如果你曾经评述过某些电子游戏的“不足”（游戏邦注：如《星际争霸2》毫无新意，《矮人要塞》易用性过低等），那么你就必须说明哪些对我们这些普通玩家来说算是“优秀” 的游戏。

那么，是什么成就了所谓的“优秀”游戏呢？这完全取决于你是否相信绝对真理。

为了文章表述简单，文中只阐述希腊古典哲学。我们将探究两位被广泛视为当代西方哲学鼻祖的人——亚里士多德和柏拉图。

亚里士多德提倡多元文化，认为社会的目标在于确保公民个人的繁荣发展（游戏邦注：他所说的公民指少部分希腊社会成员，包括受过教育的男性土地拥有者和上等人，女性和奴 隶不属于这个范畴）。当他们达到自我超越或“eudaimonia”的状态时，便得到繁荣发展。

许多人错误地将“eudaimonia”解读为快乐，但事实上其包含更深层次的含义。其中含有自我实现的层面，即那种最终实现某个目标的成就感。当然，你应当会获得那种成就感， 因为这是你自行付出努力赚取的。

所以，游戏设计中的亚里士多德哲学便是假设这种“公民”的存在，即硬核玩家。在此等状况下，游戏主要需要迎合这部分人群，或许需要付出减小游戏对其他类型玩家的可接入 性的代价。

“其他玩家”不值得考虑，因为如果他们无法在游戏末期打败BOSS，那么如何能够感受到克服挑战带来的成就感呢？这并非他们的本性，他们无法感受到那种真正的成就感。“降 低难度”只能削弱那些有天赋的玩家的游戏感觉。也就是说，游戏必须要有难度。

在8位机时代，这种设计哲学很流行，像《洛克人》和《魂斗罗》之类的平台游戏都有着超高的难度，游戏只奖励那些有着非凡协调能力和反应能力的玩家。

最近，随着平台游戏题材在独立游戏中的重生，这种设计观念有点复苏的势头。这些新亚里士多德游戏并不像“经典亚里士多德游戏”，因为他们不对玩家的失败进行严厉的惩罚 。如果玩家在游戏过程中死亡的话，通常会从死亡的那个场景重新开始，而且游戏角色的生命数量无线，并非《洛克人》那样强迫玩家在生命耗尽之后完全从新开始。然而，虽然 游戏通过这些小改动来提升易用性，但是这些游戏仍然有很大的难度，需要玩家的反应能力。

事实上，尽管《VVVVVV》已经相对较为简单，但是能够打通的玩家仍然相当少，但是那些能够打通的玩家会获得极大的成就感。以这个层面来看，这些类型的游戏确实是“以玩家 为中心”，因为游戏的吸引力本质上来源于玩家获得胜利的愿景和技能。

因而，亚里士多德理论是：优秀的玩家成就优秀的游戏。

但是，这种类型的设计存在许多哲学问题，这也是为何今日恪守这项准则来设计的游戏相对较少的部分原因所在。

具体地说，柏拉图会认为这种说法完全是谬误。

想象下，你绝望地看着自己的同事Ted努力玩《洛克人》，被汗水浸透的双手不断击打着你珍贵的上等NES控制器。当他因挫败感而将控制器摔出时，你势必会大声呼叫。难道Ted会 认为《洛克人》是款优秀的游戏吗？

可能他不会这么想。但是《洛克人》仍然非常出众，只是Ted玩不好而已。

现在，想象下整个世界充斥着Ted之类的玩家。他们无一认同《洛克人》是款优秀的游戏，然而这并没有让游戏的质量有所下降。这些玩家的个人经历玷污了《洛克人》的纯洁本质 ，也就是说，《洛克人》仍然保持其优秀的本性，但是是独立于那些无法击败Top Man阶段的拙劣玩家之外。他们只是无法认同和感受到游戏的优秀之处而已。

因而，柏拉图支持的是绝对真理。人们总是会撒谎或者误解某些事情，你是否还认为个人经历是可靠的吗？Ted或许很不擅长玩《洛克人》，但是你恰好在第一人称射击游戏中表现 不佳。你在《光晕》中拙劣的表现丝毫不会影响到游戏的创新性，也不会影响到整个游戏行业。

所以，游戏的质量应当独立于玩家之外。

依柏拉图的意思，要对游戏的质量做出准确的判断，需要选择那些独立于普通公民之外的哲学家来体验，因为只有他们能够使用超乎玩家个人体验之外的理由和逻辑来向我们展示 何谓优秀游戏。那么，谁属于此类哲学家呢？

答案就是：游戏开发者。

柏拉图或许会认为，《洛克人》之所以属于优秀的游戏是因为它出自Capcom之手，或者因为Capcom中某些“哲学开发者”的独特影响力。《洛克人》的优秀与否与玩家没有关系， 因为我们都知道玩家有着不同的口味、技能和经验。在此类环境中，他们不可能形成可靠的认知模型。

因而，与亚里士多德理论想对立，柏拉图设计哲学以开发者为中心，其支持的观点是：优秀的开发者成就优秀的游戏。

我认为，这种玩家中心和开发者中心对立是所有后续游戏设计哲学的基础，至少是划分和组织其他哲学的简便方法。

今天，多数开发者和玩家（游戏邦注：包括作者在内）相信，玩家中心和开发者中心同样重要。优秀的游戏设计应当遵循某些类型的“黄金准则”或“折中方法”，将开发者的想 法同玩家反馈、难度和可接入性以及商业潜力和艺术价值相平衡，这似乎是很显而易见的事情。是否有不同的观点呢？

游戏应当优秀，这是毫无疑问的。

的确，当遇上那些简单的公理时，所有的这些哲学思维或许都显得毫无意义。但是让我们回顾下电子游戏设计想法的历史，游戏中的“玩家易用性”和“艺术价值”似乎都是相对 较新的概念。事实上，它们在16位机时代几乎未曾出现，8位机时代就更少了。现在很显然看到的是思维长期不断变化的结果。

即便是现在，我们的游戏设计“黄金准则”仍然在随着新开发者和新玩家用户的出现而不断改变。我们对“优秀游戏”的概念正在慢慢向某个地方发展，但是这个地方是哪里呢？ 在本系列文章中，我会尝试解决这个问题。

游戏是否变得更加“政治化”，如果是这样的话，那么依我们的标准这些还能否视为“优秀的游戏”？如果EA坚持将塔利班作为可玩派系添加到《荣誉勋章》中，那么这算是优秀 的品味抑或只是宣传计划，或者这只是个游戏根本不值得我们如此严肃地探讨？如果有的话，那么什么才是通用于有关当前事件的高度政治化游戏和完全非政治化游戏的黄金法则 呢？

“艺术游戏”究竟是个合情合理的题材还是在将来没有发展空间，因为所有的游戏本质上都具有艺术性？然而，Tale of Tales声称“游戏并非艺术”，支持全新题材的互动艺术， 否认规则、目标和机制的重要性。如果有的话，那么什么才是通用于这些“非游戏”和游戏之间的黄金方法呢？

我们是应该将《FarmVille》视为“社交游戏”，还是视为不受许多硬核玩家喜爱的“肤浅”游戏，还是像Warren Spector在PAX 2010的主题演讲中所说的那样，只是硬核玩家在电 子游戏新玩家和那些老玩家（游戏邦注：这些人关注主机、订阅《PC Gamer》而且知道小岛秀夫之类的著名开发者）之间人为建立起的一道障碍？如果有的话，那么什么才是通用 于“社交游戏”和所谓的“传统游戏”的黄金法则呢？

人们在电子游戏上的分歧还不止这三个。这些分歧都无法用简单的答案解决，但是所有都呈现出独特的哲学理论和令人懊恼的激辩。

但是这些令人懊恼的东西都是很棒的，因为这才会引发对话和交流。

如果我们想要制作出更新更好的游戏，如果我们想要让游戏作为艺术媒介更加成熟，能够维持自身的存在并提出严峻的问题，那么我们就需要分析当前的推断及其合理性，而本系 列文章便是个开始。对提出这些问题的逃避是种精神懒惰行为。

