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阐述令游戏吸引大众用户的方法及风险

发布时间:2013-05-16 15:24:14 Tags:,,,,

作者:Daniel Cook

我的生命中出现过各种各样的人。有女人,有男孩,有富人,有穷人,有同性恋,有变性人,有年轻人,有老人,有充满困惑的人,有沮丧的人,有自由的人也有保守的人。他们有些喜欢被打上标签,有些却不乐意。他们拥有不同的文化,肤色,鼻子的形状,发型,体格以及带有梦想,乐趣和痛苦的生活史。

我希望所有的这些人都能玩我的游戏。

我是一个较保守的人,游戏也是我与其他人进行交流的少数方式之一。在我的理想世界中,人们将保持着开放态度进入游戏,如果能够在此获得一些有趣的体验便再好不过了。我也发现如果盲目地复制标准电子游戏的话便会疏远许多玩家。

一些具有兼容性的设计目标

接下来便是我始终牢记在心的一些设计目标。但是并非我的所有游戏都达到了这些目标,有些目标是针对于未来(还未发行)的游戏而言。我们需要对此做出尝试。然后我将听取反馈并再次尝试。

1.减少暴力元素

血腥的暴力元素将对现实中的人们带来消极影响,并只对特定的用户具有吸引力。如此你不使用任何让人震惊的内容便能对人们造成影响。你必须确保让玩家无端淤血只是一种选择,而不是游戏的默认内容。

卡通暴力拥有其立足点,特别是在明确的物理因果关系间。但是如果你探索的是不包含撞击或射击事物的系统,那么这种暴力类型也是完全可以避免的。

2.减少性感的图像

这是有些成年人想看到的内容。但说实话,千篇一律的性感角色并没有其它特别的功能。

你是否真的希望自己所创造的游戏是由身穿比基尼的性感辣妹或露出健硕身材的猛男所支撑起来的?你是否能够通过添加一些有趣的关系或服饰去完善游戏?

3.更多合作式社交动态

比起严格的玩家对抗玩家模式,我尝试着去创造鼓励合作的游戏。设置玩家间相互帮助的游戏是否可能或者具有推动性?许多游戏在主题和机制上都转向玩家间的互相伤害。

尽管设置一些具有竞争性的游戏玩法能够培养玩家的运动员精神,但是除了纯粹的个人竞争外,游戏中还存在着许多其它机遇。将动态从“如果你采取行动,我就会杀了你”改成“嘿,让我们一起游戏吧。”

4.减少粉色和蓝色的设定

从20世纪40年代以后,我们便一直习惯使用“粉色”去代表女性用户而“蓝色”则代表男性用户(游戏邦注:就像芭比娃娃和G.I. Joe)。

barbies(from fanpop.com)

barbies(from fanpop.com)

GI-JOE-Cobra-Island-7-packs(from actionfigurepics)

GI-JOE-Cobra-Island-7-packs(from actionfigurepics)

而我更愿意选择“绿色”进行修饰,因为这不会得罪某一边的用户。但同时我们也不能妥协于“紫色”,因为这仍然只是我们对于两性差异这一刻板印象的反应。相反地,我们应该基于最原始的表达方式,并使用真正的美丽与乐趣去吸引人们的注意。

5.避免刻板印象

刻板印象是一种预定的心理模式,也将对游戏产生影响。基于一个简单的单词或短语,你将触发一整个模型,即关于世界是如何运行的。但是这些廉价的心理模式拥有两个主要问题:

首先,它们将导致人们被其他人的视角所蒙蔽。其次,大量使用刻板印象将带来巨大的负担,并最终导致一个群组莫名其妙地被推脱给其他群组。

Road Not Taken(from gamasutra)

Road Not Taken(from gamasutra)

替代刻板印象的一种方法便是通过思考而构建属于你自己且具有巨大影响的主题块。当我们着眼于《Road Not Taken》时会发现,我们很难将世界置于一个现有的刻板印象中。通过构建你自己的主题,你至少能够确保任何有害的内容或盲点都是你所拥有的。

6.更多角色多样性

你能够选择各种性别,肤色和个性的角色。并对此进行混合并匹配,从而让玩家能从角色身上感受到主人翁意识。这并不是什么复杂的事。甚至是叙述类游戏也能够不牺牲玩家选择冒险的权利而赋予他们更多角色所有权。

7.欢迎不同的亚文化

游戏是否支持不同的亚文化群的发展?我不能代表所有人,但是我却能为那些拥有与我不同经验,个性和目标的人提供培养型游戏空间。

能够推动亚文化发展,同时也是我很喜欢的一种系统类别便是创作工具。如果你着眼于Game Maker,RPG Maker和Twine等系统,它们都能赋予一些小群组创造属于自己游戏空间的能力。你该如果从一个更广泛的意义上将游戏整合到创作工具中?

