作者：Josh Bycer

在之前的文章中，我曾使用过“失败循环”这一术语，即游戏设计中让人厌烦的机制。其技术术语是指负面反馈。如果机制是一种负面反馈（游戏邦注：源自街机时代），并且不能得到有效平衡，那么它最终所造成的弊端将远大于利出。

街机游戏中的负面反馈机制：

在街机时代中，使用负面反馈作为游戏机制是为了削弱玩家的力量，或提高他们失去另一个生命的机会。这种机制的使用旨在要求玩家为了让机器扭亏为盈而不断投入其中。

关于这一类型的两个主要例子便是格斗游戏和射击游戏。格斗游戏是以能源消耗攻击形式突出一个实在的机制。在这些游戏中，玩家可以按压一个按键组合去启动一个特殊的移动，这比起普通的攻击可能更具有破坏力。

这些移动总是会消耗玩家的生命值，在不能重生并且没有多少生命道具的游戏中，玩家更不会愿意将自己置于一个糟糕的境地。资深玩家往往都会意识到这一点，并选择依赖于一些较简单的攻击，如跳跃踢射去通过一波又一波的敌人。

而射击游戏突出的是更加被动的负面反馈形式，即玩家并不能积极地去控制它们。大多数射击游戏在一开始都会让玩家持有一种基本的武器，并且这些武器只能杀死最弱的敌人。玩家只有通过收集升级道具才能提升自己打败敌人的能力，并最终与boss相对抗。

每当玩家死掉时，他便会失去所收集到的升级道具，并回归到最基本的武器。最终结果便是，玩家会在一个复杂的环节中死去，并发现自己失去了所有强大的武器，从而接连丧失生命。

这种设计原理也会引出“完美运行”策略：最佳也是最简单的游戏方式是让玩家在难以弥补任何损失时不会轻易死去。

与那时候的大多数街机游戏一样，玩家可以花费时间去激活特殊的移动，但是更好的情况还是基于定期攻击。阶段：“富者变得更富有，穷者变得更贫穷”的理念也可以用于负面反馈设计中。

在早期游戏设计中，负面反馈并不意味着添加任何内容到游戏中，而是提高难度促使玩家难以继续游戏。

随着游戏设计的发展，围绕着rogue式设计的游戏创造将使用负面反馈机制，但却是基于不同的使用方法。

rogue式游戏设计：

rogue式游戏所具有的魅力便是让玩家通过测试而明确自己在单一运行中可以走多远；大多数情况下你都不可能走到游戏最后，但却会因为各种方式而死去。

为了做到这点，许多rogue游戏都通过设置敌人或情境让游戏变得更加复杂，但却仍有可能让玩家获胜。就像有些游戏中的敌人可以破坏或摧毁玩家的装备，捡起“被诅咒的”道具等等。

在这类游戏中，游戏时间通常都很短，从而让玩家不会因为惩罚机制而失去大量时间。并且因为rogue式游戏设计的随机性，玩家永远都不会知道自己是否能够找到一些道具去扭转局面。

Shiren The Wanderer(from segabits)

rogue式游戏系列：《风来之西林》便以饥饿的形式呈现出负面反馈。每隔几个回合，玩家的生命值便会开始下降，当降到0式，玩家便会开始失去生命。在这种情况下，机制的设计便是确保玩家能够继续游戏，推动着他们去权衡决定而继续探索关卡，或怀抱着乐观的希望。

在《风来之西林》中使用饥饿作为倒计时能够有效地让玩家集中注意力。在《无风的山谷》中也具有类似的效果，即在几个会合后便会出现一个大坏蛋开始搞破坏。如果玩家并未做好准备便会遭遇麻烦，因为这个大坏蛋会抢占他们的资源。

