Chapter 3. Game Settings and Worlds 第三章：游戏设定与世界

A game world is an artificial universe, an imaginary place whose creation begins with the (usually unspoken) words "Let's pretend…" Every game, no matter how small, takes place in a world. Most games have a physical, or at least a visible, manifestation of this world: a set of cards, a board, or an image on a computer screen. Even tic-tac-toe, one of the simplest games imaginable, has a world—a little diagram governed by rules and a victory condition. The boundaries of the diagram are the boundaries of the world. Any marks that you make outside of them are not part of the game.

游戏世界是一个人造的宇宙，是一个想象中的地方，它的创造始于“让我们假装……”（通常是不经意的）一句话。每款游戏，无论多小，都发生在一个世界里。大多数游戏都有一个物理世界，或者至少是一个可见的世界：一套牌、一个棋盘，或者电脑屏幕上的一个图像。即使是井字棋这种可以想象到的最简单的游戏也有一个世界——一个由规则和胜利条件支配的小图。图的边界就是世界的边界。你在图外所做的任何标记都不是游戏的一部分。

The football field defines the physical boundaries of the football game's world. The football game's world is also bounded by time: It has a beginning and an end. When the clock runs out, the world ceases to exist; the game is over. The game can also be interrupted; during a timeout, the world freezes. It still exists in the minds of the players and the spectators—the game is still in progress—but no change can take place within the world until the timeout is over.

足球场定义了足球游戏世界的物理边界。足球游戏的世界也以时间为边界：它有开始和结束。当时间耗尽时，世界就不复存在，比赛也就结束了。比赛也会中断；在暂停期间，世界会冻结。它仍然存在于球员和观众的脑海中——比赛仍在进行，但在暂停结束之前，世界不会发生任何变化。

Not all game worlds have a visible component. The game Twenty Questions consists only of some basic rules and a victory condition, but it still has a world and the world has boundaries. If you're playing Twenty Questions and the questioner asks, "Wanna go surfing after work?," most people would say that the question lies outside the game world. It doesn't count as one of the 20 allowed. A text adventure is another game defined by words; the world is created in the player's imagination when he reads the text on the screen. A few master chess players can play in their heads, with no board at all—another example of a game world with no physical component.

并非所有游戏世界都有可见的组成部分。游戏《二十个问题》只有一些基本规则和一个胜利条件，但它仍然有一个世界，而这个世界是有边界的。如果你在玩“二十个问题”游戏，提问者问：“下班后想去冲浪吗？”，大多数人会说这个问题不属于游戏世界。它不算是 20 个问题中的一个。文字冒险游戏是另一种由文字定义的游戏；当玩家阅读屏幕上的文字时，世界就在玩家的想象中产生了。一些国际象棋大师可以在脑中下棋，根本不需要棋盘——这也是游戏世界没有物理组成部分的另一个例子。

The setting of a game is its fictional component, that aspect of the game that is a fantasy. Tic-tac-toe has no setting, nor does Twenty Questions; when you play them, you're not pretending to be anywhere else or to do anything besides what you're doing. Chess has just a scrap of a setting; although the board and the moves are abstract, the pieces have names that suggest a medieval court with its king and queen, knights and bishops. Stratego has even more of a setting. The pieces in Stratego are numbered, and you could play the game completely abstractly—my number 5 takes your number 6, and so on—but Milton Bradley has chosen to paint little pictures on them, encouraging us to pretend that they are colonels and sergeants and scouts in an army.

游戏的背景是其虚构的组成部分，是游戏的幻想部分。井字棋没有背景，《二十个问题》也没有；当你玩这些游戏时，你并没有假装在其他任何地方，也没有做任何你正在做的事情以外的事情。国际象棋只有一点点背景；虽然棋盘和走法都很抽象，但棋子的名字却让人联想到中世纪宫廷里的国王和王后、骑士和主教。西洋陆军棋的背景则更加丰富。西洋陆军棋中的棋子是有编号的，你可以完全抽象地玩这个游戏——我的 5 号吃掉你的 6 号，以此类推——但米尔顿·布拉德利选择在棋子上画上小图画，鼓励我们假装它们是军队中的上校、军士和侦察兵。

The Purpose of a Game Setting 游戏设置的目的

Games exist to entertain, and the entertainment value of a game is derived from several sources: its gameplay, its story, social interaction (if it is a multi-player game), and so on. The setting also contributes to the entertainment that the game provides. In a game such as chess, almost all the entertainment value is in the gameplay; few people think of it as a game about medieval warfare. In an adventure game such as Escape from Monkey Island, the setting is essential to the fantasy. Without the setting, Escape from Monkey Island would not exist, and if it had a different setting, it would be a different game.

游戏是为了娱乐而存在的，而游戏的娱乐价值来自多个方面：游戏玩法、故事情节、社交互动（如果是多人游戏）等等。游戏环境也有助于提高游戏的娱乐性。在国际象棋这样的游戏中，几乎所有的娱乐价值都体现在游戏性上；很少有人会认为这是一款关于中世纪战争的游戏。而在《逃离猴岛》这样的冒险游戏中，环境对于奇幻游戏来说至关重要。没有背景，《逃离猴岛》就不存在，而如果有不同的背景，它就会是另一款游戏。

As a general rule, the more a game depends on its core mechanics to entertain, the less its setting matters. Mastering the core mechanics requires a kind of abstract thought, and fantasy can be a distraction. Serious chess players aren't interested in the shape of the chessmen; their shapes don't contribute significantly to the game. A serious chess player can have just as much fun with a $2 plastic travel chess set as with a $200 inlaid wooden board and solid pewter statues for pieces. As players learn to understand the core mechanics of other games, they stop thinking about the fantasy element as well. When players become highly skilled at a game such as Quake III, they no longer think about the fact that they're pretending to be space marines in a futuristic environment; they think only about hiding, moving, shooting, ambushing, obtaining more ammunition, and so on.

一般来说，游戏的娱乐性越依赖于其核心机制，其背景就越不重要。掌握核心机制需要一种抽象思维，而幻想会分散注意力。严肃的棋手对棋子的形状并不感兴趣，因为它们的形状对游戏的贡献并不大。一个严肃的棋手可以用一套 2 美元的塑料旅行棋，也可以用一套 200 美元的镶嵌木质棋盘和实心锡制雕像棋子，获得同样多的乐趣。当玩家学会理解其他游戏的核心机制时，他们也就不再考虑幻想元素了。当玩家熟练掌握《雷神之锤三》等游戏时，他们就不会再考虑自己是在未来环境中扮演太空陆战队员这一事实；他们只会考虑躲藏、移动、射击、伏击、获取更多弹药等等。

This process of abstraction—ignoring the game's setting—occurs only at a high level of play, however. To someone who's playing a game for the first time, the setting is vital to creating and sustaining his interest. One of the essential functions of a game's setting is actually to sell the game in the first place. It's not the game's mechanics that make a customer pick up a box in a store, but the fantasy it offers: who you'll be, where you'll be, and what you'll be doing there if you play that game.

然而，这种抽象化过程——忽视游戏背景——只有在高水平的游戏中才会出现。对于第一次玩游戏的人来说，游戏的背景对于激发和维持他的兴趣至关重要。实际上，游戏背景的基本功能之一首先是推销游戏。让顾客在商店里拿起一盒游戏的不是游戏的机制，而是它提供的幻想：如果你玩了这款游戏，你会成为谁，你会在哪里，你会在那里做什么。

The "Graphics Versus Gameplay" Debate “图形与游戏性”之争

The relationship between the setting and the mechanics is the subject of considerable debate in the game industry, although it's usually characterized as "graphics versus gameplay." The graphics create the setting; the core mechanics, along with the user interface, create the gameplay—the challenges the player faces and the actions he may take to overcome them. In the early days of video gaming, graphics were seriously restricted by the weakness of the display hardware. The gameplay, as implemented by the programmers, was the source of most of the game's appeal. With the growth of modern display technology, the graphics have taken on much greater importance, and creating them consumes a large proportion of a game's development budget. Some designers and programmers, especially those who've been around since the early days, have become rather annoyed at the dominant role that graphics now play. They insist that graphics must be subordinate to gameplay in game design, and as proof they point to examples of games with great graphics and very little gameplay that offer poor value for the money.

在游戏行业中，背景与机制之间的关系一直是争论不休的话题，不过这种争论通常被称为“图形与游戏性”之争。图形创造了环境，而核心机制和用户界面则创造了游戏性——玩家面临的挑战和克服挑战的行动。在早期的视频游戏中，图形受到显示硬件薄弱的严重限制。由程序员实现的游戏性才是游戏吸引力的源泉。随着现代显示技术的发展，图形的重要性大大提高，制作图形耗费了游戏开发预算的很大一部分。一些设计师和程序员，尤其是那些早期的设计师和程序员，对图形现在所起的主导作用感到非常恼火。他们坚持认为，在游戏设计中，图形必须从属于游戏性，并举出一些游戏例子，它们具有出色的图形效果，但游戏性却很低，性价比很低。

This was a serious problem in the early 1990s, when Hollywood studios thought they could take over the game industry because they were better able to create impressive graphics than the game publishers. However, they failed. Hollywood didn't understand software engineering, didn't understand interactivity, and, most important, didn't understand gameplay. The public refused to accept games with bad gameplay, no matter how spectacular the graphics were. After a few false starts, Hollywood learned to work with game publishers rather than trying to become game publishers, realizing that the two groups bring complementary skills to creating games.

这在 20 世纪 90 年代初是一个严重的问题，当时好莱坞工作室认为他们可以接管游戏产业，因为他们比游戏发行商更有能力制作出令人印象深刻的画面。然而，他们失败了。好莱坞不懂软件工程，不懂互动性，最重要的是不懂游戏性。公众拒绝接受游戏性差的游戏，无论其画面多么精彩。在经历了几次失败之后，好莱坞学会了与游戏发行商合作，而不是试图成为游戏发行商，因为他们意识到，这两个群体在创造游戏方面的技能是互补的。

We believe the "graphics versus gameplay" debate is no longer a meaningful one. The truth is that graphics and gameplay must work together to produce the total play experience. The graphics create the setting, which both sells the game and involves the player in the game's fantasy. The gameplay provides the challenge and things for the player to do. Both are essential to the player's enjoyment of the game. The graphics bring in the player, and the gameplay keeps him there.

我们认为，“图形与游戏性”的争论已不再有意义。事实是，画面和游戏性必须相互配合，才能产生全面的游戏体验。画面创造了环境，既推销了游戏，又让玩家参与到游戏的幻想中。游戏玩法则为玩家提供了挑战和活动。两者对于玩家享受游戏都至关重要。画面吸引玩家，而游戏玩法则让玩家留在游戏中。

Immersiveness and Suspension of Disbelief 沉浸感和信任感

A key part of the experience of reading a novel or watching a movie is suspension of disbelief. Suspension of disbelief is a mental state in which you choose, for a period of time, to believe that this pack of lies, this fiction, is reality. This applies to games as well. When you go inside the game world and temporarily make it your reality, you suspend your disbelief. The better a game supports the illusion, the more thoroughly engrossed you become, and then the more immersive we say the game is. Immersiveness is one of the holy grails of game design.

阅读小说或观看电影的一个重要体验就是信任感。信任感是一种心理状态，在这种状态下，你会在一段时间内选择相信这一切谎言、虚构是真实的。这也适用于游戏。当你进入游戏世界，并暂时把它当作现实时，你就暂缓了你的怀疑。游戏对这种幻觉的支持越好，你就会越彻底地沉迷其中，然后我们就会说这款游戏沉浸感越强。沉浸感是游戏设计的圣杯之一。

译者注：suspension of disbelief，直译是终止怀疑，由萨缪尔·泰勒·柯勒律治（Samuel Taylor Coleridge）提出,指读者或观众在面对虚构作品时，尽管明知故事情节是假的，却主动选择暂时相信这个虚假现实，以浸入其中。可以简化为“信任感”。

Movies and novels try to create the impression that what they depict is real, though fantasy and science fiction novels rather test our patience in this regard. Few movies and novels specifically allude to the fact that they are fiction; they try to preserve the suspension of disbelief. Some deliberately play with the idea. Both the book and the movie The French Lieutenant's Woman specifically alluded to the fact that they were works of fiction, wrenching the audience out of the work's Victorian setting to encourage comparisons with today's world. The movie The Stunt Man similarly kept the viewer—and the movie's hero—off balance, unable to tell whether what we were seeing was supposed to be reality or merely a movie being filmed.

