作者：Philippa Warr

这是Riot关于玩家行为的研究的使命陈述。这也是对于Jeffrey Lin（游戏邦注：Riot的社交系统的首席设计师）在最近的游戏开发者大会上的演讲的关注。团队协作和良好的行为将对在线游戏体验产生重要的影响，所以我们决定访问Lin，向他咨询怎样的玩家行为单位是可行的，以及Riot还致力于其它那些内容。

teamwork-op-riot-on-making-good-the-easy-choice(from redbull)

让人惊讶的是Lin所学的并不是关于多人游戏，而是认知神经学科。在华盛顿大学致力于博士学位的时候，Lin在朋友的介绍下认识了Riot的总裁Marc Merrill和首席执行官Brandon Beck。他说到：“他们已经玩了20多年的游戏了—-他们玩过基于文本的多用户虚拟空间游戏或《无尽的任务》，所以他们都清楚玩家想要的是运动员般的体验。他们想要与其他玩家一起友好且积极地玩游戏。

带着这一看法，Riot一直在寻找带有社交或认知心理学背景，能够致力于某些功能去完善《英雄联盟》的团队玩家行为的硬核玩家。这也是Lin为何会来到这家公司的原因，他们也因此创造了一支完整的创造团队去探索人们如何共同游戏。

Lin说道：“当我刚加入时，Riot中有一些人致力于某些研究。我们真的想搞清楚为什么人们会在游戏中受挫。在线游戏中影响一场积极比赛的常见障碍是什么？玩家所拥有的痛点是什么？在早期我们发现的一个要点便是人们或玩家的本性并不坏。事实是每个玩家都有其沮丧的时候。”

这是一种典范转移：大多数人并不会一直不带任何体育道德地玩游戏，他们只会偶尔因为某些小情绪而出现这种情况。玩家将把在外部世界获得的挫折和紧张感带到游戏中，这并不是一个特别玩家的常见行为，因为这会发生在大多数玩家身上（偶尔），你遇到这种情况的频率与《英雄联盟》受欢迎的程度是成正比的。

Lin表示，一旦你承认了这点，你就必须改变陈述方式。这也是Lin为何坚信惩罚玩家通常是无效的主要原因。“如果你着眼于整个社区并基于不同行为将其分割成不同目标群体，那么便会出现一个较小的群体，可能是1%的玩家始终呈现出消极心态，这时候你便需要某些系统去帮助这些玩家重塑或完善自己的行为，但来自中立和积极玩家的大多数消极体验也拥有糟糕的一天，所以我们需要像荣誉和行为警告等系统去塑造他们的行为。”

换句话说，你需要的是一根胡萝卜而不是一根棍子。惩罚给人的印象一直是一种严厉的行为，指责玩家遗忘了该有的行为准则，这通常会导致他们在态度上的转变。而用荣誉奖励去刺激积极的行为（受到任何比赛行为的影响）将能够强化玩家的积极行为。

关于刺激的有趣之处在于它并不会提供给玩家带有外在价值的角色外观或其它类型的奖励。它是与积极行为背后的动机混合在一起，你最终将为了获得奖励而不是出于作为一名优秀的玩家或团队成员的内在价值去努力做某事。荣誉奖励是反应良好行为的一种方式，同时也尝试着将动机带离至始至终都表现良好的团队玩家成员。

在线游戏中的行为背后的动机很难进行分割，所以在处理一些问题时，Lin和他的团队使用了各种各样的数据和研究方法。他们根据研究对象以及所包含的的游戏数据而做出调整，更详细的研究还出现了玩家亲自与团队成员进行沟通的情况。

Lin列举了一个例子：“如果我们正着眼于挫折，我们便可以着眼于像眼球追踪这样的内容。如果你着眼于玩家的眼球移动，你便可以将他们的眼球追踪和瞳孔扩张与受挫或压力联系在一起。”

根据较少的近距离和个人数据，如今，游戏内部聊天便是首要选择。“现在我们所呈现的是通过许多试验去帮助玩家完善他们所使用的语言，我们可以在他们所使用的词汇和措辞中看到这一方法所带来的重要影响。”

或许你记得Riot之前的团队协作OP视频，即提供了团队协作对于胜算的重要影响的信息。“如果你着眼于《英雄联盟》最后中的聊天，你将会注意到GG这一词，即意味着优秀的游戏或出色的游戏。在团队协作OP视频和有限的聊天模式中，我们可以看到在比赛最后关于该词的使用率增加了2.5%至3%。”

Lin认为GG便等于足球或篮球等传统体育比赛最后的握手。我们还询问了他这一词与有时候出现在比赛开始的GLHF（祝好运，玩的开心）有什么关系，他的回答是：

“我们并未对比赛开始的内容进行研究，但这真的是值得强调的有趣的要点。我想在社区中的积极玩家会频繁地使用这一词，这可能也会对游戏的发展带来更加积极的影响。”

