作者：Tadhg Kelly

让玩家有足够的事情可做这一点非常重要。相比桌游来说，电子游戏更需要注重玩家体验，所以你的游戏需要有大量可让玩家投入时间的动作。当然，需要关注的不仅是数量。是否每个动作都导致游戏世界发生改变？抑或多数动作可以实现？

如果对上述问题的回答是肯定的话，那么你的设计算是步入正轨。如果动作无法导致游戏世界发生改变，这种设计是不当的。游戏中毫无意义的动作各种各样，但是它们都有以下共同特征：

无意义的动作会迫使玩家在游戏中执行类似做作业般的机械工作，而这种作业往往显得乏味无趣。

西西弗斯游戏玩法

西西弗斯是希腊神话中一个狡诈的国王，他被诸神惩罚将巨石推向山顶，然后眼睁睁地看着它滚下，如此反复。他所受的惩罚就是，永无休止地做相同且毫无策略性的行动来完成任务。从本质上来说，西西弗斯的举动无疑是在浪费时间。游戏中的机械式玩法便是如此。

随着困扰行业的问题从游戏玩法转向参与度，开发商往往会制作出由机械工作组成的行为游戏设计。他们迫使玩家去做那些本可以轻易由游戏本身来完成的事情，玩家就像是迷宫中的老鼠。在他们看来，机械工作会延长玩家与游戏互动的时间，使用能量指标便可以让玩家定期回到游戏中，这样游戏的参与度便随之提升。更多的游戏时间就等同于更多的关注，也就意味着可以产生更多的乐趣和更大的交易可能性。

但事实并非如此。

上述推论的错误之处在于，更多的关注并不等同于更多的乐趣。更多关注只是表明玩家在游戏中花的时间更长而已，与玩家参与到游戏中的体验质量并无关联。多数情况下，机械式设计创造出的是低质量参与度，因为这种设计事实上只是在考验玩家的忍耐力和耐心。

除了年幼和对游戏成瘾的玩家之外，一般玩家会在一段时间后就意识到他们在游戏中做的只是等待或无意义的徘徊。他们不会将其视为乐趣，但仍然会继续玩下去，以期能够体验到真正有价值的东西。他们甚至还会通过交易（游戏邦注：购买虚拟商品）来跳过这个冗长乏味的阶段。结果就是，他们并不喜欢开发者及其游戏，但有些公司或许会想：“那又怎么样？”

如果你抱着这种态度的话，除非能够像Zynga或动视那样拥有大批铁杆粉丝，否则只要有更强势的竞争者出现，你就很可能会失去玩家。玩家能够忍耐机械式设计只是因为他们还没有发现替代品，一旦他们找到了，就会离开你的游戏。从MySpace到Facebook，Yahoo到Google，PlayStation到Wii，PC到平板电脑均是如此。玩家希望自己的动作有意义，而不是只一味浪费时间。

那么，什么才算是有意义呢？有意义的动作是指玩家做出的能够导致游戏世界发生改变的操作。

玩家希望能够开展有意义的动作。他们希望能够建造自己的农场、规划自己的城市、击败敌人、取得高分、解决谜题，总而言之，就是让游戏发生重大改变，享受动作前后的差异感。而机械式设计本质上是在向玩家传达以下信息：如果你能够在游戏中待上足够长的时间，我会让你每隔一段时间获得一次有意义的体验。

让玩家重复做同样的事情以获得体验乐趣的机会，这种做法最初似乎是可取的，但这只是个假象，玩家最终会感到厌烦。他们会努力跳过这一阶段，寻找“刷任务”的最快方法，获得能量的最快方法，这就是他们在玩此类游戏的想法。

玩家的智慧总会超越游戏系统，他们会去寻找游戏逻辑中的漏洞或使用作弊码。无论他们采用的是何种措施，玩家的目标只有一个：摆脱游戏中的机械任务阶段。

机械玩法的类型

这包括所有可以自动完成或完全跳过的动作。以下是几种机械式设计的例子：

旅行：从地图上的一个点步行、驾车或飞行到另一个点，这种设计在大型多人、角色扮演或沙盘游戏中很常见。游戏让玩家从A点移动到B点，对某些游戏来说，这是件很乏味的事情。

