作者：Jon Shafer

“和敌人接触后，计划无一奏效。”

这话出自我的好友Helmuth von Moltke之口，这简要概述出全球军事战略家所面临的挑战。对于设计专业的学生来说，更实际的是，它还充分说明为什么游戏如此趣味横生。

毫无疑问，设计出恰巧可行的完美计划后，我们内心会无比雀跃。当熟练掌握众多知识后，玩家就会沉浸于体验乐趣，没有人会觉得胜出不是最佳结果。但如果玩家每次都顺利获胜，没有遇到减速带，那么游戏很快就会变得空洞，丧失其魅力。

因此我们最好让玩家保持警惕，持续思考接下来会出现什么情况，构思应对潜在威胁的策略。需要适应变更环境是策略游戏和谜题游戏的区别所在。优质策略游戏通常没有最佳解决方案（游戏邦注：其融入广泛的可能性，根据具体情况，某些策略会优于其他策略）。如果你一开始就能够判断出问题的正确答案，那么后续的所有时间和精力投入就完全没有意义。

显然我们需要稍微动摇玩家，确保他们不会处于太过安逸的状态。下面就来看看若干具体操作方式，还有就是过度逼迫玩家或操作不当将如何破坏玩法体验。

游戏如何促进适应性？

促使玩家改变策略最吸引人、最有趣的方式是，让过去的决策直接影响当前情境。游戏玩家也许会选择初期就创建众多工厂，现在它们的集体排污量就成为一个大问题。玩家会发现，他们的当前状态完全是早期选择的结果。也许下次，他们就会在别处投入资源。或者也许尽管带来这些后果，这依然非常值得。

另一例子涉及战略往来，在此玩家会向另一玩家寻求援助。接受方可以选择帮忙或不帮忙。拒绝显然有可能会惹怒对方，如果对方进行宣战，玩家就不得不适应自己造就的结果情形。优秀游戏通常需要玩家做出权衡，决策的结果会影响他们未来所处的情形。在这类适应性模式中，玩家总是会在随后发出这样的感慨：“如果我没有XXX，结果也许完全不同。”当玩家面临新障碍时，他们只能怪自己，而不会责备游戏和幕后开发者。

当玩家没有完全控制权限时，我们也可以通过某些方式促进适应性。随机地图是我最喜欢的工具之一。虽然世界布局显然不受玩家控制，但随机地图依然能够带来所谓的“温和促进性”——带来采取意料之外新路径的益处。但玩家依然可以选择忽略“建议”，继续着眼于他们在此之前所进行的操作。发现金矿清楚表明，应采取围绕金钱的策略。从沙漠中出发所带来的挑战和发现自己置身郁郁葱葱的河谷中截然不同——这意味着他们可能被潜在敌人所包围。向玩家呈现出乎意料的机会是促使他们重新考虑策略的绝佳方式。

多数温和促进性是探索或发现之类活动的最终结果。这也许是在RPG游戏中遇到带来有趣关卡任务的NPC，或者也许是通过策略游戏中的调查活动，发现新资源。如果玩家忽然发现，能够解锁最强大武器的资源近在门前，那么他就需要考虑放弃建造计划。面临这种情景时，玩家并不总是会改变方向，但他们多半时候会改变主意，因此设计师应花时间制作能够带来这类情形的机制。

逐渐改变游戏“环境”也是促使玩家采取或远离特定路线的有效方式。也许在体验一款长时间游戏的过程中，气候会逐渐变干，生产粮食会变得越来越困难，越来越昂贵。或者也许，游戏最强大的敌人会随着你力量的提升及随从被你消灭掉而变得越来越谨慎。如果突然出现这些情况，将令玩家感到不快，显得有失公平。

遗憾的是，有些常被用于促进适应性的方式并不像上述方式那样作用显著。许多游戏通过随机事件令游戏情境陷入混乱状态，要求玩家收拾残局。虽然这适合有些玩家，但多数玩家都无法从随机处罚中感受到乐趣。玩家希望自己处于控制地位，如果他们能够在各情境中做出最优决策，那么就不会出现糟糕结果。也许玩家忘记保护最薄弱的地区，或是进行没有回报的冒险——结果也许会很糟糕，但这些结果都是由玩家的决策带来的。真实随机性会消除玩家的主人公感觉。“我完全无能为力，游戏就是要整垮我。”

比随机惩罚或限制更糟糕的是，设计师强加的游戏内容。也许是在动作或RPG游戏中消除某项特殊技能，或是在RTS（即时战略）情境中隐藏特定单元类型。所有玩家都希望自己克服的是复杂但公正的挑战，因有所成就而获得奖励。当开发者武断取走某些内容时，玩家心中唯一的想法是，“他们为什么要这么做？”这就是开发者过度将适应性元素融入游戏当中的最佳典范。

