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如何在游戏中有效使用程序生成内容

发布时间:2016-08-29 11:29:36 Tags:,,,,

作者:Michael Cook

程序生成已经出现很长很长一段时间了。现在《Rogue》已经迎来了40周年纪念日,《Elite》也已经诞生了30年,甚至是较为年轻的《洞穴探险》也问世好几年了。在过去几十年里我们见证了一些早前的理念得到了完善也见证了一些全新理念的诞生。但即使经过这样的进化与发展,有一个区域却是始终未发生任何改变的,而每一次当它引出任何问题时它似乎也悄然地希望我们能够忽视它。随着《无人深空》的发行,我觉得我们必须正视这一问题了。即我们需要认真去谈论我们对于程序生成的看法了。

No Man's Sky (from gamasutra)

No Man’s Sky (from gamasutra)

《无人深空》的第一个预告片在发行时便引起了不小的轰动,即它呈现了一些带有多样化有机生命体且非常生动的行星,并传达了这里可能进行的所有形式的太空冒险。它同样也包含了一些吸引人的短语,如“Every Atom Procedural”和“Every Planet Unique”。其实就语言本身来看这并不是营销游戏的有效方式。就像在《以撒的结合》在Steam的页面上便承诺玩家永远都不会玩到相同的游戏,但当所有人坐下来时发现自己每一次玩的都是《以撒的结合》时也不会因此而皱眉。而关于《无人深空》第一个预告片最让人惊讶的便是人们对游戏的要求的接受度,甚至是在对于游戏有更深入的了解前。

程序生成拥有一个你应该会熟悉的词汇表。它会使用像发现,独特,无尽,永远,重玩等词。虽然这些单词的使用通常都不会有错,但是它们却会有意或无意地误导人们,因为它们也带有很多不同的理解方式。就像“Every Planet Unique”也能够表示每个行星拥有一个非常复杂的科幻背景去填充一个带有两个组成部分的《星际迷航》章节。这同样也可以表示行星上的一个演示与宇宙中的其它演示并不相同。独特性通常都是用于一些缺少技术性的表达方式中。就像Kate Compton在她关于程序生成器的文章中便说道,每碗燕麦粥都是独特的。

我们很少会去询问这样的语言,所以我们便不会去讨论这些概念并考虑它们在游戏中是否有意义。在这里我不只是表示去明确开发者能否理解,我同样也想说明作为开发者的我们并不擅长在面向公众前判断我们的声明是否合理。如果我们声明玩家不能见到彼此,那么对于星球的拥有感是否还有意义?如果我们声明每颗星球都是独特的那么“真正的发现”的美感是否还有意义?从定义上看这些理念其实并不矛盾,但事实上是我们很少会去考虑这些问题,更别说对其作出总结。因为我们缺少能够传达有关程序生成的真正语言,所以我们不能去检查这些声明的矛盾性。我们只是深陷于自己的理解和心理模式中并单方面地希望它们能和记者或游戏开发者的想法相匹配。

那么我们能否做得更好呢?如果我们能够使用具体语言去讨论程序生成(或任何技术),我们便能够鼓励人们做出明确的总结。或许我们需要采用不同方式去讨论程序生成,即并不会笼统地去总结这些内容。近来我一直在思考程序生成是否能够更好地专注于其反面内容,即选取一个内容并解释它是如何生成的。在这里我的生成器将决定该在哪里隐藏内容,如何绘制日落的余晖,法人名称来自哪里等等。我们可以让人们了解我们的生成器到底在做些什么,从而让它们变得不那么复杂或难以触及。

但这并不是说我认为所有人都可以使用这一方法。有些生成器能够受利于其大规模,如《沙漠高尔夫球》无止境的高尔夫球场,并且可以通过其规模传达这样的感觉。也有些游戏会因为保持缄默而受益。就像我们并不需要清楚《变形》的岛屿是如何生成的,我也不想知道答案。而对于许多其它的生成器来说,你可能会认为解释它是如何处理某些内容会显得很无聊?或许这并没有错。的确有很多生成器很无聊,我也认为我们想要通过更大的数值和更强大的陈述去掩盖这一事实。不过作为设计师和美术师的我们却需要相信它能够达到预期的效果,如果它不值得我们进行详细说明,我们就不要提及它便可。你的游戏也有可能包含图像着色器和物理引擎等等。而它们也是游戏创造的组成部分。

