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《Pokémon Go》在易学性上所遭遇的7大问题

发布时间:2016-07-22 10:53:15 Tags:,,,,

作者:Sebastian Long

不出所料,游戏媒体中满是关于《Pokémon Go》的评论,有趣的是同时还伴随着许多有关如何玩这款游戏的指导内容与文章。为什么这款高预算手机游戏需要来自BBC,WIRED,TrustedReviews,The Guardian,VOX,Polygon,Redditors,Youtubers等媒体所创造的游戏指南的支持?本文将着重描写Niantic在设计一款容易学习与理解的游戏时所忽略的一些UIX设计原则,而这也有可能会影响到《Pokémon Go》的玩家体验。

并不是每一款游戏都是依赖于新颖的互动,家喻户晓的名字,合适的发行时间去创造“空前的”用户粘性。幸运的是《Pokémon Go》为之后的游戏创造了完善UX,特别是关于游戏学习的机遇。

以下便是源自《Pokémon Go》易学性的失败与成功的经验教训:

1.使用功能可见性的交流互动

“功能可见性”是关于一些显著的互动。例如玩家看见按键就知道该去按压它。最佳UI往往都具有有意义的功能可见性去传达它们存在的意义和目标。即看起来会旋转的物体可能就会轻轻转动;可以轻敲的内容将带有富有深度的外观。让我们看看下面PokéStop的UI。玩家该如何识别猛击/旋转互动是可行的呢?更别说这还有可能创造出一些对他们有益的内容。而即使玩家只是暂时感到困惑,他们也会自信地去轻敲屏幕。

pokestop UI(from gamasutra)

pokestop UI(from gamasutra)

但功能可见性也有不可行之处:如果某些内容不具有互动性,它就不应该表现出互动性,而《Pokémon Go》似乎便未能做到这点。当玩家轻敲角色周围的地图时其手指下方便会呈现一个蓝色圆圈并会出现音频反馈,但地图上却没有任何内容具有互动性。更糟糕的是当玩家在捕抓Pokémon时轻敲Pokémon将瞬间出现一些UI元素,即就像正面反馈那样。这也是一种无效互动,即会妨碍玩家去学习轻弹手势。我想知道有多少玩家都因为这一行为而影响到自己首次Pokémon捕抓体验:快速轻敲他们的第一只Pokémon但却是徒劳无功的。

2.使用动画去演示手势

功能可见性可以传达互动目标,但却不足以传达给玩家特定手势和互动的细微区别,因为那些看起来具有互动性的内容并不会传达像手势类型,方向,速度或目的等内容。我们的测试体验再一次证实了使用动画(游戏邦注:特别是关于手或手指动画)是传达手势的最佳方式,但《Pokémon Go》却只使用了静态图像,所以玩家可能未能注意到任何提示。

prompt on not swiping(from gamasutra)

prompt on not swiping(from gamasutra)

如果你对这一截图很陌生的话,别担心,不是只有你这样。这一提示只出现在玩家第一次捕抓Pokémon的时候,并且是在玩家未碰触屏幕的时候。让我们将其与其它三款受欢迎的“轻拍”游戏作比较,这些游戏都在第一个关卡中使用动画去演示手势;显然如果《Pokémon Go》像这样使用了动画,它便能够让玩家更自信地与Poké Balls进行互动并让他们能够专注于把握轻拍感而不是忙着对抗那些让人误解的反馈以及所缺少的特定指示。

3.有意义的纠正玩家的错误

玩家是有可能犯错的,特别是在学习游戏的阶段。玩家可能会突然轻敲某些内容(“输入错误”),而这是很容易解决的问题,即可以在玩家完成这样的行动之前添加一个“你确定?”。《Pokémon Go》在这方面就做的不错。

