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专访:EA北美GM Dan Fiden谈社交游戏的艺术和情绪内涵

发布时间:2010-07-26 04:44:45

EA电子艺界旗下playfish北美地区总经理Dan Fiden在Casual Connect西雅图做了关于社交游戏的艺术和情绪内涵相关问题的演讲。

社交游戏最近几年蒸蒸日上,但是真正脱胎换骨仅仅只是在12个月的时间以内,这段时间内farmville逐步成长为家户逾晓的品牌。

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在游戏设置当中我们很难做出一个现成的形容为美好的东西,艺术将成为一种表达力贯穿在游戏进程当中,playdom首席财务官Christa Quarles曾经以他们旗下的social city为例,怎么样去设置游戏环节来拉动玩家的游戏情绪,而这种玩家情绪大概就是游戏中可以界定为美好的东西。

Dan Fiden, GM of North America for EA-Playfish, gave a great talk today about the emotion and art within social games, and afterwards we had a chance to chat about the importance of art within the social and casual games industries.  Standing on the third floor balcony overlooking the entire conference, we discussed the importance of putting art and emotion into games, and how the modern day casual and social games industries are doing just that.  I thought I’d post a few thoughts I had after our conversation.

The social games boom has been coming on for years, but the last 12 months have really been their defining surge.  With FarmVille becoming a household name, there is a whole audience of hundreds of millions of new players of games, and we’ve only hit the tip of the iceberg.  That said, is there art in social games?

Taking the literal definition of art as “the creation of beautiful or significant things” can be tricky because beauty is hard to quantify.  That said, all that can be shared in an analysis like this is opinion, and for me we haven’t truly seen the beauty of gameplay in social games, but we’re beginning to.  I tend to look at Playdom CFO Christa Quarles’ talk at this year’s Social Gaming Summit as an example of interactive art beginning to develop.  She discussed one of the most unique features in their new Social City game, and explained how the spontaneity and unpredictability elicited a strong emotion in people.  Certainly we tend to believe that a “beautiful” thing is something that evokes emotion in us, and by that standard that piece of interactive gameplay was a ‘beautiful thing’.

The fact that social games rely heavily on social graphs may sway the issue a bit, because gameplay that involves your family and friends is far more likely to elicit emotional responses but that doesn’t necessarily make it art.  For instance, if you’re at your house and your sister plays a prank on you, everyone will be emotionally affected but (almost) nobody would call that art.  The smudged line between a beautiful thing that elicits an emotional response and a beautiful social thing that creates an emotional response is probably the border along which true interactive social gaming art lies.

In any case, Dan’s presentation really had the audience thinking about design in a new way.  He stated that when Playfish makes a decision, they’re making it with the feeling of the player in mind.  This is something that is quite different than some other big companies’ approach, where you create the game, and start turning the dial to see what generates maximum engagement.  That said, the ‘dial’ approach may just as well be generating emotion and art in players, but the approach is just a bit less ‘artistic’ in its nature.  I look more at that distinction in a future post about technical vs. emotional design of games。


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