本文原作者：Lewis Pulsipher 译者ciel chen

良好的游戏设计都存在整体协调与拼搭硬凑这两种基本内容。一款游戏，如果缺乏整体协调性或者说存在不协调内容，无论成功与否，通常都称作是有缺憾的游戏。

幸运的是，大部分不协调的游戏基本都没发行出来，不过仍有部分这类游戏仍旧是可以获得成功的。玩家通常不会在这些游戏里意识到不协调的内容，不过它们的存在仍旧对游戏不利影响。对于那些把自己的游戏当“心肝宝贝”的设计师估计也意识不到这些不协调内容。不过作为设计者，这是他们应该意识到并将其从游戏中剔除的部分。

Free Realms(from gameogre)

那么什么是游戏的整体协调内容呢？好像很难说清楚。这就跟你在音乐里感受到的那种和谐感一样，你可以通过听觉去感受，或者当这种和谐感不见的时候你也可以意识到。这里有一则比较长的引用是来自1997年的Brian Moriarty的演讲稿，这里有对整体协调的概念说明（http://ludix.com/moriarty/listen.html）：“这是一种你可以感受到的东西。你要如何获得这种各个部分以一个整体的形式运作的感觉呢？要去哪里寻找这种协调？那么我来给你们说说吧，它不是来自设计委员会、不是来自焦点小组或者市场调查、也不是来自酷炫的高科技或者昂贵的市场营销，它不会意外或者幸运地从天而降——游戏的整体协调性只会来自具有明确意图的基调之中。”

我认为Moriarty在演讲的过程中进入了感性模式，不过你可以看一下他想表达的是什么。我现在把这个定义简化为：“游戏中每件事物都处在他们所应处的状态、为同一个目标服务并且让游戏拥有完整感。”这就会整体协调性了。这是很重要的，因为游戏不仅仅是各种机制的集合；不仅仅是数据；也不仅仅是度量指标。游戏会让玩家在理智与情感上留下深刻印象，有时游戏的不协调感会很明显，有时候又很微妙——这种不协调不论在玩家的理智或情感方面都会造成不好的影响。

整体协调跟“典雅”可不是同一个东西，是事实上我很犹豫要不要用典雅这个词，因为这个词是通常被某类桌游粉丝用来攻击另一类桌游粉丝的词汇，因此很多人对这个词都有贬义的感觉。“优雅的”这个词通常被当做“有智慧的”来用，经常被用来跟很多抽象游戏来联系起来，这种抽象游戏通常都是非现实性的。

整体协调性并非是说多有智慧，这跟游戏整体性有关、这跟游戏内的合理搭配有关。而合理的搭配有取决于人们所采用的标准，这些标准会随着时间流逝而变化甚至很有可能变得越发松散的。你可以联想一下这些年来的电影和电视剧。懂了吗？透着屏幕通常都能感受到它们对“暂停怀疑”的强烈要求，但是那些娱乐媒体却越发让人难以相信了。人们会接受一切愚蠢的设定和巨大的情节漏洞，因为这个节目本来就是用来娱乐的。所以我们对待游戏的态度也是如此的。

我爱极了《星球大战》这款冒险游戏，但是当我从电影院看了原作《星球大战1》之后我说“这电影真蠢”、我还说“情节漏洞真大”，不过我还是接受了它，因为“它只是一部电影而已。”

不过电影还是有一些要求标准的。《星舰战将》（打外太空怪兽的）这部电影把我们带到了8万光年以外的地方然后忘了我们可以用坦克和直升机！怪物冲着乱飞的导弹放屁、然而人类舰队就带在那边紧紧靠在一起一动不动，倒真是让自己做了更好的靶子！这可真滑稽。不过你可别小看它，这部电影当时可流行了还拍了好多续集。

同样地，对怀疑标准的降低还发生在游戏设计中。人们经常把游戏看做消遣的工具或者看做一种适度有代入感的社交方式，而不是一种完全的娱乐项目或者是什么值得“投注精力”的东西。所以他们对一些在很多年前还无法接受的游戏接受度就比较高。

