概述

Phyne Games是位于墨西哥城的独立电子游戏工作室。工作室旨在制作表达本土文化的有趣作品。

《Mictlan》诞生于某家星巴克，当时我和Yahir在此展开讨论，一天下来，我们确定具体目标：制作我们的首款游戏。几个月后，我们完成这款作品。

Mictlan Promo from gamasutra.com

表现突出之处

开发工具和目标平台

在项目开发初始，我们有三点非常明确：制作一款墙面防御游戏，基于“死人节”主题，瞄准手机平台。随后我们选定Windows Phone 7，这是游戏不多的新平台，最重要的是，我们具备制作游戏的工具，无需在此花费金钱。

XNA 4.0 SDK和Visual Studio Express都无需付费。我们采用专业版Visual Studio，因为学生无需付费，此外我们也无需支付微软的99美元Marketplace内容发行费用。

我之前有接触过XBox 360和Windows的XNA（游戏邦注：实现跨平台的软件工具），我之前在大学的几个项目都是基于XNA，我觉得自己完全有能力在WP7采用同样的技术。如果我们选择iPhone，就需要花时间学习另一种技术。

XNA采用C#编程语言，我有JAVA背景，所以C#算是个自然跨越。虽然C#遵循高层次的规则，但我们从未在手机平台遇到过严重的运行问题。

Gameplay from gamasutra.com

正如iPhone一样，WP7的标准硬件规格让我们能够省下众多时间，无需调节游戏，以适应各种不同的平台。尽管做出承诺，但当《Mictlan》在Marketplace发行时，我们发现法国玩家无法顺利运行游戏（游戏在法国获得的评分是1/5星），有评论称游戏页面过于空白。调查后我们发现，其他开发者也存在相同问题，真是不可思议。

在《Mictlan》中，XNA和C#堪称完美搭档，而且也几乎是唯一选择（Silverlight是另一选择）。在开发末尾，我们制作出若干基于Unity 3D的原型，我们很喜欢这个引擎，我们考虑未来在自己的iPhone/Android/Web游戏中都采用此引擎。遗憾的是，WP7不支持Unity 3D。

艺术风格和主题

初次看到《Mictlan》，玩家的反应是：“非常惊人”。在设计游戏时，我们非常清楚，视觉风格必须有墨西哥特色，但不要过于本土化，令外国玩家丧失兴趣。游戏包含许多微妙的墨西哥元素，我的意思是说，并非随处都有Mariachi Sombrero。

Vineta from gamasutra.com

游戏艺术旨在从不同角度和玩家分享死亡的乐趣，这个视角更加活跃、有趣和幽默。主角Luno是普通墨西哥儿童和当代典型儿童的结合体。

我们的沟通

我和Yahir在配合彼此工作安排上遇到很多问题，通常，重要谈话都是在星巴克或午餐时间进行。帮助我们保持联系的一个重要工具是Yammer，这是个免费网站，你可以通过社交网络、私聊信息及发帖之类的传统方式同团队保持联络。我们还通过Yammer上传素材。GTalk和Skyper也是很棒的工具，但我们沟通和分享内容的官方渠道是Yammer。

我们将GitHub付费账户当作项目的资源库，通过每月支付不到10美元的费用，我们的项目得以安全地保存在云端。我是唯一使用资源库的成员，Yahir和Enrique将素材上传至Yammer，然后我将内容添加至项目中，然后发送至GitHub。重要的是，要记得对项目内容进行备份。

PhyneTeam from gamasutra.com

团队随时去除无效内容

在开发过程中，我们遇到过缺乏可行性或视觉效果很糟的内容，当出现这种情况时，我们随时都会去除或调整可能给游戏产生消极影响的内容。

这种态度对于开发团队来说非常重要。之前在学校制作其他项目时，有些成员总是觉得批评具有攻击性，因此选择离开。配备优秀的美工、程序员、设计师和音乐家非常重要。但团队愿意尽自己所能创造出杰出的作品也非常重要。

Game Jams和Dev Houses

我们在有些阶段的工作效率出现下滑。由于学校或工作事务，我们的进展非常缓慢。我们参加了一个Game Jam和若干Super Happy Dev Houses活动，这有效提高我们的积极性。

这些活动不仅扩宽我们的人脉，还让我们获得有关游戏和编程方面的回馈，他们的意见颇有价值。《Mictlan》通过这些活动得到很大突破。

大家的一致建议是，你应该多参加这些活动，有很多东西需要共同学习和分享。我知道地下室是个编程的好地方，但和杰出人士接触也能够让我们受益匪浅。

Map from gamasutra.com

失误之处

没有用于测试的手持设备

我们从开发《Mictlan》当中学到的第一点是：不应基于自己在开发初期不具备的设备设计游戏。显然这存在例外情况，例如，如果你瞄准iPhone制作Unity游戏，而手中只有Android设备，你也可以完成测试工作。问题是，你已投入3个月开发内容，但只是在电脑的模拟器上进行测试工作。当收到WP7移动设备，就所制作的内容进行测试时，我们发现多数内容在设备的屏幕上都显得过小，玩法会受到用户手指的影响。所以我们做出系列调整，以解决这些问题。

拿到手机设备并无法解决所有问题，因为我是唯一能够每天就内容进行测试的成员，Yahir只能够每周测试几次。现在，给开发团队配备足够设备变成优先考虑事项，这样所有人都能够看到游戏。

无人负责营销工作

非常重要！这一问题在如今《Mictlan》入驻Marketplace后变得越发严峻。当我们发行游戏时，我们坚信自己无需进行宣传，因为这一类型的游戏数目不多。大错特错，虽然这点看起来平淡无奇，但我还是要强调，务必安排人员负责在网站、杂志、twitter和facebook等平台发布消息。

举个例子，当《Mictlan》投放至marketplace2个月时，只有350位用户下载游戏，随后当我们腾出时间发布游戏相关消息时，1周内就有2500位用户下载这款游戏。

Scene from gamasutra.com

没有期限的冗长开发周期

刚着手《Mictlan》时，我们认为3个月内就能完成项目。这是我们的首个大型项目，我们不知道要如何安排开发时间。最糟的是，我们直到项目结尾才执行不尽人意的计划，因为在取得多次巨大进展后，我们认为自己只需再几个月就能够完成项目。

现在，我们打算采用若干敏捷开发技巧。我曾在某公司接触了9个月的SCRUM，这定能够给《Mictlan》带来有效帮助。这里，我推荐设计师们阅读两本书，一本是《Agile Game Development with SCRUM》，书中详细论述SCRUM在游戏开发中的应用，另一本是《Practices of an Agile Developer》，书中提供很多宝贵意见，告诉开发者如何多快好省地做事。

scoreScreenOld from gamasutra.com

质量保证

我们的QA工作有些不足，主要集中在项目末尾（游戏邦注：在项目完工前3个月）。朋友、家人和同事都帮我们发现漏洞，进一步就内容做出完善。例如，早先的GUI（图形用户界面）有些令人困惑，所以我们就将特效和新元素添加至hud，旨在让游戏变得更易于理解。

此外，我们还需要将用户反馈方式设置成自动化模式，因为Marketplace的评论不足以追踪漏洞，也许可以考虑向网站服务发送报告。我正在考虑Get Satisfaction，《Draw Something》也采用这一服务，这将是个可行选择。

平衡问题

游戏的首个版本过于随意，改变角色行为的方式太少。下个版本将截然不同：游戏平衡方面将包含更多灵活性，这些参数源自XML文件，任何人都能够进行修改。

Gameplay 02 from gamasutra.com

我们希望能够在无需安排新人员的情况下完成游戏平衡工作。至少就测试而言，游戏要能够连接至网络服务，检索XML文件，然后通过邮件或其他东西，测试者能够发送反馈信息，我们只需要调整文件数据，重新启动游戏。

总结

《Mictlan》是我们的首款作品，我们对于玩家的反应非常满意，其中包含很多正面反馈，对此我们非常开心，但同时也有许多负面评论，这令我们意识到，我们还需要采取更多举措，方能制作出完美的游戏。

现在我们变成一个稳固团队，其实我们有邀请外部人员加入。我们对于未来发展充满期待，我们希望尝试新东西。基于我们积累的经验，我们非常期待采取下步举措，着手更大规模的项目。

个人来说，我想要邀请若干墨西哥游戏开发同伴分享他们的经验，这样我们就不会犯下相同错误。墨西哥有很多杰出人才，现在大家是时候该团结起来了。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Mictlan Postmortem

by Arturo Nereu

Introduction

Phyne Games is an independent video game studio from Mexico City. The studio was born from the desire we have to make games that express our culture – Mexican – but also be fun.

Mictlan was created in a Starbucks, Yahir and I started brainstorming and by the end of the day we had a clear objective: to finish our first game. And a few months later, we made it.

What went right?

Development tools and target platform

At the beginning of the development, we had three things clear: create a wall defense game, with the Día de Muertos theme for a mobile device. Then we picked Windows Phone 7, it was a new platform with few games and the most important thing; we had the tools to make a game without any need to pay anything.

XNA 4.0 SDK and Visual Studio Express are free. We used the Professional edition of Visual Studio because for students it is free along with the 99 dollars fee that Microsoft charges to publish apps and games on the Marketplace.

I had previous experience with XNA in XBox 360 and Windows, some of my university projects were developed with XNA and I felt prepared to use the same technology on WP7. If we had chosen iPhone, I would have had to spend development time learning another technology.

XNA uses C# as a programming language, I had a JAVA background so C# was a natural step. Despite the high level order of C#, we never had serious performance issues on the mobile device.

As with iPhone, having a standard hardware specification on WP7, saved us a lot of time that had been devoted to adapt the game to many different devices. Despite the promise, when Mictlan reached the Marketplace we noticed that French players were having problems running the game (our average grade in France is 1 out of 5 stars) and the comments said that the game screen was blank. After investigating, we found out that other developers are having the same problems … weird.

XNA and C# were a great combination for Mictlan, besides being almost the only alternative (Silverlight is another one). At the end of the development, we made a couple of prototypes using Unity 3D and we loved the engine, we are considering using it for our iPhone / Android / Web games. The bad news is that there are no signals of Unity 3D for WP7.

Art style and theme

When people first sees Mictlan their reaction is: “It looks amazing”. When we designed the game we had very clear that the visual style should be very Mexican but without being too local and not appealing to the foreign public. There are a lot of Mexican elements in the game that we think are very subtle, I mean, there is not a Mariachi Sombrero everywhere.

The art in the game tries to share with the players the joy of death from another perspective, one that is more active, fun and with humor. Our main character, Luno, is a mix of a common Mexican kid with the contemporary universal kid.

Our Communication

Yahir and I had a lot of problems with our schedules in order to work together, generally, the important talks happened at a Starbucks or during lunch time. A great tool that helped us to never lose touch was Yammer, is a free site where you can communicate with a team via the traditional ways of a social network, direct messages, posts, etc. We also used Yammer to upload the assets. GTalk and Skyper were other great tools but the official channel to communicate and share anything was Yammer.

We used a GitHub paid account as a project repository, for less than 10 dollars per month we had our project safe on the cloud. I was the only one who used the repository, Yahir and Enrique uploaded the assets to Yammer, then I added them to the project and then pushed to GitHub. The important thing is to be sure that you have a back up of your project.

Team ready to dismiss broken stuff

During development, we ran into things that didn’t work or looked bad in the game, when this happened, we were open to dismiss or change the stuff that may affect the game in a negative way.

This attitude is important in a development team. When we worked in other game projects at school, some people thought that every comment was offensive and some of them just left the team. It is very important to have brilliant artists, programmers, designers, musicians, etc. But is also very important to have a team that is willing to make everything to finish an amazing game.

Game Jams and Dev Houses

We had some stages where our productivity decreased. Because of school or work, our progress was small. We attended a Game Jam and some Super Happy Dev Houses that helped us with a boost.

These events helps a lot with networking (we met Enrique Ibarra, sound designer, at the Global Game Jam) but also to get some feedback from people that knows about games, programming and whose perspective is very valuable. There were major advances on Mictlan during those events.

The general recommendation to everyone is that you must attend to those events, there is a lot to learn and share. I know that a basement is a great place to code, but interacting with bright people helps a lot.

What went wrong?

Not having a handheld device for testing

The very first thing we learned from Mictlan development is: you should not make a game for a platform that you don´t have in early development stages. Obviously there are some exceptions, for example if you are making a Unity game for iPhone and only have Androids, it is ok to test. The thing is that you have three months of development and you only test on a simulator in the computer. When we received a WP7 device to test, we found many things that were too small for the screen and that the gameplay was affected by the user´s finger. So we made several changes to solve the problems.

Having a Phone did not solve all our problems, because I was the only who could test the game every day, Yahir could only test it a couple of times per week. Now, this will be a priority, having enough devices for the development team or multiple builds so everyone is able to see the game.

Nobody was in charge of marketing

Very important! This point is probably the one that hurts us more now that Mictlan is in the Marketplace. When we launched the game, we were very confident that we did not needed marketing because it was not a saturated catalogue out there. Big mistake, and even if it seems obvious, I really want to emphasize that is a must to have someone in charge of sharing the news to websites, magazzines, twitter, facebook, etc.

As an example, when Mictlan had two months on the marketplace only 350 people downloaded the game, when I took some time to share about the game, we received 2,500 downloads in just a week.

Long development time with no deadlines

When we started Mictlan, we thought that in about three months the game would be finished. It was our first big project and we had no idea how to project the duration of the development time. The worst part is that we carried our bad planning until the end of the project because after every big advance, we thought that we needed just a couple of months more to finish.

Now, we are going to implement some agile development techniques. I worked at a company for nine months using SCRUM and it would have helped us a lot with Mictlan. Here, I can recommend two books for every game developer out there Agile Game Development with SCRUM with an amazing explanation of SCRUM for game development and Practices of an Agile Developer with tons of invaluable advices for developers and how to do more with less.

Quality Assurance

Our QA process was scarce and came at the end of the development (three months before completion). Friends, family and colleagues helped us to spot bugs and improvement opportunities. For example, the previous GUI was confusing, so we added effects and new elements on the hud to make the game easier to understand.

Also, we need to automate the way we get feedback from players because the comments on the Marketplace are not enough to track bugs, maybe sending reports to a web service.  I´ve been checking Get Satisfaction, Draw Something uses it and this can be a great alternative for us.

Enemy Spawner / Balancing

The Enemy Spawner never convinced me, in fact the first version was too random, with few ways to change its behavior. The next iteration is a different story: there is more flexibility to balance the game, those parameters comes from an XML file that can be modified by almost anyone.

We want to implement a way to balance the game without the need to generate a new build. At least for testing, the game should be able to connect to a web service and retrieve the XML files, then via mail or something else, the tester can send the feedback and we just need to change the values on the file and restart the game.

Conclusion

Mictlan is our first game and we are very happy with the response from the players, there is a lot of positive feedback that makes us smile but also the negative feedback makes us realize that we have a lot of work to do in order to deliver the perfect game.

Now, we are a solid team, in fact we have invited some guys to come abroad. We are very excited with what is coming, we want to experiment with new things. With what we have learned, is an amazing moment to take the next step and create something more ambitious.

Personally, I want to invite my fellow Mexican game developers to share their experiences so we won’t make the same mistakes again. There is a lot of talent in Mexico, now is a great time to collaborate.（Source：gamasutra）

如今的Facebook已经拥有近10亿用户，什么力量才能够推翻这个巨头呢？不管是政府的干预，手机领域的崛起还是社交网站的衰败，即使不会彻底摧毁Facebook，也会严重打击到这一巨头对于整个市场的影响力。

以下我将列出阻碍马克·扎克伯格创造连接世界梦想的4大因素。

这四大因素的共同点是都能够摧毁Facebook的影响力。如果你不能访问这个网站，它充斥过多广告，或者出现了一个比它更好的网站，还是用户只是觉得这个网站变得无趣了等等，不管哪一点对于Facebook来说都是致命打击。

不过老实来说，Facebook的规模，网络效应以及广泛的领导力都能够帮助它战胜这些威胁。我认为Facebook有能力长期站在胜利者的宝座上。但是不管怎么样，胜利者的威胁仍然存在：

1.失去时髦色彩

Facebook可不想只是让大家赶赶时髦，它更希望发挥实用性。它希望成为像手机或电视机一样的存在，而不是Virgin Mobile（游戏邦注：法国市场最大的移动虚拟运营商维珍移动公司）或HBO（总部位于美国纽约的有线电视网络媒体公司，电视联播网）。而Facebook受欢迎的一大原因便是它起源于常春藤联盟（包括哈佛在内的美国东北部八所高校）。凭借着这一威望，该网站迅速红遍美国各所高校，并占领了青年到青少年这一广阔的市场。在美国引起了巨大热潮后Facebook又转向世界继续发展。

facebook-cool(from techcrunch)

但是现在，你妈妈也注册了Facebook，你奶奶，教师，小表弟甚至连水管工也都有自己的Facebook帐号了。这成了一个大众普及的平台，实用性是维持Facebook有效运转的重要原因，但是对大众来说这种效能却是非常脆弱的。扎克伯格即将奔三，他将不再以热血青年的身份去挑战成人世界。现在已经有人开始对这个平台报以怀疑和冷漠态度。

今天社交网站上的一些竞争者刚开始时一般是走精英路线，但他们最终也会逐渐步入Facebook的发展轨迹。这些网站是针对年轻用户而设计，他们将邀请一些名人帮忙宣传并塑造一个细分市场以快速增强自己的力量。这一切将Facebook显得越发古板和无趣。一般Facebook用户都不希望每天再继续面对一些无聊的内容了。而这便是Facebook真正需要应对的挑战。

2.移动市场和广告收益

有业内人士指出，仅靠广告运营并不足以令Facebook的1千亿美元身价名至实归。我们需要从一个更广的层面进行思考。而现在，我们真正需要担心的是移动领域的发展。

facebook-ads-done(from techcrunch)

手机设备的有限空间不足以支撑过多广告以及Facebook的各种功能。现在，手机平台的Facebook一天只能提供给用户少许的新闻推送广告，而在网页上，Facebook每页就可以显示4至7个广告。而如果Facebook在手机设备上发布过多广告，也将会严重影响这种平台的使用性。随着越来越多Facebook用户开始从网页转移到手机平台上，面向于提供全方位服务的Facebook最终将获得越来越少的收益。

为了应对这一挑战，Facebook开始大量收购各种手机服务公司，如Instagram，希望以此推动他们的网站和应用吸引更多注意。尽管Facebook拥有5亿多的手机用户，但是大多数用户却对于其手机应用速度感到极其不满。有些用户认为这些手机应用过于杂乱，也有些用户抱怨其缓慢的加载速度。

对于Facebook来说手机便是最大的威胁，该公司也承认了这一点。如果Facebook不能创造出更多富有吸引力的手机应用并从这个小屏幕上挣得更多利益，那么从网页到手机的转变也将预示着Facebook走向衰败。

3.来自下一个“扎克伯格”的竞争

Facebook并不担心来自Twitter，Google+或其它国际巨头公司的威胁。因为事实已经证明这些竞争对手不足以吸引Facebook现有用户的注意，甚至不能够吸引其他公众的广泛关注。他们真正需要担心的是出现另一个能够将Facebook转变成下一个Myspace的“马克·扎克伯格”。

Mark Zuckerberg (from techcrunch)

虽然Facebook能够大量收购来自各大公司（像Instagram）的顶尖人才，但将扎克伯格这样的人才拉拢到Facebook旗下将更加困难（因为这些人才也会选择自立门户，与Facebook展开竞争）。除此之外Facebook还需要提防当前顶尖人才出走成立新公司挑战Facebook。

同时，一些较大的硬件变革如佩戴于眼镜上的电脑，全息图或其他尖端应用也有可能置Facebook于死地。不过到了那时候，初创企业也都需要面临极端激烈的“战斗”，就像Facebook刚出现那样。

4.政府干预及排挤

Facebook不能进入中国市场，还有一些国家也限制了Facebook，如伊朗，朝鲜以及叙利亚等。而这也等于约束了该社交网站的发展潜力。但是如果Facebook因为与政府发生争辩而遭到更多国家的排挤，这将导致更多用户转向其它社交网站。这种排挤也导致Facebook难以在一个拥有大量网络用户的高价值市场中获得盈利。举个例子来说吧，新加坡虽然是一个非常有价值的市场，但是该国政府却严格地限制了Facebook的使用。

government(from techcrunch)

此外，政府对隐私的监管也会影响Facebook的发展并降低其竞争力。Facebook勉强度过了美国联邦贸易委员会和欧盟的隐私审计。而如果其核心市场的政府开始约束Facebook新产品或者功能的发而方式，其它初创企业便会趁虚而入。想象一下如果Facebook的地理定位服务Places受到限制，那么Foursquare将会给该公司带来多大的威胁！（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Here’s What Could Kill Facebook

Josh Constine

Facebook is nearing a billion users, but what could topple the big blue giant? Government intervention, the shift to mobile, and a loss of “cool” all have the power to violently disrupt the social network, or at least cause it to lose its strong grip on the market.