刷任务：精通属于游戏趣味性的一部分，重复大量相似的挑战可以提升玩家对游戏的精通度。比如在竞速游戏中，你需要在相同的赛道上磨练数次才能创造出最快速度或击败其他玩家。这种设计确实很不错。

但是从另一方面来看，刷任务就是不断地重复体验只有微小变化的挑战。有些刷任务的设计舍弃了提升玩家的层面，只是一味地让玩家重复做相同的事情。这种设计就很糟糕了。

收获：收获是个包含收集、浇水和其他类似维护性动作的作业。玩家进入游戏后，首先要做的就是收集成熟作物来换得钱币、清扫垃圾以及修补游戏环境中破损的物品等。这个过程不会有变化和延伸（游戏邦注：即玩家无法

通过过程得到提升并获得更多乐趣），随着游戏逐渐扩展，这个过程会变得更令人难以忍受。如果游戏动作需要以能量（游戏邦注：或类似的机制）为基础而能量的恢复要慢于玩家的动作，那么上述过程会显得尤为恼人。

扫描：这是种普遍存在于冒险游戏中的现象。玩家需要收集线索，当他进入某个新场景中时，会有许多隐藏线索和物品需要他去寻找。设计师的想法是，这应该会产生出游戏沉浸感，让玩家融入游戏故事中，但是现实情况却是相反的。

玩家会按照自己的方式有条不紊地扫描整个区域。在2D冒险游戏中，他们会从左到右地移动鼠标，一行一行地扫描屏幕，寻找那些鼠标经过后会高亮的物品。在《黑色洛城》中，玩家会先沿着墙壁绕屋子走一圈，然后不断减小绕行半径往房间中央靠拢，直到他们的手柄震动为止，就像在清扫房间一般。这种设计只是在延长游戏时间而已。

交谈：玩家进入某个城镇，发现那里有许多可以与之谈话的角色。在有些游戏中，对话内容是可以选择的，这样玩家可以通过对话选择自己希望知道的内容。但是在有些游戏中，对话的设计极为生硬，游戏中与角色的对话就好比尝试房间内所有开关，看哪个可以打开房顶上的灯。对于那些对话内容不能导致游戏改变的游戏而言，这种设计就算是作业。

责任：社交游戏开发商总是秉承以下原则：我们的产品以社交网络为平台，所以它们必须包含大量的社交内容。事实上，这就等同于游戏强迫玩家开展社交行为。

许多社交游戏强迫玩家做出邀请好友、互相发送请求以及互相赠送礼物等动作。也就是说，游戏告诉玩家，在完成基础任务后需要等待一段时间才能继续进行下去，这是典型的机械式设计。

掠夺：老虎机、Bingo游戏、轮盘赌和其他运气类游戏中，玩家只需要拉动操作杆或选择某个数字，然后等待看能否获得奖励。其他游戏中也存在类似的动作，比如大型多人游戏中的战利品掉落，玩家杀死兽人后有几率获得特别奖励。

尽管获得奖励的时候会让人很高兴，但将这个过程描述为掠夺还更为恰当。虽然游戏可以根据各种因素来调整战利品，但是机械式的抢夺就像是不断投骰子来投出6。

最小化机械式设计内容

与许多玩家相同，我也享受过在《自由之城》中驾驶、在《辐射3》中与遇到的角色交谈和在《银翼杀手》中寻找线索的乐趣，甚至还在某段时间内乐于在《CityVille》中收获商店收入和房租。少许机械式设计确实很不错，能够让玩家沉浸在游戏世界中，通过时间间隔来不断提升游戏高潮。

机械式工作和有意义动作在特定背景下有时也是可以相互转换的。《荒野大镖客》中从沙漠中一个任务点移动到另一个任务点是种机械操作，但这种操作偶尔也会被随机事件打断。前往新区域击败敌人是有意义的动作，因为这会改变游戏世界。地图扩大，敌人被杀死，新的任务解锁，玩家获得胜利。

