游戏邦在:
杂志专栏:
gamerboom.com订阅到鲜果订阅到抓虾google reader订阅到有道订阅到QQ邮箱订阅到帮看

分析游戏设计与UX设计的5个共同层次

发布时间:2011-10-12 17:35:45 Tags:,,,,,,

作者:John Ferrara

电子游戏正在突破其传统角色,逐渐移入与UX(用户体验)设计相碰撞的领域。在这片新天地里,老朋友之间关系因为游戏而拉近了,素不相识的人因为游戏而团结合作。游戏帮助人们实现自己的人生目标,游戏奖励实现目标的人。游戏是创意地自我表现的舞台,打开了接纳新事物的大门。游戏训练医生救死扶伤的技能,提倡人权。随着游戏在这些领域的扩散,游戏设计与UX设计之间的界线越来越模糊,越来越无足轻重。

无论是UX还是游戏设计,都是人与计算机之间的互动形式,所以必然在理论、对象和实践上存在共通之处。特别是,二者都以技术创造体验为核心。尽管人们在游戏中的体验形式基本上是不同的,UX设计师习以为常地把电子游戏当作媒体大军(游戏邦注:包括网站、多媒体、建模程序、插画等)中的一员。

游戏模型

在UX设计方面,最为人所熟悉的实用框架之一是Jesse James Garrett提出的《用户体验要素》(The Elements of User Experience),但这个框架模型针对的是网页。我们需要一个不同的模型来理解游戏、设计游戏。在此我提出一个类似的玩家体验框架,旨在帮助UX设计师创造一个更加成功、迷人、有趣的游戏世界。此模型分为五个层次,各个层次又划分为短期效应和长期效应两个组成部分。尽管这个模型很简陋,但却是通盘考虑设计原理的基础,五个层次的协同作用产生了游戏的效应。

游戏模型的5个层面(from uxmag)

游戏模型的5个层面(from uxmag)

此外,本模型还起到规划设计进程的作用。先是游戏的动机,再到核心机制,最后是表层体验,这五个层次排列有序,完美叠加。根据这个模型,游戏设计应该有前后顺序,也就是至少等到上一个层次基本完成才进行下一个层次的设计工作(虽然直接设计后一个层次往往会与前一个层次发生重复)。打破这个顺序的设计师可能会在之后的工作中遇上麻烦。

1、动机

首先要考虑的是,某游戏的玩家是哪些人以及为什么这些玩家要玩这款游戏。这个层次由两个主要部分组成。从短期效应来看,简而言之就是体验的“有趣性”。所谓“体验”就是游戏吸引玩家、创造互动活动的乐趣的亮点。在《吃豆人》中,体验就是一边被敌人追赶,一边吃豆子。在《CityVille》中,体验是由创意管理(建立城市)和管理挑战(促进城市发展)组成的。在西洋棋和象棋中,思考如何进攻敌人同时防御自身就是其体验所在。以上种种体验都与人类完成工作、创造和被认同的基本欲望有关,当然,促使游戏成为人类生存的基本技能的原因非常多,以上这些只是其中几种。

动机的第二部分是奖励系统,其作用在于长久地维持玩家对体验的兴趣。《吃豆人》的奖励是积分和排行榜;《CityVille》是开启新游戏物品、朋友圈不断扩大带来的更多社交体验;西洋棋和象棋是证明自己比对手聪明的满足感。随着游戏的进展,奖励的作用会越来越重要,但如果玩家已经习惯了,奖励也会失去新鲜感。为了延长玩家的游戏寿命,多样化、层次化奖励是必要的。

2、有意义的选择

第二层次定义了游戏的机制和规则。根据游戏的机制和规则,玩家做出的选择会影响事件结果。虽然形式各异,但所有好游戏都存在这种有意义的选择。在这方面,象棋主要讲究的是长期战略——在走下一步以前预测将会产生的结果。而紧张的动作游戏往往涉及更多的短期策略,也就是讲究快、准、狠。

步步为营的挑战在于让游戏充满融入感的基本斗争。游戏的不同事件结果之间应该存在选择上的不确定性,这样游戏性才是最强的。如果玩家没有根据来区分不同的选择(太含糊)或者显然只存在一种最佳选择(完全没有不确定性),那么游戏很快就会失去吸引力。

3、平衡

这里的“平衡”是指游戏系统存在适度的挑战性,但仍然不失公平与平等。比如,在不平衡的RPG中,玩家可能在战斗中很容易就积累下巨额财富,这样就可以购买最高级的武器或弹药来对付最弱势的玩家。这就造成了付出与收获、强势玩家与弱势玩家之间的不平衡。另一方面,如果玩家挣得太少,那么就要在游戏中投入更多,玩家难免感到受挫。