但首先，有些历史对我们认识这些理念起着重要作用：

1982年，雅达利在美国推出一款极度风靡的视频游戏掌机，但未具体规定谁有游戏发行资格——所以1983年，行业因宠物食品公司等发行的众多糟糕作品而分崩离析。玩家永远不 会忘记：我们曾纠结于游戏是否“过短”或是否“值得”，而且电子游戏评论和文学、音乐电影和艺术评论不同，总会将价格考虑在内。

所以现在我们开始量化：多少武器、关卡和体验时间？你只能在NES暗盒有限的容量中融入这么多关卡，所以开发商会寻找其他方式扩充游戏时间——《洛克人》以更富挑战的方式 重新设置关卡和首领元素，《最终幻想》给敌方精灵重新着色，创造更加强大的角色，由于更具难度的游戏需花费更长时间攻克，因此最终会变成更“有价值”的游戏。

但就像我们之前谈到的，很少人能够享有充分掌握视频游戏的条件：例如，拥有充足可支配收入（或零花钱）支付这些游戏，有几段较长空闲时间把握这些游戏，更不要说大把运 气、技能和毅力。

这些人通常是中产年轻人，他们是传统观念中的“玩家”，但值得庆幸的是此刻板观念如今已逐步消失。这些玩家已内化1983年的崩溃局面，行业亦是如此。他们通过严格质量控 制以及着眼大众“娱乐”寻求稳定（例如，“哇，PlayStation 2也可以播放DVD！”），最近则通过通俗性扩大用户基础。

所有现代玩家中心设计理念都重新定义“优秀玩家”——从亚里士多德概念中的“熟练玩家”到“所有玩家”。

现在作为哲学家，我们必须思考：什么是通俗性？

从某种“通俗性”含义来看，也许我们可以将Valve FPS益智游戏《Portal》的问世看作此方面的转折点。

《Portal》将通俗性定义成“几乎人人都能体验和完成游戏”。游戏很简洁，但依然有少数人抱怨其过于繁琐（游戏邦注：这也是橙盒版内容的组成部分，橙盒融合5款游戏，售价 50美元，完全打破我们的价值观念）。

虽然早在这款游戏发行前，通俗性就是业内多年来的关注焦点，但大家从未如此彻底地将其融入整个开发过程。很多媒体采访都关注频繁测试如何取舍谜题内容。

强调收集数据——很多时候是平衡多人游戏的定量数据，是游戏设计的经验探讨。通俗性是指提出假设（“若Protoss Zealot的制作时间更久，将能够平衡早期游戏困扰”）以及 收集证据确认或否定假设（“Protoss如今在4分钟Gold联盟中赢得较少比赛”）。

表格、图形、热图、死亡地图、刺杀地图、视觉追踪、心率检测和玩家分析——某游戏设计经验法称：收集玩家数据，合理诠释能够创造优质游戏。

（更深入来看，逻辑实证称：任何缺乏科学根据的内容都无法证实，因此毫无意义，这本身就是非科学论断，同时也是逻辑实证如此快速消亡的部分原因。）

但这种数据导向设计也存在类似哲学科学问题：

何时数据准确，存在关联性，你如何进行收集？

若你基于高竞争团体服务器搜集数据，或也许基于某从未玩过视频游戏的用户收集信息，这些数据是否能够有效平衡游戏？（这看情况）我们是否应该转而测试其他“普通玩家” ，若是如此，谁是这些玩家？（这看情况）这是否是实现通俗目标的最佳渠道，或者是否会因试图满足各玩家，而最终落得无人问津？（这看情况）。

再来是如何诠释所收集的数据？

想象在《军团要塞 2》中，数据显示鲜有玩家选择间谍角色——这是否意味着火焰兵过于强大，工程师太难消灭，或其他信息？（我们需要更多数据）若间谍难以消灭工程师，是 否由于热门地图的特定强大地点存在关卡设计问题，或者存在相关声音漏洞，间谍的斗篷声响过大，或者存在平衡问题：间谍的斗篷无法维持至穿过前线？（我们需要更多数据） 。或者只有少数玩家扮演间谍角色是件好事？（这看情况）。

但现在假设你希望知道玩家为何总是跌落悬崖。

你是否追踪玩家摄像头位置和向量，创造其着眼的热图，决定他们是否注意“危险！不要掉下去！”标记，强化标记纹理的对比度是否有所帮助？

你是否基于关卡冲突模式绘制他们的运动向量（游戏邦注：也许他们的减速时不够快），或者是否提高灰尘材料的摩擦系数？

你是否询问他们，“为什么总是掉入悬崖？”

也许此行为主义概念——通过观察玩家行为推断意图，只是在回避问题。为何不直接征求玩家反馈，让他们表达自己的意图？社会自由主义认为在运用权利过程中，所有社区成员
都要参与。

虽然游戏设计经验学派收集定量玩家数据，但此社会自由主张通过关注群体，调查和分析玩家邮件、论坛和博客反馈信息汇集定量玩家数据模式。

社会自由观点认为优质游戏来自尽可能倾听用户心声，合理诠释用户反馈信息。这里，“通俗性”是指分散权利，分享设计权限。

（题外话，也许新自由主义模式会支持来自团体和公会的反馈信息，或者也许是第三方供应商和游戏发行商，其对此重视程度超过个人玩家意见。最终设计改变会逐步扩散，间接 帮助个人玩家）。

在《Left 4 Dead 2》中，玩家投票选择保持那些游戏模式；在《Halo: Reach》中，Bungie通过投票结果平衡多人播放列表。渐渐地，玩家如今开始通过直接民主方式做出游戏设 计决策。

但不要将此类推权限延伸过大。相比身处现实宪法民主的公民而言，玩家享有较少统治权利，鲜少真正参与设计。依然是由开发商提取反馈信息，决定优劣，然后最终落实设计工 作。

此外，不要基于玩家反馈信息设计游戏的原因还有一个：玩家通常会改变选择，或者完全停止体验。

让我们简单回到经验探讨和定量数据，坚信社会自由玩家反馈信息不是分享支配权限，而是分享更多数据（游戏邦注：是指定量数据）。

你如何知晓某组数据或诠释信息未来是否还会适用？有些玩家会出于某些原因突然扮演间谍角色。也许有天你的整个玩家经济形态就突然采用Stone of Jordans充当货币，而非金 子或宝石。或者明天重力就会忽然停止存在。

这或多或少就是David Hume所说的经验主义的问题：我们如何获悉显著现象未来是否会继续以此方式存在？

人类比自然法则不稳定，不论是反馈信息，还是论坛言辞，还是他们古怪的体验风格，这些都会在突然读到某指南或观看某YouTube战略视频时突然发生改变。

我们无法收集更多玩家数据或征求更多玩家反馈信息，以判断所收集数据或反馈信息是否有效；也就是说，我们无法通过归纳法证明归纳法的有效性，这是个循环逻辑。

但逻辑的运用原理是系列前提基础上的归纳模式（游戏邦注：同时证明归纳的有效性，我们无法运用归纳法，这是由于这也是个循环逻辑），所以我们必须通过归纳法证明归纳法 的有效性，但我们仅仅是通过归纳法证明归纳法的不可靠性！

你觉得有些困惑是人之常情，Hume自己也是。最后，他采用常识性的“观望”方式，这是实际怀疑主义的一种。“不要担心其是否能够永远适用，而是关心其当前是否有效。”

我想这是就连续游戏补丁、MMO游戏和Valve“游戏就是服务”理念的哲学论据（截至文章发布，《军团要塞2》已出现150个漏洞）。

将此态度同经典亚里士多德玩家中心主义理念比较——玩家会抱怨“《洛克人》由于Cold Fusion Man难度过大”，Capcom的回应可能是，“你如何获得这些数据？”

忽然亚里士多德不再看起来那么多元化和自由开放，而是变得固定、静止和反映迟钝。

也许我们需要接受“优质”游戏设计只能维持一段时间，直到用户数据显示其不再优秀，然后你就会重新设计，重新寻找平衡，直到其再次变得完善。这无疑是种玩家中心观念， 其倡导开发者需根据玩家社区“取得成功”。

