作者：Kai Jaffe

若你的公司由社交玩家经营，运作方式会有何不同？这个问题是社交游戏设计师Alan Wells早前在Designers Accord大会提出的。

designers accord from 828design.com

Designers Accord是全球设计师、教育家、研究者、工程师和法人代表汇集一堂的盛会，旨在将可持续原则融入游戏设计和制作的各个方面。大会主张摒弃传统竞争模式，鼓励分享最佳实践范例，这样游戏空间创新和社交创新才能更富成效，获得更广泛传播。许多设计师和设计传授者秉着分享精神汇聚至旧金山Lunar Design，探讨如何将可持续发展理念落实至工作当中。

Alan Wells是社交游戏公司Zynga的设计师。为促使玩家持续回访游戏，同好友分享游戏内容，游戏必须设有奖励机制。能让玩家获悉如何获得奖励的清晰奖励机制迎合人类本性。Alan发现成功奖励机制（游戏邦注：因而成为成功作品）的关键在于玩家展开比较、竞争和合作活动。在成功社交游戏中，玩家通常将自己同他人进行比较，然后通过同好友竞争、合作获得奖励。

除游戏设计知识外，他认为改变玩家可持续利用行为的方式是创造借助人类固有特性（游戏邦注：即指比较、竞争和合作）的游戏，促使玩家更符合可持续发展原则。IDEO研究团队通过调查福特新产品用户得出相同结论。IDEO可持续发展全球主管Steve Bishop表示，“我们的一大发现是关注能耗的司机都是游戏玩家。他们都希望获得高分。”

为说明其观点，Alan描绘了PG&E（太平洋电气公司）在社交玩家经营下的运作态势。和每月收到令人生畏的账单不同，你能够获悉自己每日能源消耗与好友、与大楼住户、街区邻居及其他街区住户的对比情况。通过让你同好友、邻居竞争高分位置，你会希望消费尽可能少的能源。若你在街区是能源消耗大户，邻居将会帮你降低能耗，这样街区就会获得好分数。无需减少能耗便降低积分的“欺骗”方式是购买风力积分。

现在回到文章开始的问题，若你的公司由社交玩家经营，会出现何种不同景象呢？你要如何奖励消费者行为，促使其行为更符合可持续发展原则呢？

游戏邦注：原文发布于2009年，5月11日，文章叙述以当时为背景。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Competing for Sustainability: Could Social Game Design Hold a Key?

by Kai Jaffe

How would your company act differently if run by social gamers? This was the question posed by social game designer Alan Wells at Thursday night’s Designers Accord town hall meeting in San Francisco.

The Designers Accord is a global coalition of designers, educators, researchers, engineers, and corporate leaders working together to integrate the principles of sustainability into all aspects of design practice and manufacturing. It advocates inverting the traditional model of competition, and encourages sharing best practices so environmental and social innovation is more efficiently and quickly disseminated. In the spirit of sharing, a number of designers and design educators came together at Lunar Design in San Francisco to discuss how they are implementing sustainability thinking into their work.

Alan Wells works at Zynga, a social gaming company, designing social games. To get people to play his game over and over and want to share it with their friends, the game must have rewards built into it. Very clear reward structures, where a player knows what they have to do to receive a reward, appeals to human nature. Alan has found that the key to a successful reward structure, and thus a successful game, is when players have to exhibit comparison, competition, and cooperation. To have a successful social game a player will always compare what they have with what others have, and therefore, compete with their friends, and cooperate with people to gain a reward.

Taking his knowledge from designing games, he believes the key to changing people’s behavior in regard to sustainability is to create a game by using these innate human traits, comparison, competition, and cooperation, to make people more sustainable. The research team at IDEO came to this same conclusion while conducting user research from drivers for Ford’s new hybrid. “Our big finding was that drivers interested in fuel efficiency were playing a game. They want a high score,” says Steve Bishop, IDEO’s global lead of sustainability.

To illustrate his point, Alan had us imagine what PG&E would be like if it was run by social gamers. Instead of getting a bill every month that you dread getting, you would be able to see everyday how your energy use compares with your friends, the other people in your building, people on your block, and other blocks in the city. By creating a competition between friends and neighbors, to get a high score, you would want to use the least amount of energy possible. If you were using too much energy on your block, your neighbors would help you lower your energy use so that the block would get a better score. The “cheat” to lower your score without using less energy would be to buy wind credits.

Now back to the question at the beginning of this post, how would your company act differently if run by social gamers? How would you reward your consumer’s behavior towards more sustainable choices?

Kai Jaffe is a freelance product designer living in the Bay Area who strives to help designers design their products in a more holistic way. He writes a blog about how the design process can be used as a tool to help people called Design with Respect.（Source：triplepundit）