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游戏设计哲学之新电子游戏设计原则(四)

发布时间:2011-09-17 17:05:16 Tags:,,,

作者:Robert Yang

这是本系列文章的最后一篇。我们学习了亚里士多德和柏拉图,大卫·休谟的经验主义以及席奥多·阿多诺的马克思主义美学观点。这是对西方哲学不同分支间一次偶然且非完整的探索。有人会说这是一种漫无边际的探索,我想反驳的是,即使漫无边际,我们也未曾“迷路”。(点击此处阅读本系列第一二、三部分

但是,当我们在讨论更多具有实验性的新游戏设计的出现时,我们不得不就此打住对于哲学的探索。因为已经找不到任何更全面的哲学理论能够用于解释游戏设计了,除了后现代主义。

后现代主义是一种涵盖性术语,包含了一些不同的哲学观点:解构主义,后结构主义,后后解构主义等等。好吧,我承认最后的观点是我杜撰的。而在这里最重要的词便是“结构”——一般来说游戏总是与游戏本身的表现形式或者其底层结构相互作用着,细分其规则集和游戏机制,并因此对游戏做出相关评论。这种游戏既不是过山车也不是运动场,它们只是碰巧由各种杂乱的外置因素组建而成。

You_Have_To_Burn_The_Rope(from fadri.deviantart.com)

You_Have_To_Burn_The_Rope(from fadri.deviantart.com)

《You Have to Burn the Rope》和《pOnd》看起来就与我们在之前讨论过的现代游戏设计(即分别注重游戏的“通俗性”和“艺术价值”)有点格格不入。在此看来,一款好的游戏总是会通过讽刺,仿效或者幽默等方式去批判那些大受欢迎的设计原则。

《You Have to Burn the Rope》明确地告诉了玩家如何做才能赢得游戏(就像游戏标题所表示的那样)而这却违背了传统游戏规则——Boss在平台上抗争着,玩家必须仔细观察他的行动并判断他的弱点,以决定如何前进或者制定出相应解决方法。正是在如此情况下,该游戏的做法让人认为要让游戏变得更加简单,就应该剔除游戏中的所有难点。但是这么做却导致了荒诞的结果。(除此之外,在《pOnd》中玩家无需了解游戏就可以玩得很好了。如果深入去研究这款游戏反倒会破坏游戏本身的乐趣。)

这些游戏能够帮助我们更深入地了解主流电子游戏的类型,并且推动着我们更加客观地去看待这类游戏。在这类型游戏中,设计者力求维持与玩家间的互动。

而当我们开始用后现代游戏来分析游戏本身的形式时,那些传统的哲学观点也就不再有任何作用了。

为什么?一部分原因是今天的哲学具有很多不确定因素。除了哲学,如今世界上可以说没有任何学科总是关注于自己的“毁灭”了吧。“哲学已经走向没落”将成为很多会议上被集中讨论的核心议题。因此我之前所主张的将鸽巢游戏设计原则(游戏邦注:组合数学中一个很重要的原理)如果融入哲学运动中的观点也就不再有意义了。

相反地,我应该撇去哲学观点而尝试寻找一些新的游戏设计原则。而如果你们发现这些原则可行,请告知我。

程序主义指的是放下游戏开发者的身份,即在游戏制作中,自己设计一部分游戏或者自己勾画游戏。当然了,我们可以讨论作者使用的特殊单词有何寓意,或者为何作曲家在歌曲的末尾将音量提升等等,但是如果关卡设计者按照自己的想法设置游戏关卡,那么很有可能会因此违背了创作者的指示吧?这么看来,一款好游戏的制作不应该被创作者牢牢控制着。(这与《使命召唤》和《荣誉勋章》系列等严格遵从“剧本”而制作出来的游戏有所不同。)

我们是否会因为游戏开发者Derek Yu在《Spelunky》(一款动作类游戏)中设置了一个不可能通过的洞穴关卡而不满?就像在游戏《求生之路》中,我们是否会因为被袭击而责怪虚拟的AI角色,尽管这都是游戏中一些非特定的行为。这些游戏都很重视游戏设计,特别是一款最“有野心”的游戏——《Facade》,尝试地制作出非玩家角色(NPC)背景和完整的叙述环境。