那么，什么是整体协调的对立面？——拼搭硬凑（Kludge）。我是从软件领域借来的这个术语（“kludgy”通常被用作这个术语的形容词）。拼搭硬凑就是指对某个特定问题强强想出来的解决方法，或者说是那种行得通不过跟项目中其他内容无法保持一致性的解决方法。

拼搭硬凑在游戏设计里很难去下定义的，因为对于有的人来说的拼搭硬凑对于另外一个人来说是“不成问题的”。所以当游戏是有参照模板的时候，你要如何注意到这些拼搭硬凑的内容呢？如果我所能找到的问题的答案是“因为它弥补了游戏设计上的瑕疵”，或者“因为设计者喜欢它”，再或者“我不知道它为什么被设置在这里”的话，那它就很有可能是拼搭硬凑的内容了。

那么在抽象型游戏中拼搭硬凑是什么样子的？——可能不会那么明显，因为这样的游戏不代表任何事物（纯粹就是游戏）。抽象型游戏就是各种游戏机制的集合，这跟有参照模型的游戏不同（其情节内容对玩家游戏过程有帮助），而这些游戏机制是人们希望能在现实中表现出来的。然而在抽象游戏中，在抽象型游戏中，你的游戏机制可能跟其余游戏内容不匹配、可能无法融入到游戏中或者似乎没有有用的功能、或者很明显已经有其他可以替代这个机制的东西了，或者最简单的——是可以从游戏中剔除的，这些就是抽象型游戏中的拼搭硬凑内容。

那么是这些拼搭硬凑的东西是从哪儿来的呢？通常它们是为了解决在测试中出现的问题而添加进来的；或者也许是设计者在游戏测试之前为有可能发生的问题添加进来的 ；大部分时候，它们是为了解决一个已经被证明的游戏缺陷而添加进来的，但也有些时候，可能纯粹出于设计者的喜好，而放到游戏中的（也不管其最后是不是真的适合这款游戏，记得游戏成品最后经常都跟设计者的原本意向是有一定“距离”的）。他或她不愿意拿掉这个拼凑上去的内容，因为他们不想“谋杀自己的心肝宝贝”。还有可能这就是游戏的最初构想本身，不过后来开发过程走偏了。从那个阶段来看，设计者应该扼杀这样的原作、把拼凑的部分剔除掉，尽管这对于设计者来说从情感上很难接受。

现在我来举一些例子。这些都是一些广为人知的成功游戏案列，所以你可以跟我正在解释的内容联系起来。游戏还是可以在拼搭硬凑的情况下成功的，只是这部分内容越多，你做出好游戏的可能性就越低。

《Catan》，又以《Settlers of Catan》著名的游戏：强盗卡和垄断卡。记住这个游戏中除了交易意外，玩家之间的交互并不多，从你游戏起步开始，你就基本没法做什么阻碍其他玩家发展的事了。

我认为设计者就是看到了玩家很难对相互的发展进行干扰，才决定添加“强盗卡”，这个卡的功能跟游戏其余部分毫无联系。总之它跟这个游戏格格不入，添加进来纯粹就是给玩家一个干扰其他玩家发展的方式，或者至少为阻碍其他玩家发展制造机会。它跟整个固定的模板没有什么牵连。如果它代表纯粹的土匪的话，那玩家的士兵就应该可以对其施加一定作用，而且强盗也不会像影响一个古老人多的区域那样去影响刚萌芽的新建区域。

《Catan》被认为是一款跟交易有关的游戏，但是很少看到玩家在里面交易。“垄断卡”可以把其他玩家手里的魔种特定资源转移到使用“垄断卡”的玩家身上。然后这些“其他玩家”就不得不为了那些被夺走的资源进行交易，或者为了让被夺走的资源生产出来而等待很长的一段时间。也许在现实世界中有人能给这件事的发生想出一个解释（不是借口），反正我不行。我认为游戏设计者添加这张卡的原因就是为了让玩家去交易的，不然那大家都各玩各的没什么交易沟通。《Catan》是深受玩家欢迎并且设计得体的一款游戏，它兼备了天时地利人和，尽管从技术层面来说它还是存在拼搭硬凑的内容。

