作者：Reid Gacke

我必须声称，我真的非常喜欢手机游戏。实际上我的电脑已经坏了3周了，但是我却不能否认我的口袋中藏着一个具有吸引力的完整世界，即使这些世界从传统意义上来看是肤浅的，甚至是具有剥削性的。并且比起想那些在PS Vita和任天堂3DS等平台上的掌机游戏，手机游戏拥有更强大的易用性。实际上手机不行那些传统的掌上游戏设备那么笨重（即使是我那台巨大的Galaxy Note也比我的3DS轻巧），甚至我们可以只使用一只手去操控许多手机设备玩游戏（有时候甚至只需要一根手指）。更不能否认的一点是，在如今的时代里我们几乎始终都带着自己的手机，所以在出门的时候我们也可以轻轻松松在手机上玩游戏。

对于作为成人的我来说，从文化角度来看这也是更能接受的，因为比起3DS，我更愿意在公共场合面对着我的手机。

更重要的一点则是，随着技术的不断发展，更加真实的游戏体验出现在手机平台上变得更有可能。我们不仅拥有一大批优秀的移植游戏（最近我便完成了《最终幻想6》并开始尝试《最终幻想9》，同时在照顾孩子期间我还能玩会《这是我的战争》），并且在我看来拥有真正只属于手机平台的游戏体验也是指日可待了。

一旦我们能够越过这道门槛，我们便能够真正看到手机游戏的潜能，我想我们也将真正认可手机游戏，而非动作控制，虚拟现实或下一代的X-Box/palystation/Wii才是真正的游戏“未来”。

实际上我可以说，如果手机游戏想拥有一个明朗的未来，那么阻碍它们的第一个也是最大的障碍之一便是这个。即不管是《剑与巫术》，《房间》，《辐射：避难所》，或者是《骑士经理》，我们拥有许许多多基于非道德商业方式去欺骗你或你的小孩投入大量钱财但却一无所获的低成本游戏—-这里存在源源不断的“上瘾”与“浪费时间的元素。你大可以去搜索Google Play Store上那些拥有最高评级的游戏评价。你会发现瘾性通常都是开发者最突出的元素，紧接着才是消耗时间或其它变量。

甚至是像《部落战争》这种更受欢迎的手机游戏体验以及之前提到的《辐射：避难所》便经常被说向玩家收太多钱，但这却绝非最糟糕的情况。比起主流AAA级游戏，我已经投入了更多钱在《复仇者学院》，《王国之心：解放X》和《最终幻想：勇气》等游戏，但是所获得的游戏体验却并不怎样。实际上，“鲸鱼用户”这一词的存在便说明在手机游戏开发领域中存在着巨大的哲学问题。而如果产业希望能够让这一媒体变得更有意义就必须去解决这一问题。

手机游戏所面临的另一个更实质性的问题便是一致性。即几乎我到目前为止所提到的每一款游戏都被移植到了其它平台上（主要是PC游戏），一些在手机平台上呈现出非常深刻游戏体验的内容也开始蔓延到其它地方，这将很大程度影响手机游戏在“游戏的未来”的讨论中的优势。实际上，我认为我们很少能够看到只存在于手机上的游戏。你可能会认为这是所有游戏平台都具有的问题，但事实的真相在于，手机是当前少数能够传递真正具有独有体验的平台。就像我们已经在《Ingress》，《Run！Zombies》和《Pokemon GO！》等游戏中看到的那样。

pokemon Go(from hc360)

这便是我为何会认为手机游戏是游戏的“未来”的核心。我并不是说在未来我们将只能在手机上玩游戏。实际上我根本不想去住在一个只有手机平台的世界。这只会让所有人都患上眼睛疲劳症。我的意思是手机游戏将成为第一个拥有不能再其它平台上体验到的游戏的平台。甚至向《部落战争》，《复仇者学院》，《迷你大楼》等游戏也将收益于手机游戏所提供的易用性，而这时除了手机或平板电脑之后的其它平台所不能给予的。也许像3DS或Vita等掌机也能够仿效这样的体验，但是还要打开盖子并开启设备的要求便会破坏游戏在这些设备上频繁被打开且散发吸引力的能力。

你可能会认为AR游戏以及所谓的“休闲”游戏从本质上来看很容易被忽视，但我想说我们将在不远的将来看到这类型游戏的真正潜能。如此普及的手机游戏不仅是人们快速赚钱的好方法（似乎产业也并不想去改变这种流行观点），并且虽然技术不断发展，但是手机平台却仍落后于其它现代游戏平台，我认为没有人真正愿意将手机带离轻松赚钱的工具定位。