电影和小说试图给人一种印象，即它们所描绘的都是真实的，尽管奇幻和科幻小说在这方面相当考验我们的耐心。很少有电影和小说明确暗示它们是虚构的；它们试图保持信任感。有些电影和小说则故意玩弄这一概念。小说和电影《法国中尉的女人》和电影都特别暗示了它们是虚构作品的事实，将观众从作品的维多利亚时代背景中拉出来，鼓励他们与当今世界进行比较。电影《特技演员》同样让观众和电影主人公失去平衡，分不清我们看到的是现实还是正在拍摄中的电影。

More often, however, suspension of disbelief is broken by poor design. This might occur if one of the people in the story does something that is wildly out of character, or if something highly improbable happens—a deus ex machina—and we are expected to accept it as normal. Another thing that frequently destroys a player's suspension of disbelief or prevents it from ever forming is a lack of harmony, which we discuss next.

然而，更常见的情况是，信任感被拙劣的设计所打破。如果故事中的某个人做出了与角色大相径庭的事情，或者发生了非常不可能发生的事情——一个天神显灵——而我们却要把它当作正常的事情来接受，就会出现这种情况。另一个经常破坏玩家终止怀疑或者阻碍其形成的原因是缺乏和谐，我们将在下文中讨论。

译者注：deus ex machina，直译是机械降神，一种意想不到的力量或事件拯救了看似绝望的局面，尤其是作为戏剧或小说中人为的情节技巧。比如，角色从悬崖掉下去，突然出现一个飞行机器人接住他，那就是机械神。

The Importance of Harmony 和谐的重要性

Good games and game worlds possess harmony, a quality first identified by the legendary game designer Brian Moriarty. Harmony is the feeling that all parts of the game belong to a single, coherent whole. In his lecture "Listen: The Potential of Shared Hallucinations," Moriarty explained the concept of harmony so well that, with his permission, we use his own words to describe it:

优秀的游戏和游戏世界具有和谐性，这是传奇游戏设计师布莱恩·莫里亚蒂最先发现的一种品质。和谐是一种感觉，即游戏的所有部分都属于一个统一的整体。布莱恩·莫里亚蒂在他的演讲《倾听：共享幻觉的潜力》中，对和谐的概念做了很好的诠释，经他同意，我们用他自己的话来描述和谐：

Harmony isn't something you can fake. You don't need anyone to tell you if it's there or not. Nobody can sell it to you, it's not an intellectual exercise. It's a sensual, intuitive experience. It's something you feel. How do you achieve that feeling that everything works together? Where do you get this harmony stuff?

和谐不能伪造。你不需要任何人告诉你它是否存在。没有人可以向你推销它，它不是一种智力练习。它是一种感性的、直观的体验。这是你的感觉。你是如何实现这种感觉的？你从哪里得到这种和谐？

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. From design decisions based on an ineffable sense of proportion and rightness. Its presence produces an emotional resonance with its audience. A sense of inner unity that has nothing to do with what or how you did something, it has something to do with why. Myst and Gemstone both have harmony. They have it, because their makers had a vision of the experience they were trying to achieve and the confidence to attain it. They laid down a solid, ambient groove that players and their respective markets can relate to emotionally. They resisted the urge to overbuild. They didn't pile on a lot of gratuitous features just so they could boast about them. And they resisted the temptation to employ inappropriate emotional effects. Effects like shock violence, bad language, inside humor.

好吧，我在这里告诉你，它不是来自设计委员会。它不是来自焦点小组或市场调查。它不是来自炫酷的技术或昂贵的市场营销。它也从来不是偶然或运气使然。和谐的游戏来自于明确的基本意图。它来自于基于不可言喻的比例感和正确性的设计决策。它的存在能与受众产生情感共鸣。一种内在的统一感，它与你做了什么或如何做无关，而是与为什么有关。《神秘岛》和《宝石》都具有和谐感。它们之所以和谐，是因为它们的制作者对所要实现的体验有着远见卓识，并有信心实现这一目标。他们奠定了坚实的氛围基础，让玩家和各自的市场在情感上产生共鸣。他们克制住了过度设计的冲动。他们没有堆砌无用功能来炫耀自己。他们抵制了使用不恰当的情感效果的诱惑，比如震撼的暴力、粗俗的语言、内部笑话。

You know, the suspension of disbelief is fragile. It's hard to achieve it, and hard to maintain. One bit of unnecessary gore, one hip colloquialism, one reference to anything outside the imaginary world you've created is enough to destroy that world. These cheap effects are the most common indicators of a lack of vision or confidence. People who put this stuff into their games are not working hard enough.

要知道，信任感是很脆弱的。很难做到，也很难维持。一点不必要的血腥场面，一句时髦的口语，一次对你所创造的想象世界之外的任何事物的提及，都足以摧毁这个世界。这些糟糕的结果是缺乏远见或信心的最常见表现。往游戏里加入这些东西的人并没有足够努力。

Harmony is essential for a good game world. With every design decision you make, you should ask yourself whether the result is in harmony with your overall vision. Too many games have elements that seem bolted on, last-minute ideas that somebody thought would be "cool" to include. Although every game design requires compromises, as we said in Chapter 1, "What Is Game Design?," an important part of your job as a designer is to minimize the false notes or off-key elements that compromises tend to create. Try to find a way to make everything fit together into a coherent, integrated whole.

好的游戏世界离不开和谐。在做每一个设计决定时，你都应该问问自己，结果是否与你的整体愿景和谐一致。太多游戏中的元素似乎是临时拼凑的，是某些人认为“很酷”的想法。尽管正如我们在第一章，“什么是游戏设计？”中所说的那样，每个游戏设计都需要妥协，但作为设计师，你工作的一个重要任务就是尽量减少妥协带来的假音或跑调元素。努力找到一种方法，让所有东西都能融为一体，成为一个连贯的整体。

A good way to identify games with harmony is to look for those that have lasted far longer in the marketplace than their designers ever expected. This means that something about the game is striking a resonant chord with its players, a chord that continues to echo. For example, people continue to make modifications to Half-Life that are actually more popular than new games because Half-Life is such an elegant, harmonious game. Tetris is another case in point. Action games come and go, but Tetris has stood the test of time and might outlive us all.

识别和谐游戏的一个好方法是寻找那些在市场上持续时间远远超过设计者预期的游戏。这意味着游戏中的某些东西引起了玩家的共鸣，而且这种共鸣还在持续回荡。例如，人们不断对《半条命》）进行修改，而这些修改实际上比新游戏更受欢迎，因为《半条命》）是一款如此优雅、和谐的游戏。《俄罗斯方块》是另一个例子。动作游戏来来去去，但《俄罗斯方块》却经受住了时间的考验，可能会比我们所有人都长寿。

The Dimensions of a Game World 游戏世界的维度

A game's setting and world are defined by many different variables, each of which describes one dimension of the world, one of the aspects of the game's look and feel. To fully define your world and its setting, you need to consider each of these dimensions and answer certain questions about them.

游戏的背景和世界由许多不同的变量定义，每个变量都描述了世界的一个维度，即游戏外观和感觉的一个方面。要全面定义你的世界及其背景，你需要考虑其中的每一个维度，并回答有关它们的某些问题。

The Physical Dimension 物理维度

Game settings are almost always implemented as some sort of physical space. The player moves his avatar in and around this space, or moves other pieces, characters, or units in it. The physical characteristics of this space determine a great deal about the gameplay.

游戏设置几乎总是作为某种物理空间来实现的。玩家可以在这个空间中移动自己的化身，也可以在这个空间中移动其他棋子、角色或单位。这个空间的物理特性在很大程度上决定了游戏玩法。

Even text adventures include a physical dimension. The player moves from one abstract "room" or other discrete location to another. Back when more people played text adventures, the boxes used to carry proud boasts about the number of rooms in the game. Gamers could take this as a very rough measure of the size of the world they could explore in the game and, therefore, the amount of gameplay that the game offered.

即使是文字冒险也包含物理维度。玩家从一个抽象的“房间”或其他不相关地点移动到另一个位置。当越来越多的人开始玩文字冒险游戏时，游戏包装盒上会自豪地标注游戏中房间的数量。游戏玩家可以用它粗略衡量他们在游戏中可以探索的世界的大小，从而衡量游戏所提供的游戏性。

The physical dimension of a game is itself characterized by several different elements: dimensionality, scale, and boundaries.

游戏的物理维度本身由几个不同的元素构成：空间维度、规模和边界。

Dimensionality 空间维度

One of the first questions you have to ask yourself is how many dimensions your physical space is going to have. A few years ago, the vast majority of games had only two dimensions. This was especially noticeable in side-scrolling games such as Super Mario Brothers. Mario could run left and right and jump up and down, but he could not move toward the player ("out" of the screen) or away from him ("into" the screen).

你首先要问自己的一个问题是，你的物理空间将有多少维度。几年前，绝大多数游戏只有两个维度。这在《超级马里奥兄弟》等卷轴游戏中尤为明显。马里奥可以左右奔跑、上下跳跃，但他不能向玩家移动（“离开”屏幕），也不能离开玩家（“进入”屏幕）。

It is essential to understand that the dimensionality of the game's physical space is not the same as how the game will display that space or how it will implement the space in software. Ultimately, all spaces must be displayed on the two-dimensional surface of the monitor screen, but that's a problem for a programmer, not a designer. How to implement and display the space are separate but related questions. The former has to do with technical design, and the latter has to do with user interface design.

我们必须明白，游戏物理空间的维度并不等同于游戏将如何显示该空间或如何在软件中实现该空间。归根结底，所有空间都必须显示在显示器屏幕的二维表面上，但这是程序员的问题，而不是设计师的问题。如何实现和显示空间是两个不同但相关的问题。前者与技术设计有关，后者与用户界面设计有关。

Nowadays, a great many computer game settings have a three-dimensional space, even though the game might implement it in various ways. Starcraft, a war game, shows you plateaus and lowlands, as well as aircraft that pass over obstacles and ground units. Starcraft's setting is clearly three-dimensional, but the space is actually implemented in a series of two-dimensional planes or layers, one above another. Objects can be placed and moved within a plane with a fine degree of precision, but vertically, an object must be in one plane; there is no "in between." Flying objects can't move up and down in the air; they're always at the same altitude—in the "air layer".

如今，许多电脑游戏都有三维空间的背景，尽管游戏可能会以不同的方式来实现它。《星际争霸》是一款战争游戏，它向你展示了高原和低地，以及越过障碍物的飞机和地面部队。《星际争霸》的背景显然是三维的，但空间实际上是以一系列二维平面或层叠的方式实现的。物体可以在一个平面内精确地放置和移动，但在垂直方向上，物体必须在一个平面内，没有“中间”。飞行物体无法在空中上下移动，它们始终处于同一高度的“空气层”中。

When first thinking about the dimensionality of your game space, it's tempting to immediately assume that you want it to be three-dimensional because that offers the greatest flexibility or seems more real. But as with everything else, the dimensionality of your physical space must serve the entertainment value of the game. Make sure all the dimensions will contribute meaningfully. Lemmings was a hit 2D game, but Lemmings 3D was nowhere near as successful because it was much more difficult to play. The addition of a third dimension detracted from the player's enjoyment rather than adding to it.

在最初考虑游戏空间的维度时，很容易立即假定游戏空间是三维的，因为三维空间具有最大的灵活性，或者看起来更真实。但与其他任何事情一样，物理空间的维度必须服务于游戏的娱乐价值。确保所有的维度都能做出有意义的贡献。《旅鼠》是一款大受欢迎的 2D 游戏，但《旅鼠 3D》却远没有那么成功，因为它难玩得多。增加第三个维度非但没有增加玩家的乐趣，反而减少了玩家的乐趣。

It's possible to have more than three spatial dimensions, but, in general, we don't recommend it. A computer can display a distorted approximation of four-dimensional space in the two dimensions of the monitor screen, just as it can display an approximation of three-dimensional space in two dimensions. However, because humans are not used to dealing with 4D spaces, most of us have a hard time navigating through them. If you want to include a fourth dimension for some reason, you might consider doing it as an "alternate plane of reality" rather than an actual four-dimensional space. In other words, you have two three-dimensional spaces that look similar, but there is something different about them. For example, the game Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver contained two three-dimensional spaces, the spectral realm and the material realm. The landscape was the same in each, but the spectral realm was lit by a blue light while the material realm was lit by white light; the actions available to the player were different in the spectral real from the material realm. Although they were both implemented in software by the same 3D models, they were functionally different places governed by different laws. In the movie version of The Lord of the Rings, the world that Frodo inhabits while he is wearing the Ring can be thought of as an alternate plane of reality as well, overlapping the real world but appearing and behaving differently.