所以什么造就优质游戏？

也许是改变的意愿。

-Tim Schafer（游戏邦注：欧美游戏设计师）回答是，因为游戏与艺术一样也能够表达人们的想法和情感。《Shadow of the Colossus》让我和我父亲都大受感动。游戏后我们都 安静地待在一间屋子里一个小时之久。

-Matthew Burns表示，谁会在乎这个答案？相反地，我们应该做些更重要的事，如玩玩电子游戏。

-Roger Ebert（游戏邦注：美国最富盛名的影评人）的回答是否定的，他认为艺术是艺术家的创作，而在游戏中却能由玩家创造结果，这种灵活性违背了艺术的意义。人们愿意目 睹悲剧的发生，但是却没有哪一个玩家愿意悲剧出现在自己身上——他们都希望能拥有一个“美好的结局”。

-Tale of Tales工作室的答案也是否定的，他们认为艺术是死的而游戏是活的——也可以说是一种“昏睡状态”，但是至少是有生命的。之所以说游戏是一种“昏睡状态”是由游 戏本身富有创造性的设置和情节所决定。

显然关于游戏是否等于艺术这一问题存在着各种分歧，我们也仅仅只是把它们当成一种分歧而已。正是因为个人权利和个人自由导致的不同观点才形成当代美学存在的意义。任何 东西都可以被成为艺术，几乎所有东西都可能得到任何人的喜爱，每个人对于不同的东西以及艺术体验都有自己的见解。

在2010年7月份的时候Ebert还是坚持观点，认为游戏不能称之为艺术，但是也许对于其他人来说却不然。所以，怎么才能制作出一款好游戏？

在柏拉图时代，艺术欣赏较之现在严格多了。柏拉图认为“美”和“和谐”都是艺术中不可或缺的部分，同时也存在着一定的法度。

例如，在你的脑子里画一个圈。那有可能是一个很完美的圈。然后尝试徒手，或者使用模板，Photoshop的“画圆”工具画下这个圈。但是不论你如何努力，你所画出的圈都与你脑 子里完美的圈存在一定的差距，有可能是像素，分子或者原子而导致的差距。同样的，其它美好的东西在我们用物理表现形式展现出来后总是会与理想效果有所偏离，而仅仅只能 作为我们心中完美意象的仿造物罢了。

很多哲学家并不同意在死板的和谐原则下形成的美学观点。他们创造了一种区别于美的“敬畏感”。这种“敬畏感”更为深奥，人类并不能轻易理解它，除非你能在站在太空轨道 上俯视地球或者观看到原子弹爆炸等轰动场景才能有所体会。而且这种敬畏感并没有明确指明什么是好的什么是坏的，什么是有趣的什么是无聊的等等。（一些哲学家一直在尝试 着将这种敬畏感区分为微弱的敬畏感和强大的敬畏感等等。）

这种“敬畏感”能够用来支持Schafer的答案，即广大游戏玩家认为的“游戏是艺术”。至少在游戏中玩家能够感受到徒然然而生的敬畏感，或者某种难以言表的情感体验。

有些人认为如今已经没有任何一种单一的价值，如“美”，“真实”或者“敬畏感”等能够将艺术统一在一起了。这倒没什么不好，如果一直尝试着去遵从那些单一价值，那么广 大艺术家们真的会窒息吧！

当然看，对于Tale of Tales回答“不”也是有原因的，我个人也蛮支持他们的论点。怎样才能制作一款好游戏？那就是不要一味地遵循各种条条框框并强迫玩家反复做着相同的事 。

在一个完整的美学论点中，艺术不一定要与美搭上边，不一定带有敬畏感或者不一定是“死的”，艺术也可以具有实践性，并被当成一种有用的工具。

对于那些莫名其妙接受了国家的赞助宣传，但是却设计糟糕的广告，或者将简短的电影画面融入游戏中去拼凑游戏片段等情况，都不能被看成是一种艺术吧。

按照马克思主义美学观点，这些都是对于艺术的腐败商业利用，是一些反面案例。大部分艺术都被赋予强大的力量，伴同文化、政治制度和宗教等形式，构建成一个“超级框架” ，使弱小者局限于一种“虚假意识形态”。

过于简单化的描述差不多就是马克思主义对于艺术的相关见解——事实上，它有可能会认为电子游戏是一种恐怖的精神控制法，使人们常常会因为虚构的战争而非现实中的阶级斗 争而分心。

为了抵制这种空虚的娱乐形式，马克思主义支持一种全新的游戏模式，即强调社会中的经济不平等，富人的权利不断扩大，穷人的地位越来越渺小等主题。但在马克思主义问世之 前，有一种被称为“社会现实主义”的艺术传统就已经存在了（但如今却深受马克思主义的影响），其观点认为一款好的游戏必须代表世界正义，批评任何非正义行为，并为正义 而战。

有很多游戏开发者便是按照这一传统开发自己的游戏。Molleindustria （总部位于意大利米兰的游戏工作室）抛弃了“独裁娱乐模式”而追求自由的电子游戏，通过发行一些设计
精巧的讽刺性小游戏，如《McDonalds Game》和《Oilgarchy》（游戏邦注：该工作室最近还推出了颇有争议的iOS游戏《Phone Story》）等去描绘各种迫切的社会需
求。“Newsgames”将报章杂志与游戏机制结合在一起创造了一种全新风格。非盈利组织Games for Change提倡将人权问题，贫穷以及全球化冲突等问题带入游戏中。我还将阐述《 合金装备》系列，《生化奇兵》系列，《侠盗猎车手：圣安地列斯》和《Deus Ex》等游戏在一种社会现实环境下是如何抨击它们所抵制的价值观。相信未来将会有更多游戏加入这 个行列。

并非所有马克思主义者都认为社会现实主义能够促成社会公正；也有些人认为社会现实主义太通俗，或者太过平淡无奇。

一位有名的马克思主义艺术家Bertolt Brecht认为不论是在电影，油画还是电子游戏上实行这种模式都将呈现出一种根本的政治性问题，因为它将带动观看者或者玩家变得更加具 有批判性。

例如，在游戏中打破“第四堵墙”（游戏邦注：戏剧术语，在镜框式舞台上，人们通常会想象位于舞台台口的一道实际上并不存在的“墙”），直接向玩家诠释故事内容，让他们 去思考自己在真实生活中的一些行为。

一款与社会不公相抗衡的好游戏，能够让玩家在正式体验后对自己或者生活进行反思。

另外一位具有影响力的新马克思主义理论家Theodor Adorno宣称艺术不能带有政治性。他认为艺术品（如电子游戏）是一种表达形式，是判断一种东西是否存在的个人自由。出于 商业用途或社会善行等而把艺术（或者游戏）当成一种工具，你将不得不牺牲一些个人自由——而牺牲艺术家的自由完全是背叛艺术本质的行为，而因此变成艺术家行列中具有“ 虚假意识”的马克思主义者。

这么说来，一款好的游戏并不一定能够推动社会公正。一款好的游戏也未必不存在任何政治因素。游戏不应该被当成工具，艺术归艺术，游戏归游戏。

我们又回到了最初念叨的观点了，即“艺术归艺术”。

因为不存在任何决定性的论断用来衡量艺术，所以如此讨论艺术也便没有任何意义了。对于艺术，不同人有不同的品味和看法，而在如今的后现代社会里，我们更是提倡遵从个人 喜好。

也许我们的看法是错误的，游戏并不是艺术，但是这并不是基于任何作者所提出的理论思想或者“敬畏感”和马克思主义美学观点。游戏之所以不能称之为艺术，是因为游戏消费 者的数量远远多于游戏制作者。

游戏之所以不能称之为艺术是因为游戏编程太难了，常常让人望而却步，反倒是画画和照相容易点。而最容易使用的游戏制作工具，如Unreal，Unity和GameMake也都要求你具备一 定的编程知识。即使你努力制作出了一些好游戏，你同样也需要好运气才能让它发行问世。