这便是我为何会认为这一方法是有帮助的,因为通过讲述我们的生成器是如何创造每一个内容,我们便能够更好地问自己生成器的哪一部分最有趣。就像关于《无人深空》的大多数报道都是关于它的行星和宇宙,但其实这却不是游戏中最具创造性的内容。如果将其与《纽约客》中关于游戏的动物叫声是如何生成的文章相比,你会发现后者既没有声明,也没有任何模糊的语言,只有关于基于一个很酷的生成器的有趣的作品的内容,并且即使未了解其中背景的我也能够轻松理解这一内容。显然模糊不清的内容不可能带给人们任何帮助,反而这只会导致我们去忽视那些真正优秀的内容。

No Man's Sky (from gamasutra)

No Man’s Sky (from gamasutra)

开发者可以说出他们想要的内容,因为只有他们需要去面对自己的市场营销结果。但毕竟没有游戏开发者是一座孤岛,我们关于技术的讨论也将帮助那些会阅读下一款程序生成游戏的研究或预览的玩家或评论者更好地理解这些内容。如果我们能够清楚地说明,解释我们的游戏是如何运行的并鼓励他们能够和我们一样对游戏内容感到兴奋,那么这不仅能够帮助他们有效理解我们的游戏,也能够帮助他们去理解所有使用了同样理念的游戏。而如果我们突显了程序生成是一种魔法的理念,如果我们表示这是由复杂且难以言状的“数学”所操控,如果我们使用一些模糊的语言去提高人民的期待值,那就等于我们将迫使人们拥有一些不同的感受并且他们将可能带着怀疑和悲观感去看待我们的下一款游戏。

程序生成的旧语言必须被废弃,相反地我们需要使用一种全新方式去传达我们所做的事以及这么做的乐趣。我们需要明确程序生成是一种黑暗艺术的理念并告诉人们这也是一种可行,容易理解且有趣的内容。或许在一开始它会显得有点吓人,即看似我们好像在创造一些脆弱且带有缝隙的内容,但事实上人们并不会介意这些内容。英文他们总是喜欢缝隙。他们也喜欢那些生成器所创造的各种愚蠢的内容。比起准确的答案,我认为用户更希望我们能够诚实且清楚地面对他们。

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

Alien Languages: How We Talk About Procedural Generation

by Michael Cook

Procedural generation has been around for a long, long time now. We are approaching the 40th anniversary of Rogue, Elite has already had its 30th birthday, and even sprightly young Spelunky is coming up to double digits. We’ve seen old ideas refined and polished over those decades, and new ideas experimented with and tested out. But throughout this evolution and growth one area has remained largely the same, swept under the rug every time it caused problems, hoping that we could forget about it for a little longer. With the release of No Man’s Sky this month, I feel like it simply can’t be ignored any longer. We need to talk about how we talk about procedural generation.

The first trailer for No Man’s Sky caused an incredible stir when it launched, showing vivid planets with diverse organic life on it, implying all manner of space adventures. It also included several interesting phrases which stood out to me, including Every Atom Procedural and Every Planet Unique. On its own, this language was not a surprising angle for a game to take in its marketing. The Binding of Isaac’s Steam page, for example, promises ‘you never play the same game twice’ but no-one so much as raises an eyebrow when they sit down and discover that they are, shockingly, playing The Binding Of Isaac every time. What was surprising about No Man’s Sky’s first trailer was the degree to which people were buying into its claims, before almost anything was known about the game (before even the developers were truly sure what they were making, I imagine).

