作者：Chris Bateman

如果说游戏设计是一门工艺，那么当游戏开发是受经济指标所驱动时这一工艺会变成什么样呢？这时候是否还有工艺之说？或者游戏将会变成纯粹的商业陷阱，即只是等着去诱惑并从无辜的受害者那里赚钱？

coins(from gamasutra)

大概在10年前，当我和朋友同时也是同事的Richard Boon一起在编写《21世纪游戏设计》时，我便预测本世纪的游戏将专注于理解玩家并通过呈现出各种玩家行为模式而做到这点。我们已经从游戏设计是由教条主义的假设以及自我满足的设计实践转向去理解玩家如何与游戏连接在一起，而这也是现代电子游戏产业中非常重要的一部分。

但是在那本书上我们却犯了一个非常重大错误，即我假设创建玩家行为模型即意味着理解如何满足玩家的需求，也就是说与玩家建立起一支正面，具有包容性且基于道德的关系。但现在玩家模型的主要形式却完全不需要我们去理解如何满足玩家，因为现在我们所使用的主要模型形式是分析参数—-这些参数是与玩家的任何心理状态维系在一起的。如果说我们想象的21世纪游戏设计是一个将通过能够真正满足玩家的游戏而赚钱，那么我们必须正视现在所看到的产业其实是通过分析现金流的来源并作为数字捕食者去吞噬玩家的数字钱包而赚取利益的产业。

你可以着眼于今天产业所使用的关键参数去理解我所说的。首先便是一些活动衡量参数，如日活跃用户指数（DAU），游戏次数，用户粘性（DAU/MAU），用户留存以及用户流失率。然后便是盈利衡量参数，如转换率，ARPDAU和ARPPU。同样地还有游戏经济衡量参数，如经济来源，游戏内部货币流量，而所有的这些都是关于鼓励玩家为获得游戏优势去花钱。这一切都是关于：从玩家的冲动中吸金。就像Game Analytics是这么描述这一商业实践的：

成功的免费游戏创造了与用户间的长久联系。那些非常喜欢游戏体验的用户总是愿意为竞争性优势而掏钱。而游戏需要拥有强大的用户留存才能拥有足够的时间与玩家建立起这样的联系。

关于这种以参数为主导的免费游戏业务模式的最忠实的支持者要属Nicholas Lovell（《The Curve》的作者）。我们最初是在Develop Liverpool见到的，不过那已经是好几年前的事了。他认为比起用户留存，市场所面临的挑战其实与盈利并无关系。我很少看到他写有关游戏设计工艺的内容，而他最近所发表的一些演讲似乎都围绕着“获取，挽留，盈利”这三个关键词展开。

在游戏设计中专注于参数将把电子游戏和它那名声不好但却很赚钱的堂兄弟，即“博彩”拉近距离，对此我们将面对各种各样诸如我们正在做什么的道德问题。我们迫切需要讨论盈利实践以明确道德参数到底包含什么，但是产业似乎对这样的讨论并不感冒。今年我在GDC上就这个主题建立了一个座谈小组，但似乎没多少人对此感到关心。产业害怕这样的讨论，但我们不得不承认在准备好处理有关怎样的参数适合游戏设计工艺的问题前，我们还需要解决可能影响游戏产业道德的问题。当然了就像在资本主义中那样，那里不可能存在道德，有的只是钱钱钱。

一个始终坚持道德盈利的游戏设计师便是前《自由国度》创意总监Laralyn McWilliams，他便是因为厌恶我们在这里所讨论的这一问题而毅然辞去了工作。在2014年一篇名为“免费游戏中的最佳实践的问题”的访问中，Laralyn表示通过设计让玩家受挫而获取盈利最终变成了让他难以忍受的问题：

有个设计师找到我我并说有个区域缺少足够的任务，刷任务设置也很糟糕。所以他想要添加5个或10个任务去改善这种情况。而我发现这便是我们最佳盈利区域。即刷任务其实就是让人们花钱，所以我不得不拒绝这会让玩家不快的做法。

