作者：Sande Chen

你是否听过“请注意做笔记”的建议？作为一名年轻的编剧，我发现这是一个让人困惑的建议，特别是在我的首次好莱坞会议时，导演说了一件事，然后制作人彻底反驳了导演，并要求进行导演不可能同意的内容改写。然而他们却微笑地进行协商，似乎已经达成了共识。到底发生了什么？如果在每场会议中都有一个反馈解释者，所有的一切便会简单许多。

有关反馈的问题并不是每个人都能清楚地说出哪里出错了。而且人们可能只是不善于提供反馈。他们只能告诉你他们在看材料时的感受，而你也只能无奈地指出只要他们读了那些内容便能够理解一切。这里的关键是，如果他们遗漏了某些内容，那么这种遗漏本身就是一种反馈。在这里真正重要的不是实际的文字，而是你能从用户体验中理解到的内容。

在2015年New York Comic Con Livestream的座谈小组关于电子游戏写作的讨论中，当被问到如何处理玩家反馈时我便提到了这个话题。我描述了设计师在一款MMO中对玩家反馈做出反应的情况，以及最终如何导致情况变得更加糟糕。

feedback(from baike.so)

在这个例子中，玩家反应这个MMO游戏世界太吵闹且太苛刻。整体看来非常无聊。有太多需要交流的任务而缺少足够的杀戮。我发现作者尝试着创造一个故事，但是很少有玩家觉得该故事有趣，特别是当他们很希望在游戏中能够杀死某人时。你大可以指责玩家，但事实上在一款以杀戮为中心的MMO中，玩家想要杀戮是再正常不过了（游戏邦注：毕竟这并不是一款关于外交的MMO游戏）。

设计师记下了笔记并在下一次发行时改变了游戏战术。现在游戏中的交流任务减少了，并添加了更多杀戮，收集以及boss对抗的任务。这完全就是关于打打杀杀的游戏。但是玩家的反应却比之前更糟糕，因为他们在游戏中会遇到许多瓶颈。玩家抱怨他们必须杀死无数暴民，但是反复杀死同样的敌人却又很无聊。到底是怎么了？

现在你也许能够理解玩家抱怨一切东西的反馈了。他们会抱怨故事任务，然后还会抱怨杀戮任务。比起基于表面去看待反馈并用杀戮任务替换掉所有故事任务，设计师应该意识到这其实是关于节奏的问题。故事任务并不是问题所在。杀戮任务也不是。它们只是用户体验的一部分。

在今天，我们很幸运能够快速获得玩家的反馈。但是这种关系并不是对抗性的。关于一个人有何感受是没有对错的。然而我们却需要创造一个过滤器去更好地理解这种反馈。有效校准用户体验便是真正专注于玩家反馈的一种方法。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转发，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Player vs. Designer: Tracking User Experience

by Sande Chen

Have you heard the advice, “Take the note under the note”? As a young screenwriter, I found this advice baffling, especially when in my first Hollywood meeting, the director said one thing and then the producer completely contradicted the director, asking for a rewrite that I thought was impossible if I followed the director’s wishes. Yet, they were smiling in agreement, seemingly both on the same page. What the heck was going on? Life would be much simpler if there were a feedback interpreter at every meeting.

The problem with feedback is that not everyone can clearly enunciate what is wrong. Moreover, people may be just bad at giving feedback. They can only tell you what they felt when they went through the material while you fight back the urge to point out that if only they had read this section, they would understand everything. The thing is, if they missed that section, that’s feedback in itself. What’s important is not the actual words in the feedback, but what you can interpret about the user experience.

Last week at the 2015 New York Comic Con Livestream panel, Writing for Video Games, which was broadcast on Twitch, I alluded to this topic when asked about how to deal with player feedback. I described a situation whereby designers reacted to player feedback in a MMO and then ended up making the situation worse.

In this example, the player response to this MMO world was loud and critical. The whole thing was too boring. Too many talk-to quests and not much killing. I could see that the writer(s) were trying to develop a story, but not many players found the story interesting, especially when they wanted to kill something. You could blame the players, but the fact is, in a kill-centric MMO, players want to kill. It’s not a MMO about diplomacy.

The designers took that note and in the next release, changed tactics. Now, there were very few talk-to quests and lots of Kill-10, Kill-Collect, and boss fights. It was Kill, Kill, Kill. But the players were more upset than ever because bottlenecks were appearing everywhere. Players complained that they had to kill hundreds of these mobs and how it was so boring to kill the same thing over and over. What happened?

Now, you might interpret this feedback as players complaining about everything. They complained about story quests and then they complained about kill quests. It might seem that way, but let’s examine that first note more closely. Instead of taking the feedback at face value and replacing all the story quests with kill quests, the designers might have realized that this was an issue of pacing. Story quests aren’t evil. Neither are kill quests. They’re just part of the user experience.

In this day and age, we’re lucky that we can get player feedback so quickly. This relationship doesn’t have to be adversarial. There’s no right or wrong in how somebody feels. However, we do have to develop a filter to interpret the feedback. Zeroing in on the user experience is one way of putting player feedback in focus.（source：Gamasutra）