但是当你获得一款像《英雄联盟》这样的游戏，即杀敌并攻向他们的区域是必不可少的游戏体验，那么你将如何在缩减“糟糕”行为的同时维持“积极”的进攻？

Lin的回答是想办法去变化比赛和体验。“在一款PvP竞争游戏中，你在游戏设计中能做的一件事便是引进其它精通或前进方法。不要让获胜成为玩家的首要和唯一目标。如果你能够削弱获胜的重要性，最终便能够创造出一款带有竞争性同时还很有趣的游戏。”

Team Builder便是Lin希望做到这点的方法之一，他表示这能够帮助玩家探索不同的团队组合并打破当前的元状态。“我们正在观察玩家尝试着某些内容，如将两个玩家带到一个丛林并让他们具有很强的侵略性，不断攻击其他团队的领地。这便是Team Builder中非常受欢迎的策略。”

在思考培育积极行为并设置良好行为的例子的方法时，我们注意到了专业玩家与更广泛的社区之间的关系。

“毫无疑问地，专业玩家具有许多社交影响。如果我们着眼于专业玩家，即他们是一些非常积极且具有体育道德的玩家，这便会对本地社区的认知产生非常大的影响。他们具有很大的影响力—-但是我们该如何去放大这一影响呢？我们并未开始深入研究这一空间。”

说到模范行为，Lin想起了Carlos ‘Ocelote’ Rodriguez。“在过去，他是以在玩家（可能是专业玩家中最糟糕的一个）身上使用真正的消极语言而出名。但他也会呈现出一些转折点，即能够彻底改变行为，而这也是如今在他的团队中作为一名出色的玩家的最佳例子之一。”

“他说过自己在欧洲的职业场馆的某一时刻，有个玩家对他说，自己千里迢迢来到这里只是为了看他玩游戏。他表示这一时刻让自己意识到‘为什么我要成为这么一个奇怪的人，因为我要告诉别人作为一个怪人也没什么不可以。”

在线玩家行为及其背后的动机是如何发展的，从而让Riot可以看到未来不同的工作室和研究所联合起来组成一个更广泛的团队游戏研究中心？

Lin说到：“如果你着眼于Riot以及其它游戏工作室，你会发现它们开始设立一支专注于玩家行为研究的团队。这并不是关于积极面或消极面，只是致力于研究与别人在网上游戏的意义。”

“可能现在去猜测5年或10年后会发生什么还为时善早，但我敢打赌在之后，几乎所有的工作室都会拥有这么一支团队致力于这一领域，至少是研究如何通过社交元素而不只是游戏玩法去设计出更加有兴趣的游戏。”

如果某一天Xbox Live团队采取同样的战术去处理《使命的召唤》中任性的玩家，你绝对不要过于惊讶。

（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）

Teamwork OP: Riot on making ‘good’ the easy choice

By Philippa Warr

That’s the mission statement behind Riot’s work on player behaviour. It was also the focus of a talk at the recent Games Developers Conference by Jeffrey Lin – Riot’s lead designer of social systems. Teamwork and good behaviour can make or break online gaming experiences so we decided to interview Lin and find out how the player behaviour unit works and what else Riot has been working on.

Lin’s background isn’t in multiplayer gaming, surprisingly – it’s in cognitive neuroscience. While working on a PhD (dealing with visual attention if you were curious) at the University of Washington, friends of Lin introduced him to Marc Merrill and Brandon Beck, the president and CEO of Riot respectively. “They had been playing games for 20 years – way back to the days when they were playing text-based MUDs or Everquest – and they all knew, they had this gut feeling that players want to have a sportsman-like time. They want to be playing with other players that are friendly and positive,” he tells Red Bull.

With that in mind Riot was looking for a hardcore gamer with a background in social or cognitive psychology who could work on features to improve team player behaviour in League of Legends. That’s how Lin ended up at the company and it’s what led to the creation of a whole team dedicated to exploring how people play together.

“When I first joined we grabbed a bunch of people all around Riot and did some research,” says Lin. “We really wanted to figure out why were players being frustrated in games. What were the common barriers to having a positive match in online games? What were the pain points players were having? One of the key insights we found early on was people or players weren’t inherently bad. What’s happening is every single player has their bad days.”

That’s a paradigm shift: most people don’t play unsportingly all the time, they only do sometimes because they’re in a bad mood every now and again. Players bring frustrations and tensions from the outside world into the game and even though it might not be common behaviour in a particular player, because it happens to most people once in a while you’ll likely run up against examples of it pretty often in a game as popular as League of Legends.