我所主张的观点是，要将机械式设计最小化。在《质量效应》中，是否真的有必要让玩家走遍整个堡垒寻找对话的角色，还是说游戏可以提供直接进行下去的捷径？玩家是否真的有必要手动收获农场游戏中的所有作物，还是说可以添加自动在作物成熟时收获的农场工人机制？玩家是否真的有必要清扫房间中的每个角落来寻找线索，还是可以将重要物品突出显示？

毫无疑问，上述这些问题的答案通常是否定的。可选方法之一便是跳过这些内容。移除那些不必要的过场动画，让玩家可以在游戏中流畅地进行下去。但是，并非所有的游戏都是紧张的动作模拟或战略游戏，所以有时根据游戏需要将机械部分最小化似乎比全部移除更为恰当。

比如，选择合适的控制方案可以显著地减少机械式设计。假如清扫行为不只限于使用第三人称控制方式或突出某些毫无意义的笔记本的功能能够被移除，《黑色洛城》会让玩家感受到更为流畅的射击体验。

将奖励收集流线化也是个可取的方法。在《战神》中，玩家往往不需要手动收集奖励，奖励会自己向玩家移动。许多游戏强迫玩家四处行走来拾取各个物品，这样的设计相对来说就显得拖沓。

将文字内容整合到游戏中而不是将两者分离开来同样是个不错的选择。如果你能够使用伴随对话，那么为何还要用阶段式分支对话方式（游戏邦注：尽管这种方法并不有趣，但角色扮演游戏依然偏爱此类设计）呢？将文字内容融入游戏中可以更好地让玩家沉浸到游戏世界中。

将机械式设计最小化的方法还有很多。这些方法的共同特点是，使用自动动作让玩家尽快回到控制游戏改变的状态中。如果你让玩家重复做无意义的事情、开展无意义的对话、收获无尽的作物等，那么你认为玩家的体验中还存在趣味性吗？

我觉得，玩家不会像你希望的那样保持长久的兴致。

自我检测

你应当查看设计中的每种游戏动作类型并考虑以下问题：

1、动作是否导致游戏世界发生重大改变？

2、动作是否存在变种？

3、动作是否导向胜利？

4、动作是否导向死亡？

5、动作是否开启新游戏区域或提供某种奖励？

6、动作是否需要玩家付出代价（游戏邦注：包括时间）？

如果上述问题的多数答案是否定的，而最后一个问题的回答是肯定的，那么该动作很可能就是机械式设计，你应当采取措施消除其负面影响。

游戏邦注：本文发稿于2011年6月1日，所涉时间、事件和数据均以此为准。（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）

Busywork is not Fun [Design]

Tadhg Kelly

It’s important to give players enough to do. Especially in videogames where the focus is more sport- and single-player oriented than in table top games, your game really needs a lot of actions to

occupy a player’s time. But of course it’s not just about the quantity. Does every game action cause a meaningful change in the game world? Do most of them?

If so, then you are on the right path. The wrong path is actions which do not cause meaningful change. There are a wide variety of meaningless actions that games incorporate but they all share a common trait:

Meaningless actions oblige the player to crank a handle that the game could easily be cranking for them. Such actions are busywork, and busywork is usually boring.

Sisyphean Gameplay

The story of Sisyphus is that of a wily king brought low. He must push a huge boulder up a hill, only to watch it fall back down, for eternity. His punishment is being made to go through the motions ad infinitum without prospect of variation or strategy on his part to finishing the task. Sisyphus is essentially doomed to waste time. Busywork is his curse.

As a part of the change in industry obsessions from gameplay to engagement, developers often create behavioural game designs composed of busywork. They oblige the player to do things that the game could easily be doing itself, so that the player is cast into the role of a janitor or a rat in a maze. Busywork lengthens interaction with a game, can be policed using an energy metric to oblige return scheduled gameplay, and so your engagement stats rise. More hours played equals more attention which equals more fun and more likelihood of transactions.

Right? Nope.

The fallacy is this: More attention does not equal more fun. What it means is more time with eyeballs staring at the game, but it says nothing at all about the quality of engagement that the player is experiencing. In most cases, busywork design creates low-quality engagement because all it actually does is test a player’s tolerance and patience.

