作者：Ernest Adams

以下是我在几年前就已经提到过的一些内容，我将根据一些玩家的反馈重新整理：（请点击此处阅读本系列第1、2、3、4、5、7、9、10、11、12、13篇）

强制且不符合规则的关卡

我快被这一漏洞烦死了，并且显然我并不是唯一受折磨的人。Joel Johnson写道：

我想要指出游戏中最让人郁闷的一部分。对我来说迷你游戏是没问题的，但是当游戏是一款FPS，除了两个让你开车的关卡以及赛车风格，便不存在其它乐趣了。这只是用于填补主要游戏中没有多少内容的事实。关于这种情况的另外一个例子包含FPS中并不常见的强制性“潜行任务”，FPS中的铁路射击区域，像《侠盗猎车手》中的节奏部分等等。可选择的迷你游戏是有趣的，并能够有效地改变节奏，但在此我们必须明确“可选择的”这一词。为了回头使用最初的技能集合而使用一种完全不同的技能集合并要求玩家必须在游戏中完成的关卡将会让人感到恼火。

Bullfrog便经常犯这样的错误——我记得在《Dungeon Keeper》，《Magic Carpet》和《Populous：The Beginning》中便存心一些强制且不符合规则的关卡。它们拉长了游戏，但因为它们创造了一些你觉得无用的内容，所以会惹人烦。请确保这些内容是可选择的。

Populous The Beginning（from designersnotebook）

不能提供明确的短期目标

当我的妻子第一次坐下玩一款原始文本冒险游戏，《Colossal Cave》时，她看到了这么一段开场白：

你站在一条路的尽头，一栋小小的砖块建筑的前面。你的四周是片森林。一条小溪从建筑里流了出来并沿着沟渠流动。

然后她便开始等待。她问那个在为自己解说游戏的人：“我该做什么？”对方傲慢地回答道：“任何你想做的！”（那时候是1979年，即基于分析程序的游戏还是一种新事物）。但是她却还是不知道自己想要做些什么。游戏并未给予她任何动机，而我们也忍受了同样的Twinkie Denial Condition将近30年——不管你是否相信，这些问题也仍会出现。Andrew Harrison写道：

当我在System（PS2）上玩《Metal Arms: Glitch》时，有时候我会未接收到任何有关该做什么的指示便从一个检查点开始游戏：暂停菜单中没有任何信息，我不能与任何人交谈，不存在任何方法去回顾解释影片，甚至在我的雷达上也没有任何标志。通常情况下我都是漫无目的地徘徊着，直至发现敌人，然后朝着他的方向前进，希望打败他便是我的目标。如果我所面临的真正目标是摧毁一些机器不见或快速拉动开关，那么我便可能要徘徊好长一段时间才能找到答案。我认为设计师们应该想办法避开这种情况。

实际上，这也是Noah Falstein对于游戏设计的一大规则：提供明确的短期目标。如果他创造了一款拯救游戏，他便会提供给玩家一个简要的概述，一个分类，或者其它能让玩家清楚自己该做些什么的内容。

支配策略

“支配策略”是源自数学游戏理论的一个术语。它指代的是一种事态，即行动的一个特殊过程总是创造出最佳结果，而不管情况是怎样。支配策略并不能保证胜利，但它却是最佳选择。结果便是，不存在任何原因去使用一种不同的策略。而带有支配策略的游戏是具有缺陷的，因为它不会提供给玩家有意义的决策。

出现在普通游戏中的支配策略是出于娱乐性。Joel Johnson写道：

如今的大多数游戏，不管是行动，冒险还是RTS，它们都会提供给玩家广泛的选择以及攻击敌人单位的各种方法。而我所注意到的一个最大问题便是，通常情况下这些内容（游戏邦注：包括特殊的移动/咒语/单位等等）都是没用的，因为一种方法具有绝对性的用处。举个例子来说吧，在《光晕》中，对于我以及大多数与我一起游戏的人来说，狙击便是游戏的根本目标。游戏未提供足够的动机让我去使用其它攻击方法，因为我可以快速且轻松地跨越关卡杀死某些人。这里存在一定带有讽刺意味的乐趣。但是Bungie在《光晕2》的时候却削弱了狙击手枪的绝对威力。虽然一开始有点郁闷，但是不得不承认游戏的确变得更加有趣了。