也许因为你并未亲手制作游戏所以它并不能称之为艺术。也许你会认为一款游戏是好游戏仅仅只是因为它是你制作的。也许我们需要更多更好的画笔——就像我们的祖母早前使用 的那些工具。

这么看来，游戏并不是艺术，除非每个人都能亲手设计游戏，并让无数电子游戏充斥着整个游戏市场，就像1983年游戏产业大崩溃的时候。要不是看到了游戏产业辉煌的未来，我 们也不会将其称之为“市场泛滥”了，我们不会像以前那样总是追求游戏的商业化，而你的后代可能会嘲笑这种行为。但我们不会再将这种情况称之为游戏产业的崩溃了。

相反地，我们会将其称之为游戏产业的“复兴”。

但是，当我们在讨论更多具有实验性的新游戏设计的出现时，我们不得不就此打住对于哲学的探索。因为已经找不到任何更全面的哲学理论能够用于解释游戏设计了，除了后现代 主义。

后现代主义是一种涵盖性术语，包含了一些不同的哲学观点：解构主义，后结构主义，后后解构主义等等。好吧，我承认最后的观点是我杜撰的。而在这里最重要的词便是“结构 ”——一般来说游戏总是与游戏本身的表现形式或者其底层结构相互作用着，细分其规则集和游戏机制，并因此对游戏做出相关评论。这种游戏既不是过山车也不是运动场，它们只是碰巧由各种杂乱的外置因素组建而成。

《You Have to Burn the Rope》和《pOnd》看起来就与我们在之前讨论过的现代游戏设计（即分别注重游戏的“通俗性”和“艺术价值”）有点格格不入。在此看来，一款好的游 戏总是会通过讽刺，仿效或者幽默等方式去批判那些大受欢迎的设计原则。

《You Have to Burn the Rope》明确地告诉了玩家如何做才能赢得游戏（就像游戏标题所表示的那样）而这却违背了传统游戏规则——Boss在平台上抗争着，玩家必须仔细观察他 的行动并判断他的弱点，以决定如何前进或者制定出相应解决方法。正是在如此情况下，该游戏的做法让人认为要让游戏变得更加简单，就应该剔除游戏中的所有难点。但是这么 做却导致了荒诞的结果。（除此之外，在《pOnd》中玩家无需了解游戏就可以玩得很好了。如果深入去研究这款游戏反倒会破坏游戏本身的乐趣。）

这些游戏能够帮助我们更深入地了解主流电子游戏的类型，并且推动着我们更加客观地去看待这类游戏。在这类型游戏中，设计者力求维持与玩家间的互动。

而当我们开始用后现代游戏来分析游戏本身的形式时，那些传统的哲学观点也就不再有任何作用了。

为什么？一部分原因是今天的哲学具有很多不确定因素。除了哲学，如今世界上可以说没有任何学科总是关注于自己的“毁灭”了吧。“哲学已经走向没落”将成为很多会议上被 集中讨论的核心议题。因此我之前所主张的将鸽巢游戏设计原则（游戏邦注：组合数学中一个很重要的原理）如果融入哲学运动中的观点也就不再有意义了。

相反地，我应该撇去哲学观点而尝试寻找一些新的游戏设计原则。而如果你们发现这些原则可行，请告知我。

程序主义指的是放下游戏开发者的身份，即在游戏制作中，自己设计一部分游戏或者自己勾画游戏。当然了，我们可以讨论作者使用的特殊单词有何寓意，或者为何作曲家在歌曲 的末尾将音量提升等等，但是如果关卡设计者按照自己的想法设置游戏关卡，那么很有可能会因此违背了创作者的指示吧？这么看来，一款好游戏的制作不应该被创作者牢牢控制 着。（这与《使命召唤》和《荣誉勋章》系列等严格遵从“剧本”而制作出来的游戏有所不同。）

我们是否会因为游戏开发者Derek Yu在《Spelunky》（一款动作类游戏）中设置了一个不可能通过的洞穴关卡而不满？就像在游戏《求生之路》中，我们是否会因为被袭击而责怪 虚拟的AI角色，尽管这都是游戏中一些非特定的行为。这些游戏都很重视游戏设计，特别是一款最“有野心”的游戏——《Facade》，尝试地制作出非玩家角色（NPC）背景和完整 的叙述环境。

我个人最赞同的便是随机生成的游戏变化。在masocore平台上的《Dungeon》便是按照玩家的电脑情况而生成一些机制，但同时这些机制也将会随机给游戏带来新的漏洞或者相应地 改变游戏模式。因此玩家必须面对一种矛盾的游戏设置，即在不同的电脑上，游戏中的“钉子”长度会不同，他们所面对的游戏关卡难度也会有所不同，因为很有可能他们所进行 的游戏也存在着一些不同点。

但是不要因为这个观点听起来像哲学而混淆。

Ian Bogost的程序主义认为游戏（传统上我们称之为“艺术游戏”）通过规则和机制表现出审美观点。按照这种“程序说法”，一款好的游戏能让玩家追求情感和心理空间，或者 能够帮助他们更好地了解现存的商业游戏。

举个例子来说吧，在《Hitman》系列中，很多玩家所采用的游戏策略都是通过高级的安全防护手段把自己伪装成NPC，经常是作为一名高级保镖以守护游戏目标。在游戏《Hitman》 中：玩家用一种安全的方法掩饰自己，但是由于他们必须将权利下放给保安们，所以也很容易因此而遭到毁灭。

或者以《Beyond Good & Evil》为例，这是一款关于收集照片的单人动作游戏。在游戏中，玩家通过拍摄稀有生物的照片而获得积分，但是有时候这些生物也有可能会吞噬掉你的 NPC好友。你会先拯救好友还是先拍照获得积分？在冲突中进行拍照任务时，玩家应该如何做才能躲避危险？

不知道IO Interactive（Square Enix旗下的一个丹麦电子游戏开发商）或Ubisoft在设计游戏时是否会想到这些问题。但是不论答案肯定与否，都不重要。重要的是玩家能够通过 与游戏机制间的互动而推测游戏的意义。这么看来，程序主义不只不能被称为游戏设计的哲学观点，也不算是游戏哲学和演绎，即我们在第一部分文章中提到的推动游戏发生转变的相关内容。

但是有些设计师却认为程序主义是个死胡同，因为比起更深层次的艺术表达，它更重视商业游戏中相同的游戏设置。走在这些设计师前沿的便是游戏开发商Tale of Tales，他们眼 中的新型电子游戏是：

非游戏（notgames）——借鉴了视频游戏中的一些元素，如游戏控制，实时3D图像等，但同时也力图打破如今束缚着游戏的一些规则和机制。这种新型游戏认为既然通过游戏规则 和机制创造出一种循环动作的游戏机制，让玩家能够掌握这种机制，为何又要蓄意制造一种反复的游戏体验？当我们注意到游戏机制是如何反复进行之时，我们将其称为“重复刷 任务”。但是如此看来，几乎所有游戏机制都具有刷任务的表现形式，那为何我们要将其隐藏起来呢？

相反地，非游戏主张用抽象的情感模式，如情绪，语调，主题等代替这种永不停歇的重复方式，而这些情感模式主要依靠视觉和音效元素体现出来。在这里，好的游戏（即相对于 非游戏而言）并不依赖于游戏机制，相反地它们更加注重对心理空间的探究。Tale of Tales的《The Graveyard》和Dan Pinchbeck的《Dear Esther》正是利用这一方法的两大典 例。

也有很多设计师不喜欢这种游戏类型，认为这种游戏类型缺少规则并过分强调理论，一直唠叨个不停却不会付诸实践。也有一些设计师（就像我）保持着审慎乐观的态度，我们并 不确定如何做才能制作出一款非游戏的游戏，并期待着Tale of Tales或其他非游戏模式实践者能够推动这种新型游戏明朗化。

同样也有一些人认为有些自由规则并不是那么容易可以推翻的：当你执行一些交互性行为时，这种交互性也会受到一些规则的约束。如果你可以用鼠标去移动游戏中的镜头和视角 ，那么这就是一种规则，不论这种移动是否有意义或者带有强制性，我们需要做的只是判断这种规则是好还是不好。如此看来，不存在任何单纯的非游戏或者低交互性的电子游戏 。

