早前的游戏中看到其它目标。同时，因为投币机的本质，将游戏变得更加困难直至玩家破产游戏获胜似乎也是说得过去的。

之后游戏转向了家庭计算机并出现了一些变化。这时的游戏开始提供给玩家可以探索的故事和世界了。然而，游戏仍然很复杂—-还残留着街机游戏的元素。

在接下来几年里，设计师不断尝试着让所有玩家都能够完成游戏—-去体验他们所呈现给玩家的内容。这也导致我们开始创造让游戏变得更加简单的方法—-实际上，有几年时间我们甚至看到像重新回归的《波斯王子：时之刃》等游戏中出现谁都不会失败的情况。

而这也破坏了我们所谓的挑战的意义。打败某些故意让你获得胜利的内容不可能带来满足感的。又过了几年，随着独立游戏浪潮的涌来，“超级硬和”游戏开始引导主流。《黑暗之魂》便经常成为参考对象。

最近这种情况变得更加普遍。像《未知敌人》和《黑暗之魂》这样将死亡作为主要功能的游戏引导着一个不断发展起来的趋势。在GDC上我参与了一次关于死亡的讨论的圆桌会议，从中我们可以发现许多人都对挑战和惩罚机制充满兴趣，几乎没有任何尝试着去避免死亡的讨论，而这也是我认为非常有效的一个目标。

之所以较少被讨论是因为很多复杂的游戏希望玩家将死亡作为学习体验中的一部分。这是复杂的游戏与不公平的游戏之间的区别。我们不应该忘记许多游戏都是关于幻想的内容，而在我们的幻想中我们是永远都不会死亡的。不管怎样我们总是会努力去赢得游戏。对于这类型游戏，我们希望玩家能够处于失败的边缘，但是我们也会提供工具帮助他们获得生存。

可读性便是其中一种工具。

现在，因为游戏的挑战性和复杂性你有时候也会遭遇失败，但缺少可读性却是许多拥有强制性死亡设定的游戏的通罪。这不仅会让玩家受挫并感到不公平，同时玩家也不知道自己为什么会死掉，从而不能更好地获得学习去精通游戏。

以下便是不同类型的可读性案例，但并非所有的这些内容都适合你的游戏设计。

了解周边环境

敌人和目标的脆弱性—-这是在你做出错误的移动时真正重要的一点。例如在打斗游戏中，这点非常重要：你必须能够在瞬间发生错误的时候判断敌人的位置，从而避免自己陷入困境。

能够伤害你的事物—-这是大多数游戏会做的事。例如，火会伤到你，但如果能够设定一致的视觉语言的话，玩家便能够清楚判断自己是否处于危险中。因为未能获得正确信息而遭遇死亡会让玩家大大受挫。

传达地形优势—-例如在《Gears》中，游戏便清楚地告诉玩家怎样的地形适合怎样的武器。难以辨认的关卡设计会让玩家感到沮丧并且会导致许多死亡。

预测之后的行动

主要是关于让玩家在行动前掌握可能出现的威胁—-身体攻击，AI的进击等等。这是经常被忽视的一种可读性类型。

传达即将到来的威胁—-这是关于提供给玩家在威胁到来前做出反应的机会。即意味着在敌人攻击前让玩家有机会准备反击或逃离，或者呈现出像陷阱或类似情况让玩家可以事先避开的游戏元素。

传达战术移动—-例如，敌人AI的侧面攻击。在《最后生还者》中，敌人会相互交谈从而让玩家知道他们的行动，并让玩家有机会做出反应。

当然还有许多例子，但所有这些做法的目的都是一样的：

1.提供给玩家足够的时间和信息对威胁做出反应，从而避免他们因为一些难以避免的情况而死亡。

2.如果你将会遭遇死亡，那么你也会知道自己死亡的原因。这是引导玩家的一种方法，如果游戏中存在正确的游戏方法，那么这么做便是在向玩家传递这样的游戏方法。

attack(from gamasutra)

许多这类型系统的其它好处便是，一旦你教授玩家一种视觉语言，他们便会知道如何处理一种全新的遭遇，从而避免重新开启boss环节而破坏游戏的叙述节奏。

《Ikaruga》便是一个经典的例子，这款游戏是关于黑白两种颜色。你能够在两种颜色间进行切换，如此你便能在配色中无懈可击。现在游戏变得更加深入，但关键在于当你在游戏初期掌握玩法后，开发者便可以在你面前设下任何挑战和对手—-你不需要在遭遇到敌人后才清楚如何去面对他们，因为不管敌人以什么姿态出现，游戏机制都是一样的，你只需要避开相反颜色便可。当然了，你仍有可能遭遇失败，这毕竟是一款复杂的游戏，但是至少你知道自己是为何失败的。你将知道自己在之后该如何避免死亡，你有机会在第一次尝试时便获得胜利。

颜色机制能够最清楚地表现出这一概念。《荒野星球》也将这一概念发挥到极致，在这里敌人会在地板上传达出他们的攻击模式，从而让玩家知道如何避开攻击。

当然了，这种传达也以一些比较不那么极端的方式出现在许多游戏中，通常是利用来自现实世界中的各种词汇，如火，钉子，黑黄色警示条，破碎且摇摇欲坠的东西，冲击波，电，慢慢加速的强大撞击等等。

再一次地，如果选择使用这些技巧会破坏你的游戏设计，那么一般情况下，除非你拥有特定的设计原因（及关于游戏是不可读的），否则你都应该尽可能去执行可读性内容。

通过向玩家传达种种威胁，你便能够提升玩家不遭遇失败玩完整款游戏的机会—-随着挑战的提升他们会玩得越来越好，虽然偶尔也会处于失败的边缘，但是他们总是能够想办法避开死亡。

（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）

Death, Readability and ‘Hard’ vs ‘Unfair’

by Asher Einhorn

When games first started appearing, many of them were devilishly hard. This was mostly because at the time, they were solely about challenge. Their inception rarely saw them include goals other than beating the system. Also, due to the nature of coin-ops, It made sense that they would be of a structure where the game would get harder and harder until you broke and the game won.