那么有关《大战役（Risk）》呢（美国2008版，不是后来的新的任务版）？该游戏的一些早现版本会有一些任务卡，不过不怎么好玩。《Risk》2008版修正了任务的问题，成为了一款跟其他版本大不相同的游戏——老版《Risk》中的领土卡属于两个意义上的拼搭硬凑内容：首先，他们都是以人工的方式（这里的人工我指的是跟现实不符）来鼓励玩家去进行进攻，玩家必须通过攻击他人领域来获得这张卡。它的存在似乎是为了试图去阻碍玩家实行“重型防御”策略，不过效果不太明显，玩家依旧以防御策略为主；其次，这些卡可以增加敌方数量。因为这些卡可以引来非常多的敌人，这也就让游戏能有个尽头。该游戏确实耗时长，但是没有这些卡敌人数量就始终只有那么多，所以我玩的次数就特别多。

所以这两个意义上的拼搭硬凑内容是为了解决（至少可以说是为了缓和）游戏的一个基础问题的：游戏没办法很自然地有个结尾，并且无法自然地让玩家进行进攻——“领域卡”的诞生便是为了解决这两个问题的。

让我们再对《坦克世界》和《战舰世界》这两款电子游戏进行一下思考。通常在这两种大型游戏里，游戏设计里的整体协调（harmony）和拼搭硬凑（kludge）会让人很难辨别出来。我们都会觉得在相对小型的游戏中做到设计的整体协调会比在那种大型游戏中来的容易些。

在《坦克世界》中，15VS.15这整个概念就是个硬凑的内容（kludge），因为这在真实战争中就是无稽之谈，然而这对保持在线游戏相对庞大用户量确实是有所必要的。而在《战舰世界》中，对战场地大部分都是在群岛之间这种狭窄的地方，而现实中战列舰和航空母舰根本不会到那么这种地方。而且在这两款游戏中都存在着诡异的国家同盟组合：你会看到德、法、英、俄的坦克战舰在统一战线，还有可能在同一个联盟队伍里看到15种类型的坦克是12中类型的战舰。这些都是有存在必要的拼搭硬凑内容（kludge）,然而这些内容跟现实完全不符。所以这两款游戏都打破了现实该有的模式，存在明显的拼搭硬凑内容。

再举个桌游的里子《Eclipse》好了，这款游戏看上去跟欧标4X概念体系【eXplore(探索)\eXpand(拓张与发展)\eXploit（经营与开发）\eXterminate（征服）】的太空游戏一样。可以说它基本算得上一款战争游戏、也基本算得上一款探索游戏、或者也基本上算得上是这样或那样的游戏，不过不管怎么说都让人不那么满意（至少对我来说）。这款游戏中主要的混凑拼搭内容就是——玩家会因为对战获得具有潜在价值的胜利点数、而且越是早期的对战，得到的胜利点数越多，因为你会将得到的胜利点数用于供给中。也就是说你被鼓励去重复地进行对战，这样你就可以多次地获得胜利点数。我觉得这个设计的添加是因为该游戏剩下内容基本很少需要对战，所以玩家会觉的玩的不过瘾。因为没有添加这个内容之前，玩家选择进行对战所冒的风险远多于他们有可能得到的好处，所以从这点上来看胜利点数的添加是有必要的。

然而这种奖励对战的方式在4X模式或者其他任何合理模式的游戏中都是说不过去的。是的，你存活下来的战斗单位会在对战中获得经验，但是你还是失去了很多人口和战舰，这样的经历在整个情景中都是不应该被奖励什么胜利点数的。军事力量只是为达到目的的一种手段，不能把其本身作为目标。我看到一款游戏里面，六个玩家中有五个玩家的大概一半的整体分数是对战得来的，这太可笑了。从长远来看，你觉得什么是更重要的？战争终究的目的还是为了经济不是吗。