因为玩家误解了游戏而引起的错误是更难解决的,在这方面《Pokémon Go》总是不能有效提供给玩家帮助。游戏有时候会基于逻辑去判断玩家是否有效使用了某一功能或者是否探索了某一界面,他们帮助玩家去纠正某些问题并作出解释。例如在《Pokémon Go》,虽然游戏告知玩家“鸡蛋孵育箱不能用于此”,他们还是轻敲了鸡蛋孵育箱。虽然这没错,但游戏却错失了纠正玩家的误解的机会—-那它可以用在哪里?如果玩家反复访问PokéStops但却未去收集道具,并且未出现任何去纠正他们这一行为的内容,玩家不仅会因此受挫,他们关于游戏中的盈利压力的想法也会受到影响。

其实有很多关于有效避免玩家犯错的实践案例,即包括使用升级奖励等。如果升级期间的道具奖励超过玩家道具包的负荷(游戏邦注:现在游戏要求最多只能拥有350个道具),玩家也不能丢弃道具,即他们的道具包将溢出来。虽然游戏并不会帮助玩家去处理已满的道具包,并且他们的注意力也不会是在道具包页面上,但至少这些升级奖励不会被丢弃。

4.努力实现隐喻中的熟悉性和一致性

比起死记硬背,玩家应该清楚道具的目的,而使用隐喻和熟悉的现实生活中的对象则能够有效提高游戏的易学性和直觉性。如果玩家能够根据道具的外观去猜测它们的目的,玩家便可以减少一样需要学习的内容。

基于一个倍受欢迎的品牌的一大优势便是,粉丝们事先已经了解了该品牌的特定元素。就像玩过《Pokémon》的玩家们便都清楚红色和白色Poké Ball的目的和作用,但往往熟悉了就会觉得平常了,所以那些全新游戏玩家会更容易记住这些内容。而《Pokémon Go》似乎就是太过依赖于玩家对于训练员的目标,Pokédexes的目的,Poké Balls和Pokémon Gyms的用户,以及进化与对抗Pokémon的能力的了解。

游戏应该努力创造一致性,而《Pokémon Go》中最明显的不一致便是“Pokémon Eggs”和“Lucky Eggs”的使用。为什么要基于不同机制在不同环境下使用两次鸡蛋孵育箱呢?Pokémon Eggs需要玩家使用鸡蛋孵育箱(游戏邦注:通过应用内部购买获取),但是lucky eggs不需要这样的孵育箱,并可以直接提供给玩家经验值奖励。而这一理念会再一次阻碍玩家快速且有效地学习游戏玩法。

two eggs(from gamasutra)

two eggs(from gamasutra)

5.教程应该以环境为基础

从易理解性的角度来看,Pokémon Gyms和对抗或许是《Pokémon Go》最薄弱的地方。其中的罪魁祸首便是缺少基于环境的教程内容;虽然玩家可以在Pokémon对抗中找到该做什么的信息,但却是在设置旁的“窍门”位置,而不是在他们最初的Gym对抗之前或期间,甚至也不是在Gym中。并且这里所谓的“窍门”只描述了滑动进行闪避的互动,而没有轻敲去攻击或轻敲并按住而发动特殊攻击等描述。关于《Pokémon Go》为何会忽略这些基本内容我们是百思不得其解。

swipe to dodge(from gamasutra)

swipe to dodge(from gamasutra)

脱离环境去提供信息只会削减教程内容的功效。玩家通常都会根据自己当下所处的情境去理解相关说明内容。

不过在这款游戏中,Pokémon的攻击动画的简短预览便有效执行了基于环境的教程。玩家将在需要主动去寻找前获得有关攻击动画的小小视觉提醒。

因为玩家的记忆通常都是不可靠的,所以你应该避免事先给予他们过多信息,并确保你能够基于环境呈现给玩家教程信息。

6.确保反馈的清晰度与目标挑战相匹配

《Pokémon Go》中有很多界面和机制是依赖于反复试验学习法,即包括熏香和鱼饵的使用,道具包限制,Pokémon捕抓等等。这并不是什么坏事,游戏其实是利用了特定玩家类型的意愿去试验并分析游戏特别的设计。