现在，负面反馈也可以作为一种惩罚机制：在玩家陷入困境时惩罚他们的一种机制。但是并非所有惩罚机制都会导致玩家的失败，这是取决于它们对于游戏的影响。

在《恶魔灵魂》和《黑暗之魂》中，游戏都突出了非常有趣的惩罚机制，即让玩家在死后失去所有经验值/货币，并从最初点重新开始。

再次死亡，所有的一切也会再次消失。尽管这是一个很大的挫折，但这却不意味着玩家不可能获取胜利，他们也可以随着时间的发展而恢复经验值。

但是如果游戏机制导致玩家开始遭遇失败，并且越来越难以恢复，这便是负面反馈循环的典例。

在Tilted Mill的《Children of the Nile》中，与大多数城市建设者一样，如果你的城市太过混乱，你便不可能去修补它。但是《COTN》拥有2个合理的系统，而当你开始衰败时，一切便难以阻止。

首先便是村民会一直观察着你是否能在他们有需要时提供特定的服务，如果不行，他们的幸福指数便会大大下降。这种情况将随着游戏时间发展持续着，并且可能会混合其它附加问题。

其次，为了获得足够的食物去养活所有人，你需要不断扩展自己的农田，这就需要更多精英公民的加入。你所拥有的精英公民数量是取决于自己声誉，并且该数量会随之上下波动。

如果人们开始感到沮丧并出现叛乱，你便不能创造出足够的食物去养活所有人，从而造成村民变得不再幸福。声誉下滑以及精英公民离去会大大降低食物的产量。没有食物便意味着公民们会吃不饱饭，他们会因此选择离去而留下大量的服务工作空缺，从而导致更多忧愁的出现。

就像你所看到的，当你进入这一恶性循环中，你便很难扭转局面了。这是在负面反馈太过绝对而自续变成一种无止尽的循环时所出现的问题。

《不再犹豫》便是如此。作为一款射击游戏，每当你被击中时，你便会失去能够提高攻击力的升级球，如果你不能恢复这些升级球，或不知道如何获得更多升级球，你便没有足够的力量能在时间耗尽前将boss拿下。

在早期游戏设计中，机制便只是作为负面反馈存在着。但是在大多数游戏类型中，作为设计师的你总是希望避免使用这种机制，因为还是存在着更加平衡的方法能够挑战并惩罚玩家。

但是就像我们所讨论的，如果游戏时间很短或者游戏能够重来，那么使用负面反馈去惩罚玩家则能够为游戏添加一定的挑战性：既能为玩家设置一座需要翻越的高山，也能够发挥倒计时般的功效。

（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）

Examining Negative Feedback in Game Design

by Josh Bycer

In past posts I’ve used the term: Lost Cycle as a troublesome mechanic of game design. The technical term is negative feedback. Mechanics that are nothing but negative feedback are a concept held over from the arcade era and if not balanced right can do more harm than good.

Getting Kicked While You Are Down:

The use of negative feedback originated in the arcade as mechanics designed to make the player weaker or increase the chance of losing another life. Their use was designed around adhering to the same metrics of requiring the player to consistently put in quarters in order for the machine to turn a profit.

Two major examples of genres were Beat-em-ups and Shoot-em-ups. Beat-em-ups featured an actual mechanic in the form of energy draining attacks. In these games the player could press a combination of buttons to unleash a special move that probably did a little more damage compared to their regular attacks.

However, these moves always cost the player health and in a game with no way to recoup lives (outside of spending more money) and rare health items, the player would more often than not leave themselves in a worse position by using them. Expert players realized this and instead relied on simple attacks like jump kicks to fight through waves of enemies.

Shoot-em-ups featured a more insidious form of negative feedback as it wasn’t something the player could actively control. Most shoot-em-ups started the player off with a basic weapon that could kill minor enemies and not much else. Collecting power-ups were vital to improving the player’s ability to fight enemies and deal with bosses.

Every time the player died they would lose all collected power-ups and reduce them back down to the basic weapon. What ended up happening was the player would die in an already hard section and would find themselves out matched with their regular gun and continue to die.

