作者：Sam Barlow

“价格为0”

在不远的未来，人们将不会再为内容花钱。我们已经一脚迈在这一必然性中，并清楚60美元盒装产品的寿命即将殆尽。谢天谢地。

似乎货真价实一直都是强调叙述的电子游戏所强调的。我们已经习惯于为内容收取特定费用。

当然，比起在Netflix上订阅，在戏剧院买票更加昂贵，不过真正的戏剧迷为的只是一种艺术形式（但却缺少大众吸引力）。这对于我们这些认为电子游戏和戏剧一样也是一种利基艺术形式的人来说真的太压抑了。

如果我们想要接触到更多用户，那就需要明确划分不同业务范围。我们需要针对性地进行定价。我们需要设定一个在未来也是有意义的价格。所以该价格便是0。这是不言自明的：如果叙述类电子游戏想要在未来拥有更广泛的吸引力，我们就需要进行免费发放。

例子：

你的Harry Mason并不是我的Harry Mason

在《寂静岭：破碎的记忆》中，我们便能够发现一种结合自我表达与故事去影响玩家的方法。就像玩家会创造“他们的Harry Mason”进行探索。但是他们的创造通常都只是故事的组成部分，并不会掩盖了我们所分享的关键信息。

现在，任何关注于这一内容的人都知道这并不意味着“制作游戏不要任何回报”。我也仍然需要报酬并获取利益。

作为创造者，我对此抱着一种务实的观点—-如果你不能创造某些内容并避免亏钱，也许这个世界并不适合你所创造的内容。当你在设想一款叙述类电子游戏时，这里存在一定程度的财务责任。免费游戏便是由此出现的。这里存在一种能让我们免费发放游戏的理念，并利用其它内容去索取金钱。

如今的免费游戏还处在早期发展阶段，但是它也呈现出了一些能让互动故事创造者兴奋的特征。如果忽视了免费游戏的子集所设定的例子，那么虚拟货币的粉丝便会因为不能花钱而感受不到更多乐趣。

以下是我关于成功的免费游戏的定义。这对于叙述类游戏设计师来说具有很大的吸引力，因为它会推动着我们却接触自己所创造的内容的本质：

创造一款免费游戏的处方

免费发放游戏

确保大多数内容是基于免费模式并能让玩家感到乐趣

确保游戏具有内在病毒性，如此你便无需多花钱去吸引用户的注意

专注于创造更具互动性且更有趣的游戏，如此你便能够创造一组硬核玩家并引导他们沉浸于你的游戏中

最后一点是关键—-付费玩家本身并不是一种类型。他们是某些特定游戏的业余爱好者，粉丝或传播者。游戏需要培育自己的玩家并创造属于自己的硬核玩家。

“是否记得电视机？”

免费叙述体验并不是什么新内容。很早之前在我们现在认为理所应当的商业电视中便出现了这种体验。

当电视最早诞生时也出现了现在的免费游戏所面对的批评者。它被当成是一种较弱的娱乐形式。即受商业规则驱使的最不标准的媒体形式。当与较高标准的电影制作艺术相比较时，电视叙述在结构和质量上都具有较大的劣势：

故事必须围绕着广告插入进行创造

较短的运行时间意味着你不能深入探索故事

低预算和较短的制作周期意味着较低的质量

廉价且能够随意使用的内容。肤浅且缺乏更高的艺术价值。听起来是不是很耳熟？

当然，有时候这些劣势也能够转变成优势：较短的运行时间和广告插入将迫使你更精确地编写电视内容，而较低预算的制作价值也将培养出更强大的技能和创造性。但是现在让我们暂时忽略这一点。相比之下，我们应该思考电视能够做些什么—-它的秘密武器是：

电视是一种社交体验。每个人都在看同样的节目并能够在等水冷却的时候或热门节目突出一些震撼人心场景的时候聚集在一起。

电视是一种动态体验。用户体验将直接推动着持续开发，而不只是呈现出一些炒作式节目。电视是与时俱进的。

电视据有较低的准入障碍。它们待在你的起居室等着你。你无需出门便可以轻轻松松地打开电视。

电视拥有一定规模的新融资模式。电视用户的广度能够实现选择性盈利：广告。这是受到数据的驱动—-甚至在早期时候电视广告主要是受到有关用户观看特定节目的数据所支配，从而去瞄准特定的目标用户群体。

电视能够永远持续下去。只要某一电视节目存在一名用户，电视创造者便能够继续探索他们的理念。电视节目可以创造出与用户长期住在一起的角色。电视节目能够带有小说式的角色探索内容。在肥皂剧中，我们便能看着角色念完学校，长大，结婚甚至拥有自己的小孩这一整个漫长的过程。