Procedural generation has a vocabulary that you’ll most likely be familiar with. It uses words like discover, unique, endless, forever, replayable. It talks in numbers and powers of ten, and bigger is always better. These words are not necessarily used falsely (although I’m sure they are in some instances, but I’m not here to cast aspersions), but intentionally or not they do mislead people, because they are very easily interpreted in a lot of different ways. ‘Every Planet Unique’ might mean that each planet has a complex sci-fi backstory rich enough to fill a two-part Star Trek episode. It might also mean that, mathematically speaking, there’s a rock somewhere on the planet that doesn’t look like any other rock in the universe. Uniqueness almost always is used in the weakest, most technically correct way possible. As Kate Compton quipped in her amazing post about procedural generators, every bowl of oatmeal is unique.

We rarely interrogate such language, and as a result we are not accustomed to discussing these concepts and thinking critically about whether they make sense in a game. By this I don’t just mean figuring out if developers are making sense, I mean also that as developers we are not good at evaluating whether our claims are sensible before going public with them. Does a sense of ownership over named planets make sense if we are also claiming players are unlikely to meet each other? Does an aesthetic of “true discovery” make sense if we are also claiming every planet is unique and wondrous? It’s not that these ideas are contradictory by definition, but we’re barely even considering the questions at all, much less drawing conclusions about them. We can’t examine these claims for their contradictions, because we lack a shared, well-understood language to communicate in about procedural generation. We are stuck with our own interpretations and mental models and the hope that they match up with the journalist whose article we are reading, or the developer whose game we are following.

Could we do better? When we use extreme language to talk about procedural generators (or any other kind of technology), we encourage people to draw extreme conclusions. Perhaps we need a different way of talking about procedural generators, one that shies away from making grand sweeping statements about its size. Lately, I’ve been wondering if procedural generators would do better to focus on the exact opposite, to take a single piece of content and explain how it is made. Here’s how my generator decides where to hide goodies. Here’s how it painted that particular shade of sunset. Here’s where that joke corporation name comes from. We can get people to connect to what our generators are doing, to make them seem less fantastical and unknowably complex.

That’s not to say I think everyone should take this approach. Some generators benefit from their vastness, like Desert Golfing’s mystically unending golf course, and talking about its scale helps get across those feelings. Other games benefit from not saying anything at all. I don’t need to know how Proteus’ islands are generated, and I kind of like not knowing. For many other generators, you might think that explaining how its processes work would be kind of… boring? You’d probably be right. A lot of generators are boring, and I think that’s one of the reasons why we reach for the big numbers and strong statements, to cover up this fact. Instead, we should be confident as designers and artists that we are using it for a desired effect, and if it isn’t worth mentioning in great detail, we can simply not mention it. Your game probably includes graphics shaders and a physics system, too. They’re part of making games.

That’s why I think this approach might be helpful, because by telling stories about what our generators do to make a single piece of content, it helps us ask ourselves what bits of our generator are most interesting. Most of the coverage of No Man’s Sky is focused on its planets and universe, which draws the wildest claims, but turns out not to be wildly new or innovative. Compare that with this New Yorker article about how its animal calls are generated. No wild claims. No ambiguous language. A focused story about interesting work on a cool generator, told in a way that I felt was accessible to me even with no audio background at all. Ambiguity doesn’t help anyone, and often it can lead to us brushing over the really good stuff.

It’s fair to ask why any of this matters – developers can say what they want, only they have to deal with the consequences of their marketing. But no game developer is an island, and how we talk about technology informs the understanding of the players and critics who will go on to read about the latest research or a preview of the next procedural game. If we speak with clarity, explain how our games work, encourage them to be excited about the same things we are, then we help them understand not just our games, but all games that use these ideas. If we reinforce the idea that procedural generation is magic, if we say it is governed by complex, nameless “maths”, if we raise people’s expectations with ambiguous language, then we encourage people to feel othered, and to treat with suspicion and pessimism the next game that comes along with a similar attitude.

The old language of procedural generation needs to be done away with, and in its stead we need a new way of communicating about what we do, and why it’s interesting. We need to debunk the idea of procedural generation as a dark art, and show people that it is accessible, understandable and interesting. It might feel scary at first, it might feel like we’re making our work vulnerable and pointing out all the cracks, but people won’t mind. They love the cracks. They love the stupid stuff generators do. They don’t expect all the answers right now, I don’t think, they just expect us to be honest and clear with them.(source:Gamasutra

 


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