但反复试验学习法所存在的一个问题是它与随机性的交叉关系。当玩家在捕抓Pokémon时,他们并不清楚为什么会出现“不断变小的圆圈”,到底更大的圆圈比较好还是小一点的好?其实关于圆圈的尺寸并不存在固有的“好”与“不好”。玩家可以通过试验的方式进行判断,或许这对于特定玩家来说是有趣的,但是因为成功捕抓Pokémon Go还存在其它随机变量,所以因为圆圈的大小或其它元素,我便不清楚自己到底成功了没。

玩家有可能因为反馈缺少特殊性和可观察模式而难以掌握一些游戏机制—-我想知道这是否是开发者的真正意图?在《Pokémon Go》中有多少挑战是源自规则或互动本身?

7.技术完整性

让人遗憾的是《Pokémon Go》在发行的过程中遭遇了严重的技术障碍,那些因为服务器的暂停和各种漏洞所引出的古怪行为都将进一步表现在玩家的反馈中。不管是Poké Balls停止移动,脚步指标失灵还是Pokémon未曾出现都会导致玩家误解这种种的漏洞行为。

这是巧合吗?

似乎直觉性对于《Pokémon Go》的成功并未作出真正的贡献—-而包含AR和定位的使用以及之前提到的品牌化和适时的发行时间都是推动这款游戏成功的重要元素。有人可能会好奇,如果说《Pokémon Go》的设计是故意显得模糊,那么或许游戏可以进一步去推动社区的发展;就像《我的世界》便受利于在线群组去填补玩家的信息缺口,你要记住当《我的世界》最初发行时它其实还处于alpha测试阶段。

关于《Pokémon Go》糟糕的教程和学习性的真正影响将通过游戏早前的用户留存数据,玩家离开游戏的规模或者长期用户粘性的缺失表现出来。通常情况下易用性和易理解性问题都是一些较一般的问题,玩家并不会对此作出太大抱怨,相反地它们只会觉得游戏“并不适合自己”—-而这可能便是《Pokémon Go》所犯的最大错误:不能有效地将所有新玩家带到这款吸引了许多年轻玩家注意的游戏中。

或许进一步强调以玩家为中心的设计并进行更多游戏测试将能帮助Niantic有效解决这一问题。

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

How Pokémon Go Fails to Capture Learnability

by Sebastian Long

The gaming press is unsurprisingly alight with comment on Pokémon Go, but interestingly also with huge numbers of guides and articles on how to actually play the game. Why does this big-budget mobile game need propping-up from how-to guides by the BBC, WIRED, TrustedReviews, The Guardian, VOX, Polygon, Redditors, Youtubers, and many more? This article highlights a number of points where Niantic have broken or ignored many UX design principles for designing a game that is easy to learn and understand, that ultimately could be affecting Pokémon Go’s player experience.

Not every game can rely on novel interactions, a household name and a well-timed release to propel a game to “unprecedented” levels of engagement. Luckily for those games then, Pokémon Go leaves some opportunities on the table for UX refinement, sepcifically in terms of learning the game.

Here are 7 lessons from Pokémon Go’s learnability failures and successes:

1. Communicate Interactivity Using Affordance

‘Affordance’ describes the apparent interactivity of something. For example, a button ‘affords’ pressing because it visually appears pressable. The best UIs have meaningful affordance to help communicate their existence and purpose. Elements that slide might obviously ‘peek out’; things that spin might gently turn; things that can be tapped are given the appearance of depth. Take a look at the UI for a PokéStop below. How are players meant to predict or recognise that a swiping/spinning interaction is possible, let alone that it would yield something beneficial? Even if the confusion is only momentary, players’ confidence will take a knock.