我个人最赞同的便是随机生成的游戏变化。在masocore平台上的《Dungeon》便是按照玩家的电脑情况而生成一些机制,但同时这些机制也将会随机给游戏带来新的漏洞或者相应地改变游戏模式。因此玩家必须面对一种矛盾的游戏设置,即在不同的电脑上,游戏中的“钉子”长度会不同,他们所面对的游戏关卡难度也会有所不同,因为很有可能他们所进行的游戏也存在着一些不同点。

但是不要因为这个观点听起来像哲学而混淆。

Ian Bogost的程序主义认为游戏(传统上我们称之为“艺术游戏”)通过规则和机制表现出审美观点。按照这种“程序说法”,一款好的游戏能让玩家追求情感和心理空间,或者能够帮助他们更好地了解现存的商业游戏。

举个例子来说吧,在《Hitman》系列中,很多玩家所采用的游戏策略都是通过高级的安全防护手段把自己伪装成NPC,经常是作为一名高级保镖以守护游戏目标。在游戏《Hitman》中:玩家用一种安全的方法掩饰自己,但是由于他们必须将权利下放给保安们,所以也很容易因此而遭到毁灭。

或者以《Beyond Good & Evil》为例,这是一款关于收集照片的单人动作游戏。在游戏中,玩家通过拍摄稀有生物的照片而获得积分,但是有时候这些生物也有可能会吞噬掉你的NPC好友。你会先拯救好友还是先拍照获得积分?在冲突中进行拍照任务时,玩家应该如何做才能躲避危险?

不知道IO Interactive(Square Enix旗下的一个丹麦电子游戏开发商)或Ubisoft在设计游戏时是否会想到这些问题。但是不论答案肯定与否,都不重要。重要的是玩家能够通过与游戏机制间的互动而推测游戏的意义。这么看来,程序主义不只不能被称为游戏设计的哲学观点,也不算是游戏哲学和演绎,即我们在第一部分文章中提到的推动游戏发生转变的相关内容。

但是有些设计师却认为程序主义是个死胡同,因为比起更深层次的艺术表达,它更重视商业游戏中相同的游戏设置。走在这些设计师前沿的便是游戏开发商Tale of Tales,他们眼中的新型电子游戏是:

非游戏(notgames)——借鉴了视频游戏中的一些元素,如游戏控制,实时3D图像等,但同时也力图打破如今束缚着游戏的一些规则和机制。这种新型游戏认为既然通过游戏规则和机制创造出一种循环动作的游戏机制,让玩家能够掌握这种机制,为何又要蓄意制造一种反复的游戏体验?当我们注意到游戏机制是如何反复进行之时,我们将其称为“重复刷任务”。但是如此看来,几乎所有游戏机制都具有刷任务的表现形式,那为何我们要将其隐藏起来呢?

相反地,非游戏主张用抽象的情感模式,如情绪,语调,主题等代替这种永不停歇的重复方式,而这些情感模式主要依靠视觉和音效元素体现出来。在这里,好的游戏(即相对于非游戏而言)并不依赖于游戏机制,相反地它们更加注重对心理空间的探究。Tale of Tales的《The Graveyard》和Dan Pinchbeck的《Dear Esther》正是利用这一方法的两大典例。

也有很多设计师不喜欢这种游戏类型,认为这种游戏类型缺少规则并过分强调理论,一直唠叨个不停却不会付诸实践。也有一些设计师(就像我)保持着审慎乐观的态度,我们并不确定如何做才能制作出一款非游戏的游戏,并期待着Tale of Tales或其他非游戏模式实践者能够推动这种新型游戏明朗化。

同样也有一些人认为有些自由规则并不是那么容易可以推翻的:当你执行一些交互性行为时,这种交互性也会受到一些规则的约束。如果你可以用鼠标去移动游戏中的镜头和视角,那么这就是一种规则,不论这种移动是否有意义或者带有强制性,我们需要做的只是判断这种规则是好还是不好。如此看来,不存在任何单纯的非游戏或者低交互性的电子游戏。

“关于技术问题”,德国哲学家Martin Heidegger认为人类应该与技术和谐相处,因为我们现在的行动被技术牢牢掌控着。例如当你开始玩《侠盗猎车手4》时,游戏指示你“跟着黄线走”,而你也会毫无异议地照做,一点都没有按照自己的想法做出选择,这不就是一种受控制的情形?