8.低准入成本

我尝试着去创造让人们可以无需花大钱便能够体验的游戏。类别将划分不同的群体。我尝试着避免向有钱人收取60美元的服务费或让人们投入300美元于专业的游戏硬件。如果你已经拥有一台计算机或手机,我便希望你能够尝试下我的游戏。虽然这并不完美,但是我希望玩家尝试游戏的边际成本为零。

在这种情况下你们是如何面对有钱人的?当有人花钱时,我会问自己“该如何做才能让其他社区成员从中受益?”使用技术去创造一款有关“自己”的游戏并不是多么了不起的事,同时这也将导致玩家间的隔离以及社会分层。似乎使用相同的技术去加强“我们”的理念会更加有帮助。

9.较低的技能障碍

我尝试着去创造能让玩家长达数千个小时而沉浸于其中的深层次游戏。但同时我也小心翼翼地为新用户设置了较大的技能要求。这些技能障碍主要分为两种形式。

第一种形式便是简单的机制复杂性。当我在创建最初的系统时,我们总是会习惯于创造一些自己喜欢的内容,但却有可能导致其他人对此感到非常困惑。这是关于平衡并将复杂系统分解成一些容易学习的小组件的问题。

第二种形式较为隐蔽。许多设计师都是伴随着经典的游戏长大,如此便引起他们猜测,新用户将拥有怎样的现有技能。“为什么还要教授如何使用模拟摇杆?所有人及其兄弟都知道如何使用它。”

但是还有很多人不知道如何做。玩家文化强调的是特定机制和心理技能,并在这一过程中排除了那些不想分享相同成长经验的人。这也是我为何喜欢创造原创游戏的主要原因。我不得不与过去告别,从而推动着所有人能够基于同一个起点开始新的体验。

风险:通过创造一款过度兼容的游戏,你最终只会创造出一款无意义作品

通用商业艺术的阴影一直笼罩着这一讨论。如果你一直努力去避免侵犯到别人,你便很难刺激对方做出深度的反应。

我认为排斥一不小心就会变成驱赶。你可以在积极挑战玩家的同时创造一款具有兼容性的游戏。兼容性将成为一种倾听和理解,并对你的玩家产生正面影响。

着眼于宫崎骏的作品,我们可以发现许多强大的探索主题。但是它们也仍然是具有兼容性的电影和漫画,既能吸引普通用户的注意,也深受特定用户的喜欢。

风险:花时间专注于兼容性是多余的

我是否因为投入太多时间于兼容性上而让预算紧缩的项目深陷危险之中?

关于上述理念我最喜欢的一点便是,如果你能预先进行设计的话,它们的成本便只占所有预算成本的一小部分。并最终能为你带来广泛的用户。

triple-town(from mmohunter.com)

triple-town(from mmohunter.com)

《Triple Town》是一款带有怪物和较阴暗图像的硬核城市建造主题游戏。有些人认为它可以更加强调粉色系,并转向可爱,轻松的基调。许多复制游戏便是这么做的。它们采取了廉价,轻松且老套的方法。但是这些懒惰的努力很少能在市场上取得成功。

不管怎样,《Triple Town》并不是一款设计昂贵的游戏,它遵循了上述的一些兼容性设计理念。不同群组的男人和女人都在玩这款游戏。但是看看玩家在Twitter上谈论这款游戏的意见就多种多样了。他们都认为这是属于自己的游戏,并且是通过好友的病毒性传播发现了它。

风险:兼容性游戏只支持主流文化

如果想要面向所有人创造游戏,难道只能围绕着它去创建主流社区?

这里潜伏着一个重大危险,我认为你们必须谨慎对待。社区的主要部件是群体规范和边界的形成,并能够保护这些规范。群组将决定谁待在内部而谁又待在外部。从表面上看,这与兼容性理念是相对立的。

考虑将你的游戏当成培育并发展社区的平台。而不是瞄准单一的社区,为群组和子群组提供工具让他们能够共存。对于我来说,一个高度兼容的游戏将包含无数活跃的利基元素,所有玩家都能够按照自己的方式去玩游戏。你需要暗地里鼓励群组们进行互动。所以在你的兼容游戏中,排外的群组也会发现自己身上开始具有了兼容性。

结论

你会发现我所列出的这些设计目标都不是很复杂。兼容性是关于如何有效推广丰富的游戏的理性问题。

当我们在谈论像兼容性这样的敏感问题时,工程师的回应角度是怎样的?尽管我们必须探索社交问题的相关情感和主要领域,但是最终我们还是需要创造出一款具有兼容性的游戏。有些人发现语言技巧可能导致用户疏远,而这也是我所致力解决的问题;我们需要采取适当的方法逐渐为上百万用户创造游戏。与法律和城市规划一样,最终结果甚至有可能让那些觉得这一过程很无聊的人受益。