其实游戏设计完全可以作为一种工艺且该工艺的从业者也完全可以去满足各种不同类型的玩家的需求。即使是以参数为主导的领域这也是可行的，开发者也希望以此去创建能够支持自己的忠实粉丝群组并去帮助其他玩家走向自己。当然了这并不是一条轻松的道路，因为这意味着开发者要去创造真正有价值的商业艺术品。

遗憾的是，那些已经避免走上掠夺性盈利方式的独立开发者似乎倾向于创造自己喜欢玩的内容，然后才去寻找喜欢这一内容的用户，而这也是我认为非常冒险的一种方式。我便看过许多开发者在这里遭遇了失败。即相信自己的游戏能够满足足够玩家的需求并最终创造出收支相抵的结果是非常困难的。就像Rami Ismail of Vlambeer曾说过：

我总是告诉开发者去创造他们想创造的内容，但却一定要足够现实。我之所以能够作为一个公众人物存在着是因为我是2010年代的独立开发圈中较为独特的人，即我强调的是去正视你的业务，与发行商和市场搞好关系，并努力让你的游戏获得公众的关注。

《21世纪的游戏设计》很快就会停止发行了；其跨国发行商已经离开有关游戏制作的书籍发行领域了。然而我们第一本书中的核心观点，即存在游戏设计方法，但不存在唯一且完美的游戏设计方法始终适用于今天的游戏设计领域。我们如果能够将这一方法贯穿到游戏心理学和电子游戏历史中，我们便能真正理解游戏设计这一工艺。但似乎游戏产业并未选择这一方法。相反地它选择的是教条式的独立设计以及实用的盈利设计方式。就我个人看来我觉得被我们称之为游戏的作品值得我们更好地去对待，但似乎拥有和我相同想法的人实在太少。并且在现在的游戏产业中已经没有多余的空间能够用于创造可以满足玩家的游戏工艺了。

（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）

The Craft of Game Design Cannot Be Measured By Any Metric

by Chris Bateman

If game design is a craft, what becomes of it when game development is driven solely by financial metrics? Does any of the craft remain? Or are games reduced to mere commercial pit traps, luring in and monetising their unwitting victims?

A little over a decade ago, when my friend and colleague Richard Boon and I were writing 21st Century Game Design, I had predicted that this century in games was going to be characterised by a new focus upon understanding players, and that this would be attained by various models of player behaviour. I suggest (with the benefit of hindsight) that this general claim was correct, and that we have gone from an era where game design was dominated by dogmatic assumptions and self-satisfying design practices (although neither of these have gone away…) to one where understanding how players relate to games is an inescapable part of the videogame industry.

But we made one crucial error in that book. My assumption had been that modelling player behaviour entailed understanding how to satisfy play needs, which is to say, having a positive, inclusive, moral and practical relationship with players. But the dominant forms of player modelling right now have absolutely no need to understand how to satisfy players in any form, because the principal form of model we are using right now is analytic metrics – and these metrics are blind to any aspect of the mental states of the player whatsoever. If our image of game design in the 21st century was that the industry was going to be making money by creating games that deeply satisfied their players, what we are actually facing now is an industry that makes the majority of its money by simply analysing where the leaks are in their cashflow, and acting as digital predators to suck spare change out of players’ digital wallets.

It may be helpful to look at the key metrics at use today to verify what I’m claiming. Firstly, there are the measures of activity – Daily Active Users (DAUs), Sessions, Stickiness (DAU/MAU), Retention and its inverse, Churn. Then, the measures of monetisation – Conversion Rate (percentage of players making purchases), ARPDAU and ARPPU (Average Revenue Per Daily Active User, or Per Paying User). Also, game economy measures for Sources, Sinks, and the Flow Rate of in-game currencies, all geared towards engineering sufficient sparseness that players will be encouraged to pay money for advantages. And that’s what it’s all about: squeezing money out of players’ impulses – although in analytics, there are no players, only users, just like the narcotics industry. As the company Game Analytics observe with the admirable unvarnished honesty that belongs to these thoroughly pragmatic commercial practices:

Successful free-to-play games create long-term relationships with users. Users that enjoy the experience enough are willing to pay to for a competitive advantage. A game needs to have strong retention to have time to build this relationship. (Emphasis added.)