Here’s a countdown of the four things that could ruin Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of a single site that connects the world.

The thread that runs between all these pitfalls is their potential to make Facebook irrelevant. If you can’t access it, its overrun by ads, there’s something better, or it’s simply uncool, Facebook could fade away.

It’s size, network effect, and wise leadership could protect it from these threats, and honestly, I think Facebook has the potential to be successful for a long, long time. But if you had to bet against Facebook, let’s count down to the #1 biggest threat you’d be betting on.

1. Losing Its Cool

Facebook doesn’t want to be cool. It wants to be a utility. It wants to be the cell phone or the television, not Virgin Mobile or HBO. But the fact is that a big reason Facebook is so popular is because it started by being accessible to only the most envied demographic in the world: Ivy League college students like those at Harvard. It used that prestige to spread like wildfire on every American college campus, and the sexiness of young adulthood to capture the teenage market. Its popularity in the trendsetting United States soon pulled in the rest of the world.

But now your mom is on Facebook. You grandma, professor, little cousins, and plumber are too. It’s not exclusive anymore. Usefulness is what keeps it afloat, but cold, dry, utility for everyone is vulnerable. And soon Zuckerberg will be 30, and he might no longer be seen as the geeky boy genius challenging the adults. He’ll be one of those adults. There are already signs that apathy and distrust for Facebook are setting in.

The slick destroyer of today’s social network would be something that starts elite but that gradually opens up like Facebook did. It would be designed specifically for the hip and young in-crowd. It would recruit big celebrities and carve out an influential niche from which to grow its power. This could be what makes Facebook seem old and boring. And the average Facebook user doesn’t want to go somewhere boring every day. That’s what their jobs are for.

2. Smaller Screens, Small Ad Revenue

Staying afloat on display ads won’t be enough for the social network to justify or surpass its ~$100 billion valuation, as Chris Dixon writes. It will have to think bigger. But for now, it has to worry about mobile.

Handheld devices have less room for ads and Facebook’s long list of features. Currently, Facebook only shows a few mobile news feed ads per user per day, while it shows as many as four to seven ads per page on the web. But if Facebook chokes mobile with too many ads, usage could plummet. As more users shift the time they spend on Facebook from the web to mobile, it will make less of the money that keeps the lights on for the whole service.

To counteract this, Facebook is aggressively acquiring and hiring from mobile companies like Instagram in hopes of getting its mobile site and apps up to draw more eyeballs. However, while it has a huge footprint of over 500 million mobile users, there’s widespread discontent with the speed of its mobile apps. Many people think they’re cluttered, and complain of slow loading speeds.

Mobile is the biggest threat to Facebook, and the company admits it. If it can’t make more compelling mobile apps and earn more money from these small screens, the shift to mobile will see Facebook lowered into its own grave.

3. Competition From The Next Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook doesn’t actually need to worry much about Twitter, Google+, or international players. They’ve failed to offer something revolutionary enough to make early adopters ditch Facebook, or mainstream enough to appeal to everyone. What big blue needs to worry about is the next social product visionary, the next Mark Zuckerberg that could turn Facebook into the next Myspace.

While acquiring and acq-hiring top talent from companies like Instagram was easy when it had pre-IPO stock to throw around, recruiting that next Zuck to side with Facebook rather than wage war against it is about to get tougher. Same goes for keeping its current rock stars from leaving to start a true competitor.

It might take a big hardware change like eyewear computers, holograms, or apps you download straight to your brain to finally make Facebook obsolete. Even then that upstart would have quite the uphill battle, but so did Facebook when it launched.

4. Big Brother

Facebook is banned in China and access is or has been restricted in several countries including Iran, North Korea, and Syria. Right now this is limiting the social network’s growth potential. But if disputes with governments over what content is appropriate cause it to be shut out of more countries, these roadblocks could divert users to other local social networks. That would fracture the value that comes with having such a high percentage of Internet users in one place. For example, Singapore is a valuable market with a strict government that could drop the ban hammer on Facebook.

Regulation around privacy could also slow Facebook down and make it more vulnerable to competition. Facebook narrowly escaped privacy audits from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the European Union. If the government of a core market put restrictions on how Facebook can launch new products or what features it can show where, it could create opportunities for startups to eat Facebook’s lunch. Imagine how much bigger a threat Foursquare would be if Facebook had been restricted from launching its Places location service.（source：techcrunch）

3D动画似乎有些令人望而却步？我能体会如果没有这方面经验但想要成为美术设计师会是什么感觉。如果你依然基于线条进行思考，那么你多半无法适应。人类总是习惯于在思维局限范围内进行思考，这就是我们所接受的教育方式。但在工作中采用道教哲学能够帮你快速克服某天需要接触3D内容的畏惧心理。我的意思是：以相同方式看待2D和3D图像。

pic 01 from gamasutra.com

美术内容相当复杂。通常你会很长一段时间里徒劳无功，你会受到以此作为职业追求人士的打击。他们会说，“画家？我说的是真正的工作！”我们应该庆幸自己生活在这样一个年代，美术工作如今倍受重视，变得越发重要。电脑的诞生促使用户广泛接受科学和数学的可视化应用，因此动画逐渐在许多学科中扮演重要角色，包括教育和医学。

多数业余美术人员都是从二维视角着手，通过纸笔创作自己的作品。我们很容易理解为什么业余爱好者的作品会被完全排除在三维媒介之外，但我们可以通过很多方式克服这一问题。

1. 个人美术视角不要完全采用二维模式

还记得自己童年第一次接触绘画？你上网搜索如何画皮卡丘，你看到一个将角色分解成简单形状的略图？很多人会觉得这是另一种形式的描摹。如果你有发现，描摹通常会和原始作品如出一辙，这是个透视图。新手通常会将透视图局限看作是自己同纸张的统一关系，但其实透视图始于你脑中的构思。在美术世界，描摹通常不被推崇，因为它不利于画家构思自己的作品。我们通常觉得这会只会带来些许风格调整，但透视法是画家创作时应该遵循的主导哲学。

group sketch from gamasutra.com

人体素描非常棘手，你无法一夜练就。它需要画家综合把握许多科学，例如人类学、肌肉学，甚至是心理学，进而确定脸部的细节元素。Norman Rockwell（游戏邦注：其美术风格在《军团要塞》中表现得淋漓尽致）主张以卡通风格呈现现实主义。业余观察者会将游戏的风格简单描述成现实主义，但作为艺术品，我觉得它更像是“人物讽刺画”。

如果你只是将脸部看作是系列线条，那么你就没有抓住要领。不要觉得铅笔画在3D作品的构思中有多么重要。

脸部不是处于平面状态。我相信你知道岁月痕迹在美术中的重要性。“你在人物的脸部添加更多线条，他看起来就会更老。”这大致是成立的。脸部是复杂的生物结构，它表现年龄的方式和身体其他部位不同，在美术中，朴素的脸庞更能够带给人年轻的感觉；在实际运用方面，在着眼于线条艺术的单个视角前先把握骨骼结构和肌肉机制这一点非常重要。

2. 在3D空间中创建立体模型

thumbnail from gamasutra.com

不要以此看待角色的动画发展潜能：

pic 02 from gamasutra.com

但是要从这样的视角入手。

3. 以关卡设计概念图的绘制方式绘制背景

我算不上优秀的背景美工，所以对此不妨持保留态度，但我觉得你可以在背景创作中也坚持这一方式。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

3D Animation: A Premeditative Outlook

by Kevin Tufano

3D animation seems pretty scary huh? I know how it feels to want to be an artist with no experience with the medium… It almost seems impossible to get acoustumed to if you’re still thinking with lines. It’s normal for the human psyche to think with absolute constraits of thought, that’s how we’re raised usually. Bare with me, but adopting a Taoist philosophy with your work could help you leaps and bounds overcome the daunting prospect of some day working with 3D materials. What I mean by this is this: think of your 2D art the same way you think of 3D art.

Art is hard. It’s usually thankless for a long time, you’re generally oppressd by people for wanting it as a carrer. “Artist?” they say, “I’m talking about a real job!” We should be thankful to live in a generation where now, more than ever, the artists work is appreciated and necessary in the work place. With the advent of computers giving a more more adopted sense to us as users the visual application of science and mathmatics, animation is useful to many many disciplines, including education and medicine.

Most amature artists start out in a 2 dimensional perspective, working with confinement of pencils and papers to produce their work. It’s easy to see how an amature could view their work as being entirely removed from the 3 dimensional medium, but there are lots of ways to overcome this.

1. Stop working with an absolute 2 dimension in your personal perspective of art.

Remember when you were first starting out as a kid? You’d go online and look up how to draw Pikachu and you’d be given an outline of breaking up the character into simple shapes? Most people stick with this simply as another method of tracing. If you’ll notice, traced work is missing a fundamental difference of the original work, which is perspective. A novice generally views prspective within the relationship of his comitment to the paper, but perspective actually starts inside of your mind. In the art world, tracing is generally discouraged since it’s detrimental to the artists conception of his work. People assume this lends itself only to style presets, but perspective is the msot governing philsoophy an artist takes when creating any drawing.

Life drawing is tricky, and it’s not something you learn overnight. it requires a LOT of study across many fields of science such as anthropology, myology, and even psychology when determing what is a relatively minute detail of the face. Norman Rockwell, the most explicit reference used in Team Fortress’s art style, is a cartoonish interpretation of realism. A casual observer would simply disect it as being realism, but as a work of art itself I feel it lends more appropriately to charicature, just a more masterful example.

If you simply look at the face itself as a series of lines you are missing the point. I really need to emphatsize discrediting your linework as being VERY important in conceptul apropriatism for 3D work, I would even go as far as to say in art in general.

The face is not flat. I’m sure you remember the value of age in the sense of art. “The more lines you add to a person’s face, the older he looks.” This is true in the vaugest sense. The face is a complex biological structure that lends itself to age differently than most of the body, and while in art a discreet apearance DOES tend to give the impression of youth, for exercises it’s more important to learn the valeus of the skeletal structure and muscular system before you get into anything of the sort of isolated perspective that line art takes you.

2. Work with your geometry in a 3D space.

Don’t think of your character’s potential for animation like this…

… But start thinking of them like this.

3. Draw backgrounds the same way you would draw level deign concept art.

I’m not a very good background artist, so take this with a grain of salt, but I figure that you can adopt this sensibility with backgrounds too.（Source：gamasutra）

51%社交游戏开发者同时也使用Unity，这种情况表明未来还将出现许多基于Unity的社交游戏。

social game flash engine(from indiegamepod.com)

Facebook仍是最受欢迎的社交游戏平台，83.5%受访者在Facebook平台发布游戏，47%受访者针对特定网站发布游戏，仅有16.8%受访者面向Google+开发游戏。在面向特定网站开发游戏的群体中，66.7%受访者同时也入驻Facebook平台。有19%的Facebook游戏开发者也推出了Google+版游戏，100%的Google+游戏开发者都是Facebook开发者。

2）据venturebeat报道，Facebook日前确认公司在纳斯达克上市的股票售价为28美元，将通过本次IPO集资160亿美元。

Facebook IPO(from capseo.com)

如果每股售价38美元，Facebook目前的市值就是1040亿美元（在此之前，Facebook股票定价范围是28-35美元，后来上升至34-38美元），这种情况表明，Facebook股票市场需求极大。

Facebook之前计划通过本次IPO出售3.374亿股票，但本周三又追加了8400万股，这意味着Facebook将出售4.212亿股票，此时CEO扎克伯格的表决权将降至55.8%。Facebook公司本身将掌握其中的1.8亿股，也就是它将通过这次交易收获68亿美元，而其他股票则将由现在的Facebook股东所出售。

3）尼尔森日前发布的Facebook发展数据显示，Facebook在2005-2009年之间仍处于初级发展阶段，该时期每年在美国流量增加2倍左右。在2009年1月，Facebook才一举超越MySpace成为美国头号社交游戏网络。

unique audience by country(from )

2006年11月份，Facebook美国独立访问用户首次突破1000万（现在的这一数据已将近1.53亿，也就是每三个美国活跃网民中，就有两个是Facebook用户）。但直到2008年4月份，Facebook英国用户才超过1000万，在法国、西班牙、德国的这一历程则更为漫长。

fb-global-visitors(from Nielsen)

bubble-graph(from Nielsen)

2012年3月，Facebook在美国电脑及手机浏览器平台收获的独立访问用户近1.53亿，在当月所有美国活跃网民中占比69.6%。同一时期Facebook巴西独立访问用户在该国活跃网民中占比76.7%，在新西兰的这一比例也将近80%，在意大利则覆盖了该国70.5%的人口。

4）市场调研公司Greenlight最近调查结果显示，有44%的Facebook用户“从来不”点击Facebook页面的赞助广告或展示广告（游戏邦注：美国通用汽车公司在本周二透露，公司将停止向Facebook投放广告，因为这种广告效能不甚理想。通用汽车将削减1000万美元的广告费用，但仍计划投入3000万美元通过Facebook展开营销活动，这种情况似乎印证了Greenlight的调查结果）。

facebook-display-ads-never(from venturebeat)

Greenlight调查样本为500名用户，其中包括学生、医务人员、会计、律师等群体，调查发现仅有3%受访者称自己会“定期”点击Facebook赞助广告，10%受访者“时常”点击广告。

30%以上的受访者称他们“极度不信任”Facebook处理用户个人数据的方式（Facebook广告计划允许广告商通过瞄准用户年龄、地理位置和兴趣爱好等个人数据，与8亿多潜在用户建立联系），但报告也指出那些点击Facebook广告的用户认为，这些广告内容“富有针对性和参与感”。

5）网络营销软件公司Wordstream最近发布的信息图表显示了Facebook与谷歌广告效能的对比情况：

从广告覆盖用户来看，Facebook与谷歌都处于一流水平，前者是全球最大社交网络，拥有8.45亿以上的月活跃用户，覆盖了51%的在线用户，每月页面访问量达1万亿；后者拥有全球最大的在线展示广告网络，在线用户覆盖率达90%， 每月广告印象达1800亿次。

但在广告营收和发展情况方面，Facebook落后于谷歌，Facebook在2012年第一季度广告收益为10.6亿美元，比2011年第四季度下降6.5%。而谷歌同一时期展示广告网络收益为29亿美元，比上一季度增长1%。

从广告效能来看，Facebok广告2010年在美国的CTR仅0.051%，低于2009年时的0.063%（游戏邦注：Facebook并未公开其广告的平均CTR，这是第三方分析公司Webtrends提供的数据）；谷歌广告的平均CTR是0.4%，几乎是Facebook广告的10倍左右；Facebook广告CPC平均为0.8美元，谷歌广告CPC平均为0.75美元。

在广告种类方面，Facebook仅提供了Facebook Ad和Sponsored Stories这两种选择，而谷歌广告却有文本广告、图片广告、视频广告、移动网络/手机游戏广告这四种类型。

facebook-vs-google-display-network(from wordstream)

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

1）Flash, Facebook lead social developer tech survey

by Patrick Miller

Game Developer magazine (Gamasutra’s sister publication) has published the results of its first-ever social and mobile developer technology survey in the May 2012 issue. (The May 2012 issue is now available via subscription and digital purchase).

Flash was the most popular development tool, with 59.2% of social game developers using it–though only 6.1% of developers reported using Flash’s Stage3D features for 3D graphics. Interestingly enough, 51% of social game developers also reported using Unity, so even though we haven’t seen many social games built in Unity released so far, it appears as though we’re about to see that change.

Facebook was the most popular social games platform, with 83.5% of surveyed developers publishing Facebook games, followed by 47% developing for a dedicated website, and only 16.8% developing for Google+. Of the games intended for a dedicated website, 66.7% are also targeting Facebook. 19% of Facebook developers are also developing Google+ versions of their games, while 100% of Google+ developers are also developing Facebook versions.

The full social/mobile tech survey offers more detail about server technology and cloud hosting services, desired middleware, analytics, and more.

The May 2012 issue of Game Developer also features a postmortem for Zynga’s Indiana Jones Adventure World, a deep dive into TERA’s free-targeting combat system, and more. You can purchase individual Game Developer issues or a subscription from the Game Developer web store, or download the Game Developer iOS app.（source:gamasutra）

2）Confirmed: Facebook sets $38 share price for largest tech IPO in U.S. history

Jennifer Van Grove

Status update: Facebook has priced its shares at $38 apiece and will raise $16 billion (up to $18.4 billion with its over-allotment option) tomorrow in its long-awaited initial public offering on the NASDAQ, the company has confirmed.

At $38 per share, Facebook’s valuation is $104 billion — but expect its market cap to skyrocket Friday as shares exchange hands at breakneck pace and at increasingly inflated prices.

Facebook was initially targeting a range between $28 and $35 share, but later upped the range to $34 to $38 a share. Coming in at the top of the range is an indication of the extremely strong demand for the offering, which will be the largest tech IPO in American history in terms of the amount of money it raises.

Also in response to overwhelming demand, the social network, which had been planning to sell 337.4 million shares through its offering, added 84 million shares to its offering on Wednesday. The eleventh-hour maneuver — shares were pooled together from Facebook investors — means that Facebook will sell 421.2 million shares through its offering, and that Zuckerberg’s voting power has been reduced to 55.8 percent. Of that pool, 180,000,000 of the shares will be Facebook’s, so the company itself will get about $6.8 billion from the transaction. The rest of the shares are being sold by current Facebook shareholders.

Additionally, the IPO’s underwriters have the option of selling 63.18 million shares — up from 50 million shares — in an over-allotment option bankers call the “greenshoe,” which is designed to control price volatility and extract more value from the IPO.

Today’s pricing means that Facebook has ticked the final checkbox on its must-complete list before becoming a publicly traded company. Friday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg and team will ring the opening bell in a remote ceremony at its Menlo Park headquarters that will be simultaneously broadcasted at the NASDAQ.

Facebook confirmed the news to VentureBeat and posted a press release confirming the $38 price after the market closed today.（source:venturebeat）

3）Facebook’s world takeover by the numbers

Jennifer Van Grove

With eight years, $2.2 billion in funding, and 901 million users under its belt, Facebook is set to become a public company. Thanks to data compiled by analytics firm Nielsen, we can revisit some of the more memorable moments of Facebook’s maturation process.

Between 2005 and 2009, for instance, Facebook was still working its way up the social networking food chain. During that period, the company managed to double its U.S. traffic each year, Nielsen found. In January 2009, Facebook surpassed competing social network MySpace to become the top social network in the U.S — and never looked back.