从某种程度上来看,兼容性机制并不是关于服务某一特定社区,并重视他们的需求。而是关于发送欢迎信号,删除障碍并创造安全的空间。虽然我不清楚每个人拥有怎样的故事,但是我却可以创造出能让他们按照自己的想法落实行动的游戏。

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

How can I make my games more inclusive?

by Daniel Cook

The good people in my life come from all sorts of walks of life.  Some women, some boys, some rich, some poor, some gay, some transgender, some young, some old, some confused, some depressed, some wildly liberal and some staunchly conservative. Some embrace labels. Some can’t abide labels. They sport different cultures, colors, nose shapes, hair types, sizes and everyone single one of them has a bizarre personal history full of dreams, joys and misery.
I’d like all of them to play my games.

I’m a rather reserved fellow and my games are one of the few  ways that I connect with the rest of humanity.  In my ideal world, people would approach my games with an open mind and if something sticks, great.  What I find can happen instead is that I blindly duplicate standard video game fallbacks and in the process accidentally and needlessly alienate people I really respect.

Some inclusive design goals

The following is a list of design goals I try to keep in mind.  Not all my games succeed at every one of these and some are goals for future games that I haven’t managed to release.  But the attempt is made.  Then I will listen to feedback and try again.

1. Less visceral violence

Visceral, bloody violence where the game revels in harming realistic people is only fun for a very specific audience.  It turns out that you make an impact on people without the use of shock. Turning everything up to 11 in terms of gratuitous gore becomes a choice rather than the default that all games must attain.

Cartoon violence has its place, especially in the clear communication of physical cause and effect. Yet even this class of violence can be avoided if you start exploring system that don’t involve hitting or shooting things.

2. Fewer pinups

Let’s hear it for the wonders of great sex between willing adults.  However, many cookie-cutter sexy characters are more about non-consensual power, dominance and ogling than they are about sex, sexiness or love.

Do you really need bikini babes or beefy man nipples to make the sort of games you want to make?  Could you improve your game by adding interesting relationships or clothing?

3. More cooperative social dynamics

Instead of strict player vs player, I try to make games that encourage cooperative play.  Is the game set up where helping one another is possible or encouraged?  Many games drift thematically and mechanically towards harming others.

While, it is certainly possible to have competitive play that encourages sportsmanship, there are some great opportunities in games outside pure individualistic competition.  Change the dynamic from “If you play, I will destroy you” to “Hey, let’s play together”

4. Less Pink and Blue art

There are historical (post 1940′s) art styles that are marketed as distinctly ‘pink’ for feminine audiences or ‘blue’ for masculine audiences.  Think Barbie and G.I. Joe.

I prefer what I think of as ‘green’ art that is its own thing and doesn’t actively push one audience away.  This isn’t compromised ‘purple’ art, which in the end is still just a muddled committee’s reaction to stereotypes.  Instead, push all that aside and aim for a raw expression that appeals to people with an appreciation of honest beauty and delight.

5. Fewer wholesale stereotypes

Stereotypes, as a form of pre-baked mental schema, can act as an entrance into a game.  With a single word or phrase, you trigger an entire model of how the world works. But these cheap schema have two critical issues:

One, they can also blind people to the unique quirks of another person or another perspective.   Two, the wholesale usage of a stereotype brings along a wide variety of uncomfortable baggage that while invisible to one group ends up being blatantly off-putting to another.

An alternative to using stereotypes is to thoughtfully construct your themes piecemeal from a large variety of influences. When you look at the art for Road Not Taken, it can be difficult to put the world into a broad existing stereotype. By constructing your own theme, you can at least ensure any insults or blindspots are something you own.

6. More avatar variety

Where appropriate, enable selection of character of a variety of genders, skin tones and personalities.  Allow mixing and matching so players feel a sense of ownership over their identity within the game.  Not exactly rocket science.  Even narrative games could stand more player ownership of the character without overly sacrificing their god-given right to author choose-your-own adventures.

7. Welcoming divergent sub-cultures

Does the game support the growth of divergent sub-cultures?  I can’t represent everyone but I can provide nurturing play spaces for people whose experiences, personalities and goals are unlike mine.

One of my favorite class of systems that encourage the growth of sub-cultures is the authoring tool.  If you look at Game Maker, RPG Maker and Twine, they are all systems that give smaller groups the power to make the play space their own.  How do you turn your game into an authoring tool in the broadest possible sense of the term?