空间维度可以超过三维，但一般来说，我们不建议这样做。计算机可以在显示器屏幕的二维空间中显示扭曲的四维空间近似物，就像它可以在二维空间中显示三维空间的近似物一样。然而，由于人类不习惯与四维空间打交道，我们中的大多数人都很难在四维空间中游刃有余。如果出于某种原因想要加入四维空间，可以考虑将其作为“现实的另一个位面”，而不是真正的四维空间。换句话说，两个三维空间看起来很相似，但又有一些不同之处。例如，游戏《凯恩的遗产：勾魂使者》包含两个三维空间：幽灵界和物质界。这两个空间的景观是一样的，但幽灵界的灯光是蓝色的，而物质界的灯光是白色的；玩家在幽灵界和物质界可以采取的行动也是不同的。虽然它们都是通过相同的三维模型在软件中实现的，但它们在功能上是不同的，受不同的法则支配。在电影版《魔戒》中，弗罗多戴着魔戒时所处的世界也可以看作是现实世界的另一个位面，它与现实世界重叠，但在外观和行为上有所不同。

Scale 比例

By scale, we mean both the total size of the physical space represented and the relative sizes of objects in the game. If a game is purely abstract and doesn't correspond to anything in the real world, the sizes of objects in its game world don't really matter. You can adjust them to suit the game's needs any way you like. But if you are designing a game that is at least somewhat representational of the real world, you'll have to address the question of how big everything should be to both look real and play well. Some distortion is often necessary for the sake of gameplay; the trick is to do it without harming the player's suspension of disbelief too much.

我们所说的规模，既指游戏所表现的物理空间的总大小，也指游戏中物体的相对大小。如果一款游戏纯粹是抽象的，与现实世界中的任何事物都不对应，那么游戏世界中物体的大小其实并不重要。你可以根据游戏的需要随意调整。但是，如果你设计的游戏至少在某种程度上代表了现实世界，那么你就必须解决这样一个问题，即所有东西都应该有多大，才能看起来既真实又好玩。为了保证游戏的可玩性，一定的失真往往是必要的；诀窍在于如何在不损害玩家信任感的前提下做到这一点。

With a sports game, a driving game, a flight simulator, or any other kind of game in which the player will expect a high degree of verisimilitude, you have little choice but to scale things to their actual sizes. In old sports games, it was not uncommon for the athletes to be depicted as 12 feet tall to make them more visible, but nowadays players wouldn't tolerate a game taking such liberties with reality. Serious simulations need an accurate representation of the physical world.

在体育游戏、驾驶游戏、飞行模拟器或其他任何玩家期望高度逼真的游戏中，你别无选择，只能按照实际尺寸缩放物体。在以前的体育游戏中，运动员被描绘成 12 英尺（ 365 厘米）高并不罕见，这样做是为了让他们更显眼，但现在的玩家不会容忍游戏如此脱离现实。严肃的模拟游戏需要准确地再现物理世界。

Similarly, you should scale most of the objects in first-person games accurately. Fortunately, almost all first-person games are set indoors or within very limited areas that are seldom larger than a few hundred feet in any dimension, so this doesn't create implementation problems. Because the player's perspective is that of a person walking through the space, objects need to look right for their surrounding area. You might want to slightly exaggerate the size of critical objects such as keys, weapons, or ammunition to make them more visible, but most things, such as doors and furniture, should be scaled normally. As screen resolutions continue to improve, we'll no longer need to exaggerate objects for visual clarity, unless we want to do so for a comic or cartoonlike effect.

同样，第一人称游戏中的大部分物体都应该精确缩放。幸运的是，几乎所有第一人称游戏的场景都设置在室内或非常有限的区域内，这些区域在任何维度上都很少超过几百英尺，因此这并不会造成实施上的问题。由于玩家的视角是一个人在空间中行走，因此物体需要看起来与周围环境相符。对于钥匙、武器或弹药等关键物品，你可能需要稍微夸大其尺寸，使其更加显眼，但大多数物品（如门和家具）都应按正常比例缩放。随着屏幕分辨率的不断提高，我们将不再需要为了视觉清晰度而夸大物体的尺寸，除非我们想做成漫画或卡通效果。

If you're designing a game with an aerial or isometric perspective, you might need to fudge the scale of things somewhat. The real world is so much larger and more detailed than a game world that it's impossible to represent objects in their true scale in such a perspective. For example, in modern mechanized warfare, ground battles can easily take place over a 20-mile front, with weapons that can fire that far or farther. If you were to map an area this size onto a computer screen, an individual soldier or even a tank would be smaller than a single pixel, completely invisible. Although the player will normally be zoomed in on one small area of the whole map, the scale of objects will have to be somewhat exaggerated so that they're clearly identifiable on the screen.

如果你在设计一款采用空中或等距视角的游戏，你可能需要在比例上做一些调整。现实世界要比游戏世界大得多，也细致得多，在这种视角下不可能表现出物体的真实比例。例如，在现代机械化战争中，地面战很容易发生在 20 英里的战线上，而武器的射程可以达到或超过 20 英里。如果把这么大的区域映射到电脑屏幕上，单个士兵甚至坦克都会比一个像素还小，完全看不到。虽然玩家通常会放大整个地图中的一小块区域，但物体的比例必须有所夸张，以便在屏幕上清晰可辨。

One of the most common distortions games make is in the relative heights of people and the buildings or hills in their environment. The buildings are often only a little taller than the people who walk past them. To be able to see the roofs of all the buildings or the tops of all the hills, the camera must be positioned above the highest point on the ground; but if the camera is too high, the people would hardly be visible at all. To solve this problem, the game simply does not include tall buildings or hills and exaggerates the height of the people. Because the vertical dimension is seldom critical to the gameplay in things such as war games and role-playing games, it doesn't matter if it's not accurate, as long as it's not so inaccurate that it interferes with suspension of disbelief.

游戏中最常见的失真现象之一是人与环境中建筑物或山丘的相对高度。建筑物往往只比走过的人高一点点。要想看到所有建筑物的屋顶或所有山丘的顶端，摄像机的位置必须高于地面的最高点；但如果摄像机的位置太高，人就几乎看不到了。为了解决这个问题，游戏干脆不包含高大的建筑物或山丘，并夸大了人物的高度。因为在战争游戏和角色扮演游戏等游戏中，纵向维度很少对游戏性起关键作用，所以只要不是不精确到影响信任感的程度，纵向维度不精确也没有关系。

Designers often make another scale distortion between indoor and outdoor locations. When a character is walking through a town, simply going from one place to another, the player will want the character to get there reasonably quickly. The scale of the town should be small enough that the character takes only a few minutes to get from one end to another, unless the point of the game is to explore a richly detailed urban environment. When the character steps inside a building, however, and needs to negotiate doors and furniture, you should expand the scale to show these additional details. If you use the same animation for a character walking indoors and outdoors, this will give the impression that the character walks much faster outdoors than indoors. However, this seldom bothers players—they'd much rather have the game proceed quickly than have their avatar take hours to get anywhere, even if that would be more accurate.

设计师经常会在室内和室外地点之间进行另一种缩放失真。当角色在城镇中穿行，只是从一个地方走到另一个地方时，玩家会希望角色能比较快速到达目的地。除非游戏的目的是探索一个细节丰富的城市环境，否则城镇的规模应该足够小，角色从一端走到另一端只需要几分钟的时间。但是，当角色走进一栋建筑，需要与门和家具打交道时，就应该扩大比例，以显示这些额外的细节。如果角色在室内和室外行走时使用相同的动画，会让人觉得角色在室外行走的速度比室内快得多。不过，这很少会让玩家感到困扰——他们更希望游戏能快速进行，而不是让他们的化身走几个小时后到达目的地，即使这样才更准确。

This brings up one final distortion, which is also affected by the game's notion of time (see the section, "The Temporal Dimension"), and that is the relative speeds of moving objects. In the real world, a supersonic jet fighter can fly more than a hundred times faster than an infantry soldier can walk on the ground. If you're designing a game that includes both infantry soldiers and jet fighters, you're going to have a problem. If the scale of the battlefield is suitable for jets, it will take infantry weeks to walk across; if it's suitable for infantry, a jet could pass over it in the blink of an eye. One solution to this is to do what the real military does and implement transport vehicles for ground troops. Another is simply to fudge it and pretend that jets fly only four or five times as fast as people walk. As long as the jet is the fastest thing in the game, it doesn't really matter how much faster it is; the "strike and retreat" tactic that jets are good at will still work. Setting these values is all part of balancing the game, as discussed in more detail in Chapter 7, "Gameplay."

这就带来了最后一种失真曲，它也受到游戏时间概念的影响（见“时间维度”部分），那就是移动物体的相对速度。在现实世界中，一架超音速喷气式战斗机的飞行速度是一名步兵在地面上行走速度的 100 多倍。如果你要设计一款同时包含步兵和喷气式战斗机的游戏，你就会遇到问题。如果战场的规模适合喷气式战斗机，那么步兵需要花费数周的时间才能走过去；如果战场的规模适合步兵，那么喷气式战斗机眨眼间就能从上面飞过。解决这个问题的办法之一是效仿真正的军队，为地面部队配备运输车辆。另一个办法是干脆弄虚作假，假装喷气式飞机的飞行速度只有人类步行速度的四五倍。只要喷气式飞机是游戏中速度最快的东西，那么快多少并不重要；喷气式飞机擅长的“攻击和撤退”战术仍然有效。设置这些值都是平衡游戏的一部分，第七章“游戏性”中将详细讨论。

Boundaries 边界

In board games, the edge of the board constitutes the edge of the game world. Because computers have a finite size, the physical dimension of a computer game world must have a finite size also. However, computer games are usually more immersive than board games, and they often try to disguise or explain away the fact that the world is limited, to maintain the player's suspension of disbelief.

在棋盘游戏中，棋盘的边缘就是游戏世界的边缘。因为计算机的尺寸是有限的，所以计算机游戏世界的物理尺寸也必须是有限的。不过，电脑游戏通常比棋盘游戏更能让玩家身临其境，而且电脑游戏通常会试图掩盖或解释世界是有限的这一事实，以保持玩家的信任感。

In some cases, the boundaries of a game world arise naturally, and we don't have to disguise or explain them. Sports games take place only in a stadium or an arena, and no one expects or wants them to include the larger world. In most driving games, the car is restricted to a track or a road, and this, too, is reasonable enough.

在某些情况下，游戏世界的边界是自然形成的，我们无需加以掩饰或解释。体育游戏只在体育馆或竞技场内进行，没有人期望或想要它们包括更大的世界。在大多数驾驶游戏中，汽车只能在赛道或道路上行驶，这也是很合理的。

Setting a game underground or indoors helps to create natural boundaries for the game world. Everyone expects indoor regions to be of a limited size, with walls defining the edges. The problem occurs when games move outdoors, where people expect large, open spaces without sharply defined edges. A common solution in this case is to set the game on an island surrounded by water or by some other kind of impassable terrain: mountains, swamps, or deserts. These establish both a credible and a visually distinctive "edge of the world."

将游戏设置在地下或室内有助于为游戏世界创造自然的边界。每个人都希望室内区域的大小有限，边缘由墙壁界定。当游戏转移到室外时，问题就出现了，因为人们希望室外有广阔、开阔的空间，而没有清晰界定的边缘。在这种情况下，一种常见的解决方案是将游戏设置在一个四面环水的小岛上，或设置在其他一些无法通行的地形上：高山、沼泽或沙漠。这些地形建立了让人信服和视觉上形成了独特的“世界边缘”。

In flight simulators, the boundaries of the world are even more problematic. Most flight simulators restrict the player to a particular area of the real world. Because there are no walls in the air, there's nothing to stop the plane from flying up to the edge of the game world, and the player can clearly see when he has arrived there that there's nothing beyond. In some games, the plane just stops there, hovering in midair, and won't go any farther. In Battlefield 1942, the game tells the player that he has left the scene of the action and forcibly returns him to the runway.

在飞行模拟器中，世界的边界问题更大。大多数飞行模拟器将玩家限制在真实世界的特定区域内。因为空中没有墙壁，所以没有任何东西可以阻止飞机飞到游戏世界的边缘，而当玩家到达那里时，可以清楚地看到外面什么也没有。在有些游戏中，飞机就停在那里，悬停在半空中，不会再往前飞了。在《战地 1942》中，游戏会告诉玩家他已经离开了行动场地，并强行将他送回跑道。

A common solution to the edge-of-the-world problem is to allow the flat world to "wrap" at the top, bottom, and sides. Although the world is implemented as a rectangular space in the software, objects that cross one edge appear at the opposite edge—they wrap around the world. If the object remains centered on the screen and the world appears to move beneath it, you can create the impression that the world is spherical. This was used to excellent effect in Bullfrog Productions' game Magic Carpet. In another Bullfrog Productions game, Populous: The Beginning, the world was actually displayed graphically as a sphere on the screen, not just a wrapping rectangle.