And here’s a fun tidbit you’ve probably forgotten: Facebook surpassed 10 million unique U.S. visitors for the first time in November 2006. Compare that to close to 153 million today — or more than two out of every three active online Americans — and you can see just how far the social network has come.

The company, however, wasn’t able to hit 10 million unique visitors in the UK until April 2008. In France, Spain, and Germany, the journey to 10 million uniques took even longer, but Facebook eventually passed those milestones in January, May, and November 2009, respectively.

But back to present day, we find that the social network reaches a majority of people active online in many of the countries where it is accessible.

In the U.S. in March, Facebook attracted a total of 152,763,000 unique visitors across work and home computers and mobile browsers. The figure represents reach to 69.6 percent of all adults active online in the month, according to Nielsen’s calculation.

Facebook also has an especially expansive reach in 10 other countries, including Brazil, Italy, the UK, Taiwan, France, and New Zealand. In Brazil, for instance, 76.7 percent of active online adults visited Facebook in March. In New Zealand, Facebook has nearly 80 percent reach to active online adults, and in Italy, the social network touches 70.5 percent of the population, based on Nielsen’s March 2012 data.

We’ve included a table and charts based on Nielsen’s data. Note that in New Zealand, Taiwan, the U.S., and Australia, Nielsen uses a hybrid measurement that incorporates mobile and tablet browser activity to calculate unique audience. In the other countries, expect for Switzerland, which shows measurement from home computers only, calculations reflect Facebook’s unique audience from home and work computers.（source:venturebeat）

4）Research: 44% of Facebook users will ‘never’ click sponsored ads

Sean Ludwig

Turns out GM might have been on to something. New research from marketing agency Greenlight shows 44 percent of Facebook’s users say that they will “never” click on sponsored posts or display ads on Facebook.

UPDATE: Facebook sets $38 share price for largest tech IPO in U.S. history.

General Motors caused a stir on Tuesday when it leaked that the company would stop running ads on Facebook due to them not being effective. GM will drop $10 million worth of ads, but it still plans to spend $30 million on marketing through Facebook. That story was poor timing for Facebook, which will have its record-breaking IPO this Friday.

For its 2011-2012 Search & Social Survey, Greenlight surveyed 500 people, including students, medical staff, accountants, lawyers, and others, to gain insight about their behavior on Facebook and their sentiments toward the company. On top of finding out 44 percent would never click on display ads, only 3 percent of respondents said they “regularly” clicked a sponsored ad; 10 percent said “often.”

Also notable is that 30 percent of those surveyed said they “strongly distrust” Facebook with their personal data, which somewhat lines up with the CNBC polling earlier this week, in which 59 percent of people said they distrust Facebook on user data.

“With over 30% of respondents saying they ‘strongly distrust’ Facebook with their personal data, Facebook’s advertising program has an upward struggle,” Hannah Kimuyu, director of paid media at Greenlight, said in a statement. “Facebook’s advertising program allows brands to connect with more than 800 million potential customers, through targeting their age, gender, location, and interests — in other words, personal data.”

One plus side to Greenlight’s report is that the users who did click on Facebook ads found “the targeting effective and engaging,” Kimuyu noted. Perhaps that’s a sign that people will be less wary of Facebook ads over time.（source:venturebeat）

5）Are Facebook ads really that bad?

John Koetsier

Facebook is getting ready for what may be history’s largest initial public offering for a tech company on Friday. But is it really a good business?

Maybe not, say an increasing number of critics, who point to how Facebook ads don’t work as well as marketers might hope. As a result, General Motors unfriended the social network, and now, says Larry Kim of internet marketing software firm Wordstream, Facebook ads aren’t converting surfers into customers effectively.

We’ve known for some time that Facebook ads have poor engagement. In fact, they have an average click-through rate of .05 percent, which is almost 10 times worse than Google’s display ad network.

That means that for every thousand viewers, precisely half a person will click on your Facebook ad.

For the full, ugly details, see Kim’s infographic at the bottom of this post.

Even for an increasingly ad-blind internet, that’s not just bad, it’s horrific. So VentureBeat talked to Kim and asked: What is it about Facebook ads that makes click-through rates so low?

“There are two factors, primarily,” said Kim. “The first has to do with ad formats. On Facebook, you have very vanilla, very basic ads only. They’re not very compelling, and not very engaging.

” In contrast, ad units on other sites or apps are richer, more media-centric, and more interactive. And, there’s simply more choice in style, size, and positioning.

“The second problem is ad targeting,” Kim said. “Facebook is really, really good at identifying demographics and interests, but not very good at deciphering intent.” In other words: Facebook knows who you are, but it doesn’t know very much about what you want right now. As Kim says, “Just because you like cars doesn’t mean you’re ready to buy a car today.”

The result is predictable: irrelevant ads. “We define relevancy as the right message to the right people at the right time,” says Kim. If a message isn’t relevant, you’d expect it to be ignored, and that’s what’s actually happening on Facebook, he says.

This, of course, compares poorly with Google, where intent is much clearer, particularly on searches. If someone is Googling for a specific keyword right now, it’s a pretty good indication of their intent — much better than the fact they “liked” Car & Driver‘s Facebook brand page some time ago.

So what’s causing the issue? Kim blamed lack of innovation. Sponsored ads were Facebook’s most recent ad format update, but Kim is not impressed. “I applaud Facebook for trying to be more engaging and relevant, but this is their second ad effort in six to seven years.”

“I wish Mr. Zuckerberg could be open to the possibility that ads would not ruin Facebook, and delivering the right ads could deliver value to both advertisers and users,” Kim said. “I think it would be really profound if they could get a clue.”（source:venturebeat）

Y U Play(from MocoSpace)

31%受访者承认自己曾经在课堂上玩手机游戏，其中有42%受访者称自己觉得上课太无趣所以才玩游戏，41%称自己是在课间休息时玩手机游戏。

调查发现MocoSpace平台55%的活跃用户每天在该网站上玩游戏时间超过总计超过1亿小时。

2）据Hollywood Reporter报道，Zynga首席技术官Dave Wehner在日前采访中表示，公司大部分营收增长和玩法应归功于手机应用（尤其是Android和iOS应用）。

他表示公司看好移动领域的发展前景，Zynga在智能手机游戏领域虽然还算不上佼佼者，但已经占据一定席位，Zynga在这一市场拥有大量发展机遇。

3）据insidemobileapps报道，Zynga最近手机游戏是《Zombie Swipeout》，它是一款僵尸主题的街机游戏，采用了与Halfbrick热作《水果忍者》相似的玩法机制。

Zombie-Machete-Coins(from insidemobileapps)

该游戏出自Zynga Mobile德国团队之手，可算是团队之前的塔防游戏《ZombieSmash!》续作（游戏邦注：该团队原名GameDoctors，在2011年10月被Zynga收购之前就已经投入开发《Zombie Swipeout》），要求玩家在触屏上划动手指消灭僵尸，但同时又不可让游戏主角Joey遇害，如果不幸触碰了Joey，玩家可以使用医药道具包继续玩游戏，否则就会导致后者丧命而结束游戏。

《水果忍者》在iOS平台推出的是0.99美元付费版本，但Zynga这款游戏则采用免费增值模式，支持玩家付费购买虚拟货币，但也推出了一个0.99美元、无广告的付费版本。

该游戏目前已入驻加拿大App Store，不久后将进入其他市场，并计划推出Android版本。

4）据《华尔街日报》报道，有匿名知情者透露苹果正下订单制造更宽屏的新一代iPhone，路透社跟进报道也得出了同样的结论。

large-iphone(from techcrunch)

据称下一代iPhone除了屏幕更大之外，还将采用4G网络技术，以及新的手机芯片集。虽然新款iPhone无法比目前的iPhone更厚，但它的屏幕可能会更长。因为4G芯片集目前还不如3G芯片集成熟，它们需要更高的功率以及更大的电池支持，所以iPhone不会更厚，而是采用更长的屏幕以便支持Retina技术。

5）伦敦工作室Six to Start最近透露，他们开发的《Zombies,Run！》这款游戏获得了苹果iOS系统的预购支持，他们能够通过与苹果直接合作，确保这个成功的Kickstarter大众融资项目顺利获得3000多个游戏拷贝版本以回馈支持者。

Zombie Run(from insidemobileapps)

App Store过去一般只针对每款游戏分配50个促销码，而Six to Start这个项目在大众融资平台获得了3400多名支持者（游戏邦注：截止2011年10月，集资超过7.2万美元），这些用户几乎都要预购这款游戏。该团队与苹果商谈之后，创造了两个游戏版本，一个是7.99美元的付费版本《Zombies Run》，另一个则是免费版本《ZR Advance》。

这些支持者需设置一个与自己的邮箱帐号相绑定的密码，等到正式发售当天再通过免费版游戏，使用邮箱和密码解琐完整版内容。

6）由Patrick Curry、 Michael Hadwin、Neill Glancy和Stephen Palmer成立的工作室Fun Machine主要瞄准智能手机、平板电脑和智能电视开发游戏，其首款游戏《Awesome Eats》自今年3月发布以来已收获80万次iOS下载量，目前计划向其他平台发布这款推广健康饮食和园艺的游戏。

Awesome Eat(from clubgames888.blogspot.com)

该工作室联合创始人Curry之前曾是迪士尼旗下Wideload Games副总裁及创意总监，代表作是Xbox游戏《Stubbs the Zombie》；而Hadwin和Glancy此前则在迪士尼Junction Point团队担任总监职位，Palmer之前是Gearbox制作人。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

1）Two thirds of mobile gamers play for fun or to kill time says MocoSpace survey

by Tom Worthington

Two thirds of mobile gamers keep up their habit to quell boredom and have fun according to MocoSpace’s latest ‘Y U Play?’ survey.

34 percent of the 10,000 mobile gamers on MocoSpace’s platform who were surveyed said they played games for fun and 32 percent said they did it because they wanted to kill time.

The remaining 34 percent said they played mobile games to compete, meet new people, connect with family and friends, and even flirt.

Not so hot for teacher

The classroom is also proving to be a gaming hotspot with 31 percent of those surveyed admitting to playing games during school.

When asked why, 42 percent said it was because they found classes boring while 41 percent said they would play mobile games when they had some downtime.

MocoSpace also found that 55 percent of its active users were playing games on its network accounting from more than one million hours of gaming clocked daily.

“This survey showed us that our gamers are really engaged with the titles we are offering,” said MocoSpace co-founder and CEO Justin Siegel.

“We are working on developing more games in-house as well as fostering relationships with third-party developers in order to churn out more fun HTML5 games that can be played on any mobile device.”（source:pocketgamer）

2）Most Zynga revenues come from mobile

by Zen Terrelonge

“Really excited” about the platform.

Social gaming giant Zynga started as a Facebook games developer, producing the popular CityVille and FarmVille games before rolling out to mobile as the smartphone era took off.

However, the Hollywood Reporter claims things have changed, as Zynga CFO Dave Wehner says the majority of the firm’s revenue growth and gameplay is generated by mobile apps, particularly Android and iOS.

Wehner, said: “We’re really excited about what we’re seeing in mobile.There’s a ton of connected wallets out there, people who are available as potential players and payers.”

“We’re one, if not the top game player, on smartphones. And yet we have a modest share. So we have a huge opportunity to grow the share in mobile.”

The firm recently paid out $180 million for mobile developer OMGPOP to acquire its Draw Something game, which has passed 50 million downloads, though gameplay has slowed in recent weeks.（source:mobile-ent）

3）Zynga takes a swipe at Fruit Ninja’s hack and slash gameplay with Zombie Swipeout

Kathleen De Vere

Zynga’s newest mobile game is Zombie Swipeout, an undead-themed arcade title that builds on the swipe and slash mechanic pioneered by Halfbrick’s hit game Fruit Ninja.

Developed by the German arm of Zynga Mobile, the game is a sequel of sorts to ZombieSmash!, the GameDoctors developed tower defense game that required users to flick, drag and smash advancing hordes of zombie using touch controls. Zombie Swipeout was in the early stages of development when GameDoctors was acquired by Zynga in October 2011, and is the first game from the team to be released under the Zynga moniker.

Zombie Swipeout follows the further adventures of Joey, the hero of ZombieSmash!. As with Fruit Ninja, players swipe their fingers across their devices screen, with the goal of swiping through some objects while avoiding others. In Zombie Swipeout the goal is to cut up zombies while avoiding Joey. If a player hits Joey, they can choose to use a consumable med-pack item on him to keep playing or leave him to die, ending their current game. Players also collect a soft currency called coins, which can be used to purchase new weapons, some of which give competitive bonuses or allow players to earn score multipliers more quickly.

While the gameplay is obviously similar to Halfbrick’s series of Fruit Ninja titles, Zynga adds some strategic and competitive elements to Zombie Swipeout to set it apart from other games in the genre. Here are the key differences:

•Social Features: Zombie Swipeout is heavily geared towards competitive play. Players can log in through Facebook Connect to compete with their friends, or trade ZombieSmash usernames directly in order to add more people to their leaderboards. Players compete in weekly tournaments, and Zombie Swipeout keeps a record of how many first, second and third place finishes a player has managed to amass. Players can also send each other gifts of soft currency in order to help each other progress through the game. By comparison, Fruit Ninja has leaderboards and achievements implemented through Game Center and OpenFeint, but players cannot send gifts to each other.

•Leveling up: Unlike Fruit Ninja, players in Zombie Swipeout also level up as they play. Leveling up grants players to additional power-ups that make it easier to cut up zombies such as liquid nitrogen and grenades.

•Energy and weapons: Players in Zombie Smash must balance the bonuses awarded by more advanced weapons against their energy consumption. A higher level weapon will give better score bonuses but it will also take more of a player’s energy to use it. While players can unlock additional weapons and backgrounds in Fruit Ninja through in-game achievements, they are only cosmetic and don’t affect gameplay.

•Monetization: While the full version of Fruit Ninja is a $0.99 paid title on iOS, Zombie Swipeout is free-to-play. The game monetizes through the purchase of its soft currency, coins (used to buy better weapons, Med Packs and restore energy) and gems, the hard currency used to buy premium weapons. Like Zynga’s other games players can also purchase a $0.99 premium version of Zombie Swipeout that does not show ads.

Despite Zombie Swipeout’s gory theme and visuals, GameDoctors co-founder and now Director at Zynga Mobile Matthias Hoechsmann tell us us the game was designed to appeal to a broad, casual audience. As such, the blood in the game can be red, green or turned off altogether.

Zombie Swipeout is out today in the Canadian iTunes App Store and will be rolling out to other countries soon. Hoechsmann tells us as with ZombieSmash! there are plans to bring Zombie Swipeout to Android eventually, but there is no set timeline for the game’s Android release.（source:insidemobileapps）

4）Reuters Agrees: The Next iPhone Will Be Larger

Matt Burns

The Wall Street Journal made waves yesterday. Citing unnamed sources, the Journal reported Apple is ordering larger touchscreens for the next iPhone. Now, citing its own unnamed sources, Reuters somewhat confirmed the reported. Prepare yourself, iPhone diehards. All signs point to a larger iPhone.

The thought of a larger iPhone clearly scares people. Read the comments on my post yesterday, “It’s Time For A Larger iPhone.” They say 3.5-inches is the best size. You don’t have to move your thumb to navigate the whole screen, they say. A phone with a 3.5-inch screen fits in my hipster jeans!

But really, the main underlying thread seems to be some people are afraid that, just perhaps, Apple will adopt something from Android like the trend of a larger screen. Scary, I know.

Change is hard. Apple has used the same form factor for 4 iPhone generations spanning 5 years. The iPhone 4, and the 4S for that matter, is still one of the best looking phones on the market, with an impossibly thin design and stunning good looks. But it’s time for a change. Besides, logic and other credible rumors point to an internal change that might be forcing Apple’s hand in using a larger screen.

Along with a larger screen, the next iPhone is said to have 4G data connectivity. This requires a new mobile chipset, which, as proven by the new iPad presents a new set of challenges. Instead of growing the iPad’s height and width (and therefore the screen size), the new iPad was made a bit thicker to accommodate the larger battery needed to power the 4G chipset and retina display. Apple doesn’t have that luxury with the iPhone. The next iPhone cannot be thicker than the current iPhone. But it can be taller.

4G chipsets are generally not as mature as their 3G counterparts. They require more power and thus require a larger battery. Instead of making the iPhone thicker, logic suggests that Apple would then make the phone a bit taller, making room for a larger, likely retina, display.

This change will likely upset the Apple diehards. As the screen size increased on Android phones, iPhone users took to Internet comments and forums to defend the smallish iPhone’s 3.5-inch screen. It seems sooner versus later now, Apple will use a different screen for the iPhone. Change is hard.（source:techcrunch）

5）Zombies, Run! developer reveals how Apple let it give away 3000 “free” copies of its iOS game

Kathleen De Vere

Zombies, Run! developer Six to Start has revealed that it’s complicated, but not impossible to set up a pre-order system for an iOS game. The London-based studio was able to work directly with Apple to ensure backers for its successful Kickstarter campaign would be able to receive the 3000 plus copies of the game they had been promised in return for their donations.

Typically, the iTunes App Store allots 50 promotional codes per version of a game — enough for reviews, but not enough for a crowd-sourcing campaign, where the most common reward for donating is a free copy of the finished product.

Six to Start’s campaign ended on Oct. 2011 with over $72,000 raised and more than 3,400 backers, almost all of whom had essentially pre-ordered a copy of the game. After discussing plans with Apple, the company created two copies of the game, the standard, $7.99 paid version of Zombies Run, and a free version called ZR Advance. Six to Start declined to explain in more detail how exactly Apple contacted them or who they talked to at the company.

Backers were asked to set up a password connected to their email account in advance, and on the day of release, Kickstarter contributors were able to use their email and password to unlock the full game’s content from within the free app.

While not an official strategy endorsed by Apple, its an efficient solution for an independent developer with a relatively small amount of product to distribute. It’s unclear, however, what sort of deal the developers behind bigger crowd-sourcing campaigns with iOS rewards (the successful République Kickstarter has promised over 7,000 copies of the game) will be able to strike with Apple, and if Apple will still allow such a workaround in the future if crowd-sourcing becomes more common.

Developers considering crowd-sourcing the funding for mobile games through platforms like Kickstarter, Indiegogo or AppStori, should carefully consider iOS distribution before launching their campaigns.（source:insidemobileapps）

6）Disney and Gearbox veterans join up to form Fun Machine

by James Nouch

Four veterans of triple-A console development have banded together to form Fun Machine.

The Austin, Texas-based developer will be focused on smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs.

Founded by Patrick Curry, Michael Hadwin, Neill Glancy and Stephen Palmer, Fun Machine is working on both games and proprietary technology. The studio’s debut, Awesome Eats, was the first product using its smarts.

Since its March 2012 release, Awesome Eats has gained 800,000 iOS downloads, and Fun Machine is currently planning to release the game – which promotes healthy eating and school gardening – on other platforms.

The times they are a-changin’

“The next generation of gaming isn’t going to come on a disc or be bought in a store. It’s going to be downloaded and streamed to every screen in your household – and in your pocket – in the blink of an eye,” explained CEO Patrick Curry.

Curry formerly served as VP and creative director at Disney-owned Wideload Games, best known for the Xbox horror comedy Stubbs the Zombie.

His co-founders have worked on titles such as worked on titles such as Epic Mickey, Borderlands, and John Woo’s Stranglehold.

Hadwin and Glancy worked at Disney-owned Junction Point in director-level role, while Palmer was lead producer at Gearbox.

All the screens

“This is an exciting time to be creating games and original intellectual properties,” said Hadwin, Fun Machine’s president and studio director.