电子游戏包含多种变量,这些变量存在“值域”,不能设得太高,也不能设得太低,而是要恰到好处。但游戏毕竟是动态系统,这些变量的相互作用非常复杂,难以完全理解。即使游戏在某些情况下确实运作良好,总是有可能了生某些极端事件,把游戏搞得一团乱,破坏了玩家的体验。确保游戏平衡的最佳方法是重复制作原型和重复进行测试,从实际的操作中找出可能出现的问题。

4、易用性

第四个层次包含了我们所熟知的UX设计的界面的注意事项,但某些易用性考虑倒是只针对游戏体验。易用性设计的重点是必须支持感觉性体验,玩家能从中理解游戏中发生的事件以及自己的活动对事件造成的影响。

这意味着玩家应该明白自己为什么失败为什么获胜。当某事件发生时,玩家应该意识到并理解其起因。玩家还应该总是能够理解可以执行的动作、应该争取的目标(或至少有合理的机会去考虑)。这些特性能让玩家在短期内产生对游戏的掌控感,从而最终让玩家精通游戏。

5、美学

最后一个层次包括了游戏美术的方方面面。在短期方面,是直接的感觉性体验,即图像响应力量反馈和游戏控制键的触觉。文字和艺术设定上的风格选择决定了游戏的基调——是幽默的、严肃的、预测性的还是傻瓜式的?许多游戏还涵盖了其他深刻的元素,是长期游戏之后才能展现的,如剧情结构的叙述。

游戏在美学上的改变并不会影响核心机制。你可以把普通的黑白棋换成美国内战、古代中国或《星际迷航》中的角色,虽然你玩的仍然是象棋。所以,一款游戏无论外表如何光鲜,突出外表之下的核心机制才是重点。

尽管如此,美学对玩家的游戏体验仍然具有独到的影响。你不能在不伤及效果的前提下,把《荒野大镖客》或《植物大战僵尸》的美术特性从游戏机制中完全剥离。

乐趣?

你可能想知道游戏性和乐趣如何添加到这个模型中。这些特性不能直接设计,但当所有层次运作良好时,游戏性和乐趣就产生了。相反地,任何一个层次的失败都会损害游戏的乐趣。

新机遇和责任

电子游戏和UX设计是一个集合的过程,两者相益得彰。UX设计师所掌握的技巧适用于游戏体验的设计,但并非没有观点上的根本改变。这第一个改变是因为体验本身而关注体验。UX设计师习惯性地认为人们享受体验是因为完成某些不存在于界面的目标,而游戏给予人们的体验是其本身的游戏性。这就给设计师带们来了不同的责任:设计的玩家体验的标准是,让玩家因为体验本身而玩游戏。(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

The Elements of Player Experience

by John Ferrara

Video games are breaking out of the roles they’ve traditionally occupied and are moving into spaces where they collide with UX design. There are games that serve as social glue between old friends, and games that bring strangers together to collaborate on solving problems. There are games that help people meet their life goals, and games that let people reward others for meeting theirs. There are games that facilitate creative self-expression, help people understand the news, train doctors to save lives, and advocate for human rights. As they expand into these realms, the lines separating game design from software UX design are growing fuzzier and less important.

Since both UX and game design are forms of human-computer interaction, they inherently share some common theory, objectives, and practices. In particular, both are centrally concerned with the quality of a person’s experience as enabled by technology. UX practitioners should become accustomed to thinking of video games as just one more medium of design (alongside websites, multimedia, modeling applications, animated illustrations, and so on), although the form of the human experience is fundamentally different in games.

A Playful Model

One of the most familiar and useful frameworks in UX design is Jesse James Garrett’s The Elements of User Experience, but that model is specific to the Web. We need a different model to understand and design for games. Below I propose a similar framework for player experiences that’s intended to help UX designers build games that will be more successful, engaging, and enjoyable. The model is divided into five planes, each of which is further divided into short- and long-term effects. Although it’s simplified, it provides a basis for thinking through the broad elements of design that work together to create the effect of a game.

The model also serves as a process map. The planes are arranged in the sequence in which they would ideally be tackled, starting from the reasons for playing, progressing through the core mechanics of the game, and finishing with the surface level experience. There’s little point in designing for the next plane until the prior one has at least been adequately thought through (although work on the later planes will almost always lead to iterations on the earlier ones). Designers can run into trouble if they skip over planes or start from the wrong end.

