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阐述早期游戏经历对现代游戏设计的影响

发布时间:2013-03-12 15:13:01 Tags:,,,

作者:Brandon Sheffield

人们总说你永远无法忘记初恋,之后所处对象都会以初恋为标准。当然,这也并非绝对真理,但有了第一段关系烙下的印记,加之父母关系所树立的榜样,这都会深深影响你多年后对爱情的看法。

我想知道:游戏是否也同样如此?我们早期玩过的那些游戏果真影响我们现在对“优秀”与“糟糕”互动媒体的评判标准?它们是否影响了我们的游戏设计方式?我认为确实有可能。

early video game(from gamasutra)

early video game(from gamasutra)

初次感觉至关重要

让我们谈谈《暗黑之魂》、《恶魔之魂》系列。这些游戏极具惩罚性,对玩家的操作技巧要求甚高,并且控制方式也挺困难,必须熟能生巧方可驾驭。这听起来有点像糟糕游戏的成份,但为什么它们还是成了热卖的成功之作?

我们通常见到的评论者对其大加赞誉的一点就是,该系列让人们回忆起日本主机和街机游戏的黄金时代,那些游戏的特点也几乎与此相同。这就好像是与新欢复燃旧爱——虽然还是存在老问题,但那种熟悉的甜蜜感总让人难以割舍。日本出版物Dengeki曾如此评价《恶魔之魂》,“老式游戏粉丝定会为之喜极而泣”。IGN评论员Sam Bishop也指出,“对于那些还记得过去的游戏如何让人频频受到惩罚,并且全身心投入其中的人来说,这款游戏值得一试。”

但那些小时候并没有这种体验的人又该如何?那些更喜欢多个保存点,一次性就能获得完整游戏体验的人呢?对他们来说,这种游戏的卖点难以令人接受,这也是为何索尼选择将《恶魔之魂》的西方发行权转交给Atlus的原因。

对《恶魔之魂》来说,它的成功与其过去的情感纽带不无关系。但也有可能是一种相反的情况:有时候,是我们个人的游戏倾向让我们屈服于过去的喜好。例如。我一向喜欢那些有意思但存在缺陷的游戏。对我来说,在《使命召唤》这种超级游戏中出现一个小故障,那就太扎眼太突兀了,但我却能够宽容《Nire》这种全方位展现新理念的游戏所出现的劣质画面和偶尔出现的隐形墙体。一款游戏果真煞费苦心地让自己与众不同,那么我就会原谅它的缺陷,如果我想成为一名能够制作出高盈利性游戏的设计师,那么这种偏爱“与众不同但却有所瑕疵”的倾向可能就无法让我做出具有商业吸引力的游戏。

为此,我认为自己的过去作为玩家的体验,可能正是影响我当前游戏喜好的原因。

从TurboGrafx-16中收获的经验

我的游戏史有点古怪,我最先从2600和Intellivision(当我得到这些设备时已经很落后,但这确实是我当时能够承担的费用),升级到我省吃俭用好几个月才买到的TurboGrafx-16。后者正是我最早作为游戏玩家的启蒙设备。

例如,《Valis》系列并不算非常有名,但我却一直爱不释手。这是一款关于一名高中女生为拯救世界,挥刀砍向怪物群的动作、平台游戏。这也是90年代典型的游戏题材。

valis(from ign.com)

valis(from ign.com)

你可以跳跃、挥舞刀剑,使用魔法(也可以组合使用这两种攻击方式),疾走,翻滚。我最近重玩《Valis III》,并且注意到那些翻滚很可能影响了我当前的喜好和设计习惯。翻滚可以让玩家向下绕过障碍,或穿过鸿沟行进一段距离。但这种距离有时候,会在很困难的平台片段将你置之死地。除此之外,平台本身有时候也会有一些凹凸让你无法站立平稳。

这很可能是现代游戏中大家极力避免的情况,因为这会让人感觉被游戏耍了一翻。而如果你战胜了这个极高难度的片段,就会从心底升起一种尽管游戏如此为难你,你还是获得了成功这种奇妙的胜利感。你实际上是在与游戏作斗争,而在今天这却是游戏设计的禁忌——但《恶魔之魂》这款现代游戏却正是利用这一特点,让玩家产生更强烈、难以言状的胜利自豪感。