AR游戏和休闲游戏没有理由不能提供给我们一些具有实质性的内容。《Pokemon Go！》便履行了经过《Ingress》的尝试后游戏所兑现的承诺。我意识到许多人“玩过”《Ingress》，但是它作为游戏而不只是“到这里并按压按键”的模拟器的价值却是有问题的。而《Pokemon Go！》提供了比这一前辈更多的游戏内容，Niantic也承诺将会往游戏中添加更多内容。不管我们是否能在游戏最终没落前看到这些，这都向我们表明了游戏的前进方向，而虽然这有待争议，但却不能否定其作为手机平台能够传达怎样的内容的范例的价值。

如果忽视游戏当前的状态，甚至忘记Niantic所给予的承诺，让我们想象《Pokemon Go！》会变成怎样。想象一款游戏拥有超过700只pokemon，在一款游戏中你可以看到有人在街上寻找pokemon并参与一些友好的战斗，在一款游戏中你可以到世界各地旅行去参加比赛并在路上获取不同的游戏体验，在一款带有活动的游戏中你将在特定地标中接受挑战并寻找稀有的pokemon。

而现在让我们想象一款基于同样道理的暴龙机应用的数码暴龙游戏，即在游戏中你可以训练自己的怪兽并捕猎入侵的暴龙将其带回数字世界中。想象一款《龙与地下城》游戏，即在这里你可以创造一个角色并去捕捉你的家乡附近的怪兽和龙，从地精领域拯救公主—-而在整个过程中你将能够从里程与任务中获取体验。想象一款战争游戏，在这里你将与邻居建立一种临时且不稳定的同盟关系，一起训练军队并前往市中心从敌军手中获取汽油站。

如果说技术教会了我们什么，那就是如果你能够想到什么，你便能够做到什么。你只需要去找出方法便可。

事实上，虚拟现实（游戏邦注：虽然具有缺陷但却被大多数专家称为游戏的“未来”）只能改变我们对于游戏的理解。这并不是一次脆弱的技术飞跃，反而更像是每一次带着全新图像技术出现的全新主机时代，即它并不能从根本上改变我们体验游戏的方式或者让游戏改变我们体验现实世界的方式。像《Pokemon Go！》，《Ingress》，《Run！Zombies！》以及其它相似的手机游戏虽然也是走得跌跌碰碰，但却真正向我们展示了只能在手机设备上获取的独一体验，如果没有能够与现实世界相联系的设备，这类型游戏便是不可能的。

我知道这看起来好像我是借着《Pokemon Go！》的势头在说这样的话，但是我认为不管遭遇了多少失败，游戏的成功都表明这个世界都准备好去见证手机游戏的发展。

而为了看到这样的结果，媒体便需要一些领头军的出现，不过我不认为任天堂便是那个领头军。因为任天堂是一家公司，而公司的目标通常就是赚钱。手机游戏所需要的是愿意在该媒体上冒险的空想主义者，即能够跳脱笼罩于手机游戏市场的金钱束缚。但这肯定需要投入许许多多的努力。当然我们拥有像《最终幻想》系列和《这是我的战争》等成功移植到手机平台上的游戏，甚至像《剑与巫术》等一开始便以手机为目标平台的游戏。但这些游戏却都未曾去利用该媒体，去挑战它，并向我们展示它。而我认为增强现实便是我们迈向手机游戏文艺复兴的第一步，但我们还需要更多愿意去参与其中，并向我们展示出除了吸引鲸鱼玩家以及从家长那里赚钱外手机游戏到底还能够做些什么。手机游戏需要像Notch，Jonathan Blow和Phil Fish等真正相信该媒体并愿意给予其机会的人。

我们需要开发者能够真正重视手机游戏并让作为玩家的我们能够看到它到底可以做些什么。真正到了那时候，这一媒体便能够理直气壮地站在那些认为它只是廉价的赚钱工具的人面前了。

（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）

Mobile, not virtual reality, is the future of gaming

by Reid Gacke

I have a confession to make: I completely and unironically love mobile games. Maybe it’s the fact that my computer has been dead for going on three weeks now, but I can’t deny that there is something very appealing about the idea of having an entire world in my pocket, even if those worlds have, traditionally, been shallow and unrealized, even exploitative. There’s also something about mobile gaming that’s even more accessible than portable games like those found on the PS Vita and Nintendo 3DS. Perhaps it’s the fact that phones are somewhat less clunky than your typical portable gaming device (even my behemoth of a Galaxy Note is less bulky than my 3DS), or maybe the fact that a lot of them can be played with one hand – one finger even in some cases, and it’s hard to deny that, in this day and age, we pretty much always have our phones with us anyways, so it’s no real inconvenience to pocket the thing on your way out the door.