Once you acknowledge that, Lin recognised, you have to change the way you mete out sentences. This realisation is why Lin believes punishing players is often not effective. “If you look at the community at large and split them into demographics based on their behaviour there is a small demographic, say one percent of players, who are persistently negative and you’ll need systems in place to help those players reform or improve their behaviours, but the majority of negative experiences come from neutral and positive players having a bad day so we need systems like honour and behaviour alerts to shape their behaviour.”

In other words, you need a carrot and not a stick. Where a punishment would come across as harsh and out of context, pointing out to players that they’re letting their usually high standards of conduct slide usually results in a change of attitude. Incentivising the good behaviour with an Honour stat which could be affected by conduct in any match also serves to reinforce that good behaviour.

The interesting thing about incentivisation is that it doesn’t help to give players character skins or other types of reward with extrinsic value. It messes with the motivation behind the good behaviour and you end up doing things for the reward rather than for the intrinsic value of being a good player or team-mate. An Honour stat is a way of reflecting good conduct while trying not to move motivation away from being a consistently good team player above all else.

Motivations behind behaviour in online games can be hard to unpick so Lin and his team use a wide variety of data and research methods when tackling questions. They change depending on what’s being studied and can involve massive piles of data from games taking place all over the world or smaller, more detailed studies involving players working with the team in person.

“If we’re looking at frustration we could look at stuff like eye-tracking,” Lin gives as an example. “If you look at a player’s eye movements, their eye-tracking and their pupil dilation you can use that as a correlate of how frustrated or how stressed out they are.”

In terms of less up-close and personal data, in-game chat is the go-to option at the moment. “What we’re showing is through a lot of these experiments we can help players improve the language they use and we see dramatic effects in the kind of vocabulary they use and their phrasing.”

You might remember Riot’s Teamwork OP video from a little while back which gives the statistics on how better teamwork has a positive effect on win rate. “If you look at chat in games in League of Legends at the end of a game you’ll sometimes see the term GG which means good game or great game. Over the course of the Teamwork OP video and restricted chat mode we saw about a 2.5 to three percent increase in that phrase being used at the end of matches.”

Lin equates the use of GG with a handshake at the end of a match in traditional sports like football or basketball. We ask whether there’s a similar relationship with the term GLHF (good luck, have fun) which sometimes appears at the beginning of a match and can set a friendly tone.

“We haven’t done the beginning of a match research yet but that’s really interesting to note. I imagine the positive players in the community use that phrase a lot more and it probably has a more positive effect going into the game as well.”

But when you’ve got a game like League of Legends where killing enemies and aggressively expanding your reach into their territory is part and parcel of the experience how do you maintain ‘good’ aggression while diminishing ‘bad’?

Lin’s answer is to find ways to vary matches and experiences. “In a competitive PvP game one of the things you could do through game design is introduce other ways of mastery or progression. Don’t make winning the number one and only goal for players. If you do that you reduce the overbearing weight of winning but also keep it a competitive and still fun game.”

Team Builder is one of the ways Lin is hoping to achieve this and so far he says that it’s helping players explore different team compositions and break with the current meta. “We’re seeing players try things like, let’s send two players into the jungle and have them be super aggressive, constantly attacking the other teams territory. That’s a super popular strategy in Team Builder.”

Thinking about ways to seed positive conduct and set examples of good behaviour, we come to the relationship between professional players and the wider community.

“Pro players undoubtedly have a lot of social influence. If we look at a pro player and they’re a very positive, super sportsmanlike player, that has a great weight in the perception of their local communities. They have a lot of influence – but how do we magnify and enhance that influence? We haven’t started digging into that space yet.”

In terms of exemplary behaviour, Lin calls out Carlos ‘Ocelote’ Rodriguez. “He was famously known in the past for using really negative language on players – probably one of the worst of any pro players. But he had a couple of turning points where he dramatically changed his behaviour one-eighty and probably now is one of the best examples of being a positive player on his team.”

“He talks about one moment where he was at a professional venue in Europe and a player mentioned to him that he flew all the way over there just to watch him play that game. He talks about how that one moment made him realise ‘Hey, why am I being a jerk because it’s telling everyone else that being a jerk is okay.’”

How players behave online and the motivations behind that behaviour are growing fields of research, so can Riot see a future where different studios and research labs team up to form a broader team game research hub?

“If you look at Riot and other game studios they’re all starting to have a team focused on player behaviour research,” says Lin. “It’s not about the positive or negative side, it’s about researching what it means to play with other people online.

“It’s a little bit too early to tell what’s going to happen five or ten years down the road but I’m willing to bet almost every studio is going to have a team dedicated to that space and at least researching how to design games that are more fun from a social aspect and not just a gameplay aspect.”

In the meantime, don’t be too surprised if the Xbox Live team adopt a similar tactic for dealing with wayward Call of Duty players. Here’s hoping.(source:redbull)