Affordance works in the opposite direction too: If something isn’t interactive, it shouldn’t look or behave like it is, yet Pokémon Go is guilty of this as well. Tapping on the map around the player character shows a blue circle under the finger and gives audio feedback, but nothing about the map is interactive. What’s worse, tapping on the target Pokémon during a Pokémon capture (a seemingly-valid interaction) brings up a number of UI elements around the Pokémon for a split second, which appear like positive feedback. This reinforces an invalid interaction, hindering players from learning the flicking gesture. I wonder how many players had the joy and excitement of their first Pokémon capture undermined by this behaviour: repeatedly tapping on their first Pokémon, completely in vain.

2. Demonstrate Gestures Using Animation

Affordance can communicate the presence of an interactive object, but often isn’t enough to communicate the nuance of specific gesture or interaction – just because something looks interactive might not communicate the type of gesture, the direction, speed or the intent of that interaction. Our experience of playtesting has repeatedly demonstrated that using animation – specifically animation of hands and fingers – is the best way to communicate a gesture, yet Pokémon Go uses only static imagery – and players may not see any prompting at all.

If the screenshot here looks unfamiliar, you’re not alone. This prompt only comes up in the player’s very first Pokémon capture, and then only if the player doesn’t touch the screen for some time. Compare this to three other popular ‘flicking’ games below, all of which use animation to demonstrate gestures in the first level; it is clear that Pokémon could have benefitted from animation like this to get the player interacting confidently with the Poké Balls, allowing them to focus on learning the ‘feel’ of flicking nearer-and-farther instead of fighting the misleading feedback and lack of specific instructions.

3. Meaningfully Correct Player Error

Players can make mistakes, especially while still learning about the game. Players who accidentally tap something (‘input error’) are fairly easy to accommodate, typically by adding an ‘are you sure?’ right before that action is finalised, and Pokémon Go generally handles this pretty well.

Errors caused by players misunderstanding the game are harder to design around, and it is here that Pokémon Go often fails to aid players. Games can sometimes logically determine if players aren’t using features correctly, or are exploring the interface, and they can provide assistance to correct and explain. For example, players that tap on an Egg Incubator item in Pokémon Go are informed that “This item can’t be used here”. This is factually correct, but misses an opportunity to correct the misunderstanding demonstrated by the player – where can it be used? If players repeatedly visit PokéStops but don’t spin to collect items, nothing happens to correct this, which is not only frustrating, but may also impact players’ perception of the monetisation pressure in Pokémon Go, given that Poké Balls otherwise cost real money.

There are some examples of good practice in avoiding player error here, including consideration for level-up rewards. If the items awarded during level-up go over the limit of the players’ item bag (currently a 350 item limit), they’re not discarded, but the bag just over-fills, keeping all the level-up rewards. Players aren’t assisted in dealing with a full bag, and their attention isn’t drawn to the bag screen, but at least the level-up rewards aren’t discarded.

4. Strive for Familiarity and Consistency in Metaphors

Players should be able to recognise the purpose of an item rather than have to remember it, and using metaphors and familiar real-life objects is a valuable means to achieve learnability and intuitiveness. If players can make valid guesses about the purpose of items because of their appearance, then that is one less thing to tutorialise.

One of the advantages of working within a much-loved brand is in fans bringing prior knowledge on brand-specific elements. The exact purpose and workings of the red and white Poké Ball will be familiar to entire generations, for example, but familiarity breeds contempt, and players new to the franchise can’t be forgotten. Pokémon Go perhaps relies too much on players bringing existing, valid knowledge to the game about the objective of a Trainer, the purpose of Pokédexes, Poké Balls and Pokémon Gyms, and the ability to evolve and battle Pokémon.

Games should also strive for consistency, and perhaps the most blatant of the inconsistencies in Pokémon Go is the use of ‘Pokémon Eggs’ and ‘Lucky Eggs’. Why use the egg metaphor twice in two completely differing contexts, with completely differing mechanics? Pokémon Eggs have to be hatched to give Pokémon using the ‘egg incubators’ (purchasable as IAP), but the ‘lucky eggs’ need no such incubation, and can be used immediately to give an XP bonus. This muddling of ideas again adds barriers to players learning the game quickly and reliably.