It’s also somewhat more culturally acceptable for me, as an adult man, to have my nose glued to my phone rather than my 3DS in public, if only just.

Even more to the point, as the technology becomes more and more impressive, the possibility of actual, meaty gaming experience coming to mobile becomes more and more likely every day. Not only have we already gotten a bevy of good ports – I recently finished Final Fantasy 6, which is great (questionable artistic decisions aside) and started on Final Fantasy 9 (if you’d have told me five years ago that I’d be playing a PSX game on my phone I’d have had a conniption), and I’ve been interspersing sittings of This War of Mine in between babysitting my time- (and wallet-) killing apps – but getting truly, mobile-exclusive game experiences is not, in my opinion, that far off.

And once we cross that threshold, I think we’ll truly see what mobile gaming is capable of…and I think we’ll find that it is mobile gaming, not motion controls or virtual reality or the next iteration of the X-Box/Playstation/Wii, that is the “future” of gaming.

Don’t worry, that cringe running up and down your spine at the speed of blech is perfectly natural, but bear with me.

The fact that I was able to make that joke and 99% of you understood my intention (even if you didn’t think it was funny…that, also, is perfectly natural) is the first, and one of the biggest, hurdles that mobile gaming is going to have to overcome if it expects to even have a future, let alone a respectful one. For every Sword and Sworcery, The Room, Fallout Shelter, and Knights of Pen and Paper, we have a seemingly endless slurry of cheaply-made cash-in games with shady or even downright unethical business practices meant to trick you or your children into spending (or accidentally spending) thousands of dollars for literally no gain – an endless stream of “addictive” and “time-wasting” drivel for which “time-wasting” and “addictive” are the best (and most frequently-used) compliments anyone can come up with. Seriously, check out the Google Play Store reviews for the best-rated games. Addictive is almost always the number one highlight, followed closely by time-killer or some variation thereof.

Even some of the more-respectable gaming experiences on mobile, games like Clash of Clans and the afore-mentioned Fallout Shelter, are oft-maligned for demanding too much of your money, and those are hardly the worst of the lot. I have sunk more money than I care to admit into Avengers Academy, Kingdom Hearts Unchained x, and Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, far more than I would spend on a mainstream, triple A title, and for a far less-meaty gaming experience. The fact that the term “whale” – a term used by the game industry muckety-mucks to describe someone, generally their target audience, willing to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on their games – even exists is evidence of a massive problem of philosophy in the field of mobile game development. It is something that the industry is going to have to get past if they ever hope to make the medium something substantial and meaningful, and if we are to ever afford mobile games any modicum of respect.

The other rather substantial problem mobile gaming faces is one of identity. Almost every game I’ve mentioned thus far has been ported to other platforms – PC mostly – and many more of the most significant gaming experiences to be found on the platform – your Final Fantasies and Baldurs Gates and the like – started off elsewhere, which substantially diminishes their use in any argument for mobile gaming as the “future of gaming.” In fact, I’d argue that we’ve seen incredibly few games that are truly “mobile-only” experiences. You could argue that this is a problem with all gaming platforms, that there’s really few, if any, gaming experiences that can be experienced on one platform but not another, but the truth of the matter is that the mobile platform is one of the few currently available that is capable of delivering that truly exclusive experience. In fact, we’ve already seen it in AR gaming like Ingress, Run! Zombies! and, yes, Pokemon GO!

This is really at the heart of the whole thing and why I think mobile gaming is the “future” of gaming. I don’t mean that in the future we’ll only be playing games on our phone. Good God, for all my pushing of the platform that’s a world even I wouldn’t want to live in. Can you imagine the eye-strain? What I mean is that the mobile platform is going to be the first platform, perhaps since the inception of gaming, that has a way to play games that literally cannot be played on any other platform. Even some of the less-substantial games I mentioned before – games like Clash of Clans, Avengers Academy, Tiny Tower and the like – benefit so much from the accessibility that mobile gaming provides that I don’t think you could ever experience them properly on any platform other than a phone or tablet. Perhaps a portable console like the 3DS or Vita could emulate the experience, but even the act of having to flick the device open and power it up would kill the sort of frequent and unobtrusive attentiveness that these games rely on to succeed.

