作者：Leigh Alexander

目前社交游戏主要根据先例和参数设计，原型设计在这个领域尚未得到充分运用。这是Scott Jon Siegel的看法，他过去3年主要投身社交游戏设计。

Scott Jon Siegel from numberless.net

Siegel在本周于纽约大学Game Center举行的PRACTICE游戏设计大会上表示，“分析团队虽然作用显著，但他们更多将这些数据用于提高游戏用户流及完善其他影响游戏业务的内容。”

他的一大担忧是社交游戏会完全依靠数据分析设计游戏模式，着眼于忽略用户体验核心的危险错误信息和商业选择。寻找适合社交游戏的建模方式非常有挑战性，但这不可或缺。

他表示借鉴先例设计游戏其实是社交游戏克隆现象的含蓄说法。例如，多数社交游戏如今都融入“doober”，这是能够吸引玩家眼球的可点击弹出窗口，能够促使玩家进行点击。这个元素最早出现于Zynga的《FrontierVille》，但当人们逐步发现这能够提高游戏粘性，多数社交游戏便开始融入这个元素。

Siegel表示，“这就是我们传播UI、UX和游戏设计机制的方式。复制成功模式要比自己创新简单得多。”

他表示，“我觉得这种衍生关系是业内游戏设计发展不可或缺的组成部分。因为我觉得休闲游戏靠辨识度获得发展，而社交游戏则是休闲游戏的一部分。”

但太多风险规避举措会扼杀一个游戏类型的发展，他觉得：社交游戏以惊人速度繁衍，但新题材却鲜有出现。“我因此鲜少看到这些模式获得任何发展。”

Siegel表示，建模能够帮助设计师降低探索新设计模式的风险。但这在社交游戏领域颇具难度，因为社交游戏更多关乎多种互动的累积效应，而非传统建模中的单回合趣味性。Siegel表示，“你无法简单地在单个背景中测试游戏机制，或由某人决定这是否适合社交游戏。”

我们只是不习惯测试留存率和扩散性（游戏邦注：这是社交游戏的成功关键）。他表示，“我觉得社交游戏建模要获得成功就需要关注这些元素。”

一个方式就是关注整体影响：持续机制给游戏空间带来的影响——例如，要求玩家播种种子，稍后进行收割的“作物生长”机制。另一方式就是着眼社交影响，社交网络和好友活动给游戏空间带来的影响。

在最近的社交尝试中，Siegel试着制作某热门社交棋盘游戏的Facebook版本——将冗长的同步体验移植至短暂且通常异步的游戏模式中。他反复尝试直至找到适合模式。

他建议希望进行更多建模尝试的社交游戏设计师要尽早着手。他表示，“我的原型设计并未向广大开发群体公开——通常只有设计团队或成员的好友知晓。”当然，建模团队要尽可能能够代表游戏目标用户的心声。

他表示，“这里尚有很大的探索空间，所以大家不妨大胆尝试，查看最终可能。”（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）

PRACTICE: Social Game Design Needs More Prototyping

by Leigh Alexander

Currently, social games are designed largely by precedent or by metrics, but the role of prototyping is under-explored in the field. That’s the view of Scott Jon Siegel, who’s been working in the field of social game design for the past three years.

“Analytics teams, while they’re doing great work, they’re using this data to improve their user flows… and all of the aspects that affect the business of a game,” Siegel opines, speaking at this weekend’s PRACTICE game design conference at New York University’s Game Center.

One of his greatest fears is that the social gaming industry will turn entirely over to analytics for its design forms, and all the dangerous false positives and business-oriented choices that can miss the spine of user experience. Finding an experimental prototyping model that works in the social space may be challenging, but it’s essential.

He concedes that design by precedent is something of a polite way of addressing the cloning that often occurs in the social game space. For example, most social games now contain “doobers,” the clickable pop-ups that catch the user’s eye and cost energy to click. It began with Zynga’s FrontierVille, and when it was perceived to enhance engagement, most social games began to adopt them.

“This is how we propagate UI and UX and game design mechanics in our space,” Siegel says. “It’s easier to replicate success patterns than it is to reinvent the wheel with every new release,” he says.

“I actually believe that derivation is… a necessary part of the design evolution of our industry,” he notes. “Because I think casual games actually thrive on recognizability, and the social games industry… is a sort of subset of the casual space.”

But too much risk aversion can stifle a genre, he believes: new social games are being produced at a stunning rate, but new genres have been very slow to emerge. “We end up rarely seeing any great amount of meandering from these [formats].”

Prototyping can help designers mitigate the risk of exploring new design forms, Siegel asserts. But it can be difficult in the social space, because social games are more about the cumulative effect of multiple interactions, versus finding the fun in a single session, as in the traditional prototype. “You can’t simply test a gameplay mechanic in a single setting and from that judge whether it will suitably serve a social game,” Siegel points out.

“We’re just not used” to testing for retention and virality, key to the success and growth of social games. “I believe that for a social game prototype to be successful, it needs to focus on these elements,” he says.

One method is to address systemic impact: The effect of mechanics of persistence on the state of a play field – for example, the “crop growth” mechanic that asks players to sow seeds and then collect from them later. The other is to address the social impact, or the effect of the social graph and friend activity on the state of a play field.

As a recent design exercise, Siegel attempted to design a Facebook version of a popular social board game – migrating a long, synchronous experience to one that accommodates short sessions and often asynchronous experiences with friends. He experimented until he found a model that worked.

His recommendation to social game designers looking to implement more prototyping is to start early. “The prototyping that I have done has not been out to a large community — it’s been usually amongst the development teams or amongst friends of the development teams,” he notes. Naturally, the prototyping group should be tailored to represent the target audience of the game as well as possible.

“There’s a ton of potential still untapped here, so I say let’s all get our hands in the dirt and see what we can build,” he enthuses.（Source：gamasutra）