“关于技术问题”，德国哲学家Martin Heidegger认为人类应该与技术和谐相处，因为我们现在的行动被技术牢牢掌控着。例如当你开始玩《侠盗猎车手4》时，游戏指示你“跟着 黄线走”，而你也会毫无异议地照做，一点都没有按照自己的想法做出选择，这不就是一种受控制的情形？

程序主义，通俗性，非游戏，新闻游戏，社交游戏。我们正在慢慢逼近奇幻与可怕的边缘。也许这一刻是天堂下一秒就变成地狱了。

制作电子游戏存在何种风险，并且设计者是否有责任承担这些风险？如今的电子游戏如何塑造思想？我想这应该是如今电子游戏设计所面临的最困难的问题，且没有人敢于提出。

如果谁相信世界上只有“好游戏”，那就真的是幼稚至极；在这四部分文章中我们都在研究“好”的各种概念以及为何在涉及电子游戏设计时，却捕捉不到“好”的核心观点。非 此即彼，我们又是如何看待“不好的游戏”呢？

在此我并不是指设计糟糕或极端愚蠢的游戏，也不是指那些色情，暴力并24小时循环播放于各种网站上的视频游戏，更非指玩家所热爱的《Farmville》等社交游戏。

这种“不好”是本身就存在，并非我们所能控制。我们也很难去解释甚至想象不到什么是“不好”。

也许其他人可以就此观点进行深入研究。

相关拓展阅读：篇目1，篇目2，篇目3，篇目4（本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或微信咨询zhengjintiao）

The Philosophy of Game Design

Robert Yang

If you’ve ever said that a videogame was “bad” for any reason – FarmVille is evil, StarCraft 2 is nothing new, VVVVVV is too hard, Braid is pretentious, Dwarf Fortress is inaccessible, Dead or Alive is sexist – in the performance of your royal duties as Grand Arbiter of Good Taste, then you also have to define and articulate what is a “good” game for us simple-minded folk.

So, what makes a “good” game? Well, it all depends on whether you believe in absolute truth. (No, really!)

For purposes of simplification, I will ignore all traditions of ancient philosophy that took place outside of Greece. Instead, we’ll just look at the two figures largely recognized as the roots of Western philosophy today – Aristotle and Plato.

Aristotle argued for a type of pluralism, where the purpose of a society was to ensure its individual citizens flourished (and by citizens, he meant only the small portion of Greek society that was the educated male land-owning military and gentry – sorry, women and slaves, no flourishing for you!) and such a person flourishes when he has reached a state of personal excellence or “eudaimonia.”

Many people wrongly translate eudaimonia as happiness, but it is more than that – there’s an aspect of self-actualization, the sense that you’ve finally achieved something. Surely, you deserve that feeling of achievement because you earned it.

So, an Aristotelian philosophy of game design would presume the existence of a “citizen” – the hardcore gamer. Under this account, the game should chiefly cater to this “best of the best,” allowing these players to excel, perhaps at the price of accessibility for every other type of player.

“Everyone else” isn’t worth considering because if they’re not capable of beating the boss at the end, then how can they possibly feel the accomplishment of surmounting a challenge? It’s not in their nature; they’re incapable of feeling real achievement. “Watering down the difficulty” would only weaken the sense of triumph for the gifted individuals that can meet the challenge – that is, games must definitely be difficult.

Such a design philosophy was very popular in the 8-bit era with incredibly difficult and unforgiving platformers like Mega Man and Contra, games that rewarded players who demonstrated uncanny coordination and reflexes.

More recently, this attitude toward design has enjoyed a return of sorts, with the rebirth of the platformer genre in the indie games scene through games like Flywrench, Streemerz and VVVVVV, as well as a new sub-genre dubbed “masocore” that delights in constant and sudden failure – or you can also consider the surprising popularity of Demon’s Souls as an example of this resurgence, a sort of neo-Aristotelian view of game design. These types of neo-Aristotelian
games aren’t “classically Aristotelian” because they don’t harshly penalize the player for failure, often respawning them on the same screen if they die along with a healthy supply of infinite lives – unlike a game like Mega Man that forces a complete level restart upon running out of lives. Yet, these games still value difficulty and player reflex, despite such small gestures toward accessibility.

Indeed, relatively very few people will ever beat the “Veni, Vidi, Vici” sequence in VVVVVV, despite its relatively forgiving nature – but those who do progress past it will have reached a transcendent state of platforming prowess. In this respect, these types of games are “player-centric” because the engaging nature of the game originates from the player’s will and skill to win.

And so, the Aristotelian tradition: Good players make good games.

But there are several philosophical problems with this type of design, which is part of the reason why there are relatively few games designed strictly in this tradition today.

Specifically, Plato would’ve called bullshit on it.

Imagine your hopelessly incompetent co-worker Ted tried to play Mega Man, with his sweaty hands permanently staining your precious vintage NES controller.
(He can’t even beat Top Man! What a disgrace.) You scream bloody murder when he tosses the now-greasy controller across the room in frustration. Would Ted agree that Mega Man is a good game?

Maybe not. But is Mega Man still good? Well, yeah, of course it is! Ted just sucks at it!

Now, imagine the entire world was populated solely by Teds. None of them agree that Mega Man is good – yet it’s still the same game, it’s still good! The personal (unskilled) experience of these Teds has corrupted the purity of Mega Man; that is, Mega Man remains eternally good, independent of the crappy players who can’t even beat the Top Man stage. They’re just too simple-minded and poorly endowed to see its greatness.

Thus, Plato argued for an account of absolute truth. People lie, misinterpret and get tricked all the time – do you really think that personal experience is reliable? Ted might be awful at Mega Man, but you happen to be terrible at first person shooters and can’t “get into” them despite Ted’s constant prodding. Your inability to play Halo without foolishly running into walls and spinning around in circles does not diminish its innovation and impact on the entire game industry.

And so, the “goodness” of a game must exist outside of the player.

Plato argues that the execution of justice is up to a select few of philosopher kings acting independently of the citizens, for they are the only ones who can use reason and logic to transcend the personal experience of players and to show us what a good game is. Who are these philosopher kings, pray tell?

The answer: game developers.

Plato would argue that Mega Man is good because Capcom made it, or because of the specific influence of certain “philosopher-developers” at Capcom. Mega Man’s “goodness” has nothing to do with players – because, as we just established, players all have different tastes, skill levels and experiences. It is impossible to formulate any reliable amount of knowledge upon such shaky ground.

Thus, as a sort of counterpoint to the Aristotelian tradition, a Platonic design philosophy is developer-centric and argues that: Good developers make good games.

This core dichotomy of player-centrism vs. developer-centrism is, I argue, the basis of all subsequent game design philosophies – or, at least, a convenient way of grouping and organizing these philosophies.

Today, most developers and players (including me) are moderates and believe in the importance of both player-centrism and developer-centrism. It may seem incredibly obvious that a good game design should follow some sort of “golden mean” or “middle way” that balances developer insight with player feedback, as well as difficulty with accessibility and commercial potential with artistic merit. How can anyone possibly think differently?

Games should be good. Duh.

Indeed, all this philosophizing might seem pointless when confronted by that simple truism. But let’s recall the history of thought in videogame design (or at least, recall it in the way I’ve packaged it) – the very notions of “player accessibility” and “artistic merit” in games are both relatively recent. In fact, they barely existed in the 16-bit era, much less the 8-bit era. What seems obvious now is actually the result of a long, gradual shift in thinking.

Even now, our “golden mean” of game design is still shifting as new developers and new player audiences emerge. Our notion of a “good game” is slowly moving somewhere … But where? Over the course of this series, I will try to address that question.

Are games getting more “political,” and if so, are these considered to be “good games” by our standard? If Electronic Arts insists on the Taliban being a playable faction in the newest Medal of Honor, is that in good taste or is it a publicity stunt or is it “just a game” so it shouldn’t be taken seriously? What, if any, is the golden mean between highly political games about current events and totally non-political games?