One of the most coherent supporters of the free-to-play business model where such metrics dominate is Nicholas Lovell, author of The Curve and regular on the same speaking circuit as me. We first met at Develop Liverpool, many years back, and our paths still occasionally cross. He views the challenges of that side of the market as not so much about monetisation (he rankles at being called a ‘monetisation consultant’) as about retention, in accordance with the quote above. But I read very little from him about the craft of game design, and his recent talks have tended to be framed in terms of the keywords ‘Acquire, Retain, Monetise’, which sounds like a scaled down version of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition. Nicholas continually insists our industry can self regulate itself away from abusive practices – but I still don’t see any sign of this, nor indeed do I detect much interest in doing so.

The focus on metrics over game design has brought the videogame industry closer to its less reputable but more profitable cousin ‘gaming’ – what’s commonly known as gambling – and with it, we have a host of ethical questions about what we are doing, none of which can be merely presupposed. We urgently need a debate on monetisation practices to establish what ethical metrics consist of, but the industry does not want to have this talk. I offered a dynamite panel to GDC this year on this topic, but it was knocked out of contention instantly. The industry is afraid to have the conversation, but until we are ready to address questions about what metrics mean for game design as a craft, we have a serious unaddressed problem that affects the integrity of the games industry. Of course, in purely capitalistic terms there is no integrity, there is only money. But money is just another of our imaginary games – it just happens to be one that we all take very, very seriously, since we have lost our ability to feed ourselves without it.

One game designer who has taken a stand on the ethics of monetisation is former Free Realms creative lead Laralyn McWilliams, who quit a job out of disgust over the issues I’m highlighting here. In an interview back in 2014 entitled “The problem with ‘best practices’ in free-to-play”, Laralyn reports how designing for ‘friction’, which is to say, monetising player frustration, finally became something she couldn’t endorse:

…a designer came to me and said there was a spot where it got really rough; there weren’t enough quests, and the grind was really terrible. He wanted to add five or ten quests to make it feel better…. But when I looked at our numbers that was the spot where we had our best monetisation. The awful feeling of that grind was getting people to spend money, so I had to say no to something that would make players happy because it would cut our revenue. At that point I said, ‘Nope,’ and I got out of social games.

Against the ruthless focus on the bottom line is the possibility, if nothing else, that game design can fulfil its calling as a craft, and that informed practitioners of that craft can satisfy the play needs of many different kinds of players. This does happen, even in the battleground of metrics, and developers that are willing to commit to doing so can build a loyal fanbase that supports them, and helps other players to find them. It’s a harder path, to be sure, because it means making commercial artworks that are worthwhile instead of just cranking the sausage machine of rehashed ideas. Nothing good comes without effort. But if we want to walk this path, it entails more than simply resisting the purely metrics-driven concept of commercial games.

Sadly, indie developers who have avoided going down the predatory monetisation path have tended to simply default to making what they like to play and then gambling upon finding an audience for it, which I view as a hugely risky way to pursue a career in game design. I’ve seen dozens (perhaps now hundreds) of developers fail doing this… it’s simply not a good enough plan to trust that – by chance – your play needs will align with enough players to magically make ends meet. As Rami Ismail of Vlambeer suggested to me when I accused him of giving this exact advice:

…I’ve told developers to make what they want to make – [but] never in that vacuum. My entire existence as a public figure exists because I was one of the very few prolific 2010-generation indies that was yelling about taking business seriously, engaging with publishers and marketing, and doing the work to make your game visible.

21st Century Game Design will be going out-of-print soon; its multinational publisher has withdrawn from publishing books about making games entirely, which in itself says something. Our first book’s core vision – that there are methods for game design, but there is no single, perfect method for game design – remains as true today as it ever did. Our deployment of that vision through a fusion of horizons between psychology of play and the history of videogames remains, I believe, an extremely fruitful way of understanding the craft of game design. Alas, the games industry didn’t choose this path. It choose instead an unholy schism between dogmatic indie design on the one hand, and pragmatic monetisation design on the other. Personally, I feel that the artworks we call games deserve more than this, but I appear to be in the minority. In a games industry divided between a stubborn individuality unable to reliably feed itself, and investment-glutted money farms, there seems little room left for cultivating the craft of satisfying players.（source：Gamasutra）