该游戏还有一些其他的缺陷——比如，对于太空的探索，其结果大多是无路可通的。我认为该设计是有意为之的，主要是为了避免游戏变成彻头彻尾的战争游戏，但是这又跟“作为完全开放领域的太空”这一概念不符。这让4X中的征服（eXtermination）内容无效化，这是连胜利点数都无法弥补的。

所以，再问一遍，你觉得什么是拼搭硬凑的内容呢（kludege）？我会说，在一款你不太喜欢的游戏里你才更容易发现这些拼搭硬凑的内容，反之则不那么容易。在一些解谜游戏中都存在一种局限性（不论该解密游戏是单人电子游戏还是个人桌上游戏亦或是协作游戏）——设计者会倾向于增加解谜难度。所以我非常赞同这句格言：“一个设计者所能达到的完美不在于再没有可添加的内容，而在于再没有可剥离的内容。”我认为这是对整体协调的另外一种定义。鉴于这句格言，我发现很多出题者所添加的内容都是属于拼搭硬凑的。

这（整体协调和拼搭硬凑）并不是什么可以被严谨地定义或者很容易就被明确的内容，这要求我们要有自我批判式的思考。这跟你用的什么特定的游戏机制没关系，无论这些机制是如今早已普遍流行的还是全新开发的（基本很少是全新的）——真正要紧的是：它们是如何作为整体运作起来的。设计者需要意识到哪些是游戏内部的不协调内容，并将其从游戏中剔除出去！

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

Harmony and its opposite, the kludge, are fundamental to good game design. Games that lack harmony or have in-harmonious aspects have a handicap, though some succeed. Fortunately, most of the in-harmonious games are never published, or only self published. Players don’t always recognize the in-harmony but its existence still affects the game. Designers may not recognize in-harmony if they think of the game as “My Baby.” But designers need to recognize it and get it out of the game.

So what is harmony? This is hard to pin down. It’s like harmony in music, something you can hear and can recognize when harmony is not present. Here is a long quote from a 1997 lecture where this concept of harmony comes from:

“It’s something you feel. How do you achieve this feeling that everything works together? Where do you get this harmony stuff? Well, I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t come from design committees. It doesn’t come from focus groups or market surveys. It doesn’t come from cool technology or expensive marketing. And it never happens by accident or by luck. Games with harmony emerge from a fundamental note of clear intention.”

I think Moriarty moves into the touchy-feely as he goes on, but you can look it up and see what he has to say. I’m using a simpler definition: “everything in the game feels as though it belongs there and contributes to the purpose and feeling of the game as a whole.” That’s harmony. It’s important because games are not just collections of mechanics. Not just data. Not just metrics. Games make intellectual and emotional impressions on players, and lack of harmony is noticeable, sometimes clearly, sometimes in subtle ways. The effect is not good for the intellectual and emotional impression.

Harmony is not the same thing as “elegance,” in fact I hesitate to use the word elegance because it’s used by fans of certain kinds of tabletop games as a bludgeon to attack fans of other kinds tabletop games, who in turn react very negatively to the word. ”Elegant” is often used in much the same sense as “clever.” It’s usually used in relation to abstract games or practically abstract games, games that are not models of some reality.

Harmony isn’t cleverness, it’s something that affects the game as a whole. It’s about appropriate fit. Now what’s appropriate fit depends on what standards people are using, and those standards have changed and very much loosened over the years. Think about movies and TV shows over the years. What makes sense? The screen has always required a heavy “suspension of disbelief”, but those entertainments have consistently become less believable. People will accept all kinds of foolishness and huge plot-holes because the program is otherwise entertaining. and we’re getting the same thing in games.