解决世界边缘问题的常见方法是让平面世界在顶部、底部和侧面“环绕”。尽管软件中的世界是以矩形空间的形式实现的，但越过一条边的物体会出现在对边——它们会环绕世界。如果物体在屏幕上保持居中，而世界在其下方移动，就会给人一种世界是球形的印象。在牛蛙的游戏《魔法飞毯》中，这种方法得到了很好的应用。在另一款牛蛙的游戏《上帝也疯狂：开天辟地》中，世界实际上是以球形的图形显示在屏幕上的，而不仅仅是一个包裹的矩形。

Questions to Ask Yourself About the Physical Dimension 关于物理维度的自问自答

• Does my game require a physical dimension? What is it used for? Is it an essential part of gameplay or merely cosmetic? 我的游戏需要物理维度吗？它的用途是什么？它是游戏的重要组成部分还是仅仅是装饰性的？

• Leaving aside issues of implementation or display, how many imaginary spatial dimensions does my game require? If there are three or more, can objects move continuously through the third and higher dimensions, or are these dimensions partitioned into discrete "layers" or zones? 抛开实现或显示问题不谈，我的游戏需要多少个想象的空间维度？如果有三个或更多维度，物体能否在第三维度和更高维度中连续移动，还是这些维度被分割为离散的“层”或区域？

• How big is my game world, in light-years or inches? Is accuracy of scale critical, as in a football game, or not, as in a cartoonlike action game? 我的游戏世界有多大，是以光年为单位还是以英寸为单位？比例精确的重要性，是像足球游戏那样，还是像卡通动作游戏那样？

• Will my game need more than one scale, for indoor versus outdoor areas, for example? How many will it actually require? 我的游戏是否需要多种比例，例如室内和室外的比例？精确需要多少个比例？

• How am I going to handle the relative sizes of objects and people? What about their relative speeds of movement? 我将如何处理物体和人的相对大小？它们的相对移动速度如何？

• How is my world bounded? Am I going to make an effort to disguise the "edge of the world," and if so, with what? What happens if the player tries to go beyond it? 我的世界是如何边界化的？我是否要努力掩饰“世界的边缘”，如果需要，怎么做？如果玩家试图超越它，会发生什么？

The Temporal Dimension 时间维度

The temporal dimension of a game world defines the way that time is treated in that world and the ways in which it differs from time in the real world.

游戏世界的时间维度定义了在该世界中处理时间的方式，以及时间与现实世界中时间的不同之处。

In many turn-based games and action games, the world doesn't include a concept of time passing, days and nights, or seasons and years. Everything in the world idles or runs in a continuous loop until the player interacts with it in some way. Occasionally, the player is put under pressure by being given a limited amount of real-world time to accomplish something, but this is usually just a single challenge, not part of a larger notion of time in the game.

在许多回合制游戏和动作游戏中，世界并不包含时间流逝、日夜、季节和年份的概念。世界上的一切都在空转或连续循环运行，直到玩家以某种方式与之互动。偶尔，玩家会在现实世界有限的时间内完成某项任务，从而承受压力，但这通常只是一次挑战，而不是游戏中更大时间概念的一部分。

In some games, time is implemented as part of the setting but not part of the gameplay. Here time creates atmosphere and gives the game some variety, but it doesn't change the way you play the game. This usually feels rather artificial. If the player can do exactly the same things at night that she can during the daytime, and no one ever seems to sleep, then there's little point in making the distinction. For time to serve the fantasy, it must affect it in meaningful ways.

在有些游戏中，时间是作为游戏设置的一部分来实现的，但却不是游戏玩法的一部分。在这些游戏中，时间营造了游戏氛围，使游戏变得丰富多彩，但它并不会改变你玩游戏的方式。这通常会给人一种相当矫揉造作的感觉。如果玩家晚上能做的事情和白天完全一样，而且似乎没有人会睡觉，那么区分时间就没有什么意义了。要让时间为幻想服务，它就必须以有意义的方式发挥作用。

Baldur's Gate is a good example of a game in which time is meaningful. Baldur's Gate is a very large role-playing game implemented according to the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules. At night, shops are closed and the characters in the game run an increased risk of being attacked by wandering monsters. It's also darker and hard to see. Taverns are open all day and all night, which is reasonable enough, but the customers don't ever seem to leave and the bartender never goes off shift. In this way, the game's use of time is a little inconsistent, but the discrepancy serves the gameplay well because you can always trade with the bartender and pick up gossip no matter what time it is. The characters do need rest if they've been on the march for a long while, and this makes them vulnerable while they're sleeping. In the underground portions of the game, day and night have less meaning, as you would expect.

《博德之门》是让时间有意义的一个很好的例子。《博德之门》是一款按照《龙与地下城》高级版规则制作的大型角色扮演游戏。到了晚上，商店都关门了，游戏中的角色被游荡的怪物袭击的风险也增加了。此外，夜色也会更暗，视线也会变得模糊。酒馆整日整夜营业，这很合理，但顾客似乎永远不会离开，酒保也永远不会下班。这样一来，游戏对时间的利用就有点不一致了，但这种不一致却很好地满足了游戏的需求，因为无论什么时候，你都可以与酒保交易，打听小道消息。如果游戏中的角色长时间处于行军状态，他们确实需要休息，这就使得他们在睡觉时很容易受到伤害。在游戏的地下部分，你可能已经猜到了，白天和黑夜的差别并不大。

Variable Time 可变时间

In games that do implement time as a significant element of the gameplay, as in books and movies, time in the game world usually runs much faster than in reality and often jumps, skipping periods when nothing interesting is happening. Most war games, for example, don't bother to implement nighttime or require that soldiers get any rest. In reality, soldier fatigue is a critical consideration in warfare, but because sleeping soldiers don't make exciting viewing and certainly aren't very interactive, most games just skip it. Allowing soldiers to fight continuously without a pause permits the player to play continuously without a pause also.

在那些将时间作为重要游戏元素的游戏中，就像在书籍和电影中一样，游戏世界中的时间运行得通常比现实中快很多，而且经常是跳跃式的，跳过了没有任何有趣事情发生的时间段。例如，大多数战争游戏都懒得设置夜间时间，也不要求士兵休息。在现实中，士兵的疲劳是战争中的一个重要考虑因素，但由于熟睡的士兵并不令人激动，当然也没有什么互动性，因此大多数游戏都直接跳过这一点。让士兵连续作战而不休息，也就可以让玩家连续游戏而不暂停。

The Sims, a game about people living in a house, handles this problem a different way. The simulated characters require rest and sleep for their health, so The Sims depicts day and night accurately. However, when all the characters go to sleep, the game speeds up considerably, letting hours go by in a few seconds. As soon as anyone wakes up, it slows back down again.

《模拟人生》是一款关于人们在房子里生活的游戏，它以不同的方式处理了这个问题。《模拟人生》中的模拟人物需要休息和睡眠来保持健康，因此《模拟人生》准确地描述了白天和黑夜。不过，当所有角色都进入梦乡时，游戏速度会大大加快，几秒钟就能过去几个小时。一旦有人醒来，游戏速度又会变慢。

The Sims is a rather unusual game in that it's chiefly about time management. You are under constant pressure to have your characters accomplish all their chores and get time for sleep, relaxation, and personal development as well. The game runs at something like 48 times as fast as real life, so you can play through the 16 hours of daytime in about 20 minutes. However, the characters don't move 48 times as fast. Their actions look pretty normal, about like real time. As a result, it takes them 15 minutes on the game's clock just to go out and pick up the newspaper. This contributes to the sense of time pressure. Because the characters do everything slowly (in game terms), they often don't get a chance to water the flowers, which consequently die.

《模拟人生》是一款相当特别的游戏，因为它的主要内容是时间管理。你面临着持续的压力，要让你的角色完成所有的家务，同时也要保证睡眠、放松和个人发展。游戏的运行速度大约是现实生活中的 48 倍，因此你可以在 20 分钟内玩完白天的 16 个小时。不过，人物的移动速度并没有 48 倍快。他们的动作看起来很正常，和现实时间差不多。因此，按游戏时间计算，他们出门取报纸需要 15 分钟。这就造成了时间压力感。由于角色做任何事情都很慢（在游戏中），他们往往没有机会给花浇水，结果花就死了。

Anomalous Time 反常时间

In The Settlers III, a complex economic simulation, a tree can grow from a sapling to full size in about the same length of time that it takes for an iron foundry to smelt four or five bars of iron. This is a good example of anomalous time: time that seems to move at different speeds in different parts of the game. Blue Byte, the developer of The Settlers, tuned the length of time it takes to do each of the many tasks in the game to make sure that it would run smoothly. As a result, The Settlers is very well balanced at some cost to realism. However, it's doesn't disrupt the fantasy because The Settlers doesn't actually give the player a clock in the game world. There's no way to compare game time to real time, so in effect, the game world has no obvious timescale.

在《工人物语三》这款复杂的经济模拟游戏中，一棵树从幼苗长成参天大树所需的时间，与一个炼铁厂冶炼四五块铁所需的时间差不多。这就是反常时间的一个很好的例子：在游戏的不同部分，时间似乎以不同的速度运行。《工人物语》的开发商 Blue Byte 调整了游戏中每一项任务所需的时间长度，以确保游戏运行流畅。因此，《工人物语》的平衡性非常好，但也付出了一定的现实感代价。不过，这并没有破坏幻想，因为《工人物语》实际上并没有给玩家提供游戏世界中的时钟。玩家无法将游戏时间与现实时间进行比较，因此实际上游戏世界没有明显的时间刻度。

Another example of anomalous time appears in Age of Empires, in which tasks that should take less than a day in real time (gathering berries from a bush, for example) seem to take years in game time according to the game clock. Age of Empires does have a timescale, visible on the game clock, but not everything in the world makes sense on that timescale. The players simply have to accept these actions as symbolic rather than real. As designers, we have to make them work in the context of the game world without disrupting the fantasy. As long as the symbolic actions (gathering berries or growing trees) don't have to be coordinated with real-time actions (warfare), but remain essentially independent processes, it doesn't matter if they operate on an anomalous time scale.

另一个时间反常的例子出现在《帝国时代》中，根据游戏时钟的显示，在现实时间中理应不到一天就能完成的任务（例如从灌木丛中采集浆果），在游戏时间中似乎要花上好几年。《帝国时代》确实有一个时间刻度，可以在游戏时钟上看到，但并非世界上的所有事情都能在这个时间刻度上合理。玩家只需接受这些行为是象征性的，而不是真实的。作为设计者，我们必须在不破坏幻想的前提下，让它们在游戏世界中发挥作用。只要象征性行动（采集浆果或种植树木）不必与实时行动（战争）协调，而是保持本质上的独立过程，那么它们在异常的时间尺度上运行也没有关系。

Letting the Player Adjust Time 让玩家调整时间

In sports games and vehicle simulations, game time usually runs at the same speed as real time. An American football game is, by definition, an hour long, but because the clock In sports games and vehicle simulations, game time usually runs at the same speed as real time. An American football game is, by definition, an hour long, but because the clock stops all the time, the actual elapsed time of a football game is closer to three hours. All serious computerized football games simulate this accurately. Verisimilitude is a key requirement of most sports games; if a game does not accurately simulate the real sport, it might not be approved by the league, and its competitors are bound to point it out as a flaw. However, most such games also allow the players to shorten the game by playing 5- or 10-minute quarters instead of 15-minute ones because most people don't want to devote a full three hours to playing a simulated football game. This is also a useful feature in testing; it would take far too long to test the product if you had to play a full-length game every time.

在体育游戏和驾驶模拟中，游戏时间通常与真实时间以相同的速度运行。根据定义，美式足球比赛的时间为一小时，但由于在体育游戏和驾驶模拟中，游戏时间通常与真实时间以相同的速度运行。根据定义，美式足球比赛的时间为一小时，但由于时钟会一直停止，因此足球比赛的实际时间接近三小时。所有严肃的电脑足球游戏都能准确模拟这一点。真实性是大多数体育游戏的关键要求；如果一款游戏不能准确模拟真实的体育运动，它就可能得不到联盟的批准，其竞争对手也必然会指出它的缺陷。不过，大多数此类游戏还允许玩家缩短比赛时间，将每节比赛的时间从 15 分钟缩短到 5 分钟或 10 分钟，因为大多数人并不想花整整三个小时来玩一场模拟足球比赛。这在测试中也是一个有用的功能；如果每次都要玩一整场比赛，测试产品的时间就太长了。

Flight simulators also usually run in real time. But there are often long periods of flying straight and level during which nothing of interest is going on; the plane is simply traveling from one place to another. To shorten these periods, many games offer a way to "speed up time" by two, four, or eight times—in effect, making everything in the game world go faster than real time. When the plane approaches its destination, the player can return the game to normal speed and play in real time.

