游戏设计老将布赖恩·雷诺兹（Brian Reynolds）日前在旧金山的2010年DiscoveryBeat大会上称，今年初发行的《拓荒者小镇》（FrontierVille），是Zynga公司创新社交游戏设计的一种尝试，该游戏的成功证明这一尝试卓有成效。

Brian Reynolds on DiscoveryBeat 2010

《拓荒者小镇》与Zynga公司原先的游戏略有不同，它是由该公司的Zynga East团队开发，而这一新团队的主要成员多为传统游戏设计师，其领军人物就是拥有资深PC策略类游戏背景的雷诺兹。

在加入Zynga公司前，雷诺兹主导设计了不少经典PC游戏，比如《文明II》（Civilization II） 和《半人马座阿尔法星》（Alpha Centuari）等（因为这些游戏实在是威名远扬，所以可想而知，当雷诺兹现身DsicoveryBeat大会时，全场记者几乎都在惊声尖叫）。从这一点上看，雷诺兹与Zynga公司多少显得有点格格不入，因为Zynga一向专注于扩大用户规模，在游戏创意和传统游戏设计上并无过人之处（甚至还有人批评Zynga公司就是一个不入流的游戏拷贝商）。

雷诺兹表示，他本人希望加入Zynga的意愿，对该公司的这一转变发挥了作用。他并非因收购而投奔Zynga的麾下，而是由于他本来就对社交游戏和Facebook很感兴趣，希望再学点社交游戏设计的技巧。他表示，“如果你不喜欢Facebook游戏，那就不会去做这类游戏。”

另外，雷诺兹从传奇游戏设计师席德·梅尔（Sid Meier）所学到的东西也在Zynga这里派上了用场。梅尔习惯快速建好游戏原型，然后再根据用户需求逐渐完善，这一点在Zynga也不例外。传统游戏和社交游戏两者的设计都一样，都不能事先过高估计用户需求的作用。比如说在《文明》系列游戏的设计中，如果设计师遵从玩家的每一个要求，那么这些游戏就会因功能过多而超载，玩家在游戏中的操作也变得无足轻重，游戏也会因此变得枯躁乏味。

frontierville

进入Zynga后，雷诺兹就开始统领Zynga East这个新团队，主要任务就是开发《拓荒者小镇》。Zynga公司高管们原先的打算是，这个项目就当是Zynga模式与传统游戏设计结合的一个测试，不计较成功与否。

雷诺兹承认，项目进展并非一帆风顺，当《拓荒者小镇》刚开始发行时，很快就吸引了大量玩家，但一段时间后用户数量一直停滞不前。问题的症结在于，这个团队缺乏一名负责监察用户数据的分析师，等于是一帮设计师在瞎忙一气。随后，Zynga终于为《拓荒者小镇》指派了一名全职分析师，用户数量很快开始回升，目前已有3000万名玩家，《拓荒者小镇》也由此成为Zynga规模最大的游戏之一。

雷诺兹表示，庞大的用户数据得到了Zynga公司的认可。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译）

Gaming legend Brian Reynolds on how FrontierVille might change Zynga

Veteran game designer Brian Reynolds said today that FrontierVille, the game that launched earlier this year, was a way for Zynga to experiment with a new kind of social game design. And the experiment paid off.

Unlike Zynga’s previous games, FrontierVille was put together by the company’s new Zynga East team, which consisted of more traditional game designers and was under the leadership of Reynolds,whose background was in traditional PC strategy games.

Reynolds was speaking at VentureBeat’s DiscoveryBeat 2010 conference in San Francisco. Before joining Zynga, Reynolds led design on classic games like Civilization II and Alpha Centuari (you can tell they’re classics because all of VentureBeat’s writers were basically squealing with excitement when he took the stage). So he might seem like an odd fit with Zynga, which is well-known for being less focused on creativity and traditional game design and more on user growth and retention than on traditional game design qualities (to the point where critics say Zynga is just a ruthless, unoriginal copycat).

One thing that helped with the transition, Reynolds said, is the fact that he wanted to work at Zynga. He wasn’t dragged in through an acquisition — he had already become interested in social games and Facebook, and he wanted to learn the new tricks of social game design.

“If you don’t like Facebook games, I would say, don’t make them,” he said.

Plus, some of the ideas that Reynolds learned from legendary game designer Sid Meier still apply at Zynga, he said. Meier liked to build a prototype as quickly as possible, then improve it based on what users do, and it’s the same at Zynga. At the same time, in both traditional design and social design, it’s important not to overvalue with users say they want. In the case of the Civilization games, for example, if the designers followed every player request, the games would have become overloaded with features and forced players to micromanage the game in a way that became tedious.

Reynolds was put in charge of a new team, Zynga East, which included more traditional game designers than the rest of Zynga, and which was focused on creating Frontierville. Executives viewed that melding of the Zynga approach with traditional game design as something of a test that might or might not get exported to the company as a whole.

Not everything went smoothly, Reynolds acknowledged. When Frontierville launched, it saw a lot of user traction right away, but then usage flattened out. The problem was that the team didn’t have an analyst focused on looking at user data, so there were basically a bunch of designers flying blind. Then, when Zynga finally put a full-time analyst on Frontierville, usage started taking off again. Now it has 30 million users, making it one of the company’s biggest games.

Reynolds said those numbers make Zynga say, “Cool, that works. Let’s do it some more.”（source:venturebeat）