玩家认知至关重要

这就引出一个关键点：“优劣”适应性的差异主要取决于玩家的认知。设计师需要铭记玩家的期望，确保游戏传递正确信息。如果有玩家觉得游戏缺乏公正性——那么游戏就会被设定这样的印象。目的无关紧要——游戏设计也不例外。

Crusader Kings from vpltd.com

这并不是说给予玩家任何惩罚都招致恶果。若游戏清楚说明机制会以特定的模糊方式运作，那么玩家会愿意接受特定“不公平”措施。一个最近例子是《十字军之王2》中的王朝机制中。玩家在游戏中需要诠释一个控制中世纪欧洲王国的朝代。玩家在游戏中不是扮演国王或王后角色，而是“诠释”王朝当前的执政党党员。游戏跨越数百年，随时间的发展，家族主导者将最终消亡（游戏邦注：或上了年纪，或英年早逝），王位将传到已故角色的后裔。这带来若干后果，多数都很糟糕：王国发生动荡，新伙伴也许不像之前的统治者那样受其他游戏角色喜爱，他或她的统治状况也许非常糟糕等。如果这些惩罚都随机出现，那么玩家无疑会被激怒。但《十字军之王》是款涉及统治王朝，处理这类问题的游戏。因此它表现突出，我从未觉得自己被游戏欺骗。

此外，许多其他的现实玩法机制以有趣方式促进适应性。我个人非常欣赏，但觉得尚未被充分利用的的一个元素是：气候和季节。我非常喜欢会随时间流逝产生周期效应的游戏机制，其中季节元素尤其吸引我。夏天是个生长季节，如果你的军队需要寻找粮食，那这再适合不过。但冬天也很不错。虽然冰雪覆盖的大地会带来些许挑战，但它也会冻结所有河流，消除特定障碍。季节变化是我们多数人都非常熟悉的内容，所以如果游戏决定将此自然现象当作主要玩法机制，那么没有人会觉得这么做过于“随意”。如果机制过于严苛，那么他们也许会心生不悦，但概念本身非常合理。

似乎1850年前装配的主要舰队都是被所谓的“百年一遇”的风暴所淹没。这是我浏览历史书籍所看到的结果，船只的下沉原因也许并非如此。需声明的是，我不建议设计师在游戏中融入让一半入侵军队被台风淹没这种类型的适应性。

适应性&多样性

谈到可疑设计选择……虽然关于适应性如何完善游戏作品，我已谈论很多内容，但还有若干缺点需要考虑。最大问题就在于把握战略可能性和多样性、重玩价值及结构（后三者由初始特性形成）之间的平衡关系。

策略游戏中的帮派分化设计难题就属于这类挑战。作为设计师，我们希望游戏中的各可玩角色或帮派都独特且有趣。玩家知道各方的运作方式并非如出一辙——作为开发者，我们的职责是呈现内容。问题是，融入非对称帮派也许会提高特定机制的重要性，也许会令其完全失去效用。如果你所扮演的是非常善战的族群，那为什么要融入无聊的反战分子内容呢？你依然可以和平玩游戏，但为什么要这么做呢？扮演此族群的重点在于，发挥他们的优势，以不同于其他帮派的方式探索游戏。

starcraft-2(from joystiq.com)

这个问题在提供多个获胜渠道的游戏中表现得更加突出。在《星际争霸》之类的游戏中，赢得单个比赛的方式只有一种，所以融入3个非对称族群算不上什么设计挑战——最终他们都旨在跨过同个终点线，所有内容都会得到平衡。这3个帮派依然有其空军部队，他们依然运用Vespene Gas，他们都试图破坏敌人的营地，保护自己的阵地。但在能够靠军事手段或和平方式胜出的游戏中，你扮演什么角色？多数玩家会忽略这样的功能：1）无法自然激发他们的兴趣；2）不是最佳策略的组成要素。无论如何，管理好战帮派的玩家多半不会花大量时间建造寺庙。

所有玩家都希望能够从游戏中体验到不同内容。游戏开发者需决定，是要着眼于极限情况，还是尝试提供平衡关系，向所有玩家呈现内容。我目前正在制作的游戏包含若干帮派，我决定采取后个方案。有约一半的种族都高度细分化（游戏邦注：而另一半则在策略方面存在更多灵活性）。这样，粉丝就能够决定什么策略最适合自己。

就和优秀策略游戏没有最佳解决方案一样，这里也没有所谓的最佳游戏设计。即便如此，适应性元素是丰富单调游戏的有效工具，而且还让玩家无从知晓接下来会发生什么情况。无论如何，要让玩家遭遇会打乱其计划的敌人——即便这些计划最终还是以其他方式顺利得到落实。（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）

Adaptation

by Jon Shafer

“No plan survives contact with the enemy.”