8. Low cost of entry

I try to make games that almost anyone can play without spending a large amount of money. Class separates people. I try to avoid the rich man’s cover charge of $60 or ask people to spend $300 on specialized gaming hardware.  If you already have access to a computer or cell phone for whatever reason, I’d love for you to be able to try one of my games.  It isn’t perfect, but I like that the marginal cost to play my game is zero dollars.

What do you do with the rich people in this scenario?  When someone does spend money, I ask “How can I make this person benefit the rest of the community?”  It is trivial to use technology to make a game about ‘me’ but this leads to isolation and social stratification. It seems far more beneficial to use those same technological super powers to strengthen the concept of ‘us’.

9. Low skill barriers

I attempt to make deep games that can be played for dozen or even thousands of hours.  Yet at the same time I’m wary of placing large skill requirements on new users.  These skill barriers come in two forms.

The first is simple mechanical complexity. When I’m building original systems, it is quite common for me to make something that I love and other people find obnoxiously difficult to wrap their head around.  This is a matter of balancing and breaking complex systems into smaller, learnable pieces.

The second is more insidious. Many designers grew up playing classic titles and bring with them assumptions about what pre-existing skills a new user will be guaranteed to possess. “Why even bother teaching how to use an analog stick?  Everyone and their brother knows how that works”

Yet many do not.  The gamer culture assumes certain highly specific mechanic and mental skills and in the process excludes those who did not share the same formative experiences.  This in one reason why I like building original games.  I’m forced to toss out the past, which in turn forces everyone to start from a common ground.

Risk: By making a game overly inclusive, you create meaningless work

The specter of blandly generic commercial art hangs over this discussion.  If you try so hard not to offend people, isn’t it difficult to provoke deep reactions?

I see exclusion more as an issue of accidentally pushing people away.  You can be all about actively challenging a player and still create an inclusive game. Inclusion becomes an act of listening, understanding and taking responsibility for your impact on the audience.

Consider the works of Miyazaki, which quite powerfully explore themes environmental destruction.  Yet, they still remain inclusive films and manga, welcoming both a broad general audience and a dedicated following.

Risk: Spending time on being inclusive is an extra cost

Won’t I put my very tightly budgeted project at risk by spending so much time on inclusivity?

What I like about many of the concepts above is that their costs end up being a tiny fraction of a game’s overall budget if you design them in upfront.  And as a result, for a little extra effort, you end up with a dramatically broader audience.

Triple Town could have gone with a hardcore city building theme with monster and bluer artwork.  Or it could have gone heavily pink and turn the cute, casual dial up several notches.  Many of the clones did just this.  They took the cheap, easy, stereotypical route.  Very few of those lazy efforts have done all that well in the market.

Triple Town, not an expensive design by any means, follows some of the inclusive design concepts above.  It is played by both men and women across a whole range of different groups.  Just watching the Twitter feed of players talking about the game is a mixing bowl.  They all think of it as their game, discovered virally by friends in their sub-culture.

Risk: Inclusive games just support the dominant culture

By making a game for everyone, won’t only the most mainstream of communities form around it?

Here lies a substantial risk and I think you need to treat it with great care.  An essential component of communities is the formation of group norms and boundaries that protect those norms.  Groups determine who is inside the group and who is outside.  On the surface, this appears antithetical to the concept of inclusivity.

Think of your game as a platform for seeding and growing communities.  Instead of aiming for a single community, provide tools for groups and sub-groups to co-exist.  To me a grandly inclusive game consists of a thousand vibrant niches, all playing the game in their own manner.  With a little prodding behind the scenes, you may even encourage groups to cross populate at times.  So that the exclusive groups in your inclusive game start discovering a little about inclusivity themselves.

This is a topic I really want to invest more time into.

Closing thoughts

You’ll notice that the design goals I’ve listed aren’t that complicated. There is little recursive navel gazing or hand wringing  My take on this topic is essentially pragmatic. Inclusivity is treated as a rational issue of how to efficiently and effectively make richer games that spread broadly.

What justifies promoting an engineer’s perspective when talking about a hot button issue like inclusivity? While it is essential to explore the emotional and critical landscape of an social issue, ultimately pipe need to be laid, bridges built and inclusive games crafted.  Though some find the language of craft deeply alienating, this is the way I work; methodically building games piece by piece for audiences of millions. Much like laws or city planning, may the results benefit even those that find the process uninspiring.

To a degree, the mechanics of inclusivity are not about serving specific communities and preferencing their needs above others.  It is about sending out welcoming signals, removing barriers and creating safe spaces.  I can’t tell each special and unique person’s story.  But I can try to build a game that empowers them to do that on their own.(source:gamasutra)


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