可以说免费游戏是一种商业电视般的电子游戏。虽然它伴随着一些较愚钝的商业内容，但它同时也具有秘密武器—-能够让我们变成更棒的游戏开发者。牢记着这点，我们便能够规划出免费叙述游戏的形状。

例子：

一系列有趣的选择

当提到讲述故事时，Choice of Games的团队正在为个性化理念和深入的数据而努力着。他们的作品是只包含文本，所以很难满足那些对视觉效果具有高要求的玩家，但是他们对于广泛类型选择的探索则非常吸引人。他们拥有忠实的粉丝基础，即愿意为了探索故事的不同面而反复游戏，同时他们也正在尝试不同的方式从游戏中获取盈利。

“一款更棒的故事游戏”

想想我们的故事游戏的付费玩家。他们只是冰山的一脚，并且是那些真正喜欢我们游戏的人。我们需要深入研究这类型玩家。他们想要进一步探索怎样的游戏玩法？这并不是关于升级剑，获得更高分数或创造强大的防卫基地。如果我们着眼于当前的叙述游戏，硬核玩家会如何面对这些游戏？是那些基本元素推动着这些玩家去玩游戏？

如果我们想要轻松地分割休闲故事游戏玩家与硬核玩家，那么最简单的方法便是问：“你是否想要重新游戏去获得一个不同的结局？”

我们的休闲玩家只会玩一次游戏，做出了自己想要的选择并感受到了个性化的结局。但是硬核玩家却希望能够看到游戏的每一面—-这些玩家甚至会画出流程图并上传到网上，或者他们会从GameFaqs上进行下载。他们希望能够尝试每个选择，最大化结果或更深度地了解游戏。他们会将游戏过上传到YouTube上向其他人呈现出每种结果。有些玩家还会预先购买策略指南去帮助自己深入游戏（而不会错失任何内容），并有代价地略过一些复杂的内容。

为了创造免费的叙述类游戏，我们需要专注于能够区别叙述游戏与静态故事的内容——选择，游戏的互动性。让我们提供给玩家更多的选择，并确保这些选择更加深入且丰富。之后我们便需要创造一种能让特定玩家沉浸其中的体验。

“赋予选择价值性”

能量机制有个坏名声。它们能够作为一款没有其它盈利方式的游戏的“懒人拐杖”——但如果不是以适量组件模式进行销售的话便会非常无聊。

让我们考虑如何将一种能量机制添加到带有更多选择和互动性的游戏体验中。强调选择的传统游戏一直在努力让玩家感受到这些选择的重要性。

《生化奇兵》便是个非常典型的例子：拯救或牺牲Little Sisters并不真实。不管我做什么都会出现选择的最终结果——我迟早都会获得奖励。

能量便是在此诞生的。让我们让能量代表一个行动所要求的“努力”。如果你消耗了太多能量你便会将其用尽——如此你必须进行等待或花钱立刻恢复（游戏邦注：花钱或通过社交性的等等方法）。基于这种方法有些行动的分量被大大加强了。如果我的角色已经想出了“简单的解决方法”，那有可能不是为故事创造一个“优化”结果—-让我们降低价格，或者以免费的方式做到这点。

但是如果存在一种选择能够得出更棒的结果并要求角色深入挖掘自己的内在优势（或者要求他们足够诚实或发现自己隐藏起来的某一面），我们便能够以较高的定价去出售这一行动。

现在，在面对着叙述压力的同时我们也面对着现实压力。不管我是一名休闲玩家，硬核玩家还是介于两者之间，这些选择都具有额外的价值—-即附加着真正的价值。

例子：

僵尸

故事游戏的成功案例——Telltale的《行尸走肉》便成功组合了IP与资深创新者。僵尸故事的限制让Telltale放弃了一些内容并专注于选择和角色。它们的最后数据便是非常典型的例子——并且能够进一步用于带有深度选择的游戏中。

“创造一个社交故事”

所以我们拥有属于自己的丰富且深层次的故事游戏—-其中的选择是受到能量机制的加强。我们需要整合社交层面去发展用户。一种方法便是将水冷却器带到这个数字时代中。

早前我们很难去想象未打破任何幻想而将玩家带到一种故事体验中—-没有任何东西能够推翻第四堵墙。

但在现在，社交不只是意味着一起游戏。我们也想要通过利用“水冷却器”的理念去加强游戏体验。面对一款没有深度数据和选择的游戏，我们可以获得许多机会去比较玩家。你的故事与好友的故事有什么相似处？你的选择是如何堆加到世界上的其他玩家身上？

当你看到好友拯救了一个你杀死的角色，或对方爱上你所要好的角色，这不仅能让个人体验更加透明，同时也能让你看到你所错过的游戏方式。这将从根本上改变游戏体验。

当你感受到故事的深度个性化并进行分享，将其暴露在社交平台上时，这便会成为一种自我表现形式。每个人都在乎自我表现。无意义的体验只会创造出没有价值的内容。但是如果你能让某些内容发生在故事中，并通过沉浸于故事中而进行自我表达，这便是值得花钱的模式。

（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）

Story games – Designs on a free-to-play future

by Sam Barlow

“THE PRICE IS ZERO”

In the near future, people won’t pay for content. We already have one foot in this inevitability and see that the $60 boxed product’s days are numbered. Thank God.