“Our technology lets us focus on innovative ideas and instantly test them across several platforms and devices. One lesson from the console industry that still holds true: iteration and polish always win.”（source:pocketgamer）

引言

前面，我曾谈到若干传统游戏设计语言没有加以解释的游戏要素（详见此处）。我谈到这样的观点，对很多玩家来说，潜在幻想是吸引他们体验游戏的主要因素，玩家和游戏存在复杂的想象关系。把握这一关系及了解游戏为什么、如何唤起这类幻想和体验将彻底改变我们对游戏的看法及具体设计方式。要实现这一目标，我们需要能够诠释这些体验，将其同游戏设计联系起来。心理学似乎就是个显而易见的框架，这是我首个瞄准的内容，但我逐渐发现通过心理学诠释前面描述的体验类型存在若干基本问题。

最初研究这一领域，我是希望找到简单的心理学原理，将其运用至电子游戏的思考中。相反，我从中发现各种意识形态间存在不可逾越的鸿沟，这一分歧在以想象和主观体验为核心的心理学中更加明显。这一分歧的一方是认知、行为主义和生物心理学学派，他们的理论和研究主要局限在理智元素，这可以通过科学方法进行客观验证。另一方是心理动力和人本主义心理学，主要围绕个人主观体验，着眼于现象哲学：在任何观察中，我们必须从主观体验切入，这是我们的唯一观察视角。

问题是，虽然客观视角在提供行为模式和描述明确概念（游戏邦注：例如认知和记忆）方面非常有效，但在经历、意识和身份之类的第一人称现象领域则就没那么奏效。就这点而言，这一理念的拥护者或将自己限制在非主管视角，或坚持极端理念：意识和主观经历属于次级现象或幻觉，不代表观察现实的准确语境。

现象第一人称视角也存在类似问题。虽然这是很多心理疗法的成功框架，是文学和文化分析的必要元素，但它无法在第三人称视角的理论中找到客观科学基础。

就如心理学家William Glassman所述，“我们似乎经常被迫在非科学的心理学和非心理学的科学中进行选择！”（Glassman，2000）在分析想象方面，我们被迫选择前者，至少直到我们拥有结合第一和第三人称分析方法的理论，因为之前我们论述的经历和整个游戏体验概念主要基于第一人称体验语境（游戏邦注：第一人称和第三人称存在客观视角和主观视角之差；而第一人称本身又有不同视角：将精神看做社会或语言概念和认为精神基于基本遗传心理学结构的荣格观点。这里我们需要进行双重结合，首先是承认普遍心理学结构的第一人称视角和承认基于这些结构的主观、文化和语境材料的第一人称视角；其次是结合第三人称客观视角和第一人称主管视角）。

确定具体立场后，我们就面临第二个问题：寻找诠释这些经历的系列概念。第一人称领域就是众多相互联系及冲突方法，从深度心理学到文化研究和后结构主义。所有这些视角都同样有效，没有一个视角能够容纳所有的第一人称经历。这意味着我们所说的第一人称经历都只是种阐释，而非原委再现，只是其中一个视角。

探索电子游戏及其所唤起的体验最有趣、最有效的视角是，荣格深度心理学。虽然这在学术界颇具争议，但荣格心理学对人文科学及许多美工、作家和电影制作人产生重要影响。它的理念非常适合电子游戏，它提供众多概念，让我们能够探索玩家和游戏、设计师和游戏间的复杂关系。它还彻底改变我们对于题材、暴力及体验过程的看法。荣格心理学是个复杂的多层面学科，我们只能在此短文中进行粗略介绍。引言旨在说明它同游戏设计的关系，向读者提供把握相关设计概念的必要知识。首先就来探究玩耍和幻想心理学，这是构成游戏体验的基础元素。

幻想、玩耍和映射

玩耍一直都被视作是人类，甚至是动物的基本属性。心理学家和教育学家将玩耍看作是天然的学习方式。通过玩耍，人类自然锻造出生命的必要生物和心理机能，从狩猎、物质生存，到社会合作和文化参与。从认知层面来看，玩耍促进我们对世界的认知。通过有趣实验玩弄物体和构思，我们逐步了解物质世界和自身的位置。

但玩耍的作用不仅体现在促进我们适应周围事物或开发合理技能。玩耍方面的杰出理论家Johann Huizinger表示，这是很多艺术和戏剧形式背后的促进因素。他还表示，玩耍并非毫无意义的练习或是工作的对立面，它是社会幸福感的必要组成要素（Poole，2000；Rheingold，1991）。

虽然玩耍的教育和社会意义众所周知，被广泛接受，但内向型玩耍、幻想及纯粹的假装扮演活动则就不那么被认同。这多半是由于我们文化的外向型偏好或佛洛伊德的著名观点：幻想是逃避现实的退化方式。但在Jungian psychology看来，幻想和其他思考方式一样重要，而且是健康心理发展的必要条件。Jung表示，就和外向玩耍促使个体适应和了解外部世界一样，内向玩耍或幻想能够让个体适应自己的内在世界。在幻想的故事、人物和景观中，个体会接触到自身以符号形式呈现的性格元素（Stevens，1999）。

这并不是说外向和内向玩耍互相排斥。我相信很多读者都还记得和玩具或其他物体玩耍，赋予它们同实际功能毫无关系的含义的经历。通过将自己的想象影射到物体，个体赋予它新的个人含义。这让他能够通过符号物体将自己的内在幻想游戏具体化。因此棍棒变成枪支，泰迪熊变成令人慰藉的朋友，系列模块精灵变成险恶的敌人。影射被玩耍理疗师这样运用：不懂说话或能够自觉把握自身情感的孩子通常会通过玩具、内在过程、冲突和反应在故事和玩耍主题中的目标表现个人问题。

Final Fantasy from games.kitguru.net

游戏是想象空间

我觉得映射概念从一定程度上呈现玩家在电子游戏的沉溺程度。通过有意识或下意识地识别不同游戏角色、故事和过程，玩家能够发现个人问题、目标及理想，同时融入文化传递给他们的内容。这并不意味着玩家只会发现游戏的可控制角色，而是说明整个游戏变成某种意义上的“想象空间”，其中的敌人、主题、风景、道具和过程都反映特定的虚构焦点。例如，两个对立角色或政治团体的相互作用也许代表着内在冲突。一个令人满意的联盟，例如在RPG游戏中，神秘或危险角色加入玩家的党派代表着不同特性角色的内在冲突得到解决。当然，将游戏中的所有元素看作是想象的映射是个最佳设计方案。由于多数游戏都有固定过程和情节主线，他们不一定都和玩家的关注点存在联系。但随着游戏复杂性和自由度的提高，它们将能够适应不同体验风格和个人目标，映射玩家个性的内在动态模式。将游戏看作想象空间的观点听起来有些非同寻常，但它和古希腊剧院的表现形式存在有趣的相似之处。

当古希腊人民到剧院时，他们并非想要收获适度娱乐或观看当前出于消遣目的的无足轻重内容。他们希望得到精神发泄，发泄深层次的情感，这在希腊人看来，是理智和灵魂的净化。精神发泄的关键在于模仿，消除怀疑，同戏剧角色产生共鸣，内化戏剧内容，换而言之，就是从个人想象层面同戏剧建立联系（Rheingold，1991）。在希腊人看来，精神发泄是应对生死话题的健康方式，这个词汇被心理学保存至今不无道理，主要用于描述同解决内在困境相关的情感。这类精神发泄也会出现在我们的精神想象空间中，当事件同玩家产生某种程度的共鸣时，例如两个之前相互对立的角色变得团结起来或是克服某复杂障碍（游戏邦注：虽然这通常表现出不同强度）。

另一相似之处体现在德国杰出小说家及诺贝尔奖获得者Hermann Hesse的作品中。在小说《荒原狼》中，Hesse挖掘文学表现的可能性空间，“自我是个多层面的实体”。他还建议读者，“不要将创作内容中的角色当作独立存在，而应该是多个层面和元素的高度统一。”（Hesse，1927）

但什么是我们映射至游戏中的精神的多个层面及元素？我们能否概述出可被运用至游戏设计中的通俗概念，或者它们因个体而异？个体的内在关注点如何同史诗及游戏和幻想中的尘世主题建立起联系及保持一致？要回答这些问题，我们需要转向荣格的心理玄学，也就是他的想象图谱。

原型和集体潜意识

很多读者都对于无意识或潜意识（包含所有无意识要素的心智状态）概念非常熟悉。这包括记忆、忘却的经历、下意识知觉及习惯倾向（如能够在无需思考的情况下驾驶汽车）。多数潜意识论述都将其当作一个白板，或是撰写个人生活经历的白板。这一观点促使很多人做出这一结论，所有思想都截然不同，或者个性完全是由社会和环境塑造。和没有将生物学考虑在内一样（所有大脑都共享同个基本机制），这一观点没有得到卡尔·荣格的认同，他投入9年时间研究精神分裂症患者脑中的错觉和幻觉。

在研究梦境、幻想及病人的错觉时，荣格发现，其中包含很多和病人生活经历毫无关系的影像和观念。这些可以被视作是无意义的精神失调，但他还发现，这些影像和观念与全球各地的神话和宗教符号非常相似。就如精神病学家Anthony Stevens所述，“荣格收集众多资料证明，这一通用符号更多不是源自个人经历或文化传播，而是来自人类大脑的结构及人类普遍无意识心智的基本要素”（Stevens，1999）。荣格将此基本要素称作集体潜意识。

在集体潜意识中，荣格假定原型的存在。这些都是和上述通用符号相关的基本心理模式。就如荣格所述，“原型概念源自重复观察，例如，世界文学的神话和童话故事包含随处可见的图案。我们在个人生活的幻想、梦境、妄想和错觉中看到过相同画面。这些典型图案就是我所谓的原型构思”（Storr，1998）。虽然荣格的原型假设颇具争议，但有些思想家认为，这能够将这类第三人称观念从第一人称视角描述成认知科学的认知纲要及进化心理学的进化心理机制；虽然我们尚不清楚这里延续多少原型模式，传递多少文化要素（Glassman， 2000；Stevens，1998）。

通常出现在神话、梦境和幻想当中的典型原型概念包含主角、毁灭性怪兽、明智老人、父亲、母亲、梦中情人、有用的动物和危险的敌人。其中还包含若干原型过程，如英雄探索，坠入地狱，攻击神龙，性结合，太阳的升降，生和死。这些原型构思都代表着心智的普遍要素和过程，能够唤起强烈的情感冲击。

这并不是说原型就是个虚构图像或存在。虚构图像和梦境及幻想中的画面都是原型的表现或象征。原型本身是没有实质内容的内在心理模式，它们呈现的是相关的真实生活画面。例如，有人心中也许会存在成为数字朋客黑客，摧毁邪恶公司的系统的英雄幻想，有人也许会存在在世界杯中胜出的幻想。虽然具体幻想内容各不相同，黑客和足球粉丝的幻想者的个性也许大相径庭，但其幻想和建立情感联系的基本方式则完全一致。二者都描绘特殊个体的英雄式胜利（游戏邦注：这是古老的普遍主题），二者都有类似的关联情感；征服、个人优势、自信和胜利情感。在两个个体中，主角原型都发挥作用，但其表达方式因个性和背景而异。这些都是简单例子，主要是为了体现原型的“虚拟”形式特性，其呈现同个体现实生活相关的画面。通过探索不同幻想部分的相关情感和态度，我们可以发现更多，有时甚至会发现某些非英雄式的画面。

除以虚构存在及梦境和幻想形式存在，原型还能够被外部世界的画面和人类激活。两个典型例子就是梦中情人和女性意像&男性意像。你是否曾在看到某位异性时（或在现实生活中，或在想象中），心中充满超越本能的强烈情感；感觉他/她就是“那一位”？此人有种魔力，当你凝视她的脸庞时，你的灵魂就会激动难耐，满怀憧憬。他也许就像是你所需要的任何物件；当你靠近他时，内心充满欣喜，当你离开时，就会感到深深的绝望。

若你作为男性，看到能够带来这种感觉的女性，那你就遇到荣格心理学所谓的女性意像。荣格表示，每个男人的灵魂深处都有个女神，即女性意像。她出现在自己的梦中，通常是个向导，是个美丽的神奇存在，有时也会是危险的“魔鬼”。通常她会被无意识地影射到某位真实女性身上，赋予此真实女性神奇特性，将此真实女性模糊化。有时这类影射会带来永恒的爱情，有时此真实女性会打破这一影射没，令男士意识到她并非自己心中所想的样子，会觉得她“变了”，离她而去，转而寻找自己的公主女性意像，另一可能激发他内心爱恋的女性。

Beauty and the Beast from fanpop.com

在荣格心理学中，男性意像是指女性精神中的对应男性形象。在梦境和幻想中，他也许会被视作英雄，有时是流氓。男性意像的另一标记是野蛮、类似于动物的男性（游戏邦注：就如童话故事《美女与野兽》所塑造的形象）。同样，女性常常也会把自己的男性意像投射到真实男性身上，这有时会带来稳定的情感，有时则会带来麻烦，若男性意像影射让她们未能认清现实。这些例子充分说明影射和原型的重要性。他们不是纯粹的抽象概念或构思，而是精神的基本力量。

这里有个和电子游戏相关的例子。想象一个胆怯的小男孩，害怕冒险，有些过度依赖父母。有天他看了一个描绘英勇冒险的卡通。男孩在期间感受到强烈的情感共鸣，每周会观看一次，开始进行基于此体验的想象游戏，将自己设想成电视主角或分享同样的冒险活动。他想象自己在遇到困境或睡前，或独自处于黑夜之中时，将最喜爱的角色召集到身旁。渐渐地，通过父母的支持和理解，小男孩变得越来越自信，越来越独立。

这个电视节目激活小男孩的英雄原型。当需要勇气和强烈认同感时，这个原型经常在梦境和幻想中出现。孩子的英雄式游戏是这一原型模式的表达，这会逐步变成他们成长的一部分，通过征服依赖和恐惧之龙，小孩对父母不再有那么强的情感依赖性，开始萌生更强烈的认同感。在这个例子中，虽然小孩最初存在模糊的不安，会生成包含英雄意像的梦境，但电视节目赋予他模仿和联系的具体形象。由于它们和内在原型存在高度相似性，电视节目的画面变得越来越具情感共鸣效果，让男孩的意识中形成无意识的自我认同和勇气。通过幻想和游戏，孩子最终将电视呈现的主角原型要素融入其有意识的个性中。英雄和英雄探险在电子游戏中无处不在，通常和普遍观念相反，而且不只局限于童年问题。我随后会详细论述这些原型及它们同电子游戏的关系。

把握荣格心理学的四大重要原型：影子、女性意像、男性意像和自我。这些主要意像通常会出现在许多梦境、幻想和电子游戏中，以各种符号形式存在。在很多个体中，影子最先出现在梦境和幻想生活中，是个性发展的不变因素（Jung，1964）。

影子

影子通常是出现在梦境和幻想中的危险敌人，代表未知或遭到抑制的潜意识，之所以遭到抑制主要是因为脑中意识所采取的态度。换而言之，影子是我们的“黑暗面”，会腐蚀其他原型，这主要取决于我们同它们的关系。一个简单例子是，刻板商人梦见危险的无政府主义者或波希米亚人闯进他的办公室，制造事端。荣格理论对于这一梦境的诠释是，波希米亚人代表无意识的创造性人才或有利于当事人、但因当事人的态度而处在有意识个性之外的生活态度。这并不意味着做梦者抛弃所有东西，变成波希米亚人，而是表示他应该尝试在生活中融入些许创造性和自发行为，及其有意识个性认为具有威胁性的品质。

影子经常被映射至其他问题上。也许此商人在碰到自由奔放的创意人士时会心生不满，会将它们同各种罪恶联系起来。若他了解自己的梦境，以此做出改变，他随后也许会梦到更少危险或者甚至是友好的波希米亚人，能够找到它们的现实对照物。

但自由奔放的波希米亚人会梦见自己同危险的刻板商人发生冲突，这映射出令他觉得不快的品质，但也许会令他受益匪浅，例如理想组织和思考。分析影子是个道德责任，它迫使我们面对不被自己接受的东西，通常会映射至其他问题上，将这些看作是种族主义和同性恋恐惧症。分析影子就是处理个人层面的善恶问题。

荣格的影子理论和Other概念相似，这一概念出现在文化研究中，旨在说明特定文化能够代表其他不同文化。就如Ziauddin Sardar描述的，“最常见的Other代表就是黑暗面，个人的二元对立：我们文明，他们野蛮；殖民主义者认真刻苦，原住民懒惰。”（Sardar和Van Loon，1999）

虽然影子通常表现出威胁性，但它也呈现出做梦者觉得正面但自己不具备的品质。有人也许会梦到好友和引人注目的同性陌生人，他们呈现出做梦者颇为欣赏的品质，但他们害怕将此融入自己的有意识生活中。

我们也许会想要植入整个影子或对其进行排斥，但这都缺乏可能性。个人存在的基本事实（游戏邦注：个体是这样，而非那样，个体认同某些事，不认同另一些事）示意自我和影子的基本对立——自我和影子，我和你，善与恶。个体的任务是把握自己的影子，了解它所代表的个人信息，尽自己所能，然后就所无法做到的进行让步。

影子在电子游戏中无处不在，以敌人、危险角色或概念形式存在。玩家也许会选择描述破坏特定秩序的敌人，能够反映自己和影子关系的游戏作品。设计师也许还会设计反映自己内在关注点的敌人和过程。谈及游戏的原型形象时，我会回过头来谈论这一重要话题。

女性意像和男性意像

就如我们前面谈到的，女性意像和男性意像是男性和女性各自的异性原型。正如性吸引背后的生物规则，荣格表示，这里也存在相关的心理规则。荣格谈到男性和女性意像，“男性的整体个性是以女性作为先决条件，包括外貌和精神方面。他的组织方式从一开始就调整至女性层面”（Stevens，1999）。女性也以类似方式调整至男性视角。但女性意像和男性意像的角色远超越普遍意识中的盲目性本能。男性对于女性及女性对于男性的意义和这一发展过程的心智及阶段存在密切关系。

根据荣格心理学，梦境和幻想的女性意像和男性意像是个体同其潜意识关系的再现。换而言之，男性会通过女性角色感受自己的潜意识，而女性则会以男性视角感受自己的无意识。女性意像通常以了解未知领域的巫婆或女巫师形象存在，例如无意识精神或但丁“Paradiso”中Beatrice之类的向导（Jung，1964）。女性意像也以爱人或同伴形象出现，在梦中通常表现为同潜意识的良好关系。她有时是有待拯救的公主，就如很多童话故事和游戏中的形象。被野兽监视代表着这样的心智态度：阻止自己同女性意像或女性建立良好关系，她必须被足以对抗此生物的强壮英雄拯救。

女性意像也有消极或黑暗元素。她也许是以倾国倾城样貌出现，就像虚拟汽笛一样，以魔法歌曲吸引男性走向灭亡，或以危险巫婆形象出现，代表以消极态度看待女性意像和潜意识，遇到缺乏力量和鉴别力的潜意识的危险。女性意像还会和男性眼中的女性化品质和态度联系起来，通过女性意像，他能够结合和理解这些有价值的品质。

男性意像通常以富有吸引力的英雄形象出现，有时是聪明的精神向导。和女性意像与男性眼中的女性品质存在联系一样，男性意像与女性感知的男性品质存在联系，例如英雄气概和理性。通过男性意像，女性可以将这些积极的品质植入自己的个性中。男性意像也有消极元素，会以流氓或罪犯形象出现。有时他会以野兽形象呈现，映射出野蛮、未驯服及无法结合的男性意像，或是对待男性及其关系的消极态度。梦到这类野兽的女性首先会感到害怕，但通过男性意像，他将被转变成更引人注目的人类形体。《美女与野兽》的故事就是这一过程的反映（Jung，1964）。

