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分析2009年时期的游戏设计宽度

发布时间:2014-01-26 11:12:55 Tags:,,,,

作者:Simon Carless

2009年的游戏产业似乎面临着两种矛盾的情况:

–使用在过去20年里得到证实的机制创造能够卖出几百万份的游戏。

–提供给人们能够像其它艺术形式那样带来重要影响的广泛体验。

我可以讨论是否包含更广泛的人类体验的确是个重要目标,但如果连《战神》这样的游戏也需要能够唤醒强大情感的场景,你也许就会承认这是许多开发者想要进一步了解的内容。

为了直击冲突的核心,我认为作为开发者的我们不应该再继续屏住呼吸而等待着游戏围绕着射击,赛车,奔跑与跳跃等主题开始进化,并去传达它们到今日还未能传达的所有内容。

这里所存在的问题就在于,当你越发精通游戏惯例,你便越有可能将游戏的核心机制带离其主题,所以才有人说像《生化奇兵》这样的游戏是对于自由意志,思想极端的危险等内容的沉思,尽管实际上你花费了90%的时间在射击别人的脸。

因为缺少游戏学者,所以世界能够更清楚且更讽刺地看待这种差异。对于许多游戏学者来说,这种洞察力准确地击中了他们的痛处。

从其它视角来看,我被一个非游戏玩家播客io9上有关《生化奇兵2》的评论深深触动了:

“我们可以看到第一人称射击游戏多有趣且让人愉快,但是当你不得不花费大量时间进行射击时,它便难以达到‘吸引人’的标准。”

这并不是个无理取闹的人,或者主张游戏审查制度的人。只是在一个黑暗诡异的地方射击许多疯狂的人不是他们的理念罢了。

开发者对此的常见反应是:“我们需要聘请更多优秀的作家”,“我们需要更好的技术”,“我们需要更棒的设计师”,“我们需要花费更多时间去策划故事。”然而,我们已经坚持这么做超过10年了。

如果你着眼于这一媒体所取得的进展,即游戏的表达能力取得了很大的发展,你会发现是因为新机制的出现或者基于现有的ones3的重大发展成就了新的美学。当然其它事物也很重要,但我们似乎遮盖了它们。

这里所存在的一个问题是,许多设计师将游戏当成是一种结构,而不是内容,但实际上它同时包含了这两者。如果在设计过程中你仅仅只是将其看成是结构,你便会创造出各种意外信息和环境。在2009年,这便意味着敲打圆形按键去克服一个内心的情感矛盾。

另外一位设计师的分析从表面价值来看完全接收了这点—-即任何论证了这一问题的内容都超越了我们的图像的视觉价值。我们几乎是看不到这些内容的,但是在外人眼里却是非常明显。

所以作为开发者,我们需要更诚实地处理范围与理解间的不一致性—-也就是说,我们告诉自己游戏的内容与它们的实际内容间的比较。历史见证了游戏与其命运相抗衡的这10年。

我是个乐观主义者,因为我们在前30年就取得了巨大的进展,而我们的媒体也发生了巨大的改变,同时还因为任何解决方法都是源自所有游戏的内部。我们必须不断探索,在某些情况下,核心机制甚至能够创造出全新的体验,并且还有许多内容是我们还未挖掘到的。以下是我发现的一些特别有趣的例子:

AI关系:在《Ico You》中与一个非玩家角色握手并与他们连接在一起。突然间你将不再是一个孤独的实体;你必须对其他人负责。有时候他们会阻碍你前进,但有时候也会提供给你帮助。不管你是否接受设计师想要让你产生同情感,你都会因为某种强大的触觉的推动而对某些事物产生真实的连接感。在《Ico》中存在许多这样的平台冒险,似乎不可避免地,游戏终有一天将重点突出这些内容。

civilization(from gamesetwatch)

civilization(from gamesetwatch)

通过自我修养实现的胜利:《文明》中的文化

有时候你可能是因为比对手更厉害而战胜了他们。对手将把你的成就作为追随的目标。每个能从内在丰富你的成就都将通过某种间接的力量推动你前进。细心照料自己的花园,你将无需发射任何子弹而变得更加强大。

diplomacy(from gamesetwatch)

diplomacy(from gamesetwatch)

社会推理:外交

敌人的敌人便是朋友。许多战争游戏都带有外交组件,当别人也参与其中时这些内容便会更加有趣。然而在不能实现直接力的游戏中,社会地位将成为其自有资本。这是受角色驱动的电视节目为何如此受欢迎的主要原因;人们总是喜欢探索社交网络中的工作和置换空间。

希望这些内容能够提供给设计师们更广泛的方向。其实着眼于过去,我们的确可以看到许多成效,不管是从各个地方冒出来的各种理念还是游戏范围的扩展。

大约在1997年,即在《Thief》和《合金装备》诞生之前,潜行是那些未被充分挖掘的机制之一。而当它突然流行起来时,我们便感受到了一些从未有过的新游戏感—-结合了鬼祟,聪明,害怕以及违法等元素。它在一种更让人熟悉的游戏环境中转变了玩家的视角。它甚至将一些新人带进了这一媒体。

这是所有人都会深深感触到的一种基本改变,不管是厌倦了很多内容的批评家还是那些完全不熟悉游戏的信任。它们都基于“真正”的方式改变了设置,而不管外观有多华丽。

面对着一种媒体,我们已经证实了自己可以搜索出具有新颖的设置,主题,艺术风格,角色和范围。我们还可以学习其它媒体。但是新机制却是特别难创造出来的。

为此我们唯一能够获得的灵感便是人类体验本身,然后我们需要想办法进行合成,系统化与迭代。这是致力于这一媒体的一种核心挑战,并且也是我们非常重视的一点。

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

Opinion: The Breadth Of Game Design

April 28, 2009

Simon Carless

As of 2009, the game industry seems to want two fairly contradictory things:

- Make games, using proven mechanics from the last 20 years, that sell millions of copies.