这是关于问题的一个非常典型的例子。选择手枪是一种支配策略。有时候支配策略之所以出现在游戏中是因为游戏缺少足够的测试；有时候则是因为设计师非常喜欢某一特殊功能并且不允许自己去削弱它，而不管这是否会破坏游戏的平衡。底线：在某些时刻做出的每个可能的选择都将具有其自身的优势与劣势。

许多《光晕》玩家学会了是用手枪去支配游戏。

halo（from designersnotebook）

游戏开始时的失忆症

从游戏平衡到讲故事，关于游戏的开始Andrew Stuart写道：

“你在一个奇怪的地方醒来。你不知道自己是谁或者你是如何来到这里。你失忆了，你的目标是搞清楚自己是谁，你在这里做什么。”虽然这很难让人相信，但几乎每一款游戏都会要求我们患上失忆症。这在宿醉后的清晨是再正常不过的事了，但是换做在计算机游戏中却有点难接受？

几年前，我在游戏开发者大会的一场演讲中找到了失忆症的问题所在。之所以会出现这一问题是因为当玩家开始游戏时并不知道有关游戏世界的任何内容。在许多冒险游戏中，玩家必须做的第一件事便是找遍自己公寓里的橱柜——这很荒谬。真实故事中的角色并不会这么做，因为角色已经是是游戏世界中的一份子了。所以在游戏产业中，我们之所以让玩家角色患上失忆症是为了证实玩家还不清楚情况。

尽管这是解决问题的一种潇洒的方法。实际上，电影观众也不了解电影世界，所以电影会提供精心设计的介绍将玩家带进剧情中。有时候，当出现不同情况时，电影会借助画外音，但大多数情况下却是不必要的。让我们着眼于最优秀的间谍电视节目《The Sandbaggers》的第一章节一开始所出现的交流内容：

秘书：Wellingham来点说想见你。

Burnside：你说的是外交部副部长？

秘书：我说的是你的岳父。

Burnside：前岳父。

在这四航内容中，我们知道了Wellingham，他的工作，他与该剧主角Burnside的关系等信息。我们也知道Burnside离过婚，但仍然与前岳父保持着业务关系。最后，我们注意到Burnside很重视人们的头衔，并且希望秘书清楚这一点。在这短短的10秒钟对话中竟然透露了这么多信息，这彻底打败了在电子游戏中听取冗长的一段角色解释内容。我们需要从这些电影和电视节目介绍中获得学习。同时，不要再添加更多患有失忆症的玩家角色了。

错误的胜利检查

《Interstate ’76》是一款在汽车上添加了许多幻想武器的赛车游戏。一个关卡包含了一个有趣但却让人厌烦的问题。游戏告诉你，你必须在一个被混凝土墙包围的封闭区域中找到出路。“正确的”解决方法是找到一个隐藏的斜坡，将车开到上方并飞过墙壁—-如此你将掉进一个深坑，但这对于下一部分故事却是必要的内容。然而，一些聪明的玩家意识到自己可能掉进墙壁附近的地雷中，所以会加速朝它驶去。爆炸将把汽车弹向空中，并借着这股巨大的动力将其带向墙的另一边。如果汽车足够坚固，它的着陆便是安全的，即使会受到一些损伤。它们满足了规定的胜利条件，但游戏却并未认出它，所以关卡并未结束。游戏只测试了斜坡的使用，而不管汽车是否是在墙壁的外面。

当你叫玩家去做某事，然后检查他是否做完，你必须测试你叫他做的这些事，而不只是你希望他做的事。在带有许多模拟环境的现代游戏中（如《侠盗猎车手》），玩家总是能够找到方法去满足你未料到的胜利条件——并且他会因此受到好评。

不合逻辑的胜利检查

避开错误的胜利检查并不意味着你将挑出准确的细节。如果玩家执行一些包含胜利条件属性的行动，他也会受到好评。Andy Lundell解释道：

当任务目标不符合逻辑时会非常糟糕，但是当你开始因为玩家做出符合逻辑的决策而惩罚玩家时，你便走过头了。我们总是会在FPS游戏或一些RTS的单人玩家部分中看到这种情况。