作为设计师我从中得到的经验就是:我有时候太过侧重于将玩家立即获得顺畅的体验,而忽视了他们的长期游戏体验。

回顾这些游戏旧爱总让我重新受到启发。例如,《Bonk’s Revenge》的神秘和炼金系统驱使我去追求那种在简单的游戏世界中产生的即兴玩法。这种追求有时候会产生功能膨胀的副作用(游戏邦注:作者认为这正是《Bonk》续作所产生的问题)。

昨日重现

为了证实我并非唯一受到过去游戏喜好影响的人,我又询问了好友Tim Rogers(就职于Action Button Entertainment)以及Frank Cifaldi(Gamasutra.com成员)的看法,让他们对自己影响最深的游戏。

Cifaldi提到的是《猴岛的秘密》,该游戏让他首次一览完整、生机勃勃的交互游戏世界的风采。这款游戏影响了他此后数年的游戏生涯,他最初曾在HyberCard制作冒险游戏,在GameTap任职时又制作了一款交互社区冒险游戏《Captain McGrandpa》。

Rogers的游戏启蒙之作是《超级马里奥3》,他认为这款游戏是史上最佳作品,它要求玩家掌握极为准确的跳跃时机和反应能力,并且含有不少秘密(游戏邦注:例如隐藏的通道、天空中的钱币箱子)。这也就不奇怪为何他主导的首款游戏《ZIGGURAT》也是一款看似简单,但却含有时机和准确性操作要求,并隐藏秘密的游戏。

自我分析

对于你的人际关系问题,你可以去找治疗专家——但他们只会向你反馈一些你已经知道的情况。我极力推荐你针对自己的游戏史进行自我分析。回顾和剖析早期学习经验,可以让你迅速升级自己的游戏理念,因此虽然多数经验是精华,但也有一些是糟粕。

音乐平台游戏《Sound Shapes》就是一个有趣的研究案例:如果你看过《游戏开发者》2012年12月期刊中的一篇事后分析文章,就会发现该游戏的主策划人员Jon Mak提到“我不喜欢平台游戏,或关卡编辑器,但我心底还是认为这些游戏很有意义。”他还补充表示,“这是我们所学到的东西:我们无法仅凭原来的本领达到自己的设计目标。”

所以这就是一个开发者同自己的一贯风格和早期特点作斗争的例子。这一做法非常有效,并且让《Sound Shapes》备受赞誉,并获得许多IGF提名。但令人奇怪的是,这款游戏给人的感觉却并不像是一款典型的平台游戏,而像是一款交互音乐玩具,平台跳跃只是一个推动游戏进程的机制。而如果没有音乐元素,这又不会成为一款太受欢迎的平台游戏。

对于所有人来说,我们的过去都蕴含许多学习经验。你可以自己试试看,回忆下第一款让你产生共鸣的游戏。也许这是首款让你爱不释手的游戏,旨在让玩家获取高手;也许这是让你感觉它是一个富有生机的世界的首款游戏;也许这是首款让你与其他玩家交战的游戏。

以全新眼光重新看待这些游戏。玩这些游戏的时候,想想平台游戏中的跳跃距离,或者你如何在竞速游戏中漂移,这个漂移持续时间有多长。想想RPG中的关卡进程,或者射击游戏中的倍频器。你当前的作品如何强化这些旧理念?你是否应该更重视这些旧理念?这是一种很有趣的训练,可以产生一些意想不到的结果。即使你并没有想出一些实质性的内容,但可能也更容易解释为何自己会在《Minecraft》或《Skyrim》沉浸更长时间。

回到未来

今天的孩子希望游戏拥有自动保存、持久性、保存点和类似于《Minecraft》的大规模交互性。他们这种期待并没有错,因为这正是他们从小所玩游戏的特点,并且在一定程度上也是未来的娱乐发展方向。但当他们长大时,他们又会喜欢哪种游戏?他们与游戏首次触电的感觉又会让他们对后来的游戏产生什么好恶情绪?

goldeneye-007-nintendo-64(from gamasutra)

goldeneye-007-nintendo-64(from gamasutra)

那么从小玩任天堂64游戏的孩子呢?要知道《GoldenEye 64》中的魔法从无后来者传神演绎。而那些伴随Dreamcast长大的孩子呢?可有人满足他们的需求?