- Give people a broad range of experiences that affect them as powerfully as those found in other forms of art.

Let’s link to two visual aids to help with this:

- The Onion: Hot New Video Game Consists Solely Of Shooting People Point-Blank In The Face

- God Of War: Chains Of Olympus in-game video (Ignore the kid yammering over the video, until about 1:10 in, for the quicktime event sequence.2.)

We can debate whether encompassing a broader range of human experience is indeed a goal of importance, but if even a God of War game feels the need to have scenes that evoke strong emotions, you might at least concede that it’s something many developers seem interested in furthering.

To cut right to the heart of the conflict I see here, I don’t think we as developers can continue holding our breath and waiting for games that revolve around shooting, driving, running and jumping to someday make a great leap into expressing all kinds of things they were heretofore incapable of.

The problem is that the better versed you are in game conventions, the easier it is to separate the core mechanics of a game from its fiction and theme, and thus say that a game like BioShock is a meditation on free will, the dangers of ideological extremes, and whatever else… despite the fact that you spend about 90 percent of it shooting people in the face.

The world can see this disparity more clearly, ironically by virtue of being less game-literate. For many among the gaming literate, that sort of insight hits pretty close to home.

For a perspective from the other end, I was struck by this comment on io9, a non-gamer blog, from this post about BioShock 2:

“I can see how a first-person shooter would be interesting and entertaining, but I would have to fall short of “compelling” when you have to spend that much time, er, shooting.”

This person wasn’t being an unreasonable jerk, or advocating the censorship of games. Shooting lots of insane people in a dark, weird place probably just isn’t their idea of a good time.

The common response to this from developers has been things like, “We just need to hire better writers”, “We need better technology”, “We need better artists”, “We need to spend more time planning out our stories”. However, we’ve been doing this for more than 10 years.

Whereas if you look at the points where this medium has made the most progress, whenever the expressive capabilities of games have expanded significantly, it’s actually been because new mechanics, or significant developments upon existing ones3, have emerged that enable new aesthetics. Those other things are quite important, but we seem to have them covered.

One problem is that, deep down, many designers view game mechanics more as structure (or “form”, if you prefer) than as content, when in fact they are both. If you treat them exclusively as structure when designing, you get all manner of unintended message and context… in a nutshell, ludonarrative dissonance. Which in 2009 means mashing the circle button to overcome an emotional inner conflict.

Another designer’s analysis accepts this completely at face value, which if anything demonstrates that this issue transcends our usual valuations of craft and art. It’s almost invisible to us, but quite apparent to outsiders.

So as developers, we need to deal more honestly with the disparity between our reach and our grasp – which is to say, what we tell ourselves our games are about, versus what they are actually about. History will see this decade as the period when games struggled with their destiny in this way.

I’m optimistic though, both because of the progress we’ve made in the first three decades or so of our medium, and because the solutions are right under our noses, deep in the fabric of all games. We must search out, and in some cases rediscover, core mechanics that engender new types of experiences – rediscover, because many have already been done at the fringes, promising yet underexplored. Here are some examples I find especially interesting:

AI Companionship: Holding hands in Ico You reach out to a non-player character and become connected to them. Suddenly you’re no longer a lone entity; you must account and take responsibility for an Other. Sometimes they’re a hindrance, sometimes a help. Whether or not you buy into the designers’ attempts to make you sympathize, you have a real connection to something that’s reinforced by strong kinesthetics. In Ico, there was plenty of platformy adventuring to go along with this, but it seems inevitable that someday a game will make this its primary emphasis.

Victory via Self-Enrichment: Culture in Civilization

Sometimes you can triumph over an adversary simply by being better than them. Rivals come to view your achievements as an example to be followed. Each accomplishment that enriches you internally affords you expansion and encroachment via indirect force. Tend to your own garden and you will become powerful and influential without firing a shot.

Social Reasoning: Diplomacy

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Many wargames have a diplomacy component, which gets especially interesting when other humans are in the mix. However in a game where direct force isn’t possible, social standing would be its own capital. This is a large part of why character-driven TV shows are popular; humans enjoy exploring the workings and permutation spaces of social networks.

Hopefully this gives an idea of the breadth of directions available to us as designers. It’s equally fruitful to look to the past, at how certain ideas bubbled up from nowhere to expand the expressive range of games.

Circa 1997, before Thief and Metal Gear Solid, Stealth was one of those underexplored mechanics. Suddenly, as it caught on, there were new play sensations we’d never had before – being some combination of sneaky, clever, afraid, transgressive. It transformed players’ perspectives on familiar game environments. It even brought some new people into the medium.

These are basic changes that everyone feels deeply, from a jaded critic to someone completely new to games. They are interactively “true” in ways that a change in setting can only rarely be, no matter how beautifully realized.

As a medium, we’ve proven we can seek out novel settings, themes, art styles, characters and tropes. We have other media to learn from, after all. New mechanics, however, are uniquely difficult.

The only inspiration we can find for them is human experience itself, and then comes the struggle of synthesizing, systematizing and iterating. This is the central challenge of working in this medium, and it’s never been more important that we embrace it.(source:gamesetwatch)


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