Aside from the very young and those with addictive personality disorders, players realise after a while that they are being made to wait or wander around. They don’t particularly relish the

feeling but they stay in the game for a while in order to get to the good bits. They will maybe even transact (buy virtual goods) in order to skip the tedium to get there. They won’t like you or your game as a result, but some companies may be inclined to think ‘So What?’

Well, unless you have a locked-in audience like Zynga or Activision arguably do, you are quite likely to lose players to a better competitor if your attitude is So What. Players are tolerant of busywork only while there is no credible alternative, and when it shows up they leave. MySpace to Facebook, Yahoo to Google, PlayStation to Wii, PCs to tablets and so on. Players want meaning, not timewasting.

What is meaning in this context? A meaningful action is any which the player takes that causes a deliberate change in the game world.

Players want to take meaningful action. They want to craft their farm, lay out their city, defeat an enemy, beat a high score, solve a puzzle in short to cause significant change and feel the difference of action versus no action. What game developers who create busywork are actually doing is confusing wins with meaningful actions. The busywork design essentially says this: If you hang around long enough, I will let you take a meaningful action every once in a while.

It seems okay to make a player jump through a hoop 100 times in order to be able to do something fun, and there are to be plenty of examples of games that do this. It’s not really, however, and players push back. They try to game the game (as it were) to get past the busywork. They figure out the quickest way to grind, the fastest way to get more energy, the most immediate way to overcome vacuuming (see below) and then that is what they will do.

Players will try to outwit the game itself, as though the imposed busywork is a system to be solved, rather than play the game as intended. This leads to all sorts of unintended consequences, including finding breaks in the game logic, employing cheat codes, hacking, creating dummy profiles and so on. Whatever the tactic may be, players will always try to subvert busywork rather than play in the spirit of it for the simple reason that it’s just wasting their time not to.

Nobody likes to be jerked around.

Types of Busywork

Busywork is any action that could conceivably be automated or skipped entirely. Here are some examples:

Traveling: Walking, driving or flying from one encounter to another across a map is pretty common in massive multiplayer, roleplaying or sandbox games. The game makes the player go from point A to point B in real time, and depending on the game it can become tedious.

Grinding: Part of the fun of any game is mastery, and repeating a lot of similar challenges helps with that. In racing games, for example, you will often have multiple races run around the same track while you try to win, beat lap times and other players. This is good.

Grinding, on the other hand, is repetition with little variation, challenge, and over hundreds of identical encounters. It dispenses with the improvement aspect and simply insists that the player should keep cranking the same handle over and over and over. This is bad.

Harvesting: Harvesting is busywork which involves collection, watering and other similar maintenance actions. The player arrives into his game and the first thing he has to do is click to collect crops, and coins arising from them, sweep up rubbish, fix broken things in the game environment and so on. It doesn’t extend (improve, get more interesting), and tends to become overbearing as the game expands. This is especially the case if the game actions are metered by energy (or similar) and that energy does not keep pace with the player’s progress.

Vacuuming: Vacuuming is a kind of busywork seen commonly in adventure games. The player is a clue-hunter and when he enters a scene there are many potential clues and objects for him to find. In the designer’s mind this should translate into a kind of game immersion that gets the player involved in the story, but what actually happens is the opposite.

Players instead scan the area methodically. In 2D adventure games this means that they move their mouse left to right, in a series of rows, until the mouse suddenly highlights on an object. In LA Noire the equivalent is for the player to walk around the walls of the room and then inward in an ever decreasing spiral until their joypad vibrates, like someone vacuuming a bedroom. All it does is lengthen the game time.

Talking: The player enters a town and there are a number of characters to talk to. In some games the dialogue is selectable, so the player can guide himself through the conversation and learn more or less as he wishes. In others it is hard-wired. The experience of talkie sections in games is actually more like flipping switches in a large room to find out which one activates the overhead light.