程序主义,通俗性,非游戏,新闻游戏,社交游戏。我们正在慢慢逼近奇幻与可怕的边缘。也许这一刻是天堂下一秒就变成地狱了。

制作电子游戏存在何种风险,并且设计者是否有责任承担这些风险?如今的电子游戏如何塑造思想?我想这应该是如今电子游戏设计所面临的最困难的问题,且没有人敢于提出。

如果谁相信世界上只有“好游戏”,那就真的是幼稚至极;在这四部分文章中我们都在研究“好”的各种概念以及为何在涉及电子游戏设计时,却捕捉不到“好”的核心观点。非此即彼,我们又是如何看待“不好的游戏”呢?

在此我并不是指设计糟糕或极端愚蠢的游戏,也不是指那些色情,暴力并24小时循环播放于各种网站上的视频游戏,更非指玩家所热爱的《Farmville》等社交游戏。

这种“不好”是本身就存在,并非我们所能控制。我们也很难去解释甚至想象不到什么是“不好”。

也许其他人可以就此观点进行深入研究。

游戏邦注:原文发表于2010年10月19日,所涉数据和事件均以当时为准。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

Philosophy of Game Design – Part Four

by Robert Yang, 19 October 2010 8:06 pm

It’s the end of the line. We went from Aristotle and Plato to empiricism with David Hume to Marxist aesthetics with Theodor Adorno. It’s been a haphazard, horribly incomplete survey across several different branches of Western philosophy. Some would say it was rambling – and to them, I would counter that all who wander are not lost.

But now our philosophical wandering is more or less ending here, with our discussion of more experimental, emerging game design practices. There aren’t any more large sweeping fields of philosophy left to generalize, save for one.

Postmodernism is generally an umbrella term that encompasses several different philosophies: deconstructionism, post-structuralism, post-post-deconstructralism … okay, I made up that last one. But the operative word here is “structure” – such games are generally trying to interact with the form of a game itself or the underlying structure, chopping up rulesets and mechanics and criticizing them. These kinds of games are neither roller coasters nor playgrounds; they’re big messy interventions.

Games like You Have to Burn the Rope or pOnd exist as somewhat cynical attacks on the modernist program of games we’ve been discussing previously in the series, targeting “accessibility” and “artistic value” respectively. Here, a good game critiques popular design practice, often through satire, parody, or humor.

You Have to Burn the Rope gives explicit directions on how to beat the game – such as the instruction in the title itself – which runs counter to the genre convention of boss fights in platformers, where a player must carefully observe a boss to identify weaknesses and conceptualize a moving / firing solution. In doing so, this game argues that if we are willing to make such games easier, why not do away with any and all meaningful concept of difficulty? Well, for one thing, the result is absurd. (Meanwhile, pOnd is best played without knowing anything more about it. To analyze it would destroy it.)

These games promote deep knowledge of genre traditions in mainstream videogames and they’re asking us to be more critical of them. They’re the games that designers make in order to remain in dialogue with one another.

That’s where our traditional philosophizing ends, with the postmodern games that analyze the form of a game itself.

Why? Well, part of the reason is that philosophy itself is even more uncertain of what it is today. No other discipline in the world is so intent on its own destruction. “Philosophy is dead” will often be the central idea of half the papers at any given conference. Thus, my past practice of pigeon-holing game design practices into philosophical movements is no longer tenable

Instead, I’m going to attempt a survey of emerging game design practices that don’t fit neatly under a philosophy. Or maybe they do, in which case you should tell me.

Generative Proceduralism is about abdicating developership of a game. It’s about a game that partly designs itself, or a painting that would paint itself. Sure, we can argue about what an author meant by a particular word, or why a composer applied a crescendo at the end of a piece, but what if a level designed itself, and how would it reconcile authorial intent with that? This approach argues that a good game is comfortable in relinquishing strict authored control. (Compare this to the highly scripted, highly linear haunted houses of the Call of Duty and Medal of Honor series.)

Do we blame Derek Yu for an impossible cave level generated in Spelunky? Do we blame a fictional AI director for “screwing us over” even though it’s just a collection of random number seeds and formulas, as in Left 4 Dead? Such games relegate some of the design work to the game itself – and possibly the most ambitious games, such as Fa?ade, attempt to procedurally generate NPC backstories and entire narrative arcs.

My personal favorite variant of this approach are those games that are secretly procedurally generated. The masocore platformer Dungeon randomly generates a number seed based on the player’s computer details, and that number seed introduces a random bug or mode to the game. Thus, players offered conflicting accounts of gameplay – on some computers, spikes were secretly taller or shorter, or maybe a level would be impossible to complete – because they were all actually playing slightly different games.