Games then moved to the home computer and evolved a little. They now begun to offer the player stories and worlds to explore. However, they were still brutally hard – a hangover from their previous incarnation as arcade cabinets.

In the following years designers would become more and more obsessed with attempting to get every player to finish their game – to experience what they’d laid out in full. This in turn lead us to start developing ways in which we could make games easier – in fact there were a few years that saw the release of games such as the rebooted Prince of Persia where it was very difficult or even impossible to ever fail.

This essentially ruined our sense of challenge. It’s not satisfying to beat something that is so obviously letting you win. Then, more years pass and a rising tide of indie and ‘super-hardcore’ games started to challenge the status-quo. Dark Souls being the often referenced, often emulated breakout hit in this genre.

Recently this has certainly become commonplace. Games where death is a main feature like XCom and Dark Souls have championed a growing trend which is now very much in vogue. I took part in a roundtable at GDC that discussed death, and while it was clear how much people were excited about the emphasis on challenge and punishment, there was absolutely no talk of trying to avoid death elegantly, which I think is still a valid goal.

The less talked about issue is that so many of these hard games actually require you to die as a part of the learning experience. This is the distinction between a game that is hard, and a game that is unfair. Let’s not forget that many games are fantasies, and in our fantasies we never die. We may come close, but we always manage to win out. For this type of game, we want to keep players on the brink of failure but provide them the tools they need to survive.

Readability is one of those tools.

Now of course you’re still going to fail sometimes just due to challenge and difficulty, but a lack of readability is the main culprit for why so many games have a lot of mandatory death in them. Not only does this feel frustrating and unfair, but if a player can’t tell why they died, then they can’t learn and get better at the game.

Following are some examples of different types of readability, though not all of them will necessarily apply to your game’s design.

Reading your surroundings

Vulnerability of enemies and objects – This is only really important when making a wrong move can result in a penalty. In a fighting game for example, this is very important: You have to be able to read the enemies stance as a split-second mistake can leave you vulnerable.

Things that can harm you – This is something that most games do. For example, fire hurts you, but beyond this having a consistent visual language so that people don’t have to interact with things just to see if they are in fact dangerous is important. Dying because the right information has not been communicated is frustrating and unnecessary.

Telegraphing terrain advantage – For example, in a Gears game, it is made very obvious which areas are suited to which weapons. Unreadable level design would make this games frustrating to play and would lead to a lot of death.

Predicting future actions

This is mainly about making the player aware of a threat before it comes into play – physical attacks, advances by the AI and so on. This is the type of readability often omitted from games.

Telegraphing incoming threats – This is about giving the player the opportunity to react to threats before they happen. This can mean a wind-up on an enemies attack giving you the opportunity to counter or evade, or the presence or a gameplay element like a trap or a situation that you may need to prepare for or avoid.

Telegraphing tactical movement – For example, flanking plays by enemy AI. In The Last of Us enemies talk to each other to let the player know what they are about to move up, giving the player the opportunity to react.

Of course there are many more examples, but essentially the true purpose of all of this is twofold.

1.That the player may be given enough time and information to react to a threat, so that they don’t get killed by something they couldn’t avoid.

2.So that if you are going to die, you know why. It is a way of coaching the player so that, if there is indeed a correct way to play, this is communicated clearly to them.

The other very significant benefit to many of these systems is that, once you have taught the payer a visual language, they will know how to tackle an encounter that is completely new to them, increasing the chance that they won’t break the narrative pacing by having to restart a boss section for example.

A classic example of this is Ikaruga, the game about two colours – white and black. You are able to switch between the two, and in doing so become invulnerable to your matching colour. Now, it goes deeper than this, but the key take away here is that after you have learnt this early on in the game, the developer can throw any number of new situations and opponents at you – you don’t have to have encountered these enemies to know how to face them, because no matter how they’re presented, the mechanics are the same – dodge the opposite colours. Of course, you will still fail, it’s a hard game, but you will know why. You will know what you need to do to avoid death in the future and you will have a chance at least of beating the situation on your first try.

Colour mechanics are the most obvious implementation of this concept. Again, Wildstar takes this concept to an extreme where enemies telegraph attack patterns on the floor for you to dodge.

Of course this telegraphing exists in many games in less extreme forms and often draws on the rich vocabulary we’ve got from real-world reference – fire, spikes, black-and-yellow warning-stripes, things that are unstable and crumbling, shockwaves, electricity, the slow wind-up of a powerful punch we get from basic animation principles and so on. None of these things have to be taught, players will inherently understand these languages already so it isn’t necessary to create a system of bright edge glows to achieve this level of readability.

Again, if and where you choose to apply these techniques is down to your game’s design, but as a general rule, unless you have a specific design reason why the game should not be readable, you should be implementing this as fully as you can. In too many games can I block some attacks and not others with no way of learning which through anything other than trial and error.

By telegraphing threats you increase the chance that some players may even play through your entire game without ever failing – still getting better as the challenge increases, still coming close to failing often, but managing to pull themselves back from the brink.(source:gamasutra)