Talking is essentially an activation and permutation exercise in which the content matters a lot less than getting to the right on/off combination which lets the player proceed. Talking is not a deliberate game action that causes change. The player is simply asked to choose X or Y repeatedly and with the sensation that the game will steer toward Y anyway. So it’s busywork.

Obligation: One of the persistent myths around social games is that because they are on social networks, they must involve a lot of social content. In actuality they involve a significant degree of  forced contact between players to allow them to proceed but it is entirely token as far as the sociality of it is concerned.

Many social games oblige players to invite friends, send each other requests, give each other gifts in the hope of reciprocity and other behaviours. The game is simply telling the player to complete rudimentary tasks and wait before being allowed to continue, which is classic busywork.

Looting: Slot machines, Bingo, Roulette and other luck games require the player to do nothing more than pull a handle or pick a number, with the prospect of a reward at the other end of this activity. The same action exists in other games, such as the loot drop in massive multiplayer games, where every once in a while the player receives a special reward for killing another orc.

It is fashionable at the moment to think of these occurrences as rewards. A more apt description, however, is looting. While the game may well adjust the levels of loot depending on various factors, the busywork of looting is simply the rolling of a die repeatedly and hoping for a 6.

Minimising Busywork

I, like many players, have enjoyed driving around Liberty City, talking to random characters in Fallout 3, hunting for clues in Blade Runner and I even found the chain-harvesting of goods and rent in CityVille oddly fun for a while. A little busywork is perfectly fine and can give the player a chance to soak in the game world, making the high points of the game that much higher because they are punctuated and paced.

Busywork and meaningful actions are also sometimes interchangeable purely depending on their context. Riding around in the desert to go from one mission to the next in Red Dead Redemption is busywork which is occasionally interrupted by random events. However riding into a new area to chase down an enemy is meaningful because it changes the world. The map expands, the enemy is killed, a new mission is unlocked and the player wins.

What I am arguing for is minimising busywork. Do I really need to walk all the way around the Citadel to find characters to talk to in Mass Effect, or could the game shortcut that process significantly? Do you really have to include manual harvesting for every last plant in your farm game, or could you include an automated farm worker who collects the crops when they are grown? Do I really need to vacuum every last corner of a room looking for clues, or could you include a visual aura around each important one?

Often the answer to these questions is an emphatic no. They are not needed, and they are just cruft. While the ideals behind them may be noble or ignoble, cruft is still cruft and should be excised where possible.

One way is to simply skip the content. Moving on with the game, reducing those cut-scenes to the bare essentials, getting the player to the next level minus the preamble and so forth are examples of this. However not all games are nor should be intense action simulators or strategy games, so sometimes it’s more about minimising rather than removing the busywork.

Choosing the right control scheme, for example, can soften busywork significantly. LA Noire could be a much smoother experience if the vacuuming behaviour wasn’t reliant on limited third person controls, for example, and the prominence of the somewhat pointless notebook function were reduced.

A third option is to streamline reward collection. In God of War the player’s rewards often do not need to be manually collected. They will travel toward him. Many other games oblige the player to walk over and pick up each individual object, and so they are comparatively sluggish.

Incorporating writing into the game rather than in discrete parts is a fourth option. Why stop play for a staged branched-dialogue sequence (as roleplaying games insist on doing even though it’s never fun) when you could use alongside dialogue instead? It’s much better to impart the feel of the game world without the comparatively egotistical design choice of making players stop to listen to your bad writing.

There are many more ways to minimise busywork. The common trait that they share is to automate that which can be automated to get the player back to causing deliberate change as quickly as possible. If you make your players jump through needless hoops, conduct pointless conversation, harvest endless crops and so on then just what kind of experience do you think you are actually delivering to them?

I guarantee it’s not nearly as high minded as you’d hope.

The Busywork Test

Ideally what you should do is go through of every type of game action in your design and consider the following questions:

Does the action cause a deliberate change the game world?

Does it permit significant variation?

Does it lead to a win?

Does it lead to a death?

Does it open up a new game area or impart a reward?

Does it costs the player anything? (including time)

If the answers are mostly no (or yes for the last one), then it’s likely that the action is busywork, and you should take steps to minimise it. (Source: What Games Are)