飞行模拟器通常也是实时运行的。但是，通常会有很长一段时间是平直飞行的，在此期间不会发生任何有趣的事情；飞机只是从一个地方飞到另一个地方。为了缩短这些时间，许多游戏都提供了一种方法，可以将时间“加速”两倍、四倍或八倍——实际上就是让游戏世界中的一切都比真实时间快。当飞机接近目的地时，玩家可以将游戏速度恢复到正常速度，并进行实时游戏。

Questions to Ask Yourself About the Temporal Dimension 关于时间维度的自问自答

• Is time a meaningful element of my game? Does the passage of time change anything in the game world even if the player does nothing, or does the world simply sit still and wait for the player to do something? 时间是我的游戏中一个有意义的元素吗？即使玩家什么都不做，时间的流逝是否也会改变游戏世界的任何事情，还是游戏世界只是静静地等待玩家做什么？

• If time does change the world, what effects does it have? Does food decay, and do light bulbs burn out? 如果时间确实改变了世界，它会产生什么影响？食物会腐烂吗？灯泡会烧坏吗？

• How does time affect the player's avatar? Does he get hungry or tired? 时间会如何影响玩家的化身？他会饿还是累？

• What is the actual purpose of including time in my game? Is it only a part of the atmosphere, or is it an essential part of the gameplay? 在我的游戏中加入时间的真正目的是什么？它只是游戏氛围的一部分，还是游戏玩法的重要组成部分？

• Is there a timescale for my game? Do I need to have measurable quantities of time, such as hours, days, and years, or can I just let time go by without bothering to measure it? Does the player need a clock to keep track of time? 我的游戏有时间刻度吗？我是否需要可测量的时间量，如小时、天和年，还是可以任由时间流逝而不必费心测量？玩家是否需要一个时钟来记录时间？

• Are there periods of time that I'm going to skip or do without? Is this going to be visible to the player, or will it happen seamlessly? 是否有一些时间段我可以跳过或省略？玩家是否能看到这些时间段，或者这些时间段是无缝衔接的？

• Do I need to implement day and night? If I do, what will make night different from day? Will it merely look different, or will it have other effects as well? What about seasons? 我需要设置白天和黑夜吗？如果需要，黑夜与白天有何不同？是仅仅看起来不同，还是还会有其他效果？那么季节呢？

• Will any of the time in my game need to be anomalous? If so, why? Will that bother the player? Do I need to explain it away, and if so, how? 游戏中的时间是否需要反常？如果需要，为什么？这会让玩家感到困扰吗？我是否需要解释清楚，如果需要，如何解释？

• Should the player be allowed to adjust time in any way? Why, how, and when? 是否应该允许玩家以任何方式调整时间？为什么？如何调整？什么时候进行调整？

The Environmental Dimension 环境维度

The environmental dimension describes the world's appearance and its atmosphere. We've seen that the physical dimension defines the shape of the game's space; the environmental dimension is about what's in that space. Its two related elements, cultural context and physical surroundings, make up the visual implementation of the game's setting.

环境维度描述的是世界的外观和氛围。我们已经看到，物理维度定义了游戏空间的形状；环境维度则是关于空间中的事物。文化背景和物理环境这两个相关元素构成了游戏环境的视觉表现。

Cultural Context 文化背景

When we speak of the cultural context of a game, we're talking about culture in the anthropological sense: the beliefs, attitudes, and values that the people in the game world hold, as well as their political and religious institutions, social organization, and so on. These characteristics are reflected in the manufactured items that appear in the game: clothing, furniture, architecture, landscaping, and every other man-made object in the world. The culture influences not only what appears and what doesn't (a game set in a realistic ancient Egypt obviously shouldn't include firearms), but also how everything looks. The appearance of objects is affected not only by their function in the world, but also by the aesthetic sensibilities of the people who constructed them: A Maori shield will look entirely different from King Arthur's shield.

当我们谈论游戏的文化背景时，我们指的是人类学意义上的文化：游戏世界中的人们所持有的信仰、态度和价值观，以及他们的政治和宗教机构、社会组织等等。这些特征反映在游戏中出现的人造物品上：服装、家具、建筑、景观以及世界上的其他所有人造物品。文化不仅会影响游戏中出现的物品和不出现的物品（一款以逼真的古埃及为背景的游戏显然不应该出现枪支），还会影响所有物品的外观。物体的外观不仅受到其在世界中的功能的影响，还受到建造它们的人的审美情趣的影响：毛利人的盾牌与亚瑟王的盾牌看起来完全不同。

The cultural context also includes the game's back story. The back story of a game is the imaginary history, either large-scale (nations, wars, natural disasters) or small-scale (personal events and interactions) that preceded the time when the game takes place. This historical background helps to establish why the culture is the way it is. A warlike people should have a history of warfare; a mercantile people should have a history of trading. In designing this, don't go into too much depth too early, however. As we warned in Chapter 2, "Game Concepts," the story serves the game, not the other way around.

文化背景还包括游戏的背景故事。游戏的背景故事是游戏发生之前的虚构历史，可以是大范围的历史（国家、战争、自然灾害），也可以是小范围的历史（个人事件和互动）。历史背景有助于确定文化的形成原因。好战的民族应该有战争史，重商的民族应该有贸易史。不过，在设计时不要过早深入。正如我们在第二章“游戏概念”中提醒的那样，故事服务于游戏，而不是相反。

For most game worlds, it's not necessary to define their culture in great detail. If the game is set in your own culture, you can simply use the things that you see around you. The Sim City series, for example, is clearly set in present-day America (European cities are rarely so rectilinear), and it looks like it. But when your game begins to deviate from your own culture, you need to start thinking about how it deviates and what consequences that has.

对于大多数游戏世界，没有必要详细定义其文化。如果游戏的背景是你自己的文化，你只需使用你周围的事物即可。例如，《模拟城市》系列显然是以当今的美国为背景（欧洲城市很少是直线型的），而且看起来也是如此。但是，当你的游戏开始偏离你自己的文化时，你就需要开始考虑它是如何偏离的以及会产生什么后果。

Physical Surroundings 物理环境

The physical surroundings define what the game actually looks like. This is the part of game design in which it's most helpful to be an artist or to work closely with one. In the early stages of design, you don't need to make drawings of every single thing that can appear in the game world, although sooner or later someone is going to have to. But for the time being, it's important to create concept sketches: pencil or pen-and-ink drawings of key visual elements in the game. Depending on what your game is about, this can include buildings, vehicles, clothing, weaponry, furniture, decorations, works of art, jewelry, religious or magical items, logos or emblems, and on and on. Man-made items in particular are influenced by the game's culture. A powerful and highly religious people are likely to have large symbols of their spirituality: stone temples or cathedrals. A warlike nomadic people will have animals or vehicles to carry their gear and weapons suitable for use on the move. (Note that these might be future nomads, driving dune buggies rather than camels.)

物理环境决定了游戏的实际外观。在游戏设计的这一部分，如果你是一名美术师，或者能与美术师密切合作，将对你的工作大有帮助。在设计的早期阶段，你不需要为游戏世界中可能出现的每一样东西都画图纸，尽管迟早会有人这样做。但目前最重要的是绘制概念草图：用铅笔或水墨画出游戏中的关键视觉元素。根据游戏的内容，这些元素可以包括建筑、车辆、服装、武器、家具、装饰品、艺术品、珠宝、宗教或魔法物品、标志或徽章等等。人造物品尤其会受到游戏文化的影响。一个强大而虔诚的民族很可能拥有大型的精神象征：石制寺庙或大教堂。好战的游牧民族则会有动物或车辆来携带适合移动使用的装备和武器。(注意，这些可能是未来的游牧民族，他们驾驶的是沙丘越野车而不是骆驼）。

Nor should you neglect the natural world. Too many games set in urban or indoor environments consisting entirely of man-made things feel sterile, artificially clean, and devoid of life. Think about birds and animals, plants and trees, earth, rocks, hills, and even the sky. Consider the climate: Is it hot or cold, wet or dry? Is the land fertile or barren, flat or mountainous? These things are all parts of a real place, opportunities to create a visually rich and distinctive environment.

你也不应忽视自然世界。有太多的游戏设定在城市或室内环境中，完全由人造物品组成，给人一种无菌、人工清洁、缺乏生命力的感觉。想想鸟兽、草木、泥土、岩石、山丘，甚至天空。想想气候：是炎热还是寒冷，潮湿还是干燥？土地是肥沃还是贫瘠，是平坦还是多山？这些都是真实环境的组成部分，也是创造丰富而独特的视觉环境的机会。

If your world is chiefly indoors, of course, you don't have to think about nature much unless your character passes a window, but there are a hundred other issues instead. Where does the light come from? What are the walls, floors, and ceilings made of, and how are they decorated? Why is this building here? Do the rooms have a specific purpose, and if so, what? How can you tell the purpose of a room from its contents? Does the building have multiple stories? How does the player get from one story to another?

当然，如果你的世界主要是在室内，那么除非你的角色经过窗户，否则你不必过多地考虑自然问题，但除此之外，还有数以百计的其他问题。光线从哪里来？墙壁、地板和天花板是由什么材料制成的？这座建筑为什么会在这里？房间是否有特定用途，如果有，是什么？如何从房间内的物品看出房间的用途？这座建筑有多层吗？玩家如何从一层到达另一层？

Physical surroundings include sounds as well as sights: music, ambient environmental sounds, the particular noises made by people, animals, machinery, and vehicles. Think about the sounds things make at the same time that you think about how they look. This will help you to create a coherent world. Suppose you're inventing a six-legged reptilian saddle animal with clawed feet rather than hooves. How does that sound as it moves? Its scales might rattle a bit. Its feet are not going to make the characteristic clop-clop sound of a shod horse. With six legs, it will probably have some rather odd gaits, and those should be reflected in the sound it makes.

物理环境包括声音和视觉：音乐、环境音、人、动物、机器和车辆发出的特殊声音。在考虑事物外观的同时，也要考虑它们发出的声音。这将有助于你创造一个连贯的世界。假设你发明了一种六条腿的爬行乘骑动物，它有爪子而不是蹄子。它在移动时会发出什么声音？它的鳞片可能会发出一些响声。它的脚不会发出有蹄马特有的“咔嗒咔嗒”声。它有六条腿，可能会有一些比较奇怪的步态，这些都应该反映在它发出的声音中。

The physical surroundings are primarily responsible for setting the tone and mood of the game as it is played, whether it's the lighthearted cheerfulness of Mario or the dimly lit suspense of Thief: The Dark Project. The sound, and especially the music, will contribute greatly to this. Think hard about the kind of music you want, and consider what genres will be appropriate. Stanley Kubrick listened to hundreds of records to select the music for 2001: A Space Odyssey, and he astonished the world with his choice of "The Blue Danube" for the shuttle docking sequence. You have a similar opportunity in designing your game.

无论是《马里奥》的轻松欢快，还是《神偷：暗黑计划》的昏暗悬疑，游戏中的物理环境都主要负责为游戏定下基调和情绪。音效，尤其是音乐，将为此做出巨大贡献。请认真思考你想要什么样的音乐，并考虑适合哪些类型。斯坦利·库布里克在为《2001：太空漫游》挑选音乐时听了数百张唱片，他为穿梭机对接程序选择的“蓝色多瑙河”让全世界为之震惊。在设计游戏时，你也有类似的机会。

Detail 细节

Every designer must decide how much detail the game world needs—that is to say, how richly textured the world will be and how accurately modeled its behavior will be. This is partly a question of "realism." Technical limitations and time constraints almost always determine a game's level of detail. No football game goes to the extent of modeling each fan in the stadium, and few flight simulators model all the physical characteristics of their aircraft. Detail helps to support the fantasy, but it always costs, in development time and memory or in disk space on the player's machine. In an adventure game, it should, in principle, be possible to pick up everything in the world; in practice, this just isn't practical. The consequence of this is that the player knows that if an object can be picked up, it must be important for some reason; if it can't be picked up, it isn't important. Similarly, in god games, it's common for all the people to look alike; they're often male adults. Bullfrog Productions once designed a god game with both male and female adults, but there wasn't enough time for the artists to model children as well. People simply had to be "born" into the world full grown. Lionhead's Black & White, on the other hand, managed to include men, women, and children.