5. Tutorials Should be Context-Specific

Pokémon Gyms and battling is perhaps the poorest part of Pokémon Go from an understandability perspective. Chief culprit of this is the lack of contextualised tutorial content; players can find information about what to do in a Pokémon Battle, but only in the ‘tips’ area next to the settings, not before or during their first Gym battle, or even in the Gym itself. Even then, the ‘tips’ only describe the swipe-to-dodge interaction, not tap to attack, nor tap-and-hold to special attack. Quite why Pokémon Go omits any hint of these absolute fundamentals is baffling.

The effectiveness of tutorial content is significantly reduced by giving information outside of the context in which that information is needed. Players are generally more capable of ascribing meaning to instructions relevant to their immediate situation, rather than ones they haven’t encountered yet, and are therefore more likely to implement and remember these instructions.

One nice implementation of contextual tutorialisation is the short preview of the Pokémon’s attack animation immediately before each capture – which is important to be able to recognise, as this animation signifies a period of invulnerability. Players get a little visual reminder of the attack animation immediately before they need to look out for it.

Players’ memories are fallible, so avoid the front-loading of information, and ensure you present tutorial information in context.

6. Ensure the Clarity of Feedback Matches The Intended Challenge

There are a number of interfaces and mechanics in Pokémon Go that rely on trial-and-error learning, including the effective use of the incense and lures, bag item limits, and Pokémon capturing. This isn’t a bad thing, and certainly the game has capitalised on certain player types’ willingness to experiment and deconstruct the game’s cryptic design in order to understand it better.

The issue with trial-and-error learning is in its intersection with randomness. The ‘shrinking circle’ element that appears when capturing a Pokémon is not at all clear; is a larger circle better or worse than a small one? There is no inherent ‘good’ or ‘bad’ state in the size of a circle. Players could experimentally determine this – and maybe that is a fun thing to experiment with for a certain type of player – but as the successful capture of the Pokémon has other random variables, ultimately I don’t know if I succeeded because of the circle size, or some other factor.

Players will likely have difficulty learning some game mechanics because of the lack of specificity and observable patterns in the feedback – I wonder if this meets the the developer’s’ intent? How much of the challenge in Pokémon Go should come from working out the rules or from the interaction itself?

7. Technical Completeness

It is a shame that Pokémon Go has hit significant technical barriers throughout launch, as the odd behaviour presented by these server time-outs and bugs only serves to further convolute the feedback presented to the player. Poké Balls that stop moving, misbehaving footstep indicators, Pokémon that never appear – each presents another barrier to understanding the game as players misinterpret bug behaviour for legitimate feedback.

Can It Be Accidental?

It seems likely that intuitiveness has not contributed to Pokémon Go’s success – clearly there are many other factors at play, including the use of AR and geolocation, as well as the aforementioned branding and release timing. One has to wonder if Pokémon Go’s design is deliberately obscure, perhaps to encourage development of a community, and exactly the media furore that has resulted; Minecraft certainly benefitted from the online groups that sprung up to plug players’ knowledge gaps, not forgetting that Minecraft was at alpha stages during initial launch.

The true effects of Pokémon Go’s poor tutorialisation and learnability can only be revealed by the early retention figures, and scale of abandonment or lack of longer-term engagement of non-fans. All-too-often usability and understandability issues are manifested as general, non-specific complaints from players, perhaps feeling that the game is ‘not for them’ – which is perhaps the biggest crime of Pokémon Go’s flawed onboarding: failing to comprehensively introduce a whole new fanbase to the game that defined the youth of so many.

Perhaps a little more player-centric design and playtesting might have helped Niantic catch ‘em all.(source:Gamasutra

 


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