我最喜欢的例子是来自《Red Faction》。这里存在一个任务会要求你去破坏太空站中的一台特殊的计算机。当你到达那里时，游戏会让你去炸毁整个太空站并跑向逃生舱。所以根据逻辑来看，我便会认为自己只需要炸毁太空站而无需担心瞄准计算机。于是我便炸毁了太空站，并跳向逃生舱，但这说明游戏却出现了故障。因为我们本应该先炸毁计算机然后才炸毁太空站的。（游戏并未解释这一努力的重复。）显然，游戏并不能处理计算机未被炸毁的关卡结果，所以我将只是回到主菜单屏幕上。这都是因为我一直都很机智地处理任何事，而不是像关卡设计师希望我做的那样，愚蠢对待。

这里存在一个线索，对于关卡设计师来说：如果一个胜利条件（如炸毁太空站）包含了另外一个胜利条件（炸毁计算机），那就不需要去检查第二个条件了—-这么做将带走你的Twinkies。

在错误的时刻改变摄像机的控制权

随着3D的出现，我们必须更加努力去描绘我们的游戏世界，特别是在行动游戏中。基于横向卷轴，纵向卷轴以及等距视图，生活会变得非常简单。基于3D的第三人称或第一人称并不会太难，但是它们也都带有局限（当在第三人称视角中角色背朝墙壁时会是怎样的情况？）。最近，我们投入了许多努力去创造更灵活的升相机，即按照Ico的方式，但是我们似乎做得不是很合理。Loren Schmidt写道：

你正在玩一款第三人称平台游戏。你沿着走廊向下跑向一个布满长钉的陷阱，你将只能进行一次跳跃，然后摄像机将进行180度旋转，这会扰乱你的时间并导致你那无助的角色掉进虚拟的死亡深渊中。

如果是从可控制模式转向固定的摄像机模式的话情况会更加糟糕，就像我们在最后两款《波斯王子》中所看到的。大多数游戏都是基于玩家控制摄像机模式，但是你的视图会突然变成一个固定摄像机。这在战斗虚拟或潜在的死亡跳跃过程中都是致命的转变。

Prince of Persia（from designersnotebook）

我理解这里的目标——在行动序列之前我们通常都需要下锁摄像机从而确保玩家能够看清发生了什么，并固定操纵杆与屏幕之间的关系。但在玩家跳跃或战斗时改变视图将会让他陷入及其严重的麻烦中。千万不要这么做。我们最好能够让玩家去控制摄像机，即使这不是最理想的，但总比没有任何警示而改变玩家视图并让他们陷入不必要的麻烦来得强吧。

让人惊讶的是，对于配置菜单（这是许多抱怨的来源）我却没有过多的抱怨。有个人写了反对那些未进行适当分类的拯救游戏列表的内容，所以你必须去搜寻最近的一些拯救游戏，虽然我同意这是件麻烦事，但我也认为拒绝Twinkies并不是什么坏事。

（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）

Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie! VIII

By Ernest Adams

It’s time once again for another edition of that annual favorite, Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie! Since last year I’ve collected up another batch of Twinkie Denial Conditions from my readers, which I present for your edification and entertainment. I’ve also finally fulfilled an old promise to set up a No Twinkie Database of all the TDCs, organized by category. Just click the link and it’ll take you to my website.

And away we go! Some of these are biggies that I really should have mentioned years ago.

Mandatory Wildly Atypical Levels

This one bugs the heck out of me, and I’m apparently not the only one. Joel Johnson writes:

I’d like to point out the painfully irritating sections of games where they “change it up.” Mini-games are fine by me, but when the game is an FPS except for two levels where you drive a car, race style, that’s not a lot of fun. It’s just padding that hides the fact that there isn’t a lot of content in the main game. Other examples of this include the obligatory “stealth mission” not uncommon in FPSs (if you want to make a stealth game, make a damn stealth game), on-rails shooting-gallery sections of FPSs, the rhythm sections of games like Grand Theft Auto, etc. Optional mini-games are fun, and can be a refreshing change of pace, but optional is the key word here. Levels where a player must complete a game that uses a completely different skill set in order to continue back to a point that uses the original skill set can be irritating as hell.

Bullfrog was often guilty of this — I remember some wildly atypical levels in Dungeon Keeper, Magic Carpet, and Populous: The Beginning. They padded out the game, but because they made just about everything you had learned useless, they were very annoying. Keep them optional.