每个设计师都必须决定游戏世界需要多少细节，也就是说，游戏世界的纹理要多丰富，游戏行为的建模要多精确。这在一定程度上是一个“现实主义”问题。技术水平和时间限制几乎总是决定了游戏的细节水平。没有一款足球游戏会对体育场内的每个球迷进行建模，也很少有飞行模拟器会对飞机的所有物理特性进行建模。细节有助于支撑幻想，但它总是要付出代价的，包括开发时间、内存或玩家机器上的磁盘空间。在探险游戏中，原则上应该可以拾取世界上的一切，但实际上这并不现实。这样做的结果是，玩家知道，如果一个物体可以被拾起，那么它一定是重要的；如果它不能被拾起，那么它就不重要。同样，在上帝游戏中，所有的人都长得很像，他们通常都是成年男性。牛蛙曾经设计过一款有男性和女性成年人的上帝游戏，但没有足够的时间让美工人员制作儿童模型。人们只能以成人的形态“出生”到这个世界上。而 Lionhead 的《黑与白》则包含了男性、女性和儿童。

Here's a good rule of thumb for determining the level of detail your game will contain: Include as much detail as you can to help the game's immersiveness, up to the point at which it begins to harm the gameplay. If the player is struggling to look after everything you've given him, the game probably has too much detail. (This is one of the reasons war games tend to have hundreds rather than hundreds of thousands of units. The player in a war game can't delegate tasks to intelligent subordinates, so the numbers have to be kept down to a size that he can reasonably manage.) A spectacularly detailed game that's no fun to play won't sell many copies.

在确定游戏的细节水平时，这里有一个很好的经验法则：为了让游戏更有沉浸感，尽可能多地加入细节，直到细节开始损害游戏性为止。如果玩家很难照顾好你给他的一切，那么游戏的细节可能就太多了（这也是战争游戏往往有几百个而不是几十万个单位的原因之一。战争游戏中的玩家无法将任务分配给聪明的下属，因此必须将数量控制在他可以合理管理的范围内）。如果一款游戏的细节做得非常出色，但玩起来却毫无乐趣可言，那么这款游戏的销量也不会太高。

Defining a Style 定义风格

In describing how your world is going to look, you are defining a visual style for your game that will influence a great many other things as well: the character design, the user interface, perhaps the manual, and even the design of the box and the advertising. You actually have two tasks to take on here: defining the style of things in your world, and also defining the style of the artwork that will depict your world. They aren't the same. For example, you can describe a world whose architectural style is inspired by Southwestern pueblos, but draw it to look like a Warner Brothers cartoon. Or you could have medieval towns with half-timbered houses, but painted in a slightly fuzzy, Impressionistic style. You must choose both your content and the way in which you will present it.

在描述游戏世界的外观时，你正在为游戏定义一种视觉风格，这种风格还将影响其他许多方面：角色设计、用户界面、手册，甚至包装盒和广告的设计。在这里，你实际上要承担两项任务：确定游戏世界中事物的风格，以及确定描绘你游戏世界的艺术作品的风格。它们并不相同。例如，你可以描述一个建筑风格受西南部村落启发的世界，但要把它画得像华纳兄弟的卡通片。或者，你可以描绘中世纪城镇的半木结构房屋，但却画成略显模糊的印象派风格。你必须选择内容和表现方式。

Both decisions will significantly influence the player's experience of the game, jointly creating a distinct atmosphere. In general, the style of depiction tends to superimpose its mood on the style of the object depicted. For example, a Greek temple might be architecturally elegant, but if its style of drawing suggests a Looney Tunes cartoon, everyone will expect something wacky and outrageous to take place there. The drawing style imposes its own atmosphere over the temple, no matter how majestic it is.

这两个决定都会极大地影响玩家的游戏体验，共同营造出一种独特的氛围。一般来说，描绘风格往往会将其氛围叠加到所描绘对象的风格上。例如，一座希腊神庙的建筑风格可能很优雅，但如果它的绘画风格让人联想到动画片《兔八哥》，那么每个人都会以为那里会发生什么古怪离奇的事情。无论神庙多么雄伟壮观，绘画风格都会将自己的氛围强加于神庙之上。

Unless you're the lead artist for your game as well as its designer, you probably shouldn't—or won't be allowed to—do this alone. Your art team will have ideas of its own, and you should listen to those suggestions. The marketing department might insist on having a say as well. It's important, however, that you try to keep the style harmonious and consistent throughout your game. Too many games have been published in which different sections had wildly differing art styles because no one held and enforced a single overall vision.

除非你是游戏的首席美术师兼设计师，否则你可能不应该——或者说不会被允许——独自完成这项工作。你的美术团队会有自己的想法，你应该听取他们的建议。市场营销部门也可能坚持要有发言权。但重要的是，你要尽量保持整个游戏风格的和谐一致。有太多的游戏在发布时，由于没有人坚持和执行统一的整体构想，导致不同部分的艺术风格大相径庭。

Overused Settings 过度使用的设置

All too often, games borrow settings from one another or from common settings found in the movies and television. A huge number of games are set in science fiction and fantasy worlds, especially the quasimedieval, sword-and-sorcery fantasy inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons, popular with the young people who used to be the primary—indeed, almost the only—market for computer games. But a lot more people play games nowadays, and they want new worlds to play in. You should look beyond these hoary old staples of gaming. As we mentioned in Chapter 2, Interstate '76 was inspired by 1970s TV shows. It included cars, clothing, and music from that era, all highly distinctive and evocative of a particular culture. Interstate '76 had great gameplay, but what really set it apart from its competitors was that it looked like nothing else on the market.

很多时候，游戏都会互相借用设定，或者借用电影和电视中的常见设定。大量的游戏都以科幻小说和奇幻世界为背景，尤其是受 J.R.R. 托尔金和龙与地下城启发的准中世纪剑与魔法奇幻世界，深受年轻人的喜爱，他们曾经是电脑游戏的主要市场，甚至几乎是唯一的市场。但现在玩游戏的人越来越多，他们需要新的游戏世界。你应该把眼光放远，不要局限于这些老掉牙的游戏。正如我们在第二章中提到的，《76 号州际公路》的灵感来自 20 世纪 70 年代的电视节目。它包含了那个时代的汽车、服装和音乐，所有这些都极具特色，让人联想到特定的文化。《76 号州际公路》拥有出色的游戏性，但真正让它从竞争对手中脱颖而出的是，它的外观与市场上其他游戏截然不同。

Especially if you are going to do science fiction or fantasy, try to make it distinctively different. At present, real spacecraft built by the United States or Russia look extremely functional, just as the first cars did in the 1880s, and the spacecraft in computer games tend to look that way also. But as cars became more common, they began exhibiting stylistic variation to appeal to different kinds of people, and now there is a whole school of aesthetics for automotive design. As spacecraft become more common, and especially as we start to see "personal" spacecraft, we should expect them to exhibit stylistic variation as well. This is an area in which you have tremendous freedom to innovate.

尤其是在制作科幻小说或奇幻作品时，应尽量使其与众不同。目前，美国或俄罗斯制造的真实航天器看起来非常实用，就像 19 世纪 80 年代的第一辆汽车一样，电脑游戏中的航天器也往往是这样。但是，随着汽车越来越常见，它们开始展现出风格上的变化，以吸引不同类型的人，现在汽车设计有一整套美学流派。随着航天器越来越常见，特别是当我们开始看到“个人”航天器时，我们应该期待它们也会呈现出风格上的变化。在这个领域，你有极大的创新自由。

The same goes for fantasy. Forget the same old elves, dwarves, wizards, and dragons. Look to other cultures for your heroes and villains. Right now about the only non-Western culture portrayed with any frequency in games is Japanese (feudal, present-day, and future) because there is a large market for games in Japan, and Japanese style has found some acceptance in the West as well. But there are many more sources of inspiration around the world, most untapped. Around 1200 A.D., while the rulers of Europe were still holed up in cramped, drafty castles, Islamic culture reached a pinnacle of grace and elegance. Muslims built magnificent palaces filled with the riches of the Orient and majestic mosques of inlaid stone. Yet this proud and beautiful civilization seldom appears in computer games because Western game designers haven't bothered to learn about it or don't even know it existed. Set your fantasy in Valhalla, in Russia under Peter the Great, in the arctic tundra, at Angkor Wat, at Easter Island, or at Machu Picchu.

奇幻也是如此。忘掉千篇一律的精灵、矮人、巫师和龙吧。从其他文化中寻找你的英雄和恶棍。目前，游戏中唯一经常描绘的非西方文化是日本文化（封建文化、现代文化和未来文化），因为日本有很大的游戏市场，而且日本风格在西方也有一定的接受度。但是，世界各地还有更多的灵感来源，其中大部分尚未开发。公元 1200 年左右，当欧洲的统治者还窝在狭窄、漏风的城堡里时，伊斯兰文化已经达到了优雅和高贵的顶峰。穆斯林建造了富丽堂皇的宫殿，宫殿里堆满了东方的财富，清真寺也是用石头镶嵌而成。然而，这一引以为豪的美丽文明却很少出现在电脑游戏中，因为西方的游戏设计师们不屑于了解它，甚至不知道它的存在。将你的幻想设定在瓦尔哈拉、彼得大帝统治下的俄罗斯、北极苔原、吴哥窟、复活节岛或马丘比丘。

Art and architecture, history and anthropology, literature and religion, clothing fashions, and product design are all great sources of cultural material. Artistic and architectural movements, in particular, offer tremendous riches: Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Palladian, Brutalism. If you haven't heard of one of these, go look it up now. Browse the web or the art, architecture, and design sections of the bookstore or the public library for pictures of interesting objects, buildings, and clothing. Photocopy things that attract your eye and post them around your workspace to inspire yourself and your coworkers. Collect "graphic scrap" from anywhere that you find it. Try old copies of National Geographic. Visit museums of art, design, and natural history if you can get to them; one of the greatest resources of all is travel, if you can afford it. A good game designer is always on the lookout for new ideas, even when he's ostensibly "on vacation."

艺术和建筑、历史和人类学、文学和宗教、服装时尚和产品设计都是文化资料的重要来源。艺术和建筑运动尤其提供了巨大的财富：新艺术运动、装饰艺术运动、帕拉第奥运动、野蛮主义运动。如果你还没听说过其中的某一个，现在就去查查吧。浏览网络、书店或公共图书馆的艺术、建筑和设计专区，寻找有趣的物品、建筑和服装图片。把吸引你眼球的东西复印下来，张贴在工作区周围，给自己和同事带来灵感。从任何地方收集“图形废料”。试试旧版的《国家地理杂志》。如果有条件的话，参观艺术、设计和自然历史博物馆；最重要的资源之一就是旅行，如果你负担得起的话。一个优秀的游戏设计师总是在寻找新的创意，即使他表面上是在“度假”。

It's tempting to borrow from our closest visual neighbor, the movies, because in the movies someone has already done the visual design work for us. Blade Runner introduced the decaying urban future; Alien gave us disgustingly biological aliens rather than "little green men." The problem with these looks is that they've already been borrowed from many, many times. You can use them as a quick-and-dirty backdrop if you don't want to put much effort into developing your world, and players will instantly recognize them and know what they're about. But to stand out from the crowd, consider other genres. Film noir, the Marx Brothers, John Wayne westerns, war movies from the World War II era, costume dramas of all periods... From the silliness of One Million Years B.C. to the Victorian elegance of Wilde, they're all grist for the mill.

从我们的视觉近邻——电影中借鉴是很有诱惑力的，因为在电影中，已经有人为我们完成了视觉设计工作。《银翼杀手》引入了衰败的城市未来；《异形》让我们看到了令人作呕的生物外星人，而不是“小绿人”。这些造型的问题在于，它们已经被借鉴了很多很多次。如果你不想花太多精力来开发你自己的世界，你可以把它们作为一个速成的背景，玩家会立刻认出它们，并知道它们是关于什么的。但要想在众多对手中脱颖而出，可以考虑其他类型。黑色电影、马克思兄弟、约翰·韦恩西部片、二战时期的战争片、各时期的历史剧……从《大洪荒》的傻气到王尔德的维多利亚时代的优雅，它们都是有用的东西。

Television goes through its own distinct phases, and because it's even more fashion-driven than the movies, it is ripe for parody. The comedies of the 1950s and 1960s and the nighttime soaps of the 1970s and 1980s all had characteristic looks that seem laughable today but that are immediately familiar to most adult Americans. That is one potential problem, however: If you make explicit references to American popular culture, non-Americans and children might not get it. If your gameplay is good enough, though, it won't matter.