1.    Motivation

The first thing to think about is who the players are and why they would want to play the game. This plane comprises two main elements. In the short term, there’s the up-front “interestingness” of the experience—the basic spark that grabs people and creates joy in the interaction. In Pac-Man, this is the race to clear the board while being pursued by enemies. In CityVille, it’s the combination of creative control over the city and the challenge of managing its growth. In checkers and chess, it’s the puzzle of figuring out how to attack your opponent while defending your own positions. These are all tied to basic human drives to complete a job, to create, and to feel competent, which are just a handful of the many motivations that make play a fundamental function of living.

The second element of motivation is the system of rewards that sustains interest in the experience over time. Pac-Man has points and leaderboards. CityVille offers access to an expanding set of game items, coupled with a social experience shared among a growing circle of friends. In checkers and chess, it’s the satisfaction of proving that you’re cleverer than your opponent. Rewards become increasingly important the longer a game runs, but they can also grow stale as the player gets used to receiving them. For very long engagements, diversifying and layering rewards can persuade players to stay involved.

2.    Meaningful choices

The next plane defines how the game’s structure and rules allow players to exercise choices that influence the outcomes of events. Such meaningful choices are present in all good games, though they can take quite different forms. Chess relies heavily on long-term strategy—the anticipation of what will happen far downstream when you take a move now. Twitchy action games typically involve more short-range tactical decisions, which are completed rapidly and in high volumes at the fine-motor level.

The challenge of consistently making better moves is the fundamental conflict that makes play engaging. Games work best when there’s a partial ambiguity between which actions will result in better or worse outcomes. They can easily lose their appeal when players either have no basis for distinguishing between choices (too much ambiguity), or when there’s clearly only one choice that has any real merit (no ambiguity at all).

3.    Balance

This is the extent to which the game’s elements work in combination to create a system that’s appropriately challenging, but which players still perceive as fair and equitable. In an unbalanced role playing game, for example, players might earn gold so easily from battles that they can purchase the most advanced weapons and armor right away for use against the weakest enemies. On the other hand, if they earned too little gold then the game would demand too much work of them and become frustrating.

Video games contain multiple variables for which there is some range of values that need to be set so they’re not too high or too low, but just right. But games are dynamic systems, and the interplay of these variables can be very complex and hard to completely anticipate. Even if a game works really well in a few scenarios, there may be lots of edge cases where it goes completely haywire and the experience becomes unsatisfying. The best way to ensure a balanced game is through iterative prototyping and testing, allowing the problems to emerge from actual play.

4. Usability

While this plane certainly includes all of the interface concerns that we know so well in the UX world, there are also usability considerations that are specific to game experiences. Importantly, the design needs to support a sensible experience, where players understand the things that happen in the game and how their actions affect them.
This means that when players lose they should understand why they lost, and when they win they should understand why they won. When something happens in the game, players should be able to attribute it to a cause that they can perceive and understand. Players should also always be able to understand the actions that are available to them, as well as the objectives they should be working toward (or they should at least have a reasonable opportunity to figure them out). These are the qualities that enable a feeling of control over the experience in the short term, and that allow players to develop mastery of the game over time.

5. Aesthetics

The last plane encompasses the many aspects of the game’s aesthetic design. In the short term there’s the direct sensory experience, which includes images sound as well as the haptics of force feedback and vibrating game controllers. Stylistic choices in writing and art set the game’s tone—whether funny, serious, foreboding, or silly. Many games also contain more contemplative elements that unfold over the long term, such as narratives with evolving story arcs.

A game’s aesthetics can be readily changed without affecting the underlying mechanics governing play. You can swap standard black and white chess pieces out with civil war, ancient Chinese, or Star Trek figures, but you’re still playing chess. So it’s important that the underlying planes of the experience are sound, no matter how glossy the surface is.
Nonetheless, the aesthetic has a profound impact on the player’s experience of the game. You can’t peel the artful qualities of Red Dead Redemption or Plants vs. Zombies away from their game mechanics without completely changing each one’s effect.

What about fun?

You might be wondering how enjoyment and fun factor into this model. Those qualities can’t be designed directly, but rather emerge from the experience when all of the elements work together well. Conversely, fun dies when any of the planes haven’t been adequately addressed.

New Opportunities and New Responsibilities

Video games and UX design are in the process of converging, and each stands to benefit from contact with the other. UX designers have a skill set that lends itself to the design of game experiences, but not without some radical changes in perspective. The first change is to be concerned with the quality of the experience for the sake of the experience. UX designers are accustomed to thinking about experiences that people enjoy because they’re completing some objective that exists outside of the interface, but games must be enjoyed for their gameness. That gives the designer a different kind of responsibility: to design player experiences that are themselves enough reason to play.(source:uxmag


上一篇:

下一篇: