單人游戲中的不同級別情感表現

作者：Rob Lockhart

本文是受到Jenova Chen在過去幾年里有關通過游戲喚醒一些深刻情感的演講的啟發。Jenova認為這是游戲作為一種藝術形式獲得廣泛認可的最大障礙之一。我也對此表示認同。

此外我認為通過單人游戲去喚醒特定情感存在難度級別。從敘述上來看確實如此，但我不會在未進行任何研究與思考之前便認定這一觀點。而在互動體驗中，我認為這是沒錯的。但這并不意味著我們需要基于這些情感的價值做出判斷，反倒應該基于它們在單人游戲中可能出現的難易水平進行判斷。

較容易出現的情感：

欲望

害怕

厭惡

厭煩

出現難度一般的情感：

敬畏

好奇

驕傲與羞恥

挫折

較難出現的情感：

悲痛

平靜

懊悔

幽默

不可能出現的情感：

嫉妒

信任

輕視

憐憫

喜愛

“容易”出現的情感都是一些基本的反應。它們往往是自然而然的反應而不是真正發自內在。對于人類來說，只要使用合適的激勵因子便能夠喚醒這些情感。就像為了激發討厭情感，游戲可以提供給玩家他們在成長過程中學會的應該去避免的東西，并且他們不會對此感到害怕。而為了激發害怕情感，我們可以創造一個顯而易見的威脅。從進化論觀點來看，快感便是最容易被激發的情感。無聊也只需要一些多余的內容。

我們還發現這些主要情感通常都會和其它情感結合在一起。就像恐怖電影便始終結合了害怕，欲望和討厭情感。你可能也會想到結合了害怕與無聊的懸疑內容，所以在那些最簡單的情感中我們也能發現一些復雜性。

“容易”列表中的情感似乎都是非常基礎的情感。即使脫離了社會，這些情感也是生存的必要元素。而與之相對立的便是那些需要相關意識或者難以從意識從脫離開來的情感。這便是我為什么會認為它們處于不可能的邊緣之上：在一個故事中人們可能會與經歷了某一情感的主角形成共鳴。在互動環境下，你則是主角。在多人游戲中，你將遇到其他擁有任何情感的玩家。而在單人游戲體驗中，你所接觸的將只有游戲本身。所以這些情況將組成從最“內在”的情感到最“外在”的情感范疇。

出現難度一般的情感仍然可作為游戲規范。像驕傲，羞恥和受挫都是朝著目標努力并最終完成目標的自然結果。而創造驕傲，羞恥和受挫情感便是基于平衡性。平衡是一個具有挑戰性的目標，同時也是一個基本目標，因為人們都希望游戲能夠達到平衡。

敬畏則是技藝與規模的產物。而技藝同時也是人們在高預算游戲中所期待看到的內容。好奇能夠受到敘述或游戲玩法的推動。即這是關于提供給玩家不完全的內容。更準確的說，它們必須是讓玩家感興趣的內容。生活便教會我們所有信息都是不完整的，但如果我們對整體故事感興趣，那些信息便會變得更加吸引人。所以好奇心便是提高玩家用戶粘性的有效工具。

而現在的游戲剛開始接觸“較難”出現的情感類別。你可能會認為從一開始在數字游戲中便存在幽默感，但其實直到最近游戲才從其它媒體上引入了幽默感。因為擁有玩笑或情景幽默，游戲總是很有趣，就像戲劇或電影一樣。而直至最近游戲才發現了屬于自己的幽默形式。像《百米賽跑》和《章魚奶爸》都是非常典型的例子。

當玩家真正依戀于某物或某人時，他們便有可能激發出悲痛情感。有些人似乎比別人更容易受到悲傷的影響。就像在Valve的《傳送門》中，當有些玩家被迫去摧毀自己的傳送門時便會有痛徹心扉之感。懊悔是一種深刻的后悔感，而如果玩家可以不斷重新加載或重玩游戲，他們便很難會感到后悔。平靜是游戲創造者會盡量去避免的一種情感，這或許是因為我們的產業在某種程度上還被街機模式所束縛著。

當我繼續致力于游戲創造時，我希望能夠呈現出更多情感元素，并基于具有創造性且足夠和諧的方式去結合各自情感共鳴。因為游戲設計通常都是受到有趣效果的支配，所以我們有必要投入更多時間去研究各種有趣的效果。

（ 本文為游戲邦/gamerboom.com編譯，拒絕任何不保留版權的轉發，如需轉載請聯系：游戲邦 ）

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 amp; 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 )