作者：Stanislav Costiuc

如果你想学习风险/奖励机制以及它们对于玩家心理的影响，你就应该尝试下《骗局》这款游戏。这是一款程序生成抢劫游戏，并且是完全基于风险/奖励循环。在本文中我将进一步分析《骗局》在风险/奖励循环设置中的突出表现。

swindle(from gamasutra)

奖励

让我们从主要目标开始说起。即赚钱。这非常直接，因为你是一名盗贼，你想要的是钱，所以你将在每个关卡中尽可能获得更多钱。如果你能够确保自己的存活，你的账户便会收到钱财。

而这也引出了一个问题。为什么你会为了获得更多钱而将自己置于危险境地？毕竟你可能会因此被抓被杀，并失去所得而需要以全新生成的角色重新开始，如此看来去避开这样的风险是否会好些？

期限—-100天

《骗局》是通过设置100天期限去解决这一问题。这并不是实时倒数计时。在游戏中，1次抢劫等于1天，你可以自己决定完成1次抢劫的时间。但在100天内，特殊安全系统将被激活，它将阻止任何抢劫行为的出现，所以你将遭遇失败。而你需要拥有足够的钱才能访问该设备并去窃取与摧毁它。

现在你便找到一个让自己身处危险去获取更多利益的理由了。因为如果你不这么做，你便只能束手就擒。很多时候你会思考，抢劫金钱或银行计算机是否值得？你是否应该冒险去获取利益，这么做自己是否好受，或者你是否害怕那些看守钱财的门卫们？在这里我需要再次声明，死亡并不会让你在游戏中遭遇失败，因为你将面对一个全新生成的角色，只不过你所面对的时间不会重置而已。

这只是风险/奖励循环的基础。而《骗局》采取了各种方法去最大化玩家的贪欲。

不同区域

首先，除了主要目标区域外玩家还需要前往5个其它场所。并且每个场所都比之前的场所更具挑战性，同时也会提供给玩家更多奖励。而这里的要点在于，玩家同时也需要去获取更多金钱去开启这些区域的大门。

现在的你肯定不想慢吞吞地在那些最简单的区域收集钱财，因为基于这种方法你不可能在100天内收集到足够的钱。所以你将开始抢钱去进入全新区域，并前往更具挑战性的场所而获得更多钱。带着这种想法，现在的你在获得更多钱之前需要先花费更多钱，这也是你将自己置于风险中去获取最大利益的原因。

关于区域最棒的地方便是每一天，每个区域将提升挑战，并且将伴随着全新的陷阱与障碍。而玩家的默认技能不足以应对这些陷阱。这便将我们引向下一个要点。

升级

玩家可以购买许多升级道具去提升自己的效能（它们同时也会提供一些奖励）。你不需要担心会失去这些升级道具，因为即使变换了角色，这些升级道具还是会留着的。

而因为这些道具都需要钱，你便需要尽可能去赚取更多钱才能完成游戏，也只有赚到更多钱你才能到达那些能够提高奖励的区域，并且你希望能够赚到更多钱去进行升级从而帮助自己更轻松地赚到更多钱且避免遭遇死亡。而这也仍不是全部。

福利

《骗局》同时也会提供给玩家许多获取额外金钱的机会。当然了，人们总是难以抗拒奖励，有谁会不喜欢额外奖励呢？所以除了从抢劫中获取的收益外，你还可以通过如下方法赚钱：

—-来自能力的奖励。这是基于提供给你作为黑客而获得的收益的升级。

—-经验值奖励。每次当你在关卡中窃取至少80%的现金时，你的角色便能获得一个经验值奖励调节器，这能够在你完成关卡后提升你所获得的现金最终数量（游戏邦注：每个全新角色的出现都伴随着重置的调节器）。

—-幽灵奖励，即你可以无需拉响警钟而从每个关卡获取所有利益。

就像游戏所说的那样，你可以在每个关卡中获取更多奖励，但是这么做的额前提是你敢于冒风险。随着100天倒计时即将到头，你也清楚自己需要更多钱，所以你便会迫切采取更多具有风险的决定并去获取更大的奖励。

昙花一现的死亡

最后能够真正完结《骗局》的风险/奖励循环的一点便是昙花一现的死亡。你的角色将因为一次攻击而死亡。虽然你可以获得多次升级，但却没办法去避免死亡的降临。如果你选择了风险并且不能抵抗风险，你便会死亡。

首先这看起来并不是什么大事。在游戏一开始，也就是学习部分，你并不会去关心死亡。但当你开始关心大量现金时，情况便完全不同了。风险会不断变大，但同时你所获得奖励与成就感也会不断变大。

《骗局》便是如此去提高玩家的贪欲并让他们去经历更多风险。这样的循环会在游戏中创造出许多让人难以忘怀的时刻。甚至连非常熟悉游戏的我有时候也会想要去经历这样的风险。

（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）

The Risk/Reward Loop of The Swindle

by Stanislav Costiuc

If you’re interested in learning about risk/reward mechanics and how they affect player psychology, you should definitely check out The Swindle. It’s a procedurally generated heist game and is pretty much fully based on risk/reward loops. In this post I’m going to explore why The Swindle is so good at this.