就如我之前描述的，女性意像和男性意像可以映射到真实男性和女性身上，有时会带来各种危险的癖好和误解。通过下意识将女性意像和男性意像同特定异性个体绑定，个体能够高效将自己的潜意识同它们等同起来，要求其表现要符合潜意识。这并不是说女性意像和男性意像完全呈现消极效果，当映射背后的真实人类能够被接受和理解时，这也是获得个人成长的工具。

女性意像经常出现在这样的游戏中：女性被玩家拯救，有时是作为同伴。鲜有游戏会描绘女性同其男性意像之间的关系。但有些游戏，如《最终幻想》系列就在此表现突出，给予玩家众多供其控制的男性和女性角色。在男性玩家看来，女性角色能够代表他的女性意像，例如《最终幻想VIII》中的Rinoa；Squall能够代表女性玩家的男性意像。SquareSoft通过基于两种视角描述他们的关系做到这点。玩家也许会选择能够反映他们同自身女性意像或男性意像之间关系的游戏，而设计师则会设计能够反映出自身关系的角色和故事。

自我

荣格将自我称作“原型的原型”（Stevens，1999）。它代表完整的心智，包含有意识和无意识元素。在荣格心理学中，自我是心智的内在核心。它通常以圆圈、九宫格或方格形式呈现在梦境、幻想和神话故事中；通常是四位一体，例如“宇宙的四个角落”，四个方向或圆圈的四个部分。对于男性做梦者来说，这也许表现为聪明的老头子，或是女性眼中的聪明老妇人，或者也许是伟大的国王或王后。有时这会表现为神圣或有魔法的孩子。通常在神话故事中，自我都表现为“宇宙人”或女性，代表完整的个体。在游戏中，这有时会表现为游戏世界中最强大的原则。在RPG游戏中，这有时表现为四种元素、空间中心的魔法宝石或生命之树。在其他游戏中，这也许具体为时空统一体、基本基因代码、国家或是任何在游戏中代表强大力量的元素。

Zeldar from facepunch.com

自我有时也通过提供帮助的动物形式呈现，它们会在童话故事中出现，旨在给主人公提供建议和帮助。很多这类动物会在游戏中出现（游戏邦注：例如《塞尔达64》中Link的猫头鹰同伴，《最终幻想》游戏中的moogles）。这些生物出乎意料，通常坚不可摧，但有些情况下却很容易受伤害，握有能够抵抗其他敌人的自然智慧，能够让它们跳脱红尘世界。它们通常被描绘成强大力量的仆人，初期的自我会引导挣扎的主人公朝自己的命运迈进。

自我也是治愈和团结的原型，通常会出现在我们同内心冲突抗争的梦境和幻想中。孩子陷入家庭离婚风波或困境的画面通常会包含圆形图案，代表自我企图将些许团结和治愈元素带入孩子破碎的内心世界（Stevens，1999）。这种自我的治愈和团结特点会出现在游戏中，通常力场和能量盾牌都会呈现圆形或球形样式的亮光。

但自我也有阴暗面；作为荣格心智中最强大的力量，自我的负面通常会由终极邪恶力量来呈现。结合这两个元素映射出意识和潜意识，光和暗的突出对立。

这四种原型都是潜意识的主要力量，通常会被映射到外部世界的物体上，包括游戏。就如上述例子所述，很多游戏都包含这些原型符号，或通过社会惯例和重复，或通过设计师的想象，他们可能自发在此幻想中生成这些符号。但开发者不能只是将原型图像放入游戏中，声称它们属于“荣格学派”。我们需要清楚这些原型如何同个体和他的心理发展建立联系，为什么个体产生此幻想，而不是其他幻想。

原型和个体

原型和集体潜意识都属于荣格理论中的术语，是低层面的潜意识心智，他们的模型塑造上述图层。但正如我们看到的，出现在梦境和幻想中的原型是个人生活中的画面。我们还发现原型会根据我们同其之间的关系呈现积极或消极画面。换而言之，它们会被我们的现实经历及有意识态度影响。在荣格精神模式中，我们和原型的关系（游戏邦注：这会决定它们的呈现方式）由个人和文化潜意识决定。

上述集体潜意识出现在个人和文化潜意识中。文化潜意识包含所处社会赋予个体的所有无意识假设。有些作者不采用文化潜意识的说法，因为严格说起来，所有这些经历都和个人体验融会贯通，但我决定将它们拆开，因为这提供文化研究的切入点，而文化研究是在游戏中运用原型图像所要涉及的必要学科。个人潜意识和本章开头所述的传统无意识观念相似。它包含我们的所有记忆、忘却的经历、下意识知觉和习惯倾向。它还包含我们的情结。

塑造我们和原型之间关系的个人潜意识的基本单元就是情结。我相信很多人都很熟悉情结一词，因为它常被用于形容各种各样的心理问题，但鲜少人会关注所谓的情结是什么或者它如何形成。当原型被激活时，它会收集同情境或激活者相关的概念画面和体验。这些围绕原型的体验、情感和概念是种情结。心理学家Anthony Stevens给出一个很好的例子，孩子脑中母亲原型的激活。根据荣格心理学，每个孩子都有内在预期的母亲形象。这个原型会在孩子遇到和内在预期形象相似的妈妈角色时而被激活。有时此妈妈形象是生母，有时则是养母、阿姨或姐姐。关于妈妈形象的情感和体验构成一种情结，主要围绕原型的情感核心（Stevens，1999）。

形成情结非常正常，但它们通常会让人因此遭罪。Anthony Stevens列举一个具体例子。Stevens描述一位童年受控于残暴父亲的女子。这位女子的父亲原型只受到部分激活，他的父亲情结主要围绕专制独裁原型，慈爱、给予保护的父亲原型依然处于无意识状态。Stevens继续描述到，此女子一直被强凌弱的男子吸引，但同时她一直憧憬着有男子能够给予她关爱和安全感。据Stevens表示，此女子的幻想和行为表明，他期待有人能够激活他潜意识里的父亲原型（Stevens，1999）。这一例子不仅说明父母不当抚育的负面结果，同时也表明，原型处于完整状态，它们包含父亲角色、母亲角色、英雄形象、自我的各种要素，只要被激活，它们就会显现出来，变成有意识内容。完整形式的原型在神话中通常被描述成Mother Earth或Gaia之类的形象；Zeus之类的终极父亲形象，Odysseus之类的终极英雄形象。

我们和原型的关系及我们的情结内容也是由我们生长的文化及我们作为社会成员的潜意识假设所塑造的。一个例子就是宣扬和鼓励英雄不会显露情感的社会。这些同何谓英雄的社会观念密切联系的情感和形象代表一种文化情结，由于多数人都存在这种情结，因此会传递给其情结由此形象构成的社会的其他成员。这些多数人都持有的文化情结常被映射到其他人身上，进而影响社会的运作方式。就如社会学家和文化评论家所说的那样，这非常有害。但这样的情结无法通过革命进行推翻；和个人情结一样，它们需要治愈和转换。

应对情结元素，将潜意识元素植入有意识个性中的渐进过程构成荣格心理发展理论的个性化过程。和某些单着眼于社会适应的发展理论不同，个性化过程描述的是提高自我意识、成熟度及自我实现的终身个人过程。个性化是精神的自然过程，发生在个人生活背景下，但它可能被惨痛经历、有害情结或看待潜意识的错误态度所阻碍。个性化始于童年自我意识和自我认同的觉醒，会贯穿于整个生活当中，进行逐步整合，逐步意识到出现在个体梦境和映射中的潜意识元素。个性化过程的终点就是同自我及代表个体完整精神世界的整个原型建立良好关系。

总结

情结，例如女子同残暴父亲形象作斗争，寻找对应慈爱形象都构成她梦境和幻想内在剧情的角色、主题和要素，它们被映射至外部世界中。因此，我们可以做出这样的假设，玩家同特定电子游戏角色和主题所达成的情感共鸣源自玩家当前心理状态的映射。

游戏采用互动模式让玩家能够跳脱被动映射或戏院和文学的模仿，自觉进行幻想。因此前面描述的女子也许会被这样的游戏所吸引：将暴君描绘成敌人，以拯救或发现有爱心的男性角色。这类型的游戏是否能够让她得到心理治疗有待进一步探讨，但通过在游戏中看到自己的内心顾虑和问题解决方案，通过出于互动性需要做出关于内心状态的决策，女子在此得到能够给予她一定帮助的系列想法和画面。至少，这款游戏及其挑战和女子的经历关联密切。

通过查看反映潜意识原型的画面，在某些情况下，玩家能够推进自己的个人发展。当潜意识模型映射至某形象时，个体收获的情感共鸣有效说明，特定游戏角色和主题为什么如此受欢迎，以及为什么某些玩家喜欢打扮成自己喜欢的角色，或花时间绘制它们，或撰写粉丝小说。玩家喜欢的角色时是其内心未被激活的潜在原型化身。通过体验，绘制图像，玩家试图将角色呈现的原型要素植入自己的有意识个性中。

解决内在冲突，整合潜意识元素的过程对于游戏来说，有点像是特殊主题内容，但这一过程如今表现在许多游戏中，因为它以英雄关卡的形式植入虚构和神话故事中。

游戏邦注：原文发布于2004年9月8日，文章叙述以当时为背景。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Games and the Imagination Part II

By Richard Dare

Introduction

In part one of Games and the Imagination I discussed some of the aspects of gaming that remain unaccounted for by the conventional language of games design. I explored the idea that for many gamers an underlying fantasy is the primary factor in attracting them to a game, and that there is a complex imaginative relationship between a player and a game. Understanding this relationship and why and how games evoke such fantasies and experiences could revolutionise the way we think about games and how we design them. To do this, we need a framework that we can use to interpret these experiences and relate them to games design. Psychology seems like an obvious framework and it was the first to which I turned, but as I discovered there were fundamental problems in using psychology to interpret the kinds of experiences described in part one.

When I began to study this area I had initially hoped to find straightforward psychological theories that I could apply to my thinking in video games. Instead I found an unbridgeable chasm dividing one ideology from another, a division running deep within psychology with imagination and subjective experience at its heart. On one side of this divide lie the schools of cognitive, behaviourist and biological psychology, their theories and research being limited to the aspects of the mind that can be verified objectively using scientific methods. On the other side lie the psychodynamic and humanist psychologies, concerned mainly with personal subjective experience and basing their work on the philosophy of phenomenology, which states that in any investigation we must start with our subjective experience, it being the only viewpoint open to us with any certainty.

The problem is, that while the objective (or “third person”) viewpoint has been extremely successful in providing models of behaviour and in describing explicit concepts such as learning and memory, it has had less success in the first-person, phenomenological realms of experience, consciousness and identity. As such, its proponents either limit their work to the non-subjective or take the extreme view that consciousness and subjective experience are secondary phenomena or completely illusory and do not represent an accurate context from which to view reality.

The phenomenological, first person viewpoint has a similar problem. Although it has been successful as a framework for a large number of psychotherapies and as an essential component in literary and cultural analysis, it has had difficulty finding an objective, scientific base in the theories offered by the third person perspective.

As psychologist William Glassman puts it (after D.N Robinson) “..it seems we are forced to choose between a psychology which is not scientific, and a science which is not psychology!” (Glassman, 2000). In approaching the imagination we are forced to choose the former, at least until we have a theory that successfully unites the first and third person approaches, since the experiences described in part one and indeed the whole idea of game playing lie within the context of first person experience1.

Having decided on which side of the border we are on, we now have the second problem of finding a set of concepts to interpret these experiences. The first person realm is a vast sea of interconnecting and conflicting approaches, from depth psychology to cultural studies and post-structuralism. All of these perspectives are equally valid and no single viewpoint can encompass the entirety of first person experience (Of course, if you accept the postmodern critique of science, then the third person view is in no better position). This means that anything we say about first person experience will be an interpretation, not an explanation, one viewpoint amongst many others.

One of the most interesting and useful viewpoints that we can use to explore video games and the experiences they evoke is that of Jungian depth psychology. Although it is controversial in academic circles2, Jungian psychology has been a great influence on the humanities and on many artists, writers and film-makers. Its concepts seem to fit video games like a glove, offering us a set of ideas that we can use to explore the complex relationship between a player and a game, and indeed between a designer and a game. It could also radically change the way we look at genre, violence and the process of playing amongst other things. Jungian psychology is a complex and multifaceted subject and I can only give the barest introduction to it in such a short article. This brief introduction is only intended to show how it relates to games design, and to give the reader the knowledge necessary for understanding the design concepts that can be derived from it. Readers wanting a deeper understanding of Jungian psychology are directed to the books listed in the bibliography. Lets start off by exploring the psychology of play and fantasy, subjects that underlie every aspect of game playing.

Fantasy, Play and Projection

Play has long been recognised as a fundamental part of human, even animal nature. Psychologists and educationalists see play as being a natural form of learning. Through play, nature trains the biological and psychological functions necessary for life, from hunting and physical survival, to social co-operation and cultural participation. On a cognitive level, play encourages the development of our concepts about the world. By toying with objects and ideas through playful experimentation we develop an understanding of the physical world and our place within it.

But there is more to play than just encouraging adaptation to our surroundings or the development of rational skills. The great theorist of play Johann Huizinger believed that it was the basis of all forms of ritual and represented the foundational impulse behind many forms of art and drama. He also maintained that far from being a wasteful exercise or the antithesis of work, play was essential to the well-being of society (Poole, 2000; Rheingold, 1991).

Although the educational and social aspects of play are widely known and accepted, introverted play, fantasy and pure make-believe are less well regarded. This may be due to the extroverted bias of our culture or to Freud’s popular notion that fantasy represents a regressive means of escaping from reality. But according to Jungian psychology, fantasy is just as important as any other kind of thinking and in fact, is essential to healthy psychological growth. Just as extroverted play orientates the individual to the outside world and helps him comprehend it, introverted play or fantasy, according to Jung, orientates the individual to his inner world. In the stories, figures and landscapes of fantasy, an individual plays with different elements of his own personality rendered in symbolic form (Stevens, 1999).

This is not to say that extroverted and introverted play are mutually exclusive. I’m sure many readers will remember playing with toys or other objects and investing them with a meaning quite unrelated to their actual function. By projecting his imagination (often unconsciously) onto an object, an individual gives it a new and personal meaning. This allows him to concretise his inner fantasy play by representing it with symbolic objects. Thus a stick becomes a gun, a teddy bear becomes a comforting friend and a collection of blocky sprites becomes a menacing foe. Projection is used in this way by play therapists, who know that a child, who may not be able to verbalise or consciously understand her feelings, will often enact personal issues through toys, with inner processes, conflicts and goals mirrored symbolically in the stories and themes of play.

The Game as Imagination Space

I think that the concept of projection goes some way in describing how a person becomes immersed in a video game. Through identifying consciously or subconsciously with the different characters, narratives and processes in a game, the player is able to explore personal issues, goals and ideals, as well as participate in those transmitted to her by her culture. This doesn’t just mean that a player will identify solely with a game’s controllable characters, it means that the game as a whole will act as a kind of “imagination space” with enemies, themes, landscapes, items and processes all reflecting a particular imaginative concern. The interplay of two opposing characters or political groups for example, may symbolise an inner conflict. A satisfying union, such as the moment in an RPG when a particularly enigmatic or dangerous character joins the player’s party may symbolise the resolution of an inner conflict represented by the characters differing natures. Of course seeing everything in a game as a projection of the imagination is a best case scenario. Since most games have fixed processes and plotlines, they won’t all relate to the concerns of every player. But as games increase in complexity and freedom, they will be able to accommodate many different playing styles and personal goals, mirroring the inner dynamics of the players personality. This idea of a game as an imagination space may sound unusual but it has an interesting historical parallel in the form of ancient Greek theatre.

When a citizen of ancient Greece went to the theatre, he didn’t go to be mildly amused or to view the kind of lightweight nonsense that passes for entertainment today. He went there to experience catharsis, a release of deep feeling that to the Greeks was related to the purification of the senses and the soul. The key to catharsis was mimesis, a combination of the suspension of disbelief, the ability to empathise with the characters on-stage and the ability to internalise the drama as it was performed, In other words, to relate to the drama on a personal, imaginative level (Rheingold, 1991). To the Greeks, catharsis was a healthy way of dealing with the great themes of life and death, and it’s not for nothing that the term is retained by psychology today, to describe the release of emotion related to the resolution of an internal difficulty. Such catharsis may also occur within our digital imagination space, when an event occurs of particular resonance to the gamer, such as the union of two formerly opposing characters or the surmounting of a difficult obstacle, though often at differing levels of intensity.

Another parallel is found in the work of the great German novelist and Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse. In his novel Steppenwolf, Hesse explores the possibility of literature representing “..the ego as a manifold entity.” He also advises the reader, “not to regard the characters of such a creation as separate beings, but as the various facets and aspects of a higher unity” (Hesse, 1927).

But what are the various facets and aspects of the psyche that we project onto a game? Can we say anything general about them that we could use in game design or are they utterly unique in every person? And how do the inner concerns of an individual relate to and identify with the epic and often otherworldly themes found in games and fantasy? To answer these questions we need to turn to Jung’s metapsychology, that is, his map of the imagination.

The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

Many readers will be familiar with the notion of the unconscious or subconscious mind, that aspect of the psyche that contains all that consciousness is unaware of. This includes such things as memories, forgotten experiences, subliminal perceptions and habitual tendencies such as the ability to drive a car without thinking about it. Most popular formulations of the unconscious regard it as a tabula rasa, or a blank slate upon which a person’s experiences are written as he or she goes through life. This view leads many to the conclusion that all minds are utterly different, or that the personality is entirely constructed by society and circumstance. As well as failing to take biology into account, with the fact that all brains share the same basic mechanisms, this idea failed to impress Carl Jung, who for nine years had conducted a study of the delusions and hallucinations experienced by sufferers of schizophrenia.

Jung noticed, when studying the dreams, fantasies and delusions of his patients, that many of them contained images and ideas that could not be related to a patient’s life history. They could, of course, be explained away as meaningless mental irregularities, but he also noticed that these images and ideas were very similar to ones found in mythical and religious symbolism from all over the world. As psychiatrist Anthony Stevens explains, “Jung gathered a wealth of evidence which persuaded him that this universal symbolism was due less to individual experience or cultural dissemination than to the structure of the human brain and to a fundamental component of the unconscious psyche which was shared by all humankind” (Stevens, 1999). Jung called this fundamental component the collective unconscious.

Within the collective unconscious, Jung posited the existence of archetypes. These are fundamental psychological patterns that relate to the universal symbols described above. As Jung explains,”The concept of the archetype.. is derived from the repeated observation that, for instance, the myths and fairy tales of world literature contain motifs which crop up everywhere. We meet these same motifs in the fantasies, dreams, deliria and delusions of individuals living today..These typical images and associations are what I call archetypal ideas” (Storr, 1998). Although Jung’s archetypal hypothesis is controversial2, some thinkers believe that it might represent a first-person view of such third-person concepts as the cognitive schemata of cognitive science and the evolved psychological mechanisms of evolutionary psychology; although it is not yet clear how much of an archetypal pattern is inherited and how much is culturally transmitted (Glassman, 2000; Stevens,1998).

Typical archetypal ideas that often appear in myths, dreams and fantasies include, the hero, the devouring monster, the wise old man or woman, the father, the mother, the “dream woman” the “dream man”, helpful animals and the dangerous enemy. There are also archetypal processes such as the heroic quest, the descent into the underworld, the slaying of a dragon, sexual union, the rising and setting of the sun, birth and death. These archetypal ideas symbolise the universal components and processes of the psyche and can often evoke a strong emotional impact.