电视也经历着自己独特的阶段，由于它比电影更受时尚的驱动，因此模仿的时机已经成熟。上世纪五六十年代的喜剧片和七八十年代的夜间肥皂剧都有自己的特色造型，这些造型在今天看来滑稽可笑，但对于大多数成年美国人来说却是再熟悉不过了。不过，这也是一个潜在的问题：如果你直接引用美国流行文化，那么非美国人和儿童可能理解不了。不过，如果你的游戏做得足够好，这不是问题。

Questions to Ask Yourself About the Environmental Dimension 关于环境纬度的自问自答

• Is my game world set in a particular historical period or geographic location? When and where? Is it an alternate reality, and if so, what makes it different from ours? 我的游戏世界是否设定在特定的历史时期或地理位置？时间和地点？它是另一个现实吗？如果是，它与我们的现实有什么不同？

• Are there any people in my game world? What are they like? Do they have a complex, highly organized society or a simple, tribal one? How do they govern themselves? How is this social structure reflected in their physical surroundings? Are there different classes of people, guilds, or specialized occupations? 我的游戏世界中有人吗？他们是什么样的人？他们是一个复杂、高度组织化的社会，还是一个简单的部落社会？他们如何管理自己？这种社会结构如何反映在他们的自然环境中？是否存在不同的阶级、行会或专门职业？

• What do my people value? Trade, martial prowess, imperialism, peace? What kinds of lives do they lead in pursuit of these ends? Are they hunters, nomadic, agrarian, industrialized, even postindustrial? How does this affect their buildings and clothing? 我的人民重视什么？贸易、武功、帝国主义、和平？为了实现这些目标，他们过着怎样的生活？他们是猎人、游牧民族、农业民族、工业化民族，甚至是后工业化民族？这对他们的建筑和服饰有何影响？

• Are my people superstitious or religious? Do they have institutions or religious practices that will be visible in the game? Are there religious buildings? Do the people carry charms or display spiritual emblems? 我的人民是迷信还是信教？他们是否有在游戏中可见的机构或宗教活动？有宗教建筑吗？人们是否携带符咒或展示精神徽章？

• What are my people's aesthetics like? Are they flamboyant or reserved, chaotic or orderly, bright or subtle? What colors do they like? Do they prefer straight lines or curves? 我的人民有怎样的审美观？他们张扬还是保守，混乱还是有序，乐观还是含蓄？他们喜欢什么颜色？他们喜欢直线还是曲线？

• If there aren't any people in the game, what are there instead, and what do they look like and how do they behave? 如果游戏中没有任何人，那么会有其他什么，他们看起来是什么样子以及他们的行为如何？

• Does my game take place indoors or outdoors, or both? If indoors, what are the furnishings and interior decor like? 我的游戏是在室内还是室外进行的，或者两者皆有？如果在室内，家具和室内装饰是什么样的？

• What is the style and mood of my game? How am I going to create them with art, sound, and music? 我的游戏的风格和氛围是什么？我将如何用美术、声音和音乐来营造它们？

• How much detail can I afford in my game? Will it be rich and varied or sparse and uncluttered? How does this affect the way the game is played? 我的游戏能有多少细节？是丰富多样，还是稀少简洁？这对游戏的玩法有什么影响？

The Emotional Dimension 情感纬度

The emotional dimension of a game world defines not only the emotions of the people in the world, but, more important, the emotions that you, as a designer, hope to arouse in the player. Action and strategy games usually involve a narrow emotional dimension, but other games that rely more heavily on story and characters can offer rich emotional content that affects the player deeply.

游戏世界的情感维度不仅决定了世界中人们的情感，更重要的是，决定了作为设计者希望唤起玩家的情感。动作和策略游戏通常涉及的情感维度较窄，但其他更依赖于故事和角色的游戏可以提供丰富的情感内容，深深地影响玩家。

The idea of manipulating the player's emotions might seem a little strange. Most computer games are pretty lighthearted and don't take themselves or their subject matter too seriously. For much of their history, games have been seen only as light entertainment, a way to while away a few hours in a fantasy world. But just because that's all they have been doesn't mean that's all they can be. In terms of the richness of their emotional content, games are now just about where the movies were when they moved from the nickelodeon to the screen. They're no longer just a few minutes' amusement; they are now capable of engaging their audience, and that means an emotional involvement as well as an intellectual one.

操纵玩家情感的想法似乎有点奇怪。大多数电脑游戏都很轻松，不会过分严肃地对待游戏本身或游戏题材。在游戏历史的大部分时间里，游戏一直被视为一种轻松的娱乐，一种在幻想世界中消磨几个小时的方式。但这并不意味着游戏只能如此。就情感内容的丰富性而言，游戏现在的地位与电影从镍币影院搬上银幕时的地位差不多。它们不再仅仅是几分钟的娱乐；它们现在能够吸引观众，这意味着情感参与和智力参与。

To affect a player's emotions, you have to make him care about something or someone, and then threaten that person or thing in a way that holds the player's interest. This is the essence of dramatic tension, whether we're watching Greek tragedy or reading Harry Potter. Something important must be at stake. The danger need not necessarily be physical; it can also be a social, emotional, or economic risk. Most of the young women in Jane Austen's novels were not in imminent peril of death or starvation, but it was essential to their family's social standing and financial future for them to make a good marriage. The conflict between their personal desires and their family obligations provides the tension in the novels.

要想影响玩家的情绪，就必须让他关心某件事或某个人，然后以一种能让玩家感兴趣的方式来威胁这个人或这件事。这就是戏剧张力的精髓所在，无论是观看希腊悲剧还是阅读《哈利·波特》都是如此。必须有重要的东西处于危险之中。危险不一定是身体上的，也可以是社会、情感或经济上的风险。在简·奥斯汀的小说中，大多数年轻女性并没有迫在眉睫的死亡或饥饿危险，但缔结一桩美满婚姻对她们家庭的社会地位和经济前景至关重要。她们的个人欲望与家庭义务之间的冲突为小说增添了紧张气氛。

A good many games set the danger at hyperbolic levels, with extreme claims like "The fate of the universe rests in your hands!". This appeals to young people, who often feel powerless and have fantasies about being powerful. To adults, it just sounds a bit silly. At the end of Casablanca, Rick said, "The problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world," but he was wrong. The whole movie, a movie still popular over a half century after its first release, is about the problems of three little people. For the duration of the film, these problems hold us entranced. It isn't necessary that the fate of the world be at stake; it is the fates of Rick, Ilsa, and Victor that tug at our hearts.

许多游戏将危险设置得过于夸张，极端地宣称“宇宙的命运掌握在你的手中！”。这对年轻人很有吸引力，因为他们常常感到无能为力，并幻想自己变得强大。对成年人来说，这听起来有点傻。在《卡萨布兰卡》的结尾，里克说：“在这个疯狂的世界上，三个小人物的问题不值一提。”但他错了。整部电影，一部在上映半个多世纪后仍然大受欢迎的电影，讲的就是三个小人物的问题。在影片的整个过程中，这些问题让我们如痴如醉。世界的命运并不一定要岌岌可危，里克、伊尔莎和维克多的命运才是牵动我们心弦的关键。

The Limitations of Fun 乐趣的局限性

Most people think that the purpose of playing games is to have fun, but fun is a rather limiting term. It tends to suggest excitement and pleasure, either a physical pleasure such as riding a roller coaster, a social pleasure such as joking around with friends, or an intellectual pleasure such as playing cards or a board game. The problem with striving for fun is that it tends to limit the emotional range of games. Suspense, excitement, exhilaration, surprise, and various forms of pleasure fall within the definition of fun, but not pity, jealousy, anger, sorrow, guilt, outrage, or despair.

大多数人认为玩游戏的目的是为了找乐子，但“乐子”是一个相当有局限性的词。它往往意味着兴奋和快乐，或是身体上的快乐，如坐过山车；或是社交上的快乐，如与朋友开玩笑；或是智力上的快乐，如玩牌或棋盘游戏。追求乐趣的问题在于，它往往会限制游戏的情感范围。悬念、兴奋、激动、惊喜以及各种形式的快乐都属于乐趣的范畴，但怜悯、嫉妒、愤怒、悲伤、内疚、愤怒或绝望则不属于。

You might think that nobody in their right mind would want to explore these emotions, but other forms of entertainment—books, movies, television—do it all the time. And, in fact, that's the key: Those media don't provide only fun; they provide entertainment. People can be entertained in all sorts of ways. Movies with sad endings aren't "fun," but they're still entertaining. Although we say that we make "games," in fact, what we make is interactive entertainment. The potential of our medium to explore emotions and the human condition is much greater than the term fun game allows for.

你可能会认为，正常人都不会想去探索这些情感，但其他娱乐形式——书籍、电影、电视——却一直在这样做。事实上，这才是关键所在：这些媒体不仅提供乐趣，还提供娱乐。人们可以通过各种方式获得娱乐。结局悲惨的电影并不“有趣”，但它们仍然具有娱乐性。虽然我们说我们制作的是“游戏”，但事实上，我们制作的是互动娱乐。作为一种媒介，它能探索情感和人类状况的潜力，远大于“有趣的游戏”一词所概括。

All that said, however, bear in mind that most publishers and players want "fun." Too many inexperienced designers are actually more interested in showing how clever they are than in making sure the player has a good time; they place their own creative agenda before the player's enjoyment. As a designer, you must master the ability to create fun—light enjoyment—before you move on to more complex emotional issues. Unpleasant or painful emotions are a greater aesthetic challenge to address successfully, and they are commercially risky besides. For more on this topic, we recommend that you take a look at the book Creating Emotion in Games, by David Freeman (New Riders, 2003).

尽管如此，请记住，大多数发行商和玩家想要的是“乐趣”。太多缺乏经验的设计师其实更想展示自己的聪明才智，而不是确保玩家玩得开心；他们把自己的创意议程置于玩家的乐趣之前。作为一名设计师，你必须先掌握创造乐趣的能力——轻度享受，然后再去解决更复杂的情感问题。表现令人不快或痛苦的情绪在美学上更具挑战性，而且在商业上也有风险。如需了解更多相关信息，我推荐你阅读大卫·弗里曼所著的《在游戏中创造情感》（New Riders, 2003）一书。

Questions to Ask Yourself About the Emotional Dimension 关于情感维度的自问自答

• Does my game have a significant emotional dimension? What emotions will my game world include? 我的游戏有重要的情感维度吗？我的游戏世界将包含哪些情感？

• How does emotion serve the entertainment value of my game? Is it a key element of the plot? Does it motivate characters in the game or the player himself? 情感如何为游戏的娱乐价值服务？它是情节的关键因素吗？它是否会激励游戏中的角色或玩家本身？

• What emotions will I try to inspire in the player? How will I do this? What will be at stake? 我将尝试激发玩家的哪些情感？如何激发？有什么弊病？

The Ethical Dimension 伦理纬度

The ethical dimension of a game world defines what right and wrong mean within the context of that world. At first glance, this might seem kind of silly—it's only a game, so there's no need to talk about ethics. But most games that have a setting, a fantasy component, also have an ethical system that defines how the player is supposed to behave. As designers, we are the gods of the game's world, and we define its morality. When we tell a player that he must perform certain actions to win the game, we are defining those actions as good or desirable. Likewise, when we say that the player must avoid certain actions, we are defining them as bad or undesirable. The players who come into the world must adopt our standards, or they will lose the game.

游戏世界的伦理维度定义了该世界背景下的是非对错。乍一看，这可能有点傻——这只是个游戏，没必要谈伦理。但大多数游戏都有一个设定，一个幻想元素，同时也有一个伦理系统来定义玩家应该如何行为。作为设计者，我们是游戏世界的神，我们定义了游戏世界的道德。当我们告诉玩家必须做出某些行为才能赢得游戏时，我们就把这些行为定义为好的或是可取的。同样，当我们告诉玩家必须避免某些行为时，我们就把它们定义为不好或不可取的。来到这个世界的玩家必须采用我们的标准，否则他们就会输掉游戏。

In some respects, the ethical dimension of a game world is part of its culture, but we've broken it out for separate discussion because it poses special design problems. The ethical space of most game worlds is rather disjoint from ethics in the real world. Games allow, even require, you to do things that you can't do in the real world. The range of actions that the game world permits is typically narrower than in the real world (you can fly your F-15 fighter jet all you want, but you can't get out of the plane), but often the permitted actions are quite extreme: killing people, blowing things up, and so on.