Populous: The Beginning

Failure to Provide Clear Short-Term Goals

The first time my wife sat down to the play the original text adventure, Colossal Cave, she saw the opening words:

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.
>
Then it just sat there, waiting. “What am I supposed to do?” she asked the guy who was showing her the game. “Anything you want!” he said proudly (this was 1979, and games with parsers were brand new). But she didn’t know what she wanted to do. The game didn’t give her any incentive to do anything in particular, and we’ve lived with the same Twinkie Denial Condition for nearly 30 years — it still happens, believe it or not. Andrew Harrison wrote to say:

When I played Metal Arms: Glitch in the System (PS2), it sometimes happened that I would start a game from a checkpoint without a clear indication of what it was that I should be doing: no information in the pause menu, no one to whom I could talk, no way to revisit an explanatory cinematic segment, not even a blip on my radar. Often I simply wandered around until I found enemies and then progressed in their general direction, hoping that their defeat was my goal. If the actual goal was to destroy some piece of machinery or flip a switch, I could potentially wander for a very long time before trying the right thing. I think that designers should try to avoid those situations.

You’re darn right they should; in fact, it’s one of Noah Falstein’s rules for game design: provide clear short-term goals. And if he starts up a saved game, give the player a recap, a journal, or something else he can look at to see what he was supposed to be doing.

Dominant Strategies

“Dominant strategy” is a term from mathematical game theory. It refers to a state of affairs in which one particular course of action (a strategy) always produces the best outcome regardless of circumstances. A dominant strategy doesn’t necessarily guarantee victory, but it is always the best choice available. As a result, there’s never any reason to use a different strategy. A game with a dominant strategy is flawed, because it offers no meaningful decisions for the player to make.

Dominant strategies show up in ordinary games for entertainment, too. Joel Johnson writes,

Most games nowadays, be they action, adventure, RTS, or whatever, give the player a wide variety of options or methods of attacking enemy units. One of the bigger problems that I’ve noticed is that it is not uncommon for most of these [special moves/spells/units/etc.] to be completely useless, because one method is so overwhelmingly useful. For example, look at Halo. Pistol-sniping was the name of the game, at least for me and for most of the people that I played with. There was little incentive for me to use other methods of attack because I could kill someone across the level quite rapidly and easily. I had a lot of fun pistol sniping people who went for a sniper rifle. There was a certain ironic pleasure in that. At any rate, Bungie did their homework and nerfed the pistol something fierce for Halo 2. I was chagrined at first, but the game was a lot more interesting to play.

It’s a perfect example of the problem. Choosing the pistol is a dominant strategy, or very nearly. Sometimes dominant strategies get into games because there just wasn’t enough playtesting; sometimes because the designer was so in love with a particular feature that he couldn’t bring himself to weaken it, even though that would bring the game into proper balance. Bottom line: there must be benefits and disadvantages to every possible choice that make them preferable at some times and not at others.

Many Halo players learned to dominate the game using the pistol.

Amnesia at the Game’s Beginning

Moving on from game balancing to storytelling, Andrew Stuart writes about games that begin:

“You wake up in a strange place. You don’t know who you are or how you got here. You have amnesia and your objective is to find out who you are and what you are doing here.” It’s hard to believe but it seems every second game has me waking up with amnesia. It’s okay after a night out on the booze, but in every second computer game? Enough!

Years ago I identified the Problem of Amnesia in a lecture at the Game Developers’ Conference. The problem arises because the player doesn’t know anything about the game world when she starts the game. In a lot of adventure games, the first thing she has to do is go through all the drawers in what is supposedly her own apartment to see what’s in them — which is ridiculous. A character in a real story doesn’t have to do this, because the character already belongs to the game world. So in the game industry, we make a lot of games in which the player’s character has amnesia to justify the player’s own ignorance.

That’s a cheesy solution to the problem, though. In reality, the viewers of a film don’t know the film’s world either, so movies have carefully crafted introductions that bring the audience up to speed gently. Occasionally, when the situation is really unfamiliar, movies resort to voiceover narration, but that’s not necessary most of the time. Consider the following exchange at the beginning of the first episode of The Sandbaggers, the best spy TV show ever made:

Secretary: Wellingham rang. He wants to see you.

Burnside [starchily]: Do you mean the Permanent Undersecretary of the Foreign Office?

Secretary [equally starchily]: I mean your father-in-law.

Burnside: Ex-father-in-law.

In four lines, without even meeting him, we’ve been introduced to Wellingham, his job, and his relationship to the show’s main character, Burnside. We’ve also learned that Burnside is divorced, but still has professional business with his former farther-in-law. Finally, we’ve noticed that Burnside is a bit formal about people’s titles (not uncommon in 1978 Britain) and that his secretary can stand up to him. That’s a lot of information in 10 seconds of dialog, and it beats the heck out of listening to some long-winded mentor character explain things in a video game. We need to study those film and TV introductions and learn how to do them too. In the mean time, no more amnesiac player characters!