This is not to say that an archetype is a mythical image or being. Mythical images, along with those found in dreams and fantasies are representations, or symbols of the archetypes. Archetypes themselves are innate psychological patterns with no content of their own, that take on the appearance of real life images that relate to them in some way. For example, one person may have heroic fantasies of being a cyberpunk hacker, bringing down the systems of evil corporations and another may have fantasies of scoring the winning goal in the World Cup. Although the content of these fantasies are different, and the personalities of the wannabe hacker and the football fan may be utterly divergent, the basic form of their fantasies and the emotions associated with them are the same. Both examples depict the heroic triumph of a special individual, a universal theme of great antiquity, and both have similar related emotions; the feelings of mastery, personal strength, self-confidence and victory. In both individuals the hero archetype is at work, but it is expressed in different ways depending on their respective personalities and backgrounds. These are simplistic examples, just to illustrate the nature of the archetypes as “virtual” patterns that take on the image of things that are related to them in a person’s life. Much more could be discovered by exploring feelings and attitudes relating to different parts of a fantasy, sometimes revealing things that may be other than heroic.

As well as appearing as the imaginary beings and landscapes of dreams and fantasies, archetypes can be activated by images and people in the outside world. Two powerful examples are the “dream man” or “dream woman”, the anima and animus. Have you ever seen a person of the opposite sex, either in real life or an image, and being struck with an overwhelming emotion beyond mere instinct; a feeling that he or she is “the one?” This person has a magical, eternal quality, and when contemplating her face, your soul aches with an almost spiritual longing. He may appear to you as everything you have ever needed; when you are near him you are lost in rapture, when you are apart, you fall into a pit of darkest despair.

If, as a man, you have seen this woman, then you have met what Jungian psychology calls your anima, or soul-image. According to Jung, every man carries within his psyche the image of a woman, the anima. She appears to him in dreams, often as a guide, often as a magical being of almost painful beauty, sometimes as a dangerous seductress. Often she is projected, quite unconsciously, onto a real woman, investing this woman with her magical qualities, commonly obscuring the real woman underneath. Sometimes such projections can lead to lasting love, sometimes, when the real woman breaks through the projection and the man realises that she is not who he thought she was, he may accuse her of having “changed”, leave her, and go off in search of his anima princess, another woman who by chance embodies his inner love.

The animus is Jung’s term for the corresponding male image within a woman’s psyche. In dreams and fantasies he may be seen as a hero, sometimes as a rogue. Another symbol of the animus is as a brutal, animal-like male, as found in the fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast. Again, women often see their animus in real men, sometimes leading to a stable relationship when the real man underneath is understood, and sometimes causing great difficulties when the animus projection blinds her to reality. These examples show the power of projection, and also the power of the archetypes. They are not to be regarded as mere abstract concepts or ideas, they are the fundamental forces of the psyche.

Here’s another example, of great relevance to video games. Imagine a timid young boy, fearful of risk and somewhat overdependant on his parents. One day he sees a cartoon depicting heroic adventures. The boy feels a great emotional resonance when watching the show, watches it every week and starts playing imaginary games based upon it, seeing himself as his television hero or sharing the same adventures. He might imaginatively summon his favourite characters to himself when he encounters difficult situations or before sleep, when he is alone in the darkness of night. Gradually, and with parental support and understanding the boy becomes more confident and independent.

This TV show has activated the boy’s hero archetype. This archetype often comes to the fore in dreams and fantasies whenever courage and strong self-identity are needed. The heroic games of children are expressions of this archetypal pattern that will arise quite naturally as part of their development, through conquering the dragons of dependence and fear, a child becomes less emotionally reliant on his parents and begins to build a stronger sense of identity. In this example, although the child may have had vague feelings of unease surrounding his initial situation, and may have had dreams containing heroic imagery, the TV show gave him concrete images that he could relate to and emulate. Through their similarity to the inner archetype, the images of the TV show become emotionally resonant symbols of it and make the unconscious qualities of self identity and courage known to the conscious mind. Through fantasy and play the child will eventually integrate the aspects of the hero archetype represented by the TV show into his conscious personality. The hero and the heroic quest are found almost universally in video games, and contrary to popular belief, are not limited to childhood concerns. I will explore these archetypes and their relevance to video games in more detail later.

The four most important archetypes, essential to any understanding of Jungian psychology are the shadow, anima, animus and self. These primary archetypes generally appear in most dreams and fantasies and in many video games, under various symbolic guises. In many individuals, the shadow is the first one to appear in dream and fantasy life and is a constant factor in the development of personality (Jung, 1964).

The Shadow

The shadow often (but not always) appears in dreams and fantasies as a threatening enemy representing the aspects of the unconscious mind that are unknown or repressed because of the attitude of the conscious mind towards them. In other words, the shadow is our “dark side” and will taint other archetypes depending on our relationship with them. A simplistic example is the straight laced business man who dreams of threatening anarchists or bohemians storming into his office and causing a scene. A Jungian interpretation of this dream would be that the bohemians symbolise an unconscious creative talent, or attitude towards life that could be useful to the dreamer but remains outside the conscious personality because of his attitude towards it. This doesn’t mean that the dreamer should drop everything and become a bohemian, it means that he should try and integrate a little more creativity and spontaneity (or whatever he associates with bohemians) into his life, qualities that for whatever reason his conscious personality finds threatening.

The shadow is often projected onto others. Perhaps our business man may be moved to rage whenever he encounters free-spirited creative individuals and will associate them with all kinds of evils. If he understands his dream and acts upon it, he may later dream of less threatening or even friendly bohemians, and will probably develop a more tolerant understanding of their real life counterparts.

A person who sees himself as a free-spirited bohemian however, may dream or fantasise about having conflicts with threatening straight laced business men, reflecting qualities that he consciously finds unpleasant, but may be useful to him, such as the ability to organise and think rationally. Working with the shadow is a real moral responsibility as it forces us to confront what we do not accept in ourselves and often project onto others, sustaining such problems as racism and homophobia. To deal with the shadow is to deal with the ancient problem of good and evil on a personal level.

Jung’s shadow is pretty much the same as the notion of the Other, which is found in cultural studies and describes the way one culture represents those different from it. As Ziauddin Sardar describes it, “The most common representation of the Other is as the darker side, the binary opposite of oneself: we are civilised, they are barbaric; the colonialists are hard-working, the natives are lazy..” (Sardar and Van Loon, 1999).

Although the shadow often appears threatening, it may also represent qualities that the dreamer finds positive, but does not attribute to himself. A person might dream of a friend or compelling stranger of the same sex who displays qualities that the dreamer finds admirable, but is afraid of integrating into conscious life.

People might try to integrate the entire shadow or fight it off at every turn, but this is impossible. The basic facts of individual existence, that a person is one thing and not another, that a person says yes to some things and no to others, implies the basic opposition of ego and shadow, me and you, good and evil. The task of the individual is to develop an understanding of their shadow and what it tells them about themselves, to integrate what they can and negotiate with what they cannot.

The shadow appears almost universally in video games, as every enemy and every threatening character or idea. A gamer might choose games that depict the destruction of a certain order of enemy, reflecting his own relationship with his shadow. A designer may also create enemies and processes that reflect his own inner concerns. I`ll return to this important subject when I discuss using archetypal images in games.

The Anima and Animus

As we saw earlier, the anima and animus are the contrasexual archetypes within men and women respectively. Just as there is a biological imperative behind sexual attraction, Jung maintained that there was also a related psychological imperative. Jung said of man and the anima, “..the whole nature of man presupposes woman, both physically and spiritually. His system is tuned to woman from the start” (Stevens, 1999). And woman is tuned to man in much the same way3. But the roles of the anima and animus go beyond blind sexual instinct as it is popularly perceived. The meaning of man to woman, and of woman to man relate closely to every aspect of the psyche and to every stage of its development.

According to Jungian psychology, the anima and animus, when they appear in dreams and fantasies are personifications of the relationship of an individual with his or her unconscious. In other words, a man will experience his unconscious as feminine, and a woman will experience hers as masculine. The anima often appears as a witch or as a magical woman with knowledge of deep and unfathomable realms, i.e. the unconscious mind, or as a guide such as Beatrice in Dante’s Paradiso (Jung, 1964). The anima also appears as a lover or companion, reflecting in dreams a successful relationship with the unconscious. She may sometimes appear as a princess to be rescued, as in many fairy tales and games. Guarded by a beast symbolising some attitude of the psyche that prevents a good relationship with the anima or with women, she must be saved by a hero strong enough to stand up to such a creature and not be devoured.

The anima also has a negative or shadow aspect. She may appear as a femme fatale, like the mythical sirens luring men to their doom with their magical songs, or as a dangerous witch, symbolising both a negative attitude towards the anima and the unconscious, and the danger of encountering the unconscious without strength and discrimination. The anima is also tied up with all the qualities and attitudes that a man regards as feminine and by working with the anima, he can integrate and understand such valuable qualities.

The animus, the male image within a woman, often appears as an attractive heroic figure, sometimes as a wise spiritual guide. Just as the anima relates to feminine qualities in a man, the animus relates to perceived masculine qualities within a woman, such as heroic courage and rationality. By working with the animus, a woman can integrate these positive qualities into her personality. The animus also has a negative aspect and can appear as a rogue or criminal. Sometimes he appears as a beast, reflecting a wild, untamed and unintegrated animus, or a negative attitude towards masculinity and her relation to it. A woman dreaming of such a beast may be fearful at first, but as she works with the animus, he will be transformed into more attractive human forms. The story of Beauty and the Beast is a reflection of this process (Jung, 1964).

As I described earlier, the anima and animus can be projected on to real men and women, sometimes causing all kinds of dangerous obsessions and misunderstandings. By subconsciously tying up their anima or animus with a person of the opposite sex, an individual effectively identifies them with his own unconscious and requires their presence and their compliance to engage with it. This is not to say that anima and animus projection is entirely negative, it can be a tool of personal growth when recognised, and when the real man or woman behind the projection is accepted and understood.

The anima often appears in games as a woman to be rescued by the player, sometimes as a companion. There are few games depicting the relationship between a woman and her animus. But some games, such as the Final Fantasy series do a good job by giving the player a large number of male and female characters to control. To a male player a female character can symbolise his anima, such as Rinoa from FFVIII; Squall could symbolise the animus of a female player. Squaresoft make this work by depicting their relationship from both perspectives. Gamers might choose games with themes that reflect their own relationship with their anima or animus, and designers might create characters and stories that reflect theirs.

The Self

Jung referred to the self as the “archetype of archetypes” (Stevens, 1999). It represents the totality of the psyche, both consciousness and unconsciousness and all that they contain. To Jungian psychology, the self is the innermost nucleus of the psyche. It is often symbolised in dreams, fantasies and mythology as a circle, mandala or square; as a quaternity, such as the “four corners of the universe” the four directions or a circle divided into four. It may appear personified as a wise old man to a male dreamer, or as a wise old woman to a female, or perhaps as a great king or queen. Sometimes it appears as a divine or magical child. Generally in myths, the self is symbolised by the “cosmic man” or woman, representing the totality of the individual. In games it is sometimes represented by the most powerful principle in the game’s world. In RPG’s it may be symbolised by the four elements, a magical jewel in the centre of the world or the tree of life. In other games it may be represented by such things as the space-time continuum, the fundamental genetic code, a nation state or by anything that symbolises the greatest power in a game.

The self is also symbolised by the helpful animals that often turn up in fairy tales to advise and assist the hero. Many of these animals appear in games, such as Link’s owl companion in Zelda 64, or the moogles in the Final Fantasy games. These creatures, unpredictable, often indestructible, but somehow vulnerable, possess a natural wisdom that defies any enemy and lifts them from the mundane world. They are often represented as servants of a great power, depicting the early appearance of the self as it guides the struggling hero towards his destiny.

The self is also an archetype of healing and unity, and will often arise in the dreams and fantasies of people struggling with inner conflicts. The drawings of children who are in the midst of divorce or family difficulties often contain circular motifs, symbolising the attempt of the self to bring some unity and healing to a child’s fragmenting inner world (Stevens, 1999). This healing and unifying aspect of the self can turn up in games, with the almost universal representation of force fields and energy shields as circular or spherical zones of light.

But the self also has a shadow side; as the most powerful force in the Jungian psyche, the shadow of the self is often symbolised by an ultimate evil. Taken together these two aspects reflects the great polarities of consciousness and unconsciousness, light and darkness.

These four archetypes are the main forces within the unconscious and are often projected on to objects in the outside world, including games. As one can see from the examples given, many games already contain symbols of these archetypes, either through social convention and repetition or through the imagination of the designer, who might spontaneously produce such symbols in a fantasy. But developers cannot simply put an archetypal image in a game and claim that they are being “Jungian”. We need to understand how the archetypes relate to the individual and to his psychological development, and why he has one fantasy rather than another.

The Archetypes and the Individual

The archetypes and the collective unconscious are in Jungian terms, the lowest level of the unconscious psyche, their patterns shaping the layers above. But as we have seen, the archetypes appear in dreams and fantasies as images from personal life. We have also seen that archetypes appear as positive or negative images depending on our relationship to them. In other words, they are coloured by the experiences we have in life and by our conscious attitude towards them. In Jung’s model of the psyche, our relationship with the archetypes that determine how they appear to us is shaped by the personal and cultural unconscious.

Above the collective unconscious lies the personal and cultural unconscious. The cultural unconscious contains all the unconscious assumptions given to an individual by the society he or she grows up in. Some writers do not refer to a cultural unconscious, as strictly speaking, all these experiences are mixed up with personal ones, but I will separate them as it allows an entry point for cultural studies, which as I will show, is an essential subject when using archetypal images in games. The personal unconscious is similar to the traditional view of the unconscious mind described at the start of this section. It contains all our memories, forgotten experiences, subliminal perceptions and habitual tendencies. It also contains our complexes.

The basic units of the personal unconscious that shape our relationship with the archetypes are the complexes. I’m sure many are familiar with the term complex, as it has entered popular use as a term describing all manner of psychological problems, but few are aware of what a complex actually is or how it arises. When an archetype is activated it gathers to itself ideas images and experiences associated with the situation or person that activated it. This bundle of experiences, emotions and ideas surrounding an archetype is a complex. A good example, given by psychiatrist Anthony Stevens, is the activation of the mother archetype in a child. According to Jungian psychology, every child is born with an innate expectancy of a mother figure, the archetype of the mother. This archetype becomes active when the child experiences a woman whose behaviour is similar to the child’s innate expectation of a mother. Sometimes this woman may be the birth mother, sometimes it may be a foster parent, aunt or older sister. The emotions and experiences associated with this mother figure form a complex, surrounding the archetype’s emotional core (Stevens, 1999).

The forming of complexes is completely normal, but they often cause suffering. An example of this is given by Anthony Stevens. Stevens described a woman whose childhood had been dominated by a brutal, tyrannical father. This woman’s father archetype was activated only partially and only the law-giving, authoritarian aspects of the father archetype were built into her father complex, with the loving and protecting aspects of the paternal archetype remaining unconscious. Stevens continued to describe how this woman kept being drawn to bullying men, but at the same time she had an unfulfilled longing for a man who would give her love and protection. According to Stevens, this woman’s dreams fantasies and behaviour showed that she longed for someone to activate and fulfil the unconscious aspects of her father archetype (Stevens, 1999). As well as demonstrating the harm done by bad parenting, this example also shows that archetypes are complete, that they contain every aspect of fatherhood, motherhood, herohood and selfhood, and that once activated, they seek completion and conscious realisation. The archetypes in their total form are often symbolised in world mythology as figures such as Mother Earth or Gaia; as ultimate father figures such as Zeus, and as ultimate heroes such as Odysseus.

Our relation to the archetypes and the content of our complexes is also shaped by the culture we grow up in and the unconscious assumptions that we pick up as a member of society. An example is a society that promotes and encourages the view that a hero never shows his feelings. These emotions and images bound up with a particular society’s view of what makes a hero represent a kind of cultural complex, since it is held by a large number of people, and will be transmitted to members of that society whose own complexes are formed by such images. These cultural complexes, held by large numbers of people, are often projected on to others and often affect the way a society functions. They can be harmful as sociologists and cultural critics have shown. But such complexes cannot be argued with, reasoned with or overthrown by revolution; like personal complexes, which in fact they are, they require healing and transformation.

The gradual process of working through complexes and integrating unconscious contents into the conscious personality form Jung’s theory of psychological development, the individuation process. Unlike some theories of development that focus on social adaptation alone, the process of individuation describes a life long and personal process of increasing self awareness, maturity and self realisation. Individuation is a natural process of the psyche, occurring the background of one’s life, but it can be arrested by traumatic experiences, harmful complexes or a faulty attitude towards the unconscious. Individuation begins with the awakening of self consciousness and self identity in a child, and continues through the whole of life with the gradual integration and conscious understanding of the unconscious material that appears to an individual in their dreams fantasies and projections. The culmination of individuation is a successful relationship with the self, the archetype of wholeness that represents the totality of the individual psyche.

Conclusion

Complexes, such as a woman’s struggle against a tyrannical father figure and her search for his loving counterpart form the characters, themes and set-pieces of the inner dramas that are enacted in dreams and fantasies and projected on to the outside world. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that the emotional resonance that a player associates with certain video game characters and themes derives from a projection of the players current psychological situation.

The fact that games are interactive allows a player to go beyond the passive projection or mimesis of theatre and literature, and to consciously take part in their fantasy. Thus the woman described earlier might be particularly drawn to a game that depicted a tyrant as an enemy and the rescue or discovery of a loving male figure as a goal. Whether such a game could help her therapeutically is debatable, but by seeing her inner concern and the path to its resolution within a game, and by being forced by its interactivity to make decisions regarding her inner situation, the woman is given a concrete set of ideas and images that might help her in some way. At the very least, this game and its challenges will be very relevant and involving to this particular woman.

By seeing images that reflect unconscious archetypal potential, a gamer may in some cases be assisted in his personal development. The emotional resonance experienced when unconscious archetypal potential is projected onto an image may account for the popularity of certain game characters and themes, and give a reason why some gamers like dressing up as their favourite character, or spend time drawing them or writing fan fiction. A gamers favourite character is a symbol or a reflection of unactivated archetypal potential. By playing the game, drawing pictures etc. the gamer is trying to integrate the aspects of the archetype represented by the character into his or her conscious personality.

The process of resolving inner conflicts and integrating unconscious material may sound like very unusual subjects for a game, but this process is reflected in many games already, because it is symbolised in myths and fairy tales as the heroic quest. In part three of Games and the Imagination, The Game as Quest, I will explore the heroic quest and show how it operates as a symbol of the development of consciousness and identity. I will also show that far from being the preserve of RPG or adventure games, the heroic quest and the individuation process appear in the majority of genres, in a large number of games.

Notes

1: Selecting a first person viewpoint from which to interpret the imaginative relationship between a player and a game is fraught with difficulties. As we have seen there is a schism between the third person, objective viewpoint, and the first person, subjective viewpoint. Within the first person viewpoint there is a further schism; between a perspective that regards the psyche as a social or linguistic construct (the tabula rasa view described earlier) and the Jungian viewpoint that states that the psyche is based on fundamental inherited psychological structures. Most schools of aesthetic or cultural criticism focus on the former, because it has a strong base in linguistics and semiotics which are ideal tools for understanding structures of cultural meaning. This viewpoint has already been successfully applied to video games (Poole, 2000) and I regard it as highly important. But I maintain that any attempt to understand video games must include personal psychology and address the issue of personal meaning, and that any personal psychology that claims that the psyche is a tabula rasa is incomplete, as overwhelming third person research will attest. The relationship between a player and a game is a complex one, and any “playability theory” must encompass cognitive, personal (in the sense of something having a unique resonance and meaning to an individual) and cultural domains.