Bang-for-buck has always been the elephant in the room for narrative heavy videogames. We’ve become accustomed to charging niche prices for content we’d like to argue has a much broader appeal.

Sure, Opera tickets are expensive when compared with a Netflix subscription but we get that Opera fans are subsidising an art form that lacks the mass-appeal to sustain itself otherwise. It would be depressing to many of us in the videogame industry to think (or admit) that videogames are a niche art form like Opera.

If we want to speak to large audiences, the business side of things needs to be sorted out. We need to price things accordingly. We need a price that makes sense in the future. That price – inescapably – is zero. There’s no getting around this: if narrative videogames are to have a broad appeal future, we need to give them away.

EXAMPLE:

YOUR HARRY MASON IS NOT MY HARRY MASON

In Silent Hill Shattered Memories we found a way to combine self-expression and a story that moved you. As players created “their Harry Mason” they explored – without realising it – the themes of the story. But their creation was always part of the story and never overshadowed the key messages we had to share.

Now, anyone paying attention will know that this doesn’t mean “making games for nothing.” We still need to get paid and turn a profit.

As a creator I take a pragmatic view here – if you can’t make something and not lose money, perhaps the world isn’t ready for what you’re making? There’s a level of fiscal responsibility required when conceiving of a narrative video game! This is where free-to-play comes in. Here’s a concept that that allows us to give the game away for free, but charge money for other things.

Free-to-play is in its early days, but already it’s demonstrating some characteristics that are hugely exciting for a creator of interactive narratives. Ignore the example set by the subset of F2P games that are re-skinned arcade machines – the virtual coin guzzlers that aren’t fun without paying.

Instead, here’s my definition for successful free-to-play. It’s exciting for narrative game designers because it forces us to engage with the essence of what we’re making:

Recipe for a free-to-play game

Give the game away for free

Make it so the vast majority can play the game for free and ENJOY IT

Make your title inherently viral so that you don’t have to pay lots of money to reach an audience

Focus on making your game more interactive, more fun so that you CREATE a hardcore group of players who are happy to pay to engage deeper with your game

This last point is key – paying players are not a breed of their own. They’re hobbyist, fans or evangelists for particular games. A game needs to nurture its players and create its own hardcore.

“REMEMBER THE IDIOT BOX?”

F2P narrative experiences are nothing new. This ground was broken earlier in the human cycle by something we now take for granted: commercial television.

When TV first arrived it had the same detractors as F2P does now. It was seen as a lesser form of entertainment. A lowest common denominator medium, one ruled by commercial imperatives. When compared with the higher art of movie making, television narratives had some ugly impositions on their structures and quality:

Stories had to be built around advert breaks

There was a necessity for cliff-hangers

Run time meant you couldn’t explore deep narratives

Low budgets and short production turnaround meant low quality

Cheap, disposable content. Shallow and lacking higher artistic merit. Sound familiar?

Of course, in time some of these impositions actually improved the work: short run times and the necessity of ad breaks forced a level of precision and structure on the writing of TV and those low budget production values fostered craft and creativity over excess. But ignore that for now. Instead, let’s think about what TV and only TV could do – its secret weapons:

TV was a social experience. Everyone watched the same shows and could come together for water cooler moments or those huge “events” when hit shows featured plots that captured the hearts of an entire population.

TV was a dynamic experience. Audience reaction directly drove the ongoing development and not just which shows got canned or not. TV could be topical, ride the zeitgeist.

TV had a low barrier to entry. They sat in your living room, waiting for you. You don’t need to go out, book a babysitter or make plans to turn on a TV.

TV had scale and new funding models. The breadth of a TV audience allowed for alternative monetisation: advertising. And this was driven by data – even from the early days TV advertising was ruled by statistics about audiences for particular shows and allowed specific demographic sections to be targeted

TV could go on forever. As long as there was an audience for a show a TV creator could fully explore their concept – have the concept grow with its audience. A show could create characters who lived entire lives alongside their audience. Where movies compress and focus, TV could unravel and have novelistic explorations of characters. In Soaps, we’ve seen characters go through school, grow up, get married and have children of their own!

