作者：Rob Lockhart

本文是受到Jenova Chen在过去几年里有关通过游戏唤醒一些深刻情感的演讲的启发。Jenova认为这是游戏作为一种艺术形式获得广泛认可的最大障碍之一。我也对此表示认同。

此外我认为通过单人游戏去唤醒特定情感存在难度级别。从叙述上来看确实如此，但我不会在未进行任何研究与思考之前便认定这一观点。而在互动体验中，我认为这是没错的。但这并不意味着我们需要基于这些情感的价值做出判断，反倒应该基于它们在单人游戏中可能出现的难易水平进行判断。

较容易出现的情感：

欲望

害怕

厌恶

厌烦

出现难度一般的情感：

敬畏

好奇

骄傲与羞耻

挫折

较难出现的情感：

悲痛

平静

懊悔

幽默

不可能出现的情感：

嫉妒

信任

轻视

怜悯

喜爱

“容易”出现的情感都是一些基本的反应。它们往往是自然而然的反应而不是真正发自内在。对于人类来说，只要使用合适的激励因子便能够唤醒这些情感。就像为了激发讨厌情感，游戏可以提供给玩家他们在成长过程中学会的应该去避免的东西，并且他们不会对此感到害怕。而为了激发害怕情感，我们可以创造一个显而易见的威胁。从进化论观点来看，快感便是最容易被激发的情感。无聊也只需要一些多余的内容。

我们还发现这些主要情感通常都会和其它情感结合在一起。就像恐怖电影便始终结合了害怕，欲望和讨厌情感。你可能也会想到结合了害怕与无聊的悬疑内容，所以在那些最简单的情感中我们也能发现一些复杂性。

“容易”列表中的情感似乎都是非常基础的情感。即使脱离了社会，这些情感也是生存的必要元素。而与之相对立的便是那些需要相关意识或者难以从意识从脱离开来的情感。这便是我为什么会认为它们处于不可能的边缘之上：在一个故事中人们可能会与经历了某一情感的主角形成共鸣。在互动环境下，你则是主角。在多人游戏中，你将遇到其他拥有任何情感的玩家。而在单人游戏体验中，你所接触的将只有游戏本身。所以这些情况将组成从最“内在”的情感到最“外在”的情感范畴。

出现难度一般的情感仍然可作为游戏规范。像骄傲，羞耻和受挫都是朝着目标努力并最终完成目标的自然结果。而创造骄傲，羞耻和受挫情感便是基于平衡性。平衡是一个具有挑战性的目标，同时也是一个基本目标，因为人们都希望游戏能够达到平衡。

敬畏则是技艺与规模的产物。而技艺同时也是人们在高预算游戏中所期待看到的内容。好奇能够受到叙述或游戏玩法的推动。即这是关于提供给玩家不完全的内容。更准确的说，它们必须是让玩家感兴趣的内容。生活便教会我们所有信息都是不完整的，但如果我们对整体故事感兴趣，那些信息便会变得更加吸引人。所以好奇心便是提高玩家用户粘性的有效工具。

bioshock-rapture-city(from gamasutra)

而现在的游戏刚开始接触“较难”出现的情感类别。你可能会认为从一开始在数字游戏中便存在幽默感，但其实直到最近游戏才从其它媒体上引入了幽默感。因为拥有玩笑或情景幽默，游戏总是很有趣，就像戏剧或电影一样。而直至最近游戏才发现了属于自己的幽默形式。像《百米赛跑》和《章鱼奶爸》都是非常典型的例子。

当玩家真正依恋于某物或某人时，他们便有可能激发出悲痛情感。有些人似乎比别人更容易受到悲伤的影响。就像在Valve的《传送门》中，当有些玩家被迫去摧毁自己的传送门时便会有痛彻心扉之感。懊悔是一种深刻的后悔感，而如果玩家可以不断重新加载或重玩游戏，他们便很难会感到后悔。平静是游戏创造者会尽量去避免的一种情感，这或许是因为我们的产业在某种程度上还被街机模式所束缚着。

当我继续致力于游戏创造时，我希望能够呈现出更多情感元素，并基于具有创造性且足够和谐的方式去结合各自情感共鸣。因为游戏设计通常都是受到有趣效果的支配，所以我们有必要投入更多时间去研究各种有趣的效果。

（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）

Emotion in Single-Player Games

by Rob Lockhart

This post was inspired by several talks Jenova Chen has given over the years, all dealing with evoking deep emotion through games. Jenova thinks this is one of the biggest obstacles in the way of mainstream acceptance of games as an art form. I would tend to agree.