Are “art games” a legitimate genre or a pretentious annoyance with no future – or is the very label redundant if we’re to argue that all games are intrinsically artistic anyway? Yet Tale of Tales declares that “games are not art” and argues for a radical new genre of interactive art that rejects the importance of rules, goals and mechanics. What, if any, is the golden mean between these “notgames” and games?

Should we be ghettoizing games like FarmVille as “social games,” as “shallow” games rejected by many hardcore gamers – or, as Warren Spector argued in his keynote for PAX 2010, is the very notion of the hardcore gamer creating an artificial barrier between new players of videogames and the “old guard” of 18-34-year-old males who argue over consoles, subscribe to PC Gamer and know who Hideo Kojima is? What, if any, is the golden mean between “social games”
and so-called “regular games?”

These are not the only three different directions that people are pulling videogames – there are, no doubt, many more. None of them offer easy answers but all of them present unique philosophies and frustrating debates.

But that frustration is good, because that will begin the conversation.

If we want to make newer, “better” games – if we want videogames to mature further as an artistic medium, capable of defending its own existence and asking the hard questions – then we need to analyze our current presumptions and their validity, and this series of articles is a start. To avoid asking these questions is intellectually lazy.

To review from Part 1: Plato valued absolute truth, irrespective of player preferences, and so he argues that good games come from good developers. Aristotle had a slightly more pluralistic account of truth that was player-dependent, and so he argues that good games come from good players – and “good players” are skilled players who can beat difficult games.

For Part 2, we’ll derive some additional philosophies from Aristotle’s account – some more modern, mainstream player-centric theories that are all the rage right now.

But first, some history that’s crucial for understanding those approaches:

In 1982, Atari had a wildly popular videogame console in the US, but didn’t regulate who could publish games – so in 1983, the industry crashed from the collective weight of so many poorly designed games made by pet food companies and other ilk. Gamers have never forgotten: We’re obsessed with whether a game is “too short” or if it was “worth it,” and videogame reviews, unlike their literary, music, film, and art counterparts, routinely take price into account.

So now we quantify: How many weapons, levels and hours of playtime? You could only fit so many levels into the limited memory of an NES cartridges so developers found other ways to inflate playtime – Mega Man reuses levels and bosses in more challenging ways, Final Fantasy recolors enemy sprites for more powerful variants – because a more difficult game took longer to beat, which in the end was a more “valuable” game.

But, as we mentioned before, relatively few people have what it takes to master videogames: Namely, enough disposable income (or allowance) to pay for these games and several long, uninterrupted stretches of free time to master these games, not to mention a whole lot of luck, skill and perseverance.

Such people were usually middle-class teenagers, the source of the “gamer” stereotype that’s thankfully dying today. While these gamers had internalized the crash of 1983, so had the industry. They sought stabilization though stringent quality control, an emphasis on general “entertainment” (e.g. “wow, the PlayStation 2 plays DVDs too!”) – and more recently, by expanding their audience through accessibility.

All modern player-centric design philosophies re-cast the “good player” – from the classic Aristotelian notion of “skilled player” to “every player.”

Now as philosophers, we have to ask: What does it mean to be accessible?

For one sense of “accessible,” perhaps we can take the release of Valve’s FPS puzzler Portal as a watershed moment in this field.

Portal defined accessibility as “almost anyone can play and beat this game.” It was rather short, yet few complained about its length. (It was also part of the Orange Box, a collection of five games for $50 that utterly exploded our collective notion of value.)

While accessibility had been an industry concern for many years leading up to the game’s release, never had it been so fundamentally integrated into public accounts of the development process. Much of the press and interviews focused on how frequent testing decided which puzzles to keep and which to reject.

This emphasis on collecting data – most often quantitative data to balance multiplayer games – is an empirical approach to game design. Here, accessibility means posing a hypothesis (“If the build time for a Protoss Zealot is longer, it will balance early game harassment.”) and collecting evidence to confirm or deny that hypothesis (“Protoss are now winning fewer matches under four minutes in the Gold league.”).

Charts, graphs, heat maps, death maps, kill maps, eye tracking, heart rate monitors, player analytics – an empirical method to game design argues that collecting player data and interpreting it properly makes good games.

(Taking that idea a hundred steps further, logical positivism argues that anything unscientific isn’t verifiable and thus is meaningless, which in itself is an unscientific statement, which is partly why logical positivism quickly died the way it did.)

But this kind of data-driven design is plagued by similar problems posed in the philosophy of science:

When is data accurate / pertinent, and how do you go about collecting it?

If you collect data from highly competitive clan servers, or perhaps from someone who’s never played a videogame before in their life, are those sets of data valid for balancing the game for everyone else? (It depends.) Should we instead test on some sort of “average player” and if so, then who is that player? (It depends.) Is that really the best way to achieve accessibility, or do we end up pleasing no one by trying for everyone? (It depends.)

And then how do you go about interpreting that data you’ve just collected?

Imagine in Team Fortress 2 that data indicates fewer players are playing as spies – does that mean Pyros are overpowered or that Engineers are too difficult to kill or something else entirely? (We would need more data.) And if Engineers are too difficult to kill as a Spy, is it actually a level design problem with specific overpowered build sites on popular maps, or is it a sound-related bug where the Spy’s cloak sound is too loud, or is it a balancing issue with how the Spy’s cloak doesn’t last long enough to get past the front line? (We would need more data.) Or is this a good thing, to have so few players playing as Spies? (It depends.)

But now let’s say you want to know why a player keeps falling off a cliff.

Do you track the player’s camera position and vector to produce a heat map of what they look at, to determine whether they notice the “Danger! Don’t Fall Off!” sign, and increase the contrast on the sign texture to compensate?

Do you map their movement vectors against the level’s collision model – maybe their movement speed doesn’t decelerate fast enough – or do you increase the friction parameter on the dirt materials?

Do you just ask them, “Why do you keep falling off the cliff?”

Maybe this behaviorist notion, that we can deduce a player’s intention from observing their actions, is just side-stepping the issue. Why not just solicit player feedback directly and have them verbalize their intentionality? Social liberalism holds that all members of society should have (at least some) input with regards to the process of running their government.

While the empirical school of game design collects quantitative player data, this social liberal approach collects a form of qualitative player data through focus groups, surveys, and analyzing player feedback from emails, forums and blogs.

The social liberal account holds that good games come from listening to as many individual players as possible and interpreting that feedback properly. Here, “accessibility” means decentralizing power and sharing the reins of design.

(As a sort of pseudo-variant, perhaps a neoliberal approach would argue for feedback from clans and guilds, or maybe third-party vendors and game publishers, and value that over individual players’ opinions. The resulting design changes might trickle down and indirectly help individual players.)

In Left 4 Dead 2, players vote for which game modes to keep; in Halo: Reach, Bungie uses voting results to balance multiplayer playlists. Increasingly, players are now making game design decisions through direct democracy.

Don’t stretch this political analogy too far, though. Compared to citizens in real-life constitutional democracies, players have very little political power and rarely get real input on design. It’s still the developers who sort feedback to determine what is signal and what is noise, and they ultimately do the design.

Plus, there’s another reason not to base your game design on player feedback: Players often change their opinions or stop playing entirely.

Let’s return briefly to the empirical approach and quantitative data, with the mindset that social liberal player feedback isn’t actually shared governance but rather just more data – qualitative data.

How do you know that a particular set of data or interpretation will hold true for the future? Many players could suddenly start playing as Spies for some reason. Maybe one day, suddenly your entire player-based economy uses Stone of Jordans as currency instead of gold or gems. Or tomorrow, gravity could suddenly cease to exist.

This is, more or less, the core problem of empiricism as posed by David Hume: How do we know that observable phenomena will continue to act that way, consistently, in the future?

People are much more unstable than the laws of nature, whether in their feedback and rants on forums or their erratic playstyles that could abruptly change upon reading a guide or watching a YouTube video of a strategy.

We can’t collect more player statistics or solicit more player feedback in order to decide whether collecting statistics or feedback is good; that is, we can’t use induction to prove the validity of induction because that’s circular logic.