This statement, famously uttered by our good friend Helmuth von Moltke (the Elder, of course) concisely frames the challenge faced by military strategists the world over. More practically for us as students of design, it also helps shed light on why some games are so much fun.

Without a doubt, there’s a unique form of glee one knows after crafting the perfect plan which also happens to work brilliantly. Humans are hard-wired to experience pleasure when gaining mastery of pretty much anything, and I don’t know anyone alive who doesn’t think winning is better than the alternative. However, if a player meets with success every time without facing a speed bump or two the game quickly becomes hollow and loses its charm.

For that reason it’s good to keep players on their toes, forever pondering what will happen next, crafting strategies to counter the threats lurking in the unknown. The need to adapt to changing circumstances is what helps separate a strategy game from a puzzle game. In a (good) strategy game, there should never be a perfect solution – just a broad spectrum of possibilities, some of which are better than others depending on the situation. If you can identify the ‘correct answer’ to a problem right from the very beginning then all the time and effort put in afterwards is completely pointless.

It’s clear that we need to shake players a little bit and make sure they’re never too comfortable. Let’s examine some ways this can be done, along with a couple examples of how pushing the player too hard or in the wrong way can hurt the gameplay experience.

How Can a Game Encourage Adaptation?

One of the most engaging and strategically interesting ways to prod players into shifting strategies is to have past decisions directly influence the current situation. Maybe the player chose to build a massive number of factories early on, and now their collective pollution output is becoming a major problem. The player is able to recognize that their current predicament is completely the result of earlier choices that they made. Perhaps next time they’ll instead invest resources elsewhere. Or maybe it was still worth it, in spite of the consequences.

Another example involves a diplomatic exchange where one player asks another for a favor. The one on the receiving end can either oblige or refuse to help. Saying no obviously risks angering the other party, and should a declaration of war follow the player is forced to adapt to a situation very much of their own creation. A good game should always require players to make trade-offs, and the result of the decisions made can help shape the situation they face in the future. With this type of adaptation players can always later remark, “man, if only I didn’t blahblahblah it all would have turned out differently…” When players are faced with new hurdles to jump over they can only point the finger at themselves, instead of blaming the game and the developers behind the scenes.

There are also many good ways to encourage adaptation when the player doesn’t have complete control. Map randomization is one of my favorite tools. While the layout of the world is obviously completely out of the player’s hands, a random map still provides what I like to call “soft encouragement” – offering benefits for taking up a new path that weren’t even previously on the radar. However, players still have the option to ignore the ‘offer’ and continue focusing on whatever they were doing before the discovery. Finding a gold deposit might strongly point to adopting a cash-centric strategy. Starting in a desert poses completely different challenges from finding yourself in a lush river valley – surrounded by potential enemies. Providing players unexpected opportunities is an excellent way to get them to reconsider their strategies.

Most soft encouragement is the result of exploration or discovery of some kind. It could be meeting an NPC that provides an interesting quest while playing an RPG, or maybe revealing new resources via research in a strategy game. One will have to seriously consider dropping their plan of pursuing a builder strategy if they suddenly discover the resource which unlocks the most powerful weapon in the game right on their doorstep. Players won’t always change directions when faced with this kind of situation, but they will often enough that it’s definitely worth the designer’s time to craft systems that can give rise to scenarios of this sort.

Gradual changes to the game’s ‘environment’ can also be an effective means of pushing players towards or away from certain paths. Maybe over the course of a long game the climate grows drier and it becomes harder and more expensive to produce food. Or perhaps the most powerful enemy in the game grows increasingly wary as you grow in strength and pick off his minions. If these sorts of things happened suddenly they would be jarring and seem unfair.

Unfortunately, there are also some oft-utilized methods for forcing adaptation which don’t work nearly as well as some of the above. Many games use random events to throw the game situation into chaos and force the player to pick up the pieces. While this works for some players, most will not get much fun out of random penalties. Players want to feel like they’re in control, and if they make the optimal decision in every situation nothing bad will happen. Maybe the player forgets to guard a flank, or takes a risk that doesn’t pay off – the outcome might be bad, but those results are due to choices the player made. True randomness eliminates that feeling of ownership. “There was nothing I could do, the game just decided to screw me.”

Even worse than random penalties or limitations are those arbitrarily imposed by the designer. Maybe it’s taking away a special ability in an action game or RPG, or locking away a specific unit type in an RTS scenario. This sort of tactic never has the intended effect. Everyone wants to feel like they’re overcoming difficult but fair challenges, and earn rewards for achieving success. When the developers just arbitrarily take something away the only thing running through the player’s mind is “why would they do that?” This is probably the best example of developers trying too hard to wedge adaptation into a game.