What is needed is a dual integration; firstly between a first person psychology that admits the existence of universal (i.e. inherited) psychological structures, and a first person psychology that admits the intersubjective, cultural and contextual nature of the material based on those structures; and secondly, an integration of the third person objective viewpoint and the first person subjective viewpoint. The first integration is a conceptual matter, the second is known by consciousness researchers as the “Hard Problem.” Until such an integration takes place, anything said about the psychology of video games, and indeed the psychology of anything, will be limited and provisional.

2: Jungian psychology is controversial in academic psychology because it is a first person theory, and like all first person theories it cannot find a sound base in third person research. It is controversial in first person academic fields such as cultural studies, because it claims that the psyche is not a total social construction and because Jung’s complex, heavyweight writings have often been misunderstood. As it occupies a middle ground between the first and third person realms, it is in a difficult philosophical position, but as I stated in the note above, the only way for psychology to go forwards is to embrace an integrative approach, and Jung’s ideas may provide a stepping stone towards that.

3: The description of the anima and animus, as the female “image” within a male and the male “image” within a female is not to make any judgement regarding homosexuality, it is just the common description used by Jungian writers for ease of understanding. Since the archetypes are psychological and emotional patterns with no content of their own, they are not innate images of men or women, but the feelings and ideas associated with them. Therefore, the anima “feeling” of a homosexual man, that is, the feeling of a desirable, or perhaps dangerous “other” will be symbolised by a male image or projected onto a man.（Source：gamedev）

如何将核心游戏元素展现在休闲游戏玩家面前？Zynga首席设计师Seth Sivak在《游戏开发者》杂志2012年5月刊中通过《夺宝奇兵冒险世界》（Indiana Jones Adventure World，以下简称IJAW）的原型，创造性等方面阐述了这个问题。

Indiana Jones Adventure World(from gamasutra)

原型是成功的关键

如果你的目标是汲取一些经典游戏，如《塞尔达传说：时之笛》以及《古墓丽影》中的游戏元素并适当地做出调整以迎合社交游戏玩家的需求，你就需要尽可能地创造更多原型。据Sivak所称：

我们的设计团队花了数周的时间去琢磨潜行，逃避，时效性技能等机制。我们使用了实时移动以及其它回合制元素创造了游戏原型。我们甚至还尝试了各种不同的移动规则以及大量用户界面处理方法，希望能够更好地向玩家传达我们的游戏机制。最后，我们开始挑战更广的层面并希望尝试基于谜题的战斗和其它不同的想法，以此观察是否有哪些内容是不合适的。“坦克小恶魔”便是一个典型的例子。

IJAW是一款回合制游戏，玩家在游戏中所穿越的每个图层都被当成是一个回合。我们设计了一个能够移动，旋转，并基于不同速度发动攻击（游戏邦注：根据玩家所处的回合进行设置）的小恶魔（尽管“坦克小恶魔”的速度较慢，但是却也能够造成一定的破坏）。而这就意味着我们必须“告诉”玩家小恶魔是如何移动，转向或攻击。同时我们必须保证适度传达这种信息，否则玩家将会感到厌恶而不愿意继续游戏，因为当他们完全清楚游戏中的所有机制时，他们便会觉得游戏不再有趣了。

随后，我们必须邀请一些人帮我们测试这些原型。我们可以通过易用性，理解难度以及游戏深度和趣味去判断游戏设计的质量。我们希望将战斗作为游戏的基础元素——甚至是面向那些从未体验过游戏战斗的玩家。我们创造了一份简单的最终设计，其中不仅包含了一些基本机制，同时也设置了能够带给玩家惊喜的“致命一击”，能够应对更多危险的升级版武器以及躲避功能。当玩家遭到损坏时，他便会丢失一个单位的能量值。

尽管这么做违背了我们的核心设计价值理念，即从不惩罚玩家，但是这也能带给玩家一种判断和征服感。我们希望将IJAW当成是Zynga第一款带有结果的游戏。并且让我们感到惊讶的是，玩家并不会被这种破坏感所惑，他们已经自然地将其视为游戏体验的一部分。

不要试图处处发挥创造性

创意固然是件好事，但是在游戏中的任何一个元素添加创造性将有可能疏远你的现有玩家。IJAW也遇到了这一问题：

IJAW的目标是创造全新的游戏玩法并建立新的社交冒险游戏类型。但是事实证明做到这点非常困难。我们带着创造全新内容的目标尝试着创造出每一个新的机制，用户界面以及游戏理念。但是这么做却是一种危险的尝试，因为如今的社交游戏玩家会期待每一款社交游戏都融入自己所习惯的功能，并贯穿游戏始终。

我们的收集系统便成了这种特殊问题的牺牲品。对于那些不熟悉社交游戏的读者来说：收集系统就像是自动贩售机。玩家在游戏中所遇到的每一个对象将有可能掉落一个特殊的道具，而玩家就必须拾起它，当玩家收集了所有道具后便能够得到奖励。我们多次迭代了这一收集系统并在核心功能基础上添加了许多不同的内容。我们的首次尝试，也就是“Discoveries”便是一种标准的收集系统。

最理想的情况是，玩家将获得新的Discoveries，并为它取一个特殊的名字，然后选择是否将这一发现与好友共享。这些额外的功能将提高Discoveries系统的范围，从而在我们的第二层收集系统中添加了更多有趣的内容。如果缺少了这些额外的功能，玩家便不会觉得遵循收集系统是有价值的，并且他们也很难意识到Discoveries与对象之间的关系。

所以最终我们还是决定遵循传统的收集机制而彻底抛弃Discoveries系统。在游戏开发过程中，抛弃设计师投入了大量心血而创造出来的一个功能并不是什么新鲜事，但我们几乎处处遇到这种情况——即使是我们发觉没有理由这样做时。我们在后来的功能中也遇到类似问题，如“Mastery”，因为没有足够的时间所以我们才没有对其进行创新。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

How Indiana Jones Adventure World’s core game mechanics target Facebook players

by Patrick Miller

How do you bring core game elements to a casual audience? In the May 2012 issue of Gamasutra sister publication Game Developer magazine, lead designer Seth Sivak explains how Zynga did it in Indiana Jones Adventure World: Prototyping, innovation, and, well, Indiana Jones. (The May 2012 issue is now available via subscription and digital purchase.)

Prototyping key to success

When your goal is to take elements from classic games like Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Tomb Raider, and adapt them for a social game audience, you’ll need to make many, many prototypes, Sivak says in the article:

The design team spent weeks toying with mechanics like stealth, avoidance, and timing-based skill. We built prototypes that used real-time movement and others that were turn-based. We tried dozens of different movement rules and an even larger variety of user interface treatments that attempted to explain them all. Eventually, we went broad and tried puzzle-based combat and a few other disparate ideas to see if there was anything that stuck. One good example of this is the “tank beastie.”

IJAW is a turn-based game; each tile that the player crosses counts as a turn. We designed a beastie that would move, rotate, and attack at different rates based on the number of turns taken by the player (the “tank beastie” would turn really slowly but attack for a lot of damage). This meant we needed to create a “tell” that could explain to the player that the beastie was about to move, turn, or attack. We also had a threat range that the player could back out of, which would make the beastie stop. This was just way too much information, and even when players understood all of it, the gameplay was not terribly fun.

Every prototype was put in front of people in the office and playtested side-by-side. We judged the designs primarily on their ease of use and how easy they were to understand, but also in terms of depth and overall fun. We hoped that combat would be a cornerstone of the game for all our players–even those who had never experienced combat in a game before. We went with a very simple final design that had a handful of basic mechanics, which included critical hits that caused stuns, weapon upgrades that dealt more damage, and dodges. When the player is damaged, he loses a unit of energy (which is used every action in the game).

While this went against our core design value of never punishing our players, it allowed us to give them a feeling of judgment and mastery that we couldn’t get otherwise. We like to think that IJAW was one of the first Zynga games with consequences. To our surprise, players never found the damage confusing, and they embraced it as part of the game.

Don’t try to innovate everywhere

Innovation is great, but trying to innovate in every single facet of your game can actually alienate your established audience. The Indiana Jones Adventure World team found this out the hard way:

The goal for IJAW was to innovate with new gameplay and establish a new genre of social adventure games. As it turns out, that is really hard. We tried to innovate with every mechanic, user interface, and idea in the game with the intention of building something new. This became dangerous because social game players have come to expect a set of features that they believe should be part of every game and should work consistently across games.

Our collection system fell victim to this particular problem. For the readers new to social games: A collection system provides a player with a slot machine feel for every action in the game. Each object the player interacts with has a chance of dropping an item from a specific collection, and when the player completes the collection, they receive a reward. We went through several iterations for a collections system that included many different additions to the core feature. Our first try, which was called “Discoveries,” was a standard collection system.

Ideally, a player would make a Discovery, give it a unique name, and then have the option to share that discovery with friends. That additional functionality increased the Discoveries system’s scope, so several of the more interesting parts were put into a secondary tier. Without those additional features, however, the system did not feel very rewarding, and the relationship between the Discoveries and the objects that provided them were not clear to the player.

In the end, we decided to keep the traditional collection mechanic and scrap the Discoveries system completely. Cutting a feature your designers have been working hard on is nothing new to the game development process, but we did this everywhere–even places where we had no reason to do it (quest structure, for example). We ran into issues later on with features like Mastery, where we should have innovated but did not have enough time left to do so. (source:GAMASUTRA)

《Taptitude》是一款由FourBros工作室于2011年初开发的手机游戏，我们希望通过本文回顾它在过去一年中的发展历程。《Taptitude》是一款Windows Phone 7手机游戏，包含60多个竞争性的迷你小游戏。游戏最初发布于2011年3月，原先只有一小部分迷你游戏内容，后来通过每周更新，添加了更多内容。

Taptitude(from fourbrosstudio.com)

这是一款免费游戏，采用的是pubCenter广告模式，主要通过eCPM实现收益。在最初几个月，我们的广告收入非常之少，平均每天就几千次广告印象。后来添加了在线积分排行榜、解琐迷你游戏的星星、购买游戏更新内容的虚拟货币，以及追踪游戏进程的状态功能之后，游戏收益才开始持续增长。

eCPM & Revenue(from gamesbrief)

现在这款游戏广告印象将近1亿次，其中多数是最近几个月的成果。下图是游戏在过去一年中每周的广告印象：

impressions(from gamesbrief)

从下图中可以看出，游戏在同一时间段的eCPM波动起伏较大：

eCPM(from gamesbrief)

最理想的情况是每天获得3美元的eCPM，但多数时间是1美元左右。

Revenue(from gamesbrief)

从上图中可以看出，在去年11月份我们eCPM达到高峰时，收益也正好处于颠峰状态（尽管此时的广告印象比前几周更少）。我们的eCPM低于1美元的时候，就不得不依靠扩大用户规模以补足广告印象差额。

ad blitz impressions(from gamesbrief)

从以上图表可以看出，我们在不同营销策略中从pubCenter广告转向AdDuplex广告时，就会出现两个明显的下沉点。因为我们此时仅显示pubCenter或AdDuplex广告，而非同时显示两种广告（游戏邦注：pubCenter广告印象的下沉点对应的是AdDuplex广告印象的尖峰，因为此时游戏是通过AdDuplex推广游戏）。在图表末尾，你可以看到我们的游戏每天已有100万次广告印象。

downloads(from gamesbrief)

上图的橙色线条代表游戏的总体下载量，绿色线条代表每日独立用户下载量。从中可以看出，我们有6个多月时间每天只新增350名用户，其中绿线的尖峰源于游戏在Marketplace获得推荐，或者更新内容，以及通过Facebook和AdDuplex展开营销活动。

versions(from gamesbrief)

《Taptitude》在去年下载量将近30万次，以上图表显示的是用户所采用的游戏版本。我们可以看出多数活跃用户在过去数周中都会保持更新，但值得注意的是有相当部分用户仍停留在4.5版本。4.5版本是我们在Mango平台发布前的最后一次更新，也就是说尚未将操作系统更新至Windows Phone 7.1（Mango）只能看到游戏的4.5版本。我们询问用户为何不更新到Mango版本，多数人的回答是他们没有可连接手机设备的电脑，并且无法通过无线网络进行更新。

devices(from gamesbrief)

manufacturers(from gamesbrief)

从游戏所分布的移动设备类型来看，诺基亚Lumia 800用户数量最为领先，其次是Lumia 710用户，而Lumia 900发布时间虽然不长，但用户数量增长也相当迅速。但从所有设备制造商情况来看，HTC手机用户分布最为广泛（因为HTC供应的Windows Phone手机设备类型更多）。

players by culture(from gamesbrief)

上图表明，《Taptitude》的主要用户分布于欧美地区（游戏邦注：因为这款游戏仅推出英文版本），多数用户来自英国、德国和西班牙。

我们认为Windows Phone是一个可助独立开发者获得成功的市场，我们看好这个平台将来的发展前景，并迫切期待进入Windows 8时代！

附：以下是游戏在过去30天中的每日盈利情况

per day revenue(from gamesbrief)

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

Taptitude – a Windows Phone Success Story

yler Four Bros

FourBros Studio began developing Taptitude early in 2011.  This article is going to look back over the last year as the game has evolved to see how far we’ve come and how we got here.  For those not familiar with Taptitude, it is a free Windows Phone 7 game with a collection of over 60 competitive minigames.  We initially launched Taptitude in March 2011 with just a handful of relatively simple minigames, and have since updated it every week adding new games and platform features.

Taptitude is free to play, and is supported by pubCenter ads.  In this buisness model, you are paid based on how many ‘impressions’ you get each day.  The amount you’re paid per thousand impressions is refered to as ‘eCPM’.  For example, if you get 10,000 impressions at $1 eCPM, then pubCenter will pay you $10.

Over the last year, we’ve seen exponential growth in our impression rate.  For the first few months we made very little money, and only served a few thousand impressions per day.  As we stuck with the project we added many weekly updates with features including online leaderboards, stars to unlock minigames, coins to purchase game upgrades, and stats to track your progress.  Taptitude continues to evolve, but lets take a high level look at how we did on average over the last year:

We’re at nearly 100 million ad impressions, and much of that was in the last few months as you can see from this breakdown of impressions per week over the last year:

Over the same timeframe, you can see that our eCPM fluctuated pretty wildly:

We would love to get $3 eCPM every day, most of the time it’s closer to $1.  In the next chart we can see how our revenue is a combination of both eCPM and Impressions:

As you can see, in the weeks of November we had a big spike in eCPM resulting in record revenue despite having significantly less impression than recent weeks.  As we settled into the lower $1 eCPM we’ve had to grow our user base in order to make it up with impressions.

At the time of this writing, we are about half way through April and we have record impressions per day as seen by the following chart.  There are two clear dips in this chart that show when we diverted our pubCenter ads over to AdDuplex during different marketing blitz efforts.  The reason for this is that we either show a pubCenter ad or a AdDuplex ad, but not both.  Toward the end of this graph, you can see our 1 million impression days!

* NOTE: the dips in pubCenter ads correspond to a spike in AdDuplex ads because this is where we marketed our game using AdDuplex.

The graphs above show how our impressions have grown over the last year, now lets look at how that correlates to our userbase growth:

In this chart, the orange line shows the cumulative downloads of Taptitude, and the green line represenets the number of unique downloads per day. You can see from this graph that we stayed pretty flat at around 350 new users a day for over 6 months!  There are a couple spikes which tend to line up with getting featured in the Marketplace, releasing major new updates, as well as marketing campaigns that we ran on Facebook and AdDuplex.

Taptitude has been downloaded nearly 300k times in the last year.  With this many users, it’s interesting to slice and dice the demographics.  Lets look at the data we’ve collected in the last 30 days.

We publish an update for Taptitude every week.  We wondered how quickly our users were updating to the latest version:

Most of our active users do a good job of staying on the last few weeks, but there is an anomoly where a significant portion of our users are still on v4.5.  It turns out that v4.5 was the last version we released pre-Mango.  Anyone that hasn’t updated to Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) will be stuck seeing only version 4.5 on the Marketplace.  We’ve asked our users why they don’t update to Mango, considering it’s free, and most of the responses were because they didn’t have a computer to update their phone with.  Unfortunately this can’t be done over the air.

Now let’s break down which phones (devices) have played Taptitude in the last month:

Nokia is leading with the Lumia 800 followed by the 710, with the 900 making significant gains in the short period of time since its release.  Despite this, HTC is actually the #1 manufacturer at this time due to the breadth of devices they offer:

We also keep track of the ‘culture’ of the phones that play Taptitude.  This corresponds to the region that the player is from:

As to be expected, en-US is the primary culture considering Taptitude is only localized to English.  This is followed by a significant portion of our users coming from Great Britain, Germany, and Spain respectively.

Windows Phone is a rapidly growing market where indie developers can be successful.  We are looking forward to an even better second year as indie game developers, and can’t wait for Windows 8!

That wraps up our analysis of the last year of Taptitude.  In a future article we will dig into some of the specific stats that we track in game to see how our users are doing.  If you like this type of analysis, follow @FourBrosStudio on Twitter, and/or check out the Taptitude Facebook page.（source:gamesbrief）

不管你是否喜欢免费模式（即开发商提供免费的游戏并通过应用内部购买而赚钱），它都深深扎根于游戏领域。最近有很多人在担忧免费模式是否会影响游戏质量，而我想说的是这种担忧根本毫无根据。

免费模式的确存在着一些弊端，但是我们却不能因此完全否定这种模式。

freemium(from omalleyblog.typepad.com)

简述免费模式发展史

在还未出现免费模式之前，玩家需要预先支付一定的费用才能获得游戏。在传统的盒装模式时代，市场准入门槛相对较高，这就意味着市场上彼此竞争的产品并不多，所以商家只要通过一定的广告促销或口碑营销便能够吸引玩家注意——这也意味着发行商能够支付高额的预算并且无需承担过多风险。这种商业模式虽然不甚完美，但是却非常有效。在这里创造性虽然不是开发者最先考虑因素，但是他们也仍未忽视游戏质量。

而再次回到下载时代，特别是App Store盛行的这个年代，开发者所面临的市场准入门槛瞬间变得很低——甚至任何人只要拥有一台电脑和一个编辑器便能够发行游戏。起初大家都会认为这是件好事，我们可以看到许多“独立游戏”的出现并听到许多大获成功的显著案例，但是很快地市场上便开始充斥各种质量良莠不齐的游戏，而开发者也开始为了赢得竞争而大肆砍价。

我们将这个变化过程称之为“向下竞争”，可以看到现在大多数付费游戏的售价都在1至2美元之间，扭转了我们对于游戏价值的真正看法。在过去我们会认为售价5美元的游戏真的非常便宜了，但是在现在看来这却变得异常昂贵——尽管人们可以毫不犹豫地花同样的钱买杯拿铁和吃个三明治。

这意味着，开发者若打算面向手机和平板电脑市场创造一款高质量的游戏，他便可能面临巨大的风险。也就是尽管你那售价5美元（或更多）的游戏非常出色，但是却很少有玩家能够发现并愿意购买它。他们更愿意下载那些价钱便宜的手机游戏，尽管这些游戏中不乏质量糟糕的内容。

这便是免费模式所塑造出来的框架。如果你为游戏设置了免费模式，所有人都能够轻松地尝试这款游戏——当然了，这个市场中已经充满了许多其它选择，但是你却可以通过不断完善游戏而让它从中脱颖而出。

只要你吸引了一些玩家的注意，你便可以开始向他们出售游戏道具并从中赚取利益了。因为这些玩家已经深深对游戏着迷了，所以你便可以向他们收取比封顶的应用售价更高的道具费用。最近我也发现许多游戏通过进一步挖掘这一系统而赚取了大量收益。

这种模式存在何种问题？

我在上个段落的最后一句中使用了“挖掘”这一词，而这便是免费模式的问题所在。从中我们可以发现游戏并不是单纯地吸引玩家的注意并要求他们支付一定的费用才能继续游戏；它们是通过使用一些“不正当的手段”向玩家兜售过多的游戏内部道具，并以此鼓励玩家沉浸于游戏中而忽视了这些道具的成本。

前段时间我在Android平台上玩的一款游戏《Paradise Island》便是一个典型的例子。在游戏中玩家可以为自己的岛屿购买任何特殊的建筑，在这个过程中玩家需要支付各种不同形式的货币，但是他们却不能真正意识到这些建筑的实际成本。我曾经仔细估算过这款游戏的“万圣节包”中的一种建筑的开销高达50美元左右。

我想应该是这种上瘾型游戏才让免费模式落得如此糟糕的声誉吧。当你回到盒装游戏时代时，你会发现那时候的我们已经在脑海中形成了免费模式这一理念，虽然那时它还未成为一种流行词。

是否能够改正这一问题？

这么做已经是指日可待了。最近的一些游戏已经在应用内部付费方面有所收敛。例如《Triple Town》在免费版本中限制玩家每一天只能玩一定量的“回合”，并且让他们可以使用固定的费用去购买无限量的回合。尽管玩家仍可以通过花钱赢得胜利，但是现在他们却可以对此做出选择，也可以只进行一次性付费。这便是解决问题的一大正确方向。

除此之外，近来日本法律还出面审查“kompu gacha”机制（游戏邦注：kompu gacha是出现于许多日本手机社交游戏的高盈利机制）。在采用这种机制的游戏中，玩家需要支付一定的费用去购买随机虚拟道具（本质上也就是彩票），他们会不断受到刺激而购买更多虚拟道具直至最终收集了一整套特殊道具。

尽管这只是冰山一角，但是这次的风波却引起了无数媒体的关注，也开始促使日本社交游戏行业进行自律，而玩家本身也会对这种“不正当手段”提高警惕。

好的免费模式

我想免费模式肯定也存在着“坏免费模式”和“好免费模式”。

坏免费模式的游戏只会一心想着如何从玩家身上赚钱，而好免费模式的游戏虽然碰巧带着“免费”的皮囊，但是却能让玩家感受到诚实与乐趣。

我想坏免费模式即将离我们远去，与其绝望地面对市场现状，我们更应该尝试着创造一款自己的免费游戏，并确保它采用好的免费模式。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Opinion: Embrace freemium

by Tim Gaulton

Like it or not, the freemium gaming model (i.e. games are free and the money is made via in-app purchases) appears to be here to stay. I’ve seen a lot of concern voiced recently that freemium content is driving down the quality of games, but I don’t believe that’s necessarily true.