Reward

Let’s start with the main goal. Get money. This is pretty straightforward, you’re a thief, you want money, you try to get as much of it as possible in each level. You receive the money into your account only if you get out of the heist alive, though.

This poses a question. Why would you want to put yourself in danger to get more heavily guarded money? After all, if you get caught and killed, you’ll lose the rest of the haul and continue with a newly generated character, so isn’t it better to just not put yourself at risk?

The Risk/Reward Loop of The Swindle

Time Limit – 100 days

The Swindle handles this question by introducing a time limit – 100 days. It’s not real-time countdown. In the context of the game, 1 heist = 1 day, and you can complete a heist for as long as you like. But in 100 days, a special security system will be activated that will prevent any heists from occurring, ever, and you lose. And you need lots of money to gain security access to the location of that device to steal and destroy it.

Now there’s a reason to put yourself in danger to maximize profits. Because if you don’t – you’ll lose. And a lot of times you start thinking, is going after that bag of money or bank computer worth it? Should you take the risk now and reap the rewards and feel good about yourself, or you’re afraid that the deadly spike and guards are located in such a position that you can’t deal with them? And I want you to note again that dying doesn’t make you lose the game, a new character gets generated but the remaining time doesn’t reset.

And this is just the basics of the risk/reward loop, The Swindle does several more things to maximize player’s greediness.

The Risk/Reward Loop of The Swindle

Different Zones

First, outside of the main goal zone with the mega device, there’s five other locations where you can go to. Each is more challenging than the preceding one, but also provides bigger rewards. But the catch is – you also need to gather money to unlock security access to those zones. Not as much as for the final one, but still.

Now you don’t want to gather up money like a turtle in the easiest zone, because you’ll never gather enough in 100 days that way. So you start stealing enough to get new security accesses, and then going into more challenging locations to get more money. So, with this situation in mind, you now have to spend even more money than you had to before to get even more money and that’s why you’d like to put yourself at risk to maximize the amount of monetary potential you can achieve.

The cool thing about zones is that with each day, every zone gets a little bit more challenging as well, with new additional traps and obstacles that weren’t present there before (but, to be fair, rewards are also slightly increasing alongside the difficulty). Your default skills aren’t enough to deal with that. Which leads us to…

The Risk/Reward Loop of The Swindle

Upgrades

There are many upgrades that you can buy to increase your efficiency (and also provide reward bonuses). And you don’t have to worry about losing them, since upgrades persist between characters.

The catch? They cost money. So now not only do you want to get as much money as possible to be able to complete the game, even more money to gain access to places that will increase the rewards that you can get, but also you want even more of those wonderful dollars to get upgrades that will make it easier for you to get money and die less (therefore making sure that you don’t lose anything). But this is not all. There’s also…

The Risk/Reward Loop of The Swindle

Bonuses

The Swindle also provides plenty of opportunities for bonus money. Of course, it’s hard to resist a bonus, who doesn’t like additional rewards? So outside of the main haul that you take from the heist, you get money also for the following things:

– Aptitude bonus. It’s based on an upgrade that gives you more money for hacking.

– XP bonus. Every time you steal at least 80% of the cash in the level, your character gets an XP bonus modifier, which increases the final amount of cash you get after completing the level (the modifier gets reset with each new character).

– Ghost Bonus that you get for taking all the money from the level without raising an alarm.

So basically the game says, look, you can get even more rewards than there are in the level… but you need to put yourself at risk to do so. And as the 100 days countdown gets closer and closer to 0 and you know you need more money… this perspective to take risky actions to get bigger rewards looks nicer and nicer.

The Risk/Reward Loop of The Swindle

One-Hit Death

One last thing that really rounds up the whole risk/reward loop of The Swindle is one-hit death. Your character dies on one hit. There’s no way around that. There’s a bunch of upgrades but none increase your health. If you take a risk and don’t succeed… you die.

And at first, this doesn’t seem like a big deal. In the beginning of the game, which to be fair is more of a learning period, you don’t really care that much about dying. But when you start talking not hundreds but thousands or even tens of thousands of cash… well… it’s a different matter entirely. Risks get bigger… but so do the rewards and the feeling of achievement.

The Risk/Reward Loop of The Swindle

So this is what The Swindle does to make the player greedier and wanting to take more risks. And this loop can create some very memorable moments in the game. Even I, knowing all this, sometimes can’t resist going for that one last computer to hack… before accidentally jumping into a mine.(source:gamasutra)