我并不是提议大家都重返故纸堆寻找怀旧情愫,而是以新型现代的产品,让那些用户找回青葱岁月时的感觉。没有人想玩一款完全复制《GolenEye 64》的新游戏,他们想玩一款可以让他们回想起自己开始玩《GoldenEye 64》那种感觉的游戏。通过一点自我分析,仔细研究过去时代的游戏,也许你就能找回那种神秘而妙不可言的感觉。(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

Learning from your earliest video game experiences

By Brandon Sheffield

Game Developer magazine’s Brandon Sheffield reflects on what designers can learn from their first video game loves. (Originally printed in Game Developer’s March issue, available now.)

They say you’re forever dating your first love. Not literally, of course, but the early patterns set by your first relationship, and the relationships of your parents, tend to strongly influence how you approach love and relationships for many years to come.

I wonder: Is the same true for games? Do those early games we played in our formative years influence what we now perceive as “good” and “bad” in interactive media? Do they influence how we design games? I submit that they may.

First kiss is deadly

Let’s think about a series like Dark Souls/Demon’s Souls. These games are punishing, require rather exacting inputs from players, and have somewhat fiddly controls that require getting used to. That sounds like a nice recipe for a failure stew. So why did these games succeed?

One of the praises you often see from reviewers is that the series reminds them of the glory days of Japanese console and arcade games, which were built with much the same recipe. It’s like a new love affair with an old flame – the same problems as always, yet sweetly, lovingly familiar. Japanese publication Dengeki said of Demon’s Souls, “Fans of old-school games will shed tears of joy.” IGN reviewer Sam Bishop echoed the sentiment, saying, “Those that can remember the good ol’ days when games taught through the highly effective use of intense punishment and a heavy price for not playing it carefully should scoop this up instantly.”

But what about people who didn’t grow up with that experience? What about those who are more used to frequent checkpoints, and the game providing a full experience to blaze through in one go, rather than in halting steps? For them, the game is a harder sell, which is why Sony passed on publishing Demon’s Souls in the West, and core-oriented niche publisher Atlus had to step up and do it instead.

For Demon’s Souls, its link to the past helped it succeed. But perhaps the reverse can also happen: Our personal game heritages could, at times, make us slaves to our past interests. For example, I tend to like games that are interesting, but flawed. To me, a glitch in an otherwise super-polished Call of Duty is extremely glaring and illusion-shattering, but I’ll happily forgive poor graphics and the occasional invisible wall in a game like Nier, which stabs out in all directions with new ideas. If a game tries hard to do something different, I’ll forgive its faults – and if I want to be a designer who makes games that are good at making money, this preference for different-but-flawed could hold me back from making games with commercial appeal.

With this thought in mind, I decided to dissect my own past as a player to see what influence it might have had on my current interests.

Lessons from the TurboGrafx-16

My history is a bit odd – I went from the 2600 and Intellivision (which were already old when I got them, but they were affordable!), to the TurboGrafx-16, which I saved up for months to afford. And this is the console that informed my early days as a player of games.

The Valis series, for example, is not very well known, but I played it to death. It’s an action, platforming, hack-and-slash affair that stars a high school girl, out to save the world, with a sword taking on a horde of monsters. Pretty standard fare for the 1990s.

You could jump, perform a sword attack, use magic (and could power up both of these attacks), walk, and roll. I replayed Valis III recently, and I noticed something about those rolls that may have influenced my current interests and design habits. Rolling allows the player to travel for a set distance, both under obstacles and across gaps. But this distance is such that, at times, beginning a roll just a few pixels one way or the other means life or death in a difficult platforming section. On top of that, the platforms themselves can occasionally have dressings that don’t count as area you can stand on.

This is most likely something one would want to avoid in the modern era, because it feels like the game has tricked you, when you’ve clearly made the roll visually, but it’s counted as a death. Less obvious, though, is the triumph you feel after defeating that particularly difficult section. It’s as though you’ve succeeded in spite of the game’s efforts to thwart you. You are actually fighting against the game itself, which we’re generally told not to do – but in a modern game like Demon’s Souls, it makes the thrill of victory that much more compelling.