There are problems that need addressing – but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

A brief history of freemium

Take away the freemium model, and you’re left with users having to pay for games up front. With traditional disk-based media that worked, the barrier to entry meant that there were relatively few titles on sale so it was possible to get a game noticed given a decent advertising push and by word of mouth – and that meant publishers could afford decent budgets and take a few risks. The business model wasn’t perfect, but it sufficed. Innovation wasn’t always top priority, but the quality bar was fairly consistent.

Fast forward to the age of downloads, in particular the App Store, and the barrier to entry for developers was suddenly much lower – almost anyone with a computer and a compiler could release a game. Initially this seemed like a good thing, there was much excitement about “indie gaming” and a few notable success stories, but soon the market was flooded and developers began undercutting each other on price in order to get sales.

This process, commonly dubbed “the race to the bottom,” now seems to have run its course, with the majority of games now in the $1-2 bracket, and that has warped the general perception of value. Paying $5 for a game may have seemed cheap once but now looks expensive against the backdrop of bargain bucket titles – despite the fact that people will happily fork out that much (and more) for a latte and a sandwich.

As a result it has become incredibly risky to invest in making a high-quality game for the mobile and tablet market. Even if your $5+ game is awesome, the chances of enough people finding it and paying for it are slim. They’re more likely to download half a dozen separate dollar titles and conclude that all mobile games are rubbish.

That’s where freemium enters the frame. If you can give your game away for free, there’s nothing (bar the initial download) to stop people trying it out – sure, the market is still flooded with choice, but you’ve improved your chances dramatically.

Once you’ve got people hooked on your game, then you can start billing them for items, and make your money that way instead. And because you’ve already hooked people in, you can charge them a lot more than the minimum app price that people have come to expect for paid apps. Recently we’ve seen a few games exploit this system to make large sums of money.

So what’s the problem?

Notice I used the word “exploit” in the last sentence? Well, that’s the problem with freemium at the moment. Games don’t simply draw you in and then ask for a single payment to continue playing; they attempt to sell you a whole plethora of in-game items, often using devious means that encourage addictive behavior and disguise the true cost.

A while back I played a game called Paradise Island on Android that was a perfect example; you could buy special buildings for your island, but the way you did so involved so many different forms of currency along the way that it wasn’t immediately obvious what the cost would be. I once sat down and calculated that the true cost of a single building in their Halloween pack was a staggering $50.

It’s this addiction-feeding style of game that I believe has given freemium such a bad name. After all, if you look back to the era when magazine cover-discs were the norm, you realize that freemium has been with us in spirit for decades, even if the buzzword hasn’t.

Can the problem be fixed?

I think we’re beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel. Some recent games have started to implement less aggressive forms of in-app purchasing – for example, Triple Town works by limiting the free version to a fixed number of ‘turns’ per day, and gives you the option to purchase unlimited turns for a fixed fee. It still has option to buy items to essentially cheat your way to victory, but at least you can opt out of that and make a one-off payment. It’s a step in the right direction.

Perhaps more importantly though, the Japanese courts have reportedly stepped in regulate the “kompu gacha” mechanic, whereby players pay a small fee to purchase random virtual item (in essence, a lottery), and are encouraged to keep buying them until they’ve collected a full set to unlock a special item.

It’s only one specific mechanic that they’re investigating, and it’s only the tip of the iceberg, but the case has drawn a lot of attention from the press over the last few days, and looks like it might be the tipping point that wakes regulatory bodies, and players themselves, up to the devious way in which they’ve been manipulated.

Nice freemium

Much as the makers of yogurt products keep telling us there are “bad bacteria” and “good bacteria.” I believe there can also be “evil freemium” and “nice freemium.” The evil freemium games are built purely to extort money from their players, while nice freemium are good honest fun, that just happens to come in a freemium package.

I doubt we’ve seen the back of evil freemium just yet, but rather than despair at the state of the freemium market, why not try making your own game freemium – just make sure it’s nice freemium.(source:GAMASUTRA)

针对社交卡牌游戏是否会在其他地区受捧的问题，serkantoto举例称《Legend of the Crypitds》这款社交卡牌游戏于5月13日晋升至美国App Store免费应用榜单第13名，之后虽然略有下滑，但仍保持在该应用商店营收榜单第62名（5月16日排名情况）。

GREE首款针对美国市场的游戏《Zombie Jombie》同样属于社交卡牌游戏类型，它在3月份入驻美国App Store时曾跻身免费应用榜单第3名，之后虽然排名迅速下滑，但目前在应用榜单也排到了第16名，至今下载量超过100万次。

此外，通过英文版Mobage平台在Google Play发布的《Rage of Bahamut》也属于这种典型，它在该应用商店营收榜单登顶时间长达4周。

Rage of Bahamut(from topappstoday.com)

因此serkantoto认为这种迹象或许能够说明，这类游戏不但在日本很有市场，如果能够根据不同地区的用户品味进行调整，并执行适当的营销手段，它们在其他地区也可能同样受捧（需注意的是，上述三款游戏均未采用日本漫画风格的美术设计，而由Drecom开发并于去年投放美国App Store的《Spirit Force》则采用了极为典型的日本动漫美术风格，但却鲜有美国用户捧场）。

Spirit Force(from itunes.apple.com)

2）据GamesIndustry International报道，曾参与开发《孢子》和《文明》系列的知名设计师及程序设计师Soren Johnson也已离开EA加入Zynga团队。

文明(from games)

他加入Zynga的时间可追溯到去年9月份，当时Zynga East总经理Tim Train及首席设计师Brian Reynolds极力邀请他加入工作室共同参与开发新游戏类型。Johnson目前担任Zynga East一款策略游戏的设计总监，这款基于HTML5的多人游戏将不同与典型的Zynga产品，它将含有最终结局、赢家和输家。

Johnson的游戏行业生涯始于十多年前在EA的实习，之后进入Firaxis任职7年，并在2007年重新回归EA，他在EA2D团队曾任《龙腾世纪：传奇》主设计师。

3）据insidesocialgames报道，在Facebook公开募股即将来临之际，Zynga股票又开始出现回升迹象。5月16日Zynga股价收盘价为每股8.22美元，虽然低于开盘时的8.75美元，但却明显高于本周初的情况（游戏邦注：Zynga股票在过去两周中持续下跌，上周五更是跌至7.45美元的历史最低点）。

Zynga stock(from insidesocialgames)

Facebook在最近的S-1修订文件中指出，公司在2011年的收益中有15%来自Zynga（Facebook曾在2月份的S-1文件中称Zynga为Facebook创造了12%的收益，当时Zynga的股票就一度攀升至每股14美元），如果Facebook IPO获得成功，那么Zynga股票也很可能随之水涨船高。

4）韩国网游公司Nexon最近与6waves合作向Facebook发布《Zoo Invasion》这款玩法类似于《俄罗斯方块》以及《宝石迷阵闪电战》的益智游戏。

Zoo Invasion(from games)

玩家在游戏中需扮演一个可爱的黄色小外星人，点击鼠标以绑架不同的小动物，并按顺序将它们排列成组，消除同种类型的动物。该游戏中含有积分排行榜功能，以及一个控制玩家游戏频率的能量补充系统。

5）King.com旗下游戏《Candy Crush Saga》在本周DAU增长最快的Facebook游戏榜单登顶，新增40万DAU，增幅达22%。

Top gainers this week-DAU(from AppData)

Peak Games英文版游戏《Lost Bubble》位居第二，新增40万DAU，增幅为500%；《Zynga Slingo》新增40万DAU，增幅达11%，位居第三；EA《模拟人生社交版》位居第四，新增30万DAU，增幅为11%；Cookapps游戏《Buggle》DAU增幅为50%，新增26万，位居第五。

迪士尼Playdom游戏《Armies of Magic》新增8万DAU，增幅达100%；Sulake旗下的《Habbo Hotel España》新增3万DAU，增幅为25%。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

1）Will Collectible Cards Game Genre In Mobile Social Games Pick Up In South East Asia? [Social Games]

by Dr. Serkan Toto

I am a hardcore user of Q&A service Quora where I just gave a detailed answer to this question:

Will collectible cards game genre in mobile social games pick up in South East Asia?

My answer:

In Japan, by far the world’s biggest market for mobile social games, social card games (social card battle games or social collectible card games) are the most popular genre at the moment. (Note: I am based in Japan, a hardcore gamer, and a consultant focusing on the social gaming industry).

Background:

http://www.serkantoto.com/2012/01/24/ip-based-and-card-battle-social-games/

I estimate that during the last 12 months, around 50-70% of the top 20 games on the leading platforms in Japan, GREE and DeNA‘s Mobage, have been social card games.

I understand your question to be if Japan is ahead of the curve and if this popularity can spill over to other markets, i.e. South East Asia.

As I mention in the comments in my answer to the question What is the actual gameplay of Japanese mobile social card games? from December 2011, my view is this genre has potential outside Japan, too.

There are some pointers that indicate this is already the case, at least in the United States. It appears to be both DeNA’s and GREE’s strategy is to see how things pan out in the US before tackling other markets like South East Asia.

So let’s first have a look at how things look like in the US.

Example 1:

In the US App Store, a social card game called Legend of the Cryptids, has peaked at the No. 13 spot in the free app chart on May 13, 2012 (source in Japanese: http://gamebiz.jp/?p=60182).

Legend of the Cryptids is what I would call a typical mobile social card battle game (created by a Japanese company). It has since fallen in the free app chart, but it still holds a respectable position (No. 62) in the top grossing ranking in the US App Store right now (May 16, 2012).

Link to the game:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/l…

Example 2:

GREE’s first American social game, Zombie Jombie, mixes Japanese and Western game elements and has been very successful – as a social card game.

It was released in the US App Store in March 2012 and peaked at the No. 3 spot in the ranking of the top free apps. Zombie Jombie fell out of the charts quickly, but right now, the game is the No. 16 in the top grossing app ranking. It boasts over 1 million downloads overall.

Link to the game:

http://itunes.apple.com/app/id47…

Example 3:

On Google Play, a social card game developed by a Japanese company and offered in the English Mobage network, has been topping the top grossing rank for about 4 weeks now (source:

http://www.insidemobileapps.com/…).

The title, Rage Of Bahamut, is a typical Japanese mobile social card game.

Link to the game.

I personally think that these initial success stories confirm my hunch from last year that games belonging to this genre do have a chance outside Japan, not only in the US but also South East Asia.

Gameplay-wise, there shouldn’t be too many differences between the taste of Japanese vs. non-Japanese players in the case of this specific genre. If created in the right way, this genre can produce games that are very addicting and hard to put down, regardless of the player’s nationality or cultural background.

There are physical card games that have been doing very well in the global market for years, with Magic The Gathering being just one example. The gameplay and general structure is, in parts, very similar to mobile social card games.

If your question is if Japanese games belonging to this genre can be successfully ported to other country markets: I think that in this case, the titles must fit a certain design to appeal to a mass market in the US or Europe. The three games mentioned above don’t use manga-esque artwork but rather appeal to Western design tastes – I am doubting that they would be as successful otherwise.

One example for this hypothesis is Spirit Force, which Tokyo-based Drecom rolled out in the US App Store last year:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/s…

This game uses extremely manga-inspired artwork and has not been very successful outside Japan (I am neglecting other factors like marketing efforts or PR but do see a causality here).

Great for Japanophiles, but probably not the right way to go to appeal to a broad, global audience.

To conclude, I think that social card games – if executed and marketed in the right way – can catch on in regions outside Japan.

One development I don’t see for the future of social card games in the US or South East Asia is that this genre will be as dominant as in Japan: I think that the level of the popularity social card games are seeing is unique to this country.（source:serkantoto）

2）Zynga’s Soren Johnson on why company is shifting focus to game design

by Eric Caoili

Noted game designer and programmer Soren Johnson, who has worked on titles like Spore and the Civilization series, has left Electronic Arts to join rival company Zynga.

Johnson cited shifts in the game industry away from big-budget retail games with long development periods, and toward relatively low-cost mobile/social titles that can be regularly updated, as one of his primary reasons for joining Zynga.

He joined Zynga last September after he was courted by the heads of FrontierVille developer Zynga East, studio general manager Tim Train and chief game designer Brian Reynolds, both veterans from Firaxis and Big Huge Games.

“Many designers are openly worried about whether social game design is being led by metrics towards decisions which maximize revenue over fun,” said Johnson in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz. “Tim and Brian, however, convinced me that Zynga is shifting its primary focus to game design.

“Ultimately, I told Tim and Brian what type of game I wanted to make, and Zynga is now giving me the chance to make it. The greatest opportunities today are for games that connect players and avoid the traditional retail model of gaming. Zynga suddenly made sense for me when it became clear that they wanted to experiment with new types of games in this space.”

He is now working on a strategy title at Zynga East as design director. The multiplayer-focused HTML5 project is meant to be a departure from Zynga’s usual output, in that it actually has an ending, with winners and losers.

When Gamasutra published an early report of Johnson jumping ship to Zynga last year, insiders indicated that he was heading development of a game that would compete with Civ World, Firaxis’ social game adaptation of beloved strategy series Civilization.

Johnson got his start in the industry at EA as an intern more than a decade ago. He eventually joined Firaxis and worked there for seven years before returning to EA in 2007. Most recently, he was a lead designer at the EA2D team, where he worked on Dragon Age: Legends.

EA has previously acknowledged that it’s far behind Zynga in the social space, though it’s attempting to catch up. But Zynga hasn’t made it easy for EA, as it’s poached key executives from the competitor in recent years, such as former COO John Schappert and EA Interactive head Barry Cottle.（source:gamasutra）

3）Zynga’s stock recovers as Facebook IPO looms

Mike Thompson

After starting off the week at an all-time low, Zynga’s stock is beginning to rise again while Facebook’s initial public offering approaches.

The stock closed today at $8.22 a share, down from its opening at $8.75 but still notably higher than where its price was at the beginning of the week. Since Monday, Zynga’s shares have opened above their closing point from the previous day. The stock could be improving as Facebook’s Friday IPO draws near. The social network will likely be valued at over $100 billion with a stock price between $34 and $38 a share.

Facebook recently revealed in an S-1 amendment that Zynga was responsible for 15 percent of its 2011 income. When Facebook’s February S-1 showed 12 percent of its income came from Zynga, the developer’s stock rocketed up to over $14 a share before starting to fall back to previous levels. If the social network’s IPO is as big a success as many believe it will be, Zynga’s stock will likely see an even more dramatic share price increase.

Zynga’s stock still hasn’t taken off like many investors hoped it would when it began trading in December; shares didn’t return to their original price until late January. The stock managed to stay above $10 for February and March, but began a significant slide in mid-April, especially after the company’s Q1 earnings call on April 26. Although the company reported record bookings, it also reported a net loss of $85.4 million and shares dropped from $9.50 to $8.52 the next day. Shares continued to drop over the past two weeks, hitting an all-time low of $7.45 last Friday.（source:insidesocialgames）

4）Zoo Invasion, or the cutest puzzler you’ll ever play on Facebook

by Joe Osborne

If there’s one way to describe Nexon’s most popular games, it’s “cute”. The latest from the Korean games maker (and publisher 6waves) all but takes the cake: Zoo Invasion. A brand new puzzler for Facebook, Zoo Invasion is an interesting variant on the ever-popular Tetris that employs the Blitz-style of gameplay popularized on Facebook by Bejeweled Blitz.

In Zoo Invasion, you play an adorable, blob-like yellow alien that abducts various mammals conveniently condensed into little cutes for such a puzzle game. Using the mouse, players pick up the cubes and rearrange them in order to make matches and for them to disappear. Think of Zoo Invasion as Tetris meets Bejeweled meets Hello Kitty, and you’re about on the same page.

Of course, the game features friend-based leaderboards and a heart system that refills over time to control how often players can play the game. And like any good match-three game, power-ups are on the way. This release comes hot off the heels of KartRider Dash, the Facebook version of one of the developer’s hottest franchises. If you don’t come away from Zoo Invasion with at least one dawww, then you just don’t know what “cute” is.（source:games）

5）Candy Crush Saga also on top of this week’s fastest-growing Facebook games by DAU

Mike Thompson

King.com’s Candy Crush Saga continues its chart-topping performance this week, taking the No. 1 spot on our list of fastest-growing Facebook games by daily active users with a 22 percent gain of 400,000 DAU.

Peak Game’s English-language bubble shooter Lost Bubble takes the No. 2 spot with 400,000 DAU for a 500 percent increase. Zynga Slingo also gained 400,000 DAU for an 11 percent gain, allowing it to take the No. 3 position. EA’s The Sims Social appears in the No. 4 spot with its first serious gain since late April, up 11 percent with 300,000 DAU. Cookapps’s Buggle swelled by 50 percent with 260,000 DAU, securing it the No. 5 spot.

Five more games on the list show gains greater than 25 percent. King.com’s Pyramid Solitaire Saga is already picking up speed, increasing by 210,000 DAU for a 55 percent gain. Disney Playdom’s Armies of Magic shows a 100 percent gain with 80,000 DAU, while Corazon Games’s Spanish-language La Vecindad de “El Chavo” (“The neighborhood of “El Chavo””) grew by 40,000 DAU for a 36 percent gain. Plumbee’s Mirrorball Slots is up by 40,000 DAU for a 27 percent increase. Finally, Sulake’s Habbo Hotel España shows a 30,000 DAU gain, up by 25 percent.（source:insidesocialgames）