Player Perception is Paramount

This brings me to a key point: the main difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ adaptation is merely how the player perceives it. The designer always needs to keep in mind their players’ expectations, and help ensure the game is conveying the right message. If someone feels like a game is unfair… then it is. Period. Intentions matter for nothing – game design is no exception.

That’s not to say slapping any sort of penalty on players is a terrible thing. If a game makes it clear that a system works in a specific, unambiguous way then players will be willing to (and maybe even readily) accept a certain measure of ‘unfairness’. One of the best examples of this working in a fairly recent offering is the dynasty system in Crusader Kings 2. For those unfamiliar with the game, you play as a dynasty which controls a medieval European kingdom. Instead of taking the role of a specific king or queen, players ‘live’ through whoever the current ruling member of their dynasty happens to be. The game spans several hundred years, and as time progresses one’s family head will eventually die, either due to old age or some premature cause, and the crown will pass to the newly-deceased character’s heir. This has several consequences, most of which are bad: the realm is destabilized, other characters in the game might not like this new fellow as much as the previous ruler, his or her governorship stats might be awful, etc. If these sorts of penalties just popped up randomly players would be justifiably annoyed. But Crusader Kings is a game about ruling a dynasty and dealing with these sorts of problems. For that reason it works brilliantly and never once did I feel like the game was cheating me.

There’s a myriad of other gameplay mechanics based on reality that can force adaptation in interesting ways. There is one in particular that I personally love, and feel is woefully underutilized: climate and seasons. I’m a huge fan of systems with effects that cycle over time, but seasons in particular have always grabbed me. Summer is the growing season, great if your armies need a quick bite to eat. Good luck with that in winter though. While the frozen landscape might pose some new challenges, perhaps it also freezes all of the rivers, eliminating certain barriers. Seasonal change is something most of us are familiar with, so if a game decides to incorporate that natural phenomenon as a major gameplay system no one will complain about its inclusion being ‘arbitrary.’ If the mechanics are overly harsh they might not be happy, but the concept itself is sound.

Hell, it seems like pretty much every major fleet put together prior to 1850 was sunk by a so-called “once in a lifetime” storm. Well… that’s what I picked up from skimming the history books anyways… that may not actually have been how it went down. Just for the record, having half of your invasion force sunk by a typhoon is not the type of adaptation I suggest designers apply in their games!

Adaptation VS Variety

Speaking of suspect design choices… While I’ve talked a lot about how adaptation can improve a game, there are also some drawbacks to consider. The largest issue is the balance between offering strategic possibilities and the variety, replayability and structure provided by starting traits.

The dilemma of how to approach the design of faction differentiation in a strategy game showcases this challenge. As designers, we want the various playable characters or factions in our games to be unique and fun to try out. Players have come to expect that not every side will play exactly the same – and our job as developers is to deliver. The problem is that having asymmetric factions either elevates the importance of certain mechanics, or can even outright discourage their use. If you’re playing a race that is greatat warfare, why even bother with the boring peacenik stuff? Sure, you’re still able to play peacefully, but why would you? The whole point of playing a race like that is to take advantage of their strengths and explore the game in a different manner than you would with all the other factions.

This problem is most acute in games that offer more than one way to win. In a game like Starcraft there is only one way to win a single match, so having three extremely asymmetric races is less of a design challenge – ultimately they’re all trying to cross the same finish line, and everything can be balanced off of that. All three factions still have air units, they all still use Vespene Gas, and they’re all trying to destroy the enemy base while protecting their own. But what do you do in a game where you can win militarily orthrough peaceful means? Most players will ignore the features which either 1) don’t naturally interest them, or 2) aren’t an element of the optimal strategy. Either way, the player in charge of that warfare-inclined faction we were talking about earlier probably isn’t going to be spending much time constructing temples.

Everyone wants something different from the games they play. Game developers must decide between focusing on the extremes and running with it, or trying to offer a balance and provide something for everyone. The game I’m currently working on has several factions, and I’ve decided to go with the latter approach. Roughly half of the races are highly specialized, while the other half have much more flexibility in terms of what strategies are worth pursuing. This way, fans of any type can decide which approach best fits their taste.

Just as there are no perfect solutions in good strategy games, there are no perfect game designs. Even so, adaptation is a great tool for spicing up what could otherwise be a monotonous experience, while also ensuring one never really knows what’s going to happen next. However you do it, make sure your players always have an enemy out there that will at least rough up their plans – even if those plans do ultimately come out the other side alive.（Source：gamasutra）