I love Star Wars for the adventure, but when I first watched the original Star Wars I came out of the theater and said “this is dumb” and “that is a big plot-hole” but I (in the long run) accepted it because “it’s a movie.”

I still have SOME standards even for movies. The Starship Troopers movie (monsters in outer space) had us travel 80,000 light years and then forget that we can use tanks or helicopters! Monsters farted unguided missiles, yet the human fleet stayed tightly packed together in space to make itself a good target! It’s just ludicrous. Yet it was a popular movie that begetted a couple sequels.

The same kind of loosening of standards of disbelief has happened in game design. People often treat games more as time killers or something mildly engaging to do while they socialize, than as actual entertainment or something worth *focusing* on. So they let things go by that would not have been accepted many years ago.
All right. What’s the opposite of harmony? The Kludge. I borrow this term from software (“kludgy” is the adjective that’s used.) A kludge is a tacked-on solution to a particular problem, or a solution that works but isn’t consistent with the rest of the program. In software though not in games it’s also hard to understand and modify.

The Kludge is hard to define in game design because one man’s kludge is another man’s “nothing wrong with that.” How do you notice the kludges if the game is a model of something? The kludge will usually be inconsistent with the rest of the model, and may have nothing at all to do with what’s being modeled. It may be there to fix some design flaw. When I play games I sometimes ask, why am I doing this particular thing? If the only answer I can find is “because it fixes a design flaw,” or “because the designer liked it,” or “I have no clue why it’s here,” then it is probably a kludge.

What about kludges in abstract games? A kludge is less obvious because the game doesn’t represent anything (other than “a game”). Abstracts are collections of mechanics, different from a model where the context should help people play the game, and the mechanics are expected to represent something that happens in a real world. Nonetheless, in abstracts you can have a mechanic that doesn’t fit with the rest, that doesn’t mix well or doesn’t seem to have a useful function, or clearly should’ve been replaced with something else, or simply should have been removed from the game.

Where do kludges come from? Often they are added to games to solve a problem that appeared in testing. Or perhaps the designer realized it would be a problem, and added it before the testing. Most of the time it’s added to fix a demonstrated flaw, but at other times, it’s in the game because the designer liked it, even though it doesn’t fit with what he ended up with. (Remember, games often end up some “distance” from where the designer originally intended.) He or she isn’t willing to take it out, isn’t willing to “shoot their baby”. It could be the original idea itself, yet the game has developed in another direction. At that point, the designer should shoot the original, get it out of there, but it’s emotionally hard for a designer to do.

Now some examples. These are from well-known, successful games, so that you’ll be able to relate to what I’m explaining. Games can succeed despite kludges; but the more you have, the less likely that the game will be good.

Catan, which used to be known as Settlers of Catan: both the robber and the monopoly cards. Keep in mind there’s not a lot of interaction in Catan between the players except for the trading, and there’s little you can do to actually hinder another player after the initial setup.

I think the designer saw the difficulty of hindrance, and decided to add the Robber, which has *nothing* to do with the rest of the game. It doesn’t fit at all in any way, shape, or form, but was added to provide a way for a player to hinder another player or at least have the potential to hinder other players. It has nothing to do with the settling model. If it represented mere bandits, a player’s soldiers would be able to do something about it, nor do bandits affect a budding newly-settled region the way they can an old, over-populated region.

Catan is supposed to be a game about trading, but I’ve seen many players who don’t trade much. The monopoly card takes all of a particular resource from all the other players and puts them into the hand of the player who played the monopoly card. Then others are forced to trade if they want to get that resource, or wait a long time for more of that resource to be produced. Perhaps someone can come up with an explanation (not excuse) of how this would happen in the real world, I cannot. I think the designer added that card to make people trade, thinking of the groups where there’s otherwise not much trading.

Catan is very popular and is a decent design that was in the right place at the right time, although technically speaking it has these kludges.