You can argue that these games – both AR games and so-called “idle” games – are insubstantial and easily dismissed as such, but I’d counter by saying we have yet to truly see what these types of games are capable of. Between the prevailing mentality that mobile gaming is a haven for either unethical cash-grabs or lazy and shallow not-games (and the industry’s lack of willingness to turn this popular opinion around) and the fact that the technology, while growing stronger every year, lags intensely behind other modern gaming platforms, I think it’s safe to say no one’s truly tried to see how mobile can be used as anything other than an easy money delivery service.

There is no reason AR games and idle games can’t give us something substantial, something big. Pokémon GO!, for all of its failings (and there are quite a few), shows remarkable promise as an actual game after the sort of experiment that Ingress presented. Yes, I realize many people “play” Ingress, but its value as a game, rather than simply a “go here and push a button” simulator, is questionable. Pokémon GO! provides more game content than its somewhat venerable big brother, and Niantic promises more and more will be added. Whether we will ever see that before the game utterly tanks, which seems to be the direction that it’s going, is up for debate but does not remove its value as an illustrative example of what the platform can deliver.

But even ignoring the game’s current state, and even beyond the promises Niantic has given us, imagine what Pokémon GO! could be. Imagine a game with over 700 (likely well over 800 come this autumn with the launch of Pokémon Sun and Moon) pokémon to find; a game where you can see someone down the street hunting for pokémon and challenge them to a friendly battle; a game where you can travel the world to compete in tournaments and have a different game experience everywhere you go; a game with events that challenge you to go to certain landmarks and find legendary pokémon or stop Team Rocket schemes. Imagine what the game could be.

Now imagine a Digimon game in the same vein with a companion Digivice app in which you train your monster and hunt invading digimon to fight them back into the digital world. Imagine a Dungeons and Dragons game in which you create a character and chase griffons and dragons around your hometown and rescue princesses (or princes!) from goblins that have fortified themselves at local landmarks – all the while gaining experience for distance traveled as well as objectives completed. Imagine a war game in which you form a temporary and uneasy alliance with your nextdoor neighbor and train troops before marching with them downtown to take the gas station from rival armies.

If technology has taught us anything, it’s that if you can imagine it, you can do it. You just have to find out how.

The truth is, virtual reality – which is the recent development that most pundits laud as the “future” of gaming despite its own egregious flaws – can only really change how we perceive games. It’s not an insubstantial technological leap, just like every console generation brings with it new graphical technologies and, with them, shiny new mud-splatter physics, but it doesn’t fundamentally change how we experience gaming or, at its most extreme, how gaming changes how we experience the world around us. Mobile games like Pokémon GO!, Ingress, Run! Zombies! and their ilk, while perhaps stumbling at times, truly show us gaming experiences that can be experienced nowhere but on mobile devices, a sort of gaming that is not possible without a device that is so integrated with the world around us that is uses the world itself as a platform for its experience.

I know it may seem like I’m still riding a high of Pokémon GO! hype in this piece, and maybe I am (it took me so long to regurgitate this opinion that I don’t know if Pokemon GO! has a lot of hype at the moment though, between all of Nintendo/Niantic’s missteps and the simple course of time), but I think the game’s success, despite its (many) failings, shows that the world is ready to see what mobile gaming can really do.

But in order to see that, the medium is going to need some pretty significant champions…and I don’t think Nintendo is that champion. Because Nintendo is a business – a business whose sole aim is to make money. What mobile gaming needs is visionaries who are willing to take a risk on the medium, someone who is willing to break through the perceived stench of money-grubbing, cash-in bullshit that hangs over over the mobile market like a pall. And don’t get me wrong, this is going to take a lot of work. There are few legitimate efforts to make the mobile medium into something respectable in a way that couldn’t be done elsewhere. Sure we have games like the Final Fantasy series and This War of Mine that have received ports onto mobile platforms, and even games that seem to have been designed from the ground up with mobile in mind like Sword and Sworcery. But none of these games tap the medium, challenge it, in a way that truly shows what it, and only it, can do. I think augmented reality is the first real step towards this mobile gaming renaissance, but we’re going to need more developers willing to take this plunge, willing to show what mobile games can do besides just hook whales and cheat unsuspecting parents out of thousands of dollars. Mobile gaming needs its Notch, its Jonathan Blow, its Phil Fish, people who believe in the medium as something worth believing in, and who are willing to take chances with it.

We need someone to take mobile gaming seriously so that we, as gamers, can see what it’s really and fully capable of and I think that then, and only then, will we see the “future of gaming” that everyone has so readily, hastily, and preemptively assigned to virtual reality. Until that happens, we’re going to continue to see this promising medium continue to be squandered, its good name slandered by those who see it only as a cheap cash-in.（source：gamasutra）