There is a lesson here for me as a designer: I can sometimes focus too much on making things smooth for a player in the immediate term, versus their long-term experience.

I won’t bore you with my history as a player, but revisiting these old game-loves continually revealed patterns in my current thinking. For instance, Bonk’s Revenge’s somewhat mystical and alchemic systems helped drive me to chase the elusive beast that is emergent gameplay in a simple game world. But is that my white whale? That pursuit has, at times, led to feature bloat (which is exactly what happened in the subsequent Bonk installment, incidentally).

Reconstructing our past

Just to make sure I wasn’t the only one who’s influenced by his past, I asked my friends Tim Rogers of Action Button Entertainment and Frank Cifaldi of Gamasutra.com, with whom I record a weekly podcast (which is also called insert credit), to talk a bit about their formative games, and found them similarly branded by past experience.

For Cifaldi, it was The Secret of Monkey Island, which gave him the first glimpse of a full, living interactive game world. This colored his interest in games for years to come; when he was young, he made adventure games in HyperCard, and later, when he was working at GameTap, he made an interactive community adventure game called Captain McGrandpa.

Rogers, meanwhile, thinks Super Mario Bros. 3 is the best game ever made. SMB3 is very much about precision and timing of jumps and reactions, but also about secrets – warps, hidden passageways, and coin boxes in the sky. It’s no wonder, then, that the first game he directed (ZiGGURAT for iOS) is a deceptively simple game about timing, precision, and nothing else – aside from the occasional secret.

Tell me about your Mother

For your human relationship problems, you can go to a therapist – but they’ll just reflect back what you already know. I highly recommend you take a self-analysis approach to your game history. Going back and dissecting those early learnings can help you grow past your earliest ideas of what a game is, or can be, because while most lessons will be good, some will be bad as well.

The musical platformer Sound Shapes is an interesting case study: If you read the postmortem in the December 2012 issue of Game Developer, you’ll see that the game’s mastermind, Jon Mak, said, “I don’t like platformers, or level editors, but in the back of my mind they made sense.” He also added, “That was a thing that we learned: We couldn’t achieve our design goals with what we would do naturally.”

So here is an example of developers playing against their type, and against their early imprint. This worked well, and brought Sound Shapes to critical acclaim, and many IGF nominations. But at the same time, is it any wonder that (sorry, Jon) the game just doesn’t feel like a solid platformer? It feels like an interactive music toy where platforming happens to be the mechanic to drive progress. Without the music element, this would not be a loving homage to the platforming genre.

There are lessons in our past for all of us. Try it out on yourself; think about the first game that really grabbed you. Maybe it’s the first game that compelled you to keep coming back, aiming for a perfect score; maybe it’s the first game that made you feel like games were a living world; maybe it’s the first game that let you play against another player.

Revisit these games with new eyes. While playing them, think about the jump distances for platformers, or how you start a drift in a racing game, and how long that drift lasts. Think about the level progression in RPGs, or the score multipliers in a shooter. How has your current work reinforced those old ideas? How have they strayed? Should you be more critical of those old ideas? It’s an interesting exercise which can yield some surprising results. Even if you don’t come away with something practical, you may have an easier time explaining why you prefer to sink hours into Minecraft over Skyrim – or the reverse.

Back to the future

The kids of today expect autosaving, persistence, checkpoints, and massive interactivity on a Minecraft scale. And they’re not wrong to expect it! That’s what they grew up with, and that is to some extent the future of entertainment. But when they grow up, what will they expect from games? What will their first love affair teach them to love and hate?

Getting closer to the now, what about kids who grew up with the Nintendo 64? The precise magic of GoldenEye 64 has never been properly revisited. What of a child who grew up with the Dreamcast? Is anyone serving her needs?

I’m not suggesting we need to mine the past and prey on nostalgia. But attempting to serve similar experiences to those people felt in their youth – in new and modern products – can be a valuable goal. Nobody wants to play a new game that’s exactly like GoldenEye 64. They want to play a game that feels like how they remember GoldenEye 64 at the time they were playing it. With a little self-analysis, and a careful study of these bygone eras of games, you might just get at that mystical and elusive feeling. (source:gamasutra


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