Further, I think there is a ranking to the difficulty in evoking certain emotions with a single-player game. This may hold true for narratives, in general, but I wouldn’t make that claim without a lot of further research and thought. In interactive experiences, I think these are reasonable assertions about emotion. This is not meant to be a judgement on the value of these emotions, only on how difficult they are to produce in a single player game.

Easy:

Lust
Fear
Disgust
Boredom

Medium:

Awe
Curiosity
Pride & Shame
Frustration

Hard:

Grief
Serenity
Remorse
Humor

Impossible?:

Jealousy
Trust
Contempt
Pity
Love

‘Easy’ emotions are basically stimulus response. They are reactive, not introspective. For humans, evoking these emotions is a simple matter of providing the right stimulus. To stimulate Disgust, you give the player something gross — something which human evolution has taught us to avoid, but not to fear. To stimulate fear, we create an apparent threat. From an evolutionary perspective, it should be obvious why titillation is the easiest of all. Boredom requires only redundancy.

We see these primal emotions most often in combination with others. The slasher film has a long history of combining fear and lust and disgust all in one work. You might think of suspense as a combination of fear and boredom, so there is some complexity to be found even amongst the simplest feelings.

The emotions in the ‘Easy’ category seem to be very raw animal emotions. These are the emotions necessary for survival (and propagation) even outside of any kind of society. On the other end of the spectrum are emotions which require a sentient being to relate to, or something that is nearly indistinguishable from sentient. That’s why I think they may be borderline impossible: In a narrative one can empathize with a main character who is experiencing an emotion. In an interactive setting, that main character is you. In a multiplayer game, you can relate to the other players with any of these emotions. In a single-player experience, who do you have to relate to but the game itself? The whole array forms a spectrum from the most ‘internal’ emotions, to the most ‘external.’

The medium emotions are still fairly standard for games. Pride, shame, and frustration are natural consequences of struggling towards a goal and finally accomplishing it. Creating pride, shame, and frustration is therefore mostly a matter of balancing. Balancing is a challenging subject, but a largely mechanical one – it is expected that a game will be balanced.

Awe is a product of craftsmanship and of scale. Craftsmanship, too, has come to be expected among games with large budgets. Curiosity can be driven either by narrative or by gameplay. In both cases, it’s a matter of providing an incomplete picture of something. More specifically, it must be something the player cares about. Life has taught all of us that most information is incomplete, but it only becomes compelling if we have an interest in knowing the whole story. Curiosity is a function of engagement.

Games are just beginning to tap into the ‘Hard’ category of emotions. You might argue that there has been humor in digital games almost since the beginning, but until fairly recently the humor in games has been borrowed from other media. Games were funny because they had jokes, or situational humor, just like theater or motion pictures. Only recently have games found their own form of humor. Games like QWOP and Octodad are prime examples.

Grief comes once the player has formed a true attachment to something or someone. Some people seem to be more susceptible to a feeling of grief than others. Some players reported a twinge of grief when they were forced to destroy their companion cube in Valve’s Portal (a great example of a bond created by gameplay rather than narrative). Remorse is a deep regret, and regrets are hard to form when players can always reload or replay a game. Serenity (which is often confused for boredom, even by those experiencing it) was considered so undesirable that it was actively shunned by game creators — perhaps because our industry was still, on some level, in thrall to the arcade paradigm.

As I continue to make games, I plan to bring out the lens of emotion as much as I can, and to combine emotional resonances in novel harmonic ways. Game design is so often governed by interesting effects, I think it’s time we spent more of our time on interesting affects.(source:gamasutra)