Incorrect Victory Checks

Interstate ’76 was a driving game that included a lot of fancy weapons on the cars. One level contained a funny, but annoying, mistake. The game told you that you had to find your way out of a closed area surrounded by a concrete wall. The “correct” solution was to find a hidden ramp, drive up it, and fly over the wall — which landed you in a pit, but that was essential for the next part of the story. However, some clever players realized that they could drop a land mine near the wall, then drive towards it at speed. The explosion would blast the car into the air while forward momentum would carry it over the wall. If the car was sturdy enough, they’d land damaged but alive. They fulfilled the stated victory condition, but the game didn’t recognize it, so the level never ended. The game was only testing for use of the ramp, not whether the car was outside the wall.

When you tell a player to do something, then check to see if he’s done it, you have to test the thing you asked him to do, not just what you wanted him to do. In modern games with richly-simulated environments (e.g. the Grand Theft Auto games), there’s a good chance the player will find a way to meet your victory condition that you never expected — and he should get credit for it.

Interstate ’76

Continuing in the same theme, we come to…

Illogical Victory Checks

Avoiding incorrect victory checks does not mean that you should nitpick the precise details. If the player performed some action that by its nature included the victory condition, he should get credit for that too. Andy Lundell explains:

It’s bad enough when the mission objectives are illogical, but when you start punishing the player for making logical decisions, you’ve gone to far. You usually see this in FPS games or sometimes in the single-player parts of RTS games.

My favorite example is from Red Faction. There was a mission where you were told you had to destroy a particular computer on the space station. Once you got there you were told that you had to blow up the entire space station and run for the escape pods. So I, quite logically I thought, assumed that I could just blow up the space station and not worry about targeting the computer specifically. I blew up the space station, jumped in my escape pod and … and … the game glitched.  We were supposed to blow up the computer then blow up the station. (They had no explanation for this duplication of effort.)  Apparently the game couldn’t handle the fact that the level ended without the computer being specifically blown up, so I just got dumped back to the main menu screen. All because I tried to do things intelligently instead of the stupid way the level designers wanted me to!

Here’s a clue, level designers: if one victory condition (blowing up the station) naturally includes another one (blowing up the computer), there’s no need to check the second one at all — and doing so could get your Twinkies taken away.

Seizing Control of the Camera at Bad Times

Ever since 3D came along, we’ve had to work a whole lot harder to depict our worlds, especially in action games. With side-scrollers, top-scrollers, and isometric views, life was pretty simple. The 3D fixed third- or first-person perspectives aren’t too hard either, but both have their limitations (what happens in third person when the avatar has his back to a wall?). Nowadays we put a lot of work into creating intelligent cameras, a la Ico, and we don’t always get it right. Loren Schmidt writes,

You’re playing a third person platformer. You’re running down a hallway towards a huge, spike-filled pit you can barely clear in a single jump… and then the camera flips around 180 degrees, messing up your timing and causing your helpless character to plunge to its virtual death.

This is even worse when combined with a transition from controllable to fixed camera modes, as seen in the last two Prince of Persia games. Most of the game is played with a player-controlled camera, but occasionally your point of view suddenly leaps to a (sometimes poorly placed) stationary camera. This can be particularly lethal during combat sequences and potentially deadly jumps.

I understand the goal here — right before an action sequence we often need to lock down the camera so as to guarantee the player a clear view of what’s going on, and to fix the relationship between joystick and screen. But suddenly changing the point of view while the player is jumping , or fighting for his life, guarantees him trouble. Don’t do it. It’s better to leave the camera under the player’s control, even if that’s not ideal, than it is to disorient the player by changing his perspective without warning.

Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones

That’s it for this year. Amazingly enough, I didn’t get any big complaints about configuration menus (a constant source of irritation). One person did write to object about lists of saved games that were un-sorted, or sorted inconveniently so you had to hunt for your most recent save, and while I agree that’s a nuisance I figure it’s not bad enough to warrant denial of Twinkies.

As always, I want to hear your gripes! Stop by the No Twinkie Database to see if I’ve already covered it, and if I haven’t, send me mail at notwinkie@designersnotebook.com and let me know about it!.(source:designersnotebook)