This kind of design philosophy also led to the “perfect run” strategy: where the best and easiest way of playing a game, would be to not die as it would be hard to recoup any losses.

Like most arcade games at the time, players could spend life to activate special moves, but were better off using regular attacks.
The phrase: “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer” can be applied to the concept of negative feedback design.

With early game design,  negative feedback wasn’t meant to add anything to the game, but instead made it harder for the player to continue playing.

As game design evolved, titles built around rogue-like design would use negative feed back mechanics, but with a different application.

Rolling the Die:

The thrill behind rogue-likes is testing yourself to see how far you can go on a single run; most of the time you are not going to see the end of the game but instead die in any number of ways.

To facilitate that, many rogue-likes have enemies or situations that would make the game harder if not impossible to win. Some examples would be enemies that could damage or destroy the player’s equipment, picking up a “cursed” item and so on.

In these types of games, the playtime of a run is short enough that the player won’t lose a huge amount of time due to punishing mechanics . Also, due to the randomness of rogue-like design, the player never knows if they will find something to turn things around.

The rogue-like series: Shiren The Wanderer had a negative feedback mechanic in the form of hunger. Every few turns the player’s fullness would drop down and when it hit 0 the player would start losing health. In this case the mechanic was designed to keep the player going and force them to weigh the decision of continuing to search levels, or move on and hope for the best.

The use of hunger in Shiren acts as a countdown for the player and was a great way to focus their attention. We saw a similar effect in A Valley Without Wind 2 in the form of the big-bad who after a select number of turns, came out onto the field to wreck havoc. If the player wasn’t properly prepared they would be in a lot of trouble as it began to take out the player’s resources.

Now, negative feedback can also be considered punishment mechanics: mechanics that are meant to punish the player for messing up. However, not all punishment mechanics can lead to the player failing, which depends on their impact on the game.

Sine Mora was a challenging game that truly rewarded those that mastered it and punished those that didn’t.

In both Demon’s and Dark Souls, the games featured a very punishing mechanic in the form of the player losing all their experience/currency and having it fall to the ground when they died.

Die again, and it is all gone. While this can be a major setback, it doesn’t mean the player is unable to win, as they can recoup the experience over time.

But if the mechanics of a game cause the player to start failing and it becomes harder and harder to recoup, that would be an example of a negative feedback loop.

In Children of the Nile by Tilted Mill, like most city builders if your city fell too far into disarray, you wouldn’t be able to recover. But COTN had two systems in place that once you started to fall, it was very hard to stop.

First was that villagers remembered if you weren’t able to provide them with a specific service or item when they wanted, lowering their max happiness. This memory lasted for a while in terms of game time and could be compounded on by any additional issues.

Second was that in order to have enough food to feed everyone, you needed to keep expanding your farms which required more elite citizens to move in. The amount you could have was based on your prestige and would rise and fall because of it.

If people started to become unhappy and revolt, you wouldn’t have the food to feed everyone causing more unhappiness. Causing your prestige to drop and elite citizens to move out which further decreased the amount of food you could harvest. No food meant that specialized citizens wouldn’t eat causing them to move out and losing services could cause even more unhappiness.

As you could see, once you started to fall into that vicious cycle, it was difficult to recover. That is a problem when negative feedback is so absolute and self sustaining that it becomes an unending cycle which the best thing is to restart instead of continuing to play.

Sine Mora which I examined on Game-Wisdom last year was that way. As a shoot-em-up, every time you were hit you would lose power up orbs that increased your attack power. If you weren’t able to recover them or get enough during a level, you may not have had enough firepower to take down the boss before time ran out.

Mechanics that are nothing but negative feedback are to some extent, held over from the early days of game design. In most cases and genres, you as the designer want to avoid their use as there are more balanced ways of challenging and punishing the player.

But as we’ve talked about, if the general play time of a game is short or designed to be replay-able, hitting the player with negative feedback can add challenge to the game: either as a mountain to overcome, or a figurative doomsday clock.(source:gamasutra)