However, that very reasoning about using logic is a form of deduction from a set of premises – and to prove the validity of deduction, we can’t use deduction because that’s circular logic too – so we must use induction to prove the validity of deduction … but we just used deduction to argue for the fallibility of induction!

It’s okay if you’re confused – so was Hume. In the end, he adopted a kind of common sense “wait and see” approach, a type of practical skepticism. “Don ’t worry about whether it will hold true forever, but just worry about whether it holds true for now.”

And that, I guess, is a philosophical justification for frequent game patches, MMOs and Valve’s “games as services” mantra (as of this writing, there have been 150 patches to Team Fortress 2.)

Compare this attitude to the classic Aristotelian conception of player-centrism – players might’ve complained that “Mega Man is too hard because of Cold Fusion Man” – and Capcom’s response probably would’ve been, “How did you get this number?”

Suddenly Aristotle doesn’t look so pluralistic and liberal anymore – instead, it seems immovable, static and unresponsive.

Perhaps we must accept that a “good” game design is only good for a while, until the player data indicates it isn’t good anymore – and then you redesign and rebalance it until it’s good again. This is distinctly a player-centric notion, the idea that a developer must “do right” by the community of players.

So what makes a good game?

Perhaps it’s the willingness to change it.

Robert Yang is currently an MFA student studying “Design and Technology” at Parsons, The New School for Design. Before, he studied English and taught game design at UC Berkeley. If he’s famous for anything, it’s probably for his artsy-fartsy Half-Life 2 mod series “Radiator” that’s still (slowly) being worked on.

Before we look more closely at the philosophy of art (or “aesthetics”) and games, let’s just briefly consider some of the answers for that notorious question: “Are games art?”

- YES, says Tim Schafer, because games can express thoughts and feelings just like art can. Shadow of the Colossus made me and my dad cry! Afterward, we sat in a dark room in profound silence for an hour.

- WHO CARES? implies Matthew Burns. Instead we should go do something that’s actually important, like playing videogames.

- NO, says Roger Ebert, because art is about an artist; if the player determines the outcome, that flexibility betrays the artist’s intent. Tragedy is satisfying to witness, but players will rarely choose to plunge themselves into it – they want the “good ending.”

- NO, says Tale of Tales, because art is dead and games are alive – comatose maybe, but still alive. Blame the coma on games that favor established settings and scenarios over innovation and creativity.

While there are clearly some differences of opinion on whether games are art, we still fundamentally regard them as merely “differences of opinion.” Relativistic notions of individual rights and personal freedom have flooded our contemporary sense of aesthetics. Anything can be art, almost anything can be liked by anyone, and everyone has their own personal tastes in things and their experience of art.

Well, that’s kind of the position that Ebert eventually retreated to in July 2010 – that games still weren’t art for him, but maybe they’re art for someone else. So what makes a good game? The existence of any fans who will argue that it’s good.

But artistic appreciation was much more rigid in Plato’s time. He argued specifically for certain values like “beauty” and “harmony” as important aspects of art, but with some stipulations.

For instance, picture a circle in your head. It’s probably a perfect circle. Now try to draw one freehand, or with a stencil, or using the “Circle” tool in Photoshop.

Any physical manifestation of that circle, no matter how hard you try, is always going to be slightly off from that perfect circle – by just a few pixels, molecules or atoms. Similarly, any attempted physical manifestations of ideal beauty (i.e. the “art” a human produces) will always be just slightly off from that ideal, existing only as mere imitations of the perfect mental image.

Many philosophers weren’t satisfied with this idea of beauty founded on rigid principles of harmony and such. They coined a “sublime” separate from beauty. This “sublime” was more about witnessing overwhelming profoundness, admitting that it’s beyond your puny human ability to comprehend it; as if you ’re looking down at Earth from orbit, or watching a nuclear bomb explode. It isn’t necessarily indicative of anything, good or bad, tasteful or disgusting, etc. (Some philosophers also tried to distinguish between different kinds of this “awe,” between weak awe and strong awe, and so forth.)

That account of the “sublime” is what supports Schafer’s answer, which is one of the most common “Yes” responses invoked by gamers. What makes a good game? At least one in-game moment that stirs up awe or profound emotion of some kind.

Some might argue that there is no longer any single value like “beauty” or “truth” or “sublime” to unify art today. Which isn’t bad; in trying to conform to any single value like that, perhaps the artist is actually stifling their own expression.

That’s a justification for Tale of Tales’ “No” response, and personally I’m a little sympathetic to that argument. What makes a good game? Not blindly following formal conventions and forcing players to do what they’ve done before.

Then there’s a whole tradition of aesthetics arguing that art isn’t necessarily beautiful or sublime or dead – that art can be practical and useful as a tool.

You might dismiss such “art” as surprisingly decent state-sponsored propaganda, poorly designed and thinly veiled advertisements, or the common groan- inducing movie tie-in game with short scenes from the film as unlockable “extras.”

But no, those are corrupt commercial applications of art and bad examples of art as a tool, argues Marxist aesthetics. Most art has been co-opted by the powerful to keep the powerless in a state of constant distraction – this art, along with culture, political institutions and religion (“opiate of the masses”) forms the “superstructure” that keeps the powerless in a state of “false consciousness.”

That gross oversimplification is more or less how Marxism feels about art – in fact, it would probably point menacingly at videogames as a startlingly dangerous type of mind control, distracting us with a fictional war against the Zerg instead of our real-life ongoing class struggle against the rich.

To fight such empty entertainment, Marxism would argue for a new revolutionary type of game that highlights economic inequities in society, the growing power of the rich and the weakness of the poor. Existing long before Marxism but now heavily influenced by it, this artistic tradition is known as “social realism:” a good game fights for social justice in the world by representing it and critiquing it.

Many game developers operate in this tradition. Molleindustria seeks to “free videogames from the ‘dictatorship of entertainment,’ using them instead to describe pressing social needs” with well-designed satirical flash games like the McDonalds Game and Oilgarchy. The “Newsgames” project aims to coin a new genre that merges journalism with mechanics. Games for Change advocates new ways to bring awareness to human rights issues, poverty and global conflicts. I would also argue that the

Metal Gear Solid series, BioShock series, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Deus Ex operate in a kind of a social realist context and attack the values they see as oppression. The list goes on.

But not all Marxists agreed that social realism best advanced social justice; some felt it was too vulgar, too obvious or too comfortable.

One famous Marxist artist, Bertolt Brecht, argued that experimenting with the form itself – whether in theater, painting or perhaps videogames – would be intrinsically political because it would force the viewer or player to be more critical. Breaking the fourth wall and directly addressing the player, for example, might force him or her to reflect on their real-life actions.

A good game fights for social justice through formal experimentation that encourages players to reflect on themselves.

Another incredibly influential neo-Marxist theorist, Theodor Adorno, claimed that art should not be political at all. He argued that artworks (like videogames) wee forms of expression, symbols of our personal freedom to will things into existence. By using art (or games) as a tool, for commercial exploitation or social good or otherwise, you sacrifice your freedom to some outside purpose – and sacrificing any artistic freedom is the ultimate betrayal of art and fosters that Marxist “false consciousness” within the artist.

By this account, a good game doesn’t advance social justice. A good game remains as apolitical as possible. Games should not be used as tools; art is art and games are games.

Now we’re back where we started, muttering horribly pointless things like “art is art” and you’re probably rolling your eyes.

Again, talking about art like this might feel useless because there are no definitive judgments to be made about art. Everyone has their own opinion and taste in art and we generally respect that as a matter of personal preference in this postmodern age.

Maybe everyone had it wrong. Games aren’t art – but not because some of some theoretical idea of authorship or the “sublime” or Marxist aesthetics. Games aren’t art because so few people are making them compared to the huge amount consuming them.

Games aren’t art because learning how to code is still too daunting, while comparatively anyone can pick up a paintbrush or a camera and start making work. The most user-friendly solutions like Unreal, Unity and GameMaker still require substantial programming knowledge. Even if you do manage to make something that works, good luck getting istribution on any console!