But don’t confuse this for the similar sounding philosophy of …

Proceduralism, as coined by Ian Bogost, argues that games (often what we traditionally call “art games”) make aesthetic arguments through rules and mechanics. Through this “procedural rhetoric,” a good game allows players to explore emotional and psychological spaces, or perhaps offers a way of exploring pre-existing commercial games.

For example, in the Hitman series, many player strategies revolve around disguising oneself as an NPC with a high-level of security access around the level, usually as one of the high-ranking bodyguards assigned to guard the target. Thus, Hitman games make a point about the powerful: They may surround themselves with security, but the power they delegate to their security is almost always their undoing.

Or look at Beyond Good & Evil, a single-player game about the personal conflicts inherent in photojournalism. Throughout the game you receive points for photographing rare creatures – but at one point in the game, one of these rare creatures is about to devour your NPC friend. Do you rescue your friend, or do you take a quick snapshot first, to score valuable points? In photojournalism missions during times of war, to what degree is the journalist embedded in the conflict?

It is questionable whether IO Interactive or Ubisoft designed these games with such larger points in mind. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t; in the end, it’s irrelevant. What matters is that the player extrapolated that meaning from the game through their interaction with a system of gameplay mechanics. In this way, proceduralism isn’t just a philosophy of game design, but also a philosophy of play and interpretation, which represents a significant shift from how we used to look at games in Part 1.

But some designers see proceduralism as a dead end, as more of the same structured gameplay of commercial titles instead of an interpretive shift that allows a deeper range of artistic expression. The vanguard of these designers is generally considered to be a developer couple known as Tale of Tales, who argues for a radical new genre of videogames:

Notgames borrow some elements from videogames – control schemes, approaches to real-time 3D graphics – but otherwise seek to break free of the rules and mechanics that constrain games today. It argues that rules and mechanics create gameplay loops of repeated actions, thus allowing mastery, but why craft an experience that is intentionally repetitive? When we notice how repetitive a mechanic is, we call it grinding. But in this view, almost all mechanics are a form of grinding, so why try to hide it?

Instead, notgames seek to replace this perpetual grinding with emotional abstraction like mood, tone and theme, which often relies heavily on audio and visual direction. Here, good (not)games don’t rely on mechanics; rather, they rely on simple exploration of an artfully realized psychological space. Tale of Tales’ The Graveyard and Dan Pinchbeck’s Dear Esther are two seminal works in this approach.

Many designers dislike this genre and criticize its relative lack of a canon and overemphasis on theory, that it talks too much talk and needs to walk the walk. Other designers (like me) are cautiously optimistic but aren’t exactly sure how to make a game that isn’t a game, and are waiting for Tale of Tales and other notgames practitioners to articulate something more concrete.

There is also the argument that it is never possible to break free of rules: The instant you implement some sort of interaction, that very interaction is constrained by rules. If you can simply move the camera with your mouse, that is a rule in itself; whether or not those mouse movements are meaningful and compelling, however, determines whether it is a good rule or a bad rule. By this account, pure notgames are impossible to create and exist only as low-interaction videogames.

In “The Question Concerning Technology,” the German philosopher Martin Heidegger argues that people need a “free” relationship with technology because right now, we’re enslaved by it. When you begin Grand Theft Auto IV and it instructs you to “follow the yellow line” and you do it without protest or forethought, have you actually made a choice for yourself? Are you enslaved?

Proceduralism, accessibility, notgames, newsgames, social gaming. We are on the verge of something both wonderful and frightening. What could become paradise here and now could also be hell itself tomorrow.

This, I think, is the hardest question facing videogame design today, that no one wants to bring up: What damage is being done by videogames, and what is the designer’s responsibility to mitigate that damage? How are today’s videogames shaping thought?

To believe that there are only “good games” is horribly naive; this entire series of articles has been focused on debunking this collective idea of “good” and how we do not have a central idea of “good” as it pertains to videogame design. Alternatively, where is our sense of a “bad game”?

I’m not talking about a game that you found to be poorly designed and stupid; I’m not talking about sexy, violent videogames demonized by a 24-hour news cycle; I’m not even talking about the player exploitation of FarmVille.

There’s a “bad” out there that’s not even on our radar. A “bad” that is difficult to articulate or even fully conceive of.

Maybe someone should do something about it.(source:escapistmagazine


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