How about Risk, the US pre-2008 version, not the newer version based on missions? Some of those earlier versions had mission cards, but they didn’t work well. In 2008 Risk was revised with missions to make it quite a different game. In old Risk, the territory cards are kludges in two senses. First, they were an artificial method, and by artificial I mean there’s no correspondence with reality, of encouraging players to attack. You have to a conquer a territory to get a card; it was something to try to discourage turtling, which is nonetheless quite common in Risk.

Second, you turn in the cards for armies. That’s there to bring the game to a conclusion, because you have an increasing number of armies that can get very large. The game is pretty long as is, but it’s very long without increasing numbers of armies, which I have played a number of times. Instead of going up to 50 armies and more I used 4-6-8-4-6-8-4-6-8, but that makes it a very long game.

Two kludges to solve (or at least mitigate) a fundamental problem in the game: the game didn’t naturally come to a conclusion. The game didn’t naturally encourage people to attack. So the cards were added for those purposes.

Let’s consider the online video games World of Tanks and World of Warships. In big video games like these both harmony and the kludge become obscured. We could probably say that it’s easier to make a harmonious game that’s relatively small and focused rather than one quite big.

In World of Tanks the entire idea of 15 versus 15 randomly assigned teams is a kludge, in the sense that it has nothing to do with real warfare, but it’s necessary to make the online game practical for a very large audience. In World of Warships the overall kludge is to play in a small area, usually amongst lots of islands, places where real world battleships and aircraft carriers virtually never went. In both games we have the bizarre mix of nationalities of equipment: German and French and English and Russian tanks or ships on the same side, and possibly 15 different tanks or 12 different ships on a team. It’s also a necessary kludge but has nothing to do with reality. So both games break down as models of reality, and the kludges are obvious.

But in video games there are many conventions, normal modes of design, that are ridiculous kludges but necessary to make a game of it. (Consider the ammo and medpacks sitting all over the place in shooters, or even respawning itself – awful kludges.) When is a kludge no longer a kludge? When almost everyone accepts it as necessary, I guess.

Let’s take a tabletop game such as Eclipse, which is ostensibly a Euro-fied 4X space game. It’s almost a wargame, almost an exploration game, almost this, almost that, but ultimately unsatisfactory (for me). The major kludge in the game is that players are awarded hidden-value victory points for fighting, and fighting early on tends to give you higher value points because you draw a number of VP pieces and throw some back into the supply. You’re encouraged to fight repeatedly as you can draw again whenever you fight. I think this was added when the rest of the game resulted in little fighting, because people didn’t gain enough from fighting. What they were likely to lose in assets was more than they were willing to risk for the possible gain. So the victory points were added well.

Rewards for fighting make no sense in the 4X model, or any reasonable model. Your surviving units gain experience when you fight, yes, but you lose a lot of ships and people, and that experience in the overall context should not be worth a lot (if any) of victory points. Military forces are a means to an end, not an end in itself. In a game I watched, about half of the overall points for five of the six players came from fighting, which is ridiculous. They were roughly equal to the points for holding the solar systems that had been discovered. In the long run what do you think is more important? Wars are economic, after all.

There are other flaws in the game. For example, the results of exploration are that space is mostly impassable. I think that’s deliberate, to avoid and out-and-out wargame, but it doesn’t fit one’s idea of space as wide-open territory. That makes the extermination part of 4X (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate) ineffective even with the fighting points.
Again, how do you recognize a kludge? I’d say it’s easier to find things you think are kludges in a game you don’t like than ones you do like. Also we have the limitation that some designers of puzzle-like games, whether they’re single player video games or solo tabletop games or cooperative games, tend to add things to make the puzzle solution more difficult. I come in heavily on the side of this motto: “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” I think that’s an alternative definition of harmony. Given that motto, I see many of those puzzle-maker additions as kludges.

This is not something you can rigidly define or easily pin down, it requires self-critical thinking. It doesn’t matter what specific mechanics you use, whether already very popular or brand new (the latter very rare). What matters is how they work together as a whole. Designers need to recognize the in-harmonious, and excise it!（source：gamasutra.com ）