So maybe games aren’t art because you aren’t making them. Maybe a good game is a game that you made. Maybe we need more and better paintbrushes – more intuitive ones that my grandmother can use.

In this sense, games won’t be art until there are millions of videogames, designed by everyone, flooding the marketplace like in 1983 with the crash of the game industry. Except in this glorious future we wo’t call it “flooding the marketplace” because we won’t commodify games like that anymore and your children will laugh at you for doing so. No, we won’t call it “the crash.”

It’s the end of the line. We went from Aristotle and Plato to empiricism with David Hume to Marxist aesthetics with Theodor Adorno. It’s been a haphazard, horribly incomplete survey across several different branches of Western philosophy. Some would say it was rambling – and to them, I would counter that all who wander are not lost.

But now our philosophical wandering is more or less ending here, with our discussion of more experimental, emerging game design practices. There aren’t any more large sweeping fields of philosophy left to generalize, save for one.

Postmodernism is generally an umbrella term that encompasses several different philosophies: deconstructionism, post-structuralism, post-post- deconstructralism … okay, I made up that last one. But the operative word here is “structure” – such games are generally trying to interact with the form of a game itself or the underlying structure, chopping up rulesets and mechanics and criticizing them. These kinds of games are neither roller coasters nor playgrounds; they’re big messy interventions.

Games like You Have to Burn the Rope or pOnd exist as somewhat cynical attacks on the modernist program of games we’ve been discussing previously in the series, targeting “accessibility” and “artistic value” respectively. Here, a good game critiques popular design practice, often through satire, parody, or humor.

You Have to Burn the Rope gives explicit directions on how to beat the game – such as the instruction in the title itself – which runs counter to the genre convention of boss fights in platformers, where a player must carefully observe a boss to identify weaknesses and conceptualize a moving / firing solution. In doing so, this game argues that if we are willing to make such games easier, why not do away with any and all meaningful concept of difficulty? Well, for one thing, the result is absurd. (Meanwhile, pOnd is best played without knowing anything more about it. To analyze it would destroy it.)

These games promote deep knowledge of genre traditions in mainstream videogames and they’re asking us to be more critical of them. They’re the games that designers make in order to remain in dialogue with one another.

That’s where our traditional philosophizing ends, with the postmodern games that analyze the form of a game itself.

Why? Well, part of the reason is that philosophy itself is even more uncertain of what it is today. No other discipline in the world is so intent on its own destruction. “Philosophy is dead” will often be the central idea of half the papers at any given conference. Thus, my past practice of pigeon-holing game design practices into philosophical movements is no longer tenable

Instead, I’m going to attempt a survey of emerging game design practices that don’t fit neatly under a philosophy. Or maybe they do, in which case you should tell me.

Generative Proceduralism is about abdicating developership of a game. It’s about a game that partly designs itself, or a painting that would paint itself. Sure, we can argue about what an author meant by a particular word, or why a composer applied a crescendo at the end of a piece, but what if a level designed itself, and how would it reconcile authorial intent with that? This approach argues that a good game is comfortable in relinquishing strict authored control.
(Compare this to the highly scripted, highly linear haunted houses of the Call of Duty and Medal of Honor series.)

Do we blame Derek Yu for an impossible cave level generated in Spelunky? Do we blame a fictional AI director for “screwing us over” even though it’s just a collection of random number seeds and formulas, as in Left 4 Dead? Such games relegate some of the design work to the game itself – and possibly the most ambitious games, such as Fa?ade, attempt to procedurally generate NPC backstories and entire narrative arcs.

My personal favorite variant of this approach are those games that are secretly procedurally generated. The masocore platformer Dungeon randomly generates a number seed based on the player’s computer details, and that number seed introduces a random bug or mode to the game. Thus, players offered conflicting accounts of gameplay – on some computers, spikes were secretly taller or shorter, or maybe a level would be impossible to complete – because they were all
actually playing slightly different games.

But don’t confuse this for the similar sounding philosophy of …

Proceduralism, as coined by Ian Bogost, argues that games (often what we traditionally call “art games”) make aesthetic arguments through rules and mechanics. Through this “procedural rhetoric,” a good game allows players to explore emotional and psychological spaces, or perhaps offers a way of exploring pre-existing commercial games.

For example, in the Hitman series, many player strategies revolve around disguising oneself as an NPC with a high-level of security access around the level, usually as one of the high-ranking bodyguards assigned to guard the target. Thus, Hitman games make a point about the powerful: They may surround themselves with security, but the power they delegate to their security is almost always their undoing.

Or look at Beyond Good & Evil, a single-player game about the personal conflicts inherent in photojournalism. Throughout the game you receive points for photographing rare creatures – but at one point in the game, one of these rare creatures is about to devour your NPC friend. Do you rescue your friend, or do you take a quick snapshot first, to score valuable points? In photojournalism missions during times of war, to what degree is the journalist embedded in
the conflict?

It is questionable whether IO Interactive or Ubisoft designed these games with such larger points in mind. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t; in the end, it ’s irrelevant. What matters is that the player extrapolated that meaning from the game through their interaction with a system of gameplay mechanics. In this way, proceduralism isn’t just a philosophy of game design, but also a philosophy of play and interpretation, which represents a significant shift from
how we used to look at games in Part 1.

But some designers see proceduralism as a dead end, as more of the same structured gameplay of commercial titles instead of an interpretive shift that allows a deeper range of artistic expression. The vanguard of these designers is generally considered to be a developer couple known as Tale of Tales, who argues for a radical new genre of videogames:

Notgames borrow some elements from videogames – control schemes, approaches to real-time 3D graphics – but otherwise seek to break free of the rules and mechanics that constrain games today. It argues that rules and mechanics create gameplay loops of repeated actions, thus allowing mastery, but why craft an experience that is intentionally repetitive? When we notice how repetitive a mechanic is, we call it grinding. But in this view, almost all mechanics are a
form of grinding, so why try to hide it?

Instead, notgames seek to replace this perpetual grinding with emotional abstraction like mood, tone and theme, which often relies heavily on audio and visual direction. Here, good (not)games don’t rely on mechanics; rather, they rely on simple exploration of an artfully realized psychological space. Tale of Tales’ The Graveyard and Dan Pinchbeck’s Dear Esther are two seminal works in this approach.

Many designers dislike this genre and criticize its relative lack of a canon and overemphasis on theory, that it talks too much talk and needs to walk the walk. Other designers (like me) are cautiously optimistic but aren’t exactly sure how to make a game that isn’t a game, and are waiting for Tale of Tales and other notgames practitioners to articulate something more concrete.

There is also the argument that it is never possible to break free of rules: The instant you implement some sort of interaction, that very interaction is constrained by rules. If you can simply move the camera with your mouse, that is a rule in itself; whether or not those mouse movements are meaningful and compelling, however, determines whether it is a good rule or a bad rule. By this account, pure notgames are impossible to create and exist only as low- interaction videogames.

In “The Question Concerning Technology,” the German philosopher Martin Heidegger argues that people need a “free” relationship with technology because right now, we’re enslaved by it. When you begin Grand Theft Auto IV and it instructs you to “follow the yellow line” and you do it without protest or forethought, have you actually made a choice for yourself? Are you enslaved?

Proceduralism, accessibility, notgames, newsgames, social gaming. We are on the verge of something both wonderful and frightening. What could become paradise here and now could also be hell itself tomorrow.

This, I think, is the hardest question facing videogame design today, that no one wants to bring up: What damage is being done by videogames, and what is the designer’s responsibility to mitigate that damage? How are today’s videogames shaping thought?

To believe that there are only “good games” is horribly naive; this entire series of articles has been focused on debunking this collective idea of “good ” and how we do not have a central idea of “good” as it pertains to videogame design. Alternatively, where is our sense of a “bad game”?

I’m not talking about a game that you found to be poorly designed and stupid; I’m not talking about sexy, violent videogames demonized by a 24-hour news cycle; I’m not even talking about the player exploitation of FarmVille.

There’s a “bad” out there that’s not even on our radar. A “bad” that is difficult to articulate or even fully conceive of.

Maybe someone should do something about it.