Free-to-play is the commercial TV of videogames. It brings with it some commercial considerations that can come off as crass. But it also has secret weapons – possibilities that will make us better game developers. With this in mind, let’s sketch out the kind of shape a F2P narrative game could take.

EXAMPLE:

A SERIES OF INTERESTING CHOICES

The team at Choice of Games are doing a lot for the concept of personalisation and deep data when it comes to story telling. Their works are text-only and could never satiate a visually minded Arsenal-Man gamer, but some of their explorations of a broad selection of genres are very compelling. They have a dedicated fan base of users who like to play and re-play to explore the different facets of a story and they’re experimenting with a number of different ways of monetising a deep choice game.

“A BETTER STORY GAME”

Think about the paying players for our story game. They’re the tip of the player iceberg and the people who really LOVE our game. Drill down and think about what the core proposition is for them. What is the gameplay they want to go deep on? It’s not levelling up swords, getting high scores or creating an amazingly well defended base. If we go and look at existing narrative games, what do the hardcore do with those games? What aspects – fundamental to the games – drive these players?

I’m going with CHOICE. The interactivity. If we want to easily separate the casual story game players from the hardcore, the easiest way to do it is to ask: “Do you replay the game to achieve a different ending?”.

Our light user plays once, takes the choices they want and enjoys their personalised ending. But the hardcore want to see every angle – these are the players drawing flow charts, uploading to – or downloading from – GameFaqs. They want to try every choice, maximise their outcome or gain a deeper understanding of the game. They’re the ones uploading playthroughs to YouTube showing each and every ending. Some of them just buy the strategy guide up front to enable them to go deep, not miss a thing, but skip the hard work for a cost.

Simple then. To make narrative games work as free-to-play, let’s focus on what makes a narrative game different from a static story – the choice, the game’s interactivity. Let’s give our players more choice, make those choices deeper or richer. Then we will have created an experience that certain players will want to go deep on.

“GIVING CHOICES VALUE”

Energy mechanics get a bad rap. And they can be used as a lazy crutch for a game which doesn’t have any other way to monetise – or which would grow bland if consumed in anything other than bite sized pieces.

But let’s consider how an energy mechanic might add to the experience of this game with more choice and more interactivity. Traditionally games with an emphasis on choice have struggled to make player’s actually feel the weight of those choices.

Everyone’s favourite example is Bioshock: saving or sacrificing the Little Sisters never felt real. Whatever I did nothing much seemed to change as the consequences of either choice seemed balanced – I’d be rewarded with Adam sooner or later.

Well here’s where energy comes in. Let’s make energy represent the ‘effort’ required by an action. If you expend too much energy you run out – and have to wait or pay (with money, or via social actions, etcetera). This way some actions have more weight. If my character has a decision with an “easy way out”, perhaps one that might not produce an ‘optimal’ outcome for the story – let’s make that cheap, even free perhaps.

But if there’s a choice that could lead to a much better outcome and requires that character to dig down and really draw from their inner strength – an action that requires them to be painfully honest or draw on a part of themselves they’ve kept hidden – we can price this action much higher.

Now we have a real world pressure in sync with the narrative pressure. Whether I’m a casual player, one of our hardcore, or somewhere in between, each of these choices has an extra weighting – a genuine value attached to it.

EXAMPLE:

DEAD MEN WALKING

The success story for full on story games – Telltale’s episodic The Walking Dead – was a great marriage of an IP with an experienced group of innovators. The constraints of the zombie narrative enabled Telltale to drop some of the baggage and focus on choice and character. Their end-of-episode stats are a great example of the water cooler element – and could be taken so much further in a game with deeper choice.

“MAKING A SOCIAL STORY”

So we have our rich, deep story game – one where choices have a value enhanced by an energy mechanic. What’s left? We need to bring the social dimension in to grow and enhance our audience. A way of dragging the water cooler into the digital age.

In an earlier time it was hard to imagine ways of drawing other players into a story experience without breaking the illusion – nothing breaks a fourth wall like a co-op player hamming it up, or having to stop to take a drink off his mom.

But now social means so much more than just playing together. We want to enhance the experience by drawing on that concept of ‘water cooler’. With a game running off deep stats and choices there are a multitude of opportunities to compare and contrast players. How similar is your story to your close friends? How do your choices stack up next to the other players in the world?

When you see that your friend saved a character that you killed, or perhaps fell in love with a character where you merely become friends… not only does this make the individual experience more apparent, but it potentially exposes you to ways of playing you missed. And it changes the experience fundamentally.

When you take deep personalisation of a story and then share it, expose it on the social stage, it becomes self expression. Everyone cares about self expression. An empty experience creates content that is worthless. But the opportunity to make things happen in a story, to mould it, to express yourself by immersing yourself in a story? That is worth paying for.(source:develop-online)