在某些方面，游戏世界的伦理维度是其文化的一部分，但我们将其分离出来单独讨论，是因为它带来了特殊的设计问题。大多数游戏世界的伦理空间都与现实世界的伦理空间脱节。游戏允许，甚至要求你做一些在现实世界中做不到的事情。游戏世界允许的行为范围通常比现实世界狭窄（你可以尽情驾驶你的 F-15 战斗机，但你不能离开飞机），但允许的行为往往相当极端：杀人、炸毁东西等等。

On the whole, most games have simple ethics: clobber the bad guys, protect the good guys. It's not subtle but perfectly functional; that's how you play checkers. Not many games explore the ethical dimension in any depth. A few include explicit moral choices, but, unfortunately, they tend to be namby-pamby, consistently rewarding "nice" behavior and punishing "bad" behavior. Such preachy material turns off even children, not to mention adults. But you can build a richer, more involving game by giving the player tough moral choices to make. Ethical ambiguity and difficult decisions are at the heart of many great stories and, indeed, much of life. Should you send a platoon of soldiers to certain death to save a battalion of others? How would you feel if you were in the platoon?

总的来说，大多数游戏的道德规范都很简单：打倒坏人，保护好人。这并不精妙，但非常有用；这就是你玩跳棋的方式。深入探讨道德层面的游戏并不多。少数游戏包含明确的道德选择，但不幸的是，这些选择有些做作，一味奖励“好”行为，惩罚“坏”行为。这种说教式的内容连孩子都会反感，更不用说成年人了。但是，通过让玩家做出艰难的道德选择，你可以制作出更丰富、更吸引人的游戏。道德模棱两可和艰难抉择是许多伟大故事的核心，实际上也是生活的核心。你是否应该让一排士兵冒着必死的危险去拯救一营士兵？如果你是其中一员，你会作何感想？

Black & White was a game that included a certain amount of moral decision making. So are some role-playing games—you can choose to play as an evil character who steals and kills indiscriminately, but the game becomes more difficult to win that way because other characters will refuse to cooperate with you and might even attack you on sight. Rather than impose a rule that says, "Immoral behavior is forbidden," the game implements a rule that says, "You are free to make your own moral choices—but be prepared to live with the consequences!". This is a more adult approach to the issue.

《黑与白》是一款包含一定道德决策的游戏。有些角色扮演游戏也是如此——你可以选择扮演一个肆意偷盗和杀戮的邪恶角色，但这样游戏就更难获胜了，因为其他角色会拒绝与你合作，甚至会当场攻击你。游戏中的规则不是“禁止不道德行为”，而是“你可以自由做出道德选择，但要做好承担后果的准备！”。这是更成人化的处理方式。

All that said, we strongly discourage creating games that reward or even allow the player to do truly hateful things. One of the most repugnant games ever created was a cartridge for the Atari 2600 console called Custer's Revenge, in which the player's avatar, a cowboy, was supposed to try to rape a Native American woman who was tied to a pole. (The cartridge was independently published and was not supported or endorsed by Atari in any way.) This kind of thing is beyond bad taste; it's pathological. Games that expect a player to participate in sexual assault, torture, or child abuse will never sell well. They serve only to gratify their designers' sick fantasies while tarnishing the reputation of the rest of us. Although no one would condemn all cinema on the basis of one offensive movie, interactive entertainment is still a young-enough medium that it happens to us. Like it or not, what we each do individually affects us all collectively. The best way to avoid censorship is to exercise some judgment in the first place.

综上所述，我们强烈反对制作奖励甚至允许玩家做出真正令人憎恶的事情的游戏。有史以来最令人厌恶的游戏之一是雅达利 2600 游戏机上的一款名为《卡斯特的复仇》的卡带游戏，在这款游戏中，玩家的化身是一个牛仔，他要强奸一个被绑在柱子上的美国原住民妇女。（这个卡带是独立发行的，雅达利公司没有以任何方式支持或认可它）。这种事情已经超出了低级趣味的范畴，而是一种病态。希望玩家参与性攻击、折磨或虐待儿童的游戏永远不会畅销。它们只会满足设计者变态的幻想，同时玷污我们其他人的名声。虽然没有人会因为一部令人反感的电影而谴责所有的电影，但互动娱乐仍然是一种足够年轻的媒体，这种谴责就发生在我们身边。不管你喜不喜欢，我们每个人的所作所为都会影响到我们所有人。避免审查的最好办法就是先做出一些判断。

You must be sure to explain the ethical dimension of your game clearly in the manual, in introductory material, or in mission briefings. For example, some games that have hostage-rescue scenarios make the death of a hostage a loss condition: If a hostage dies, the player loses. This means that the player has to be extra careful not to kill any hostages, even at the risk of his own avatar's life. In other games, the only loss condition is the avatar's death. In this case, many players will shoot with complete abandon, killing hostages and their captors indiscriminately. In real life, of course, the truth is somewhere in between. Police officers who accidentally shoot a hostage are seldom prosecuted unless they've been grossly negligent, but it doesn't do their career any good. You can emulate this by penalizing the player somehow. To be fair to the player, however, you need to make this clear at the outset.

你必须确保在游戏手册、介绍材料或任务简报中清楚地解释游戏的伦理维度。例如，一些有人质营救情节的游戏会把人质死亡作为损失条件：如果人质死亡，玩家就输了。这意味着玩家必须格外小心，即使冒着自己的化身丧命的危险，也不能杀死任何人质。在其他游戏中，唯一的失败条件只是化身死亡。在这种情况下，许多玩家会肆无忌惮地开枪，滥杀人质和绑架者。当然，现实生活中的情况介于两者之间。意外射杀人质的警察很少被起诉，除非他们有重大过失，但这对他们的职业生涯没有任何好处。你可以通过某种方式惩罚玩家来仿效这种做法。不过，为了对玩家公平，你需要在一开始就明确这一点。

The ethical dimensions of multi-player games, whether online or local, are an enormous and separate problem. We discuss this at length in Chapter 17, "Online Games."

多人游戏（无论是联网游戏还是本地游戏）的伦理层面是一个庞大而独立的问题。我们将在第十七章，“网络游戏”中详细讨论这个问题。

A Word About Game Violence 关于游戏暴力

It's not part of our mission in this book to debate, much less offer an answer for, the problem of whether violent video games cause violent behavior in children or adults. This is a psychological question that will be resolved only after prolonged and careful study. Unfortunately, a good many people on both sides of the issue seem to have made up their minds already, and arguments continue to rage in the halls of Congress and elsewhere, supported for the most part by very few facts.

关于暴力电子游戏是否会导致儿童或成人的暴力行为，这不是我们在本书中要讨论的问题，更不用说给出答案了。这是一个心理学问题，只有经过长期细致的研究才能解决。遗憾的是，这个问题的正反两方面似乎都有很多人已经下定了决心，国会大厅和其他地方的争论仍在继续，而支持这些争论的事实大多寥寥无几。

To you, as a designer, however, we do have a few suggestions. The essence of most games is conflict, and conflict is often represented as violence in varying degrees of realism. Chess is a war game in which pieces are killed—removed from the board—but nobody objects to the "violence" of chess; it's entirely abstract. American football is a violent contact sport in which real people get injured all the time, but there are no serious efforts to ban football, either. The only way to remove violence from gameplay would be to prohibit most of the games in the world because most contain violence in some more-or-less abstract form. The issue is not violence, per se, but how violence is portrayed and the circumstances under which it is acceptable.

不过，作为设计者，我们还是有一些建议。大多数游戏的本质都是冲突，而冲突往往在不同程度上以暴力的形式表现出来。国际象棋是一种战争游戏，在这种游戏中，棋子会被杀死——从棋盘上被移走——但没有人反对国际象棋的“暴力”；它完全是抽象的。美式橄榄球是一项暴力接触运动，经常有真人受伤，但也没有人认真努力地禁止橄榄球。要想从游戏中消除暴力，唯一的办法就是禁止世界上大多数游戏，因为大多数游戏都以某种或多或少的抽象形式包含暴力。问题不在于暴力本身，而在于如何描绘暴力以及在何种情况下可以接受暴力。

Games get into political trouble when they have a close visual similarity to the real world but an ethical dimension that is strongly divergent from the real world. Kingpin was a game in which the player was encouraged to beat prostitutes to death with a crowbar, with bloodily realistic graphics. Not surprisingly, it earned a lot of criticism. On the other hand, Space Invaders involved shooting hundreds of aliens, but it was so visually abstract that nobody minded. In other words, the more a game resembles reality visually, the more its ethical dimension should resemble reality as well, or it's likely to make people upset. If you want to make a game in which the player is encouraged to shoot anything that moves, you're most likely to stay out of trouble if those targets are nonhuman and just quietly disappear rather than breaking apart into bloody chunks. Tie your ethical realism to your visual realism.

当游戏在视觉上与现实世界十分相似，但在道德层面却与现实世界大相径庭时，游戏就会陷入政治麻烦。《金并》是一款鼓励玩家用撬棍打死妓女的游戏，画面血腥逼真。毫不奇怪，这款游戏遭到很多批评。另一方面，《太空侵略者》涉及射击数百个外星人，但它的画面非常抽象，因此没有人在意。换句话说，一款游戏在视觉上与现实越相似，它的伦理维度就越应该与现实相似，否则很可能会令人反感。如果你想制作一款游戏，鼓励玩家射杀任何会动的东西，为了最大程度避免惹来麻烦，这些目标最好是非人类的，而且击中以后静静地消失，而不是碎成血块。将伦理现实主义与视觉现实主义结合起来。

Computer games are about bringing fantasies to life, enabling people to do things in make-believe that they couldn't possibly do in the real world. But make-believe is a dangerous game if it is played by people for whom the line between fantasy and reality is not clear. Young children (those under about age eight) don't know much about the real world; they don't know what is possible and what isn't, what is fantasy and what is reality. An important part of raising them is teaching them this difference. But until they've learned it, it's best to make sure that any violence in young children's games is suitably proportionate to their age. The problem with showing violence to children is not the violence, per se, but the notion that there's no price to pay for it. For a detailed and insightful discussion of how children "process" violence, read Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence by Gerard Jones.

电脑游戏就是要把幻想变为现实，让人们在虚构中做一些在现实世界中不可能做的事情。但是，如果幻想与现实之间的界限不明确，那么虚构就是一种危险的游戏。幼儿（大约八岁以下）对现实世界了解不多，他们不知道什么是可能的，什么是不可能的，什么是幻想，什么是现实。教育他们的一个重要部分就是教会他们这种区别。但在他们学会之前，最好确保幼儿游戏中的任何暴力行为都与他们的年龄相称。向儿童展示暴力的问题不在于暴力本身，而在于“不需要为此付出代价”的观念。关于儿童如何“处理”暴力的详细而深刻的讨论，请阅读杰拉德·琼斯所著的《杀死怪物：为什么儿童需要幻想、超级英雄和虚构的暴力》一书。

Ultimately, the violence in a game should serve the gameplay. If it doesn't, then it's just gratuitous and you should consider doing without it. A few designers, mostly young and male, seem to think that deliberately including gratuitous violence in their games is a gesture of rebellion against the antiviolence crusaders. We encourage these gentlemen to grow up and to remember who the game is for. Our customers don't buy games to see rebellious gestures; they buy them to be entertained.

归根结底，游戏中的暴力应该为游戏性服务。如果不是这样，那它就是无谓的，你应该考虑去掉它。一些设计师，大多是年轻人和男性，似乎认为故意在游戏中加入无端暴力是对反暴力斗士的反抗。我们鼓励这些先生们成熟起来，记住游戏是为谁而做的。我们的客户买游戏不是为了看叛逆的姿态，而是为了娱乐。

Questions to Ask Yourself About the Ethical Dimension 关于道德维度的自问自答

• What constitutes right and wrong in my game? What player actions do I reward and what do I punish? 在我的游戏中，什么是对，什么是错？我要奖励和惩罚玩家的哪些行为？

• How will I explain the ethical dimensions of the world to the player? What tells him how to behave and what is expected of him? 我将如何向玩家解释这个世界的道德标准？用什么告诉他如何行为以及对他的期望是什么？

• If my game world includes conflict or competition, is that represented as violence or as something else (racing to a finish, winning an economic competition, outmaneuvering the other side)? 如果我的游戏世界包含冲突或竞争，那么冲突或竞争是表现为暴力，还是其他形式（抢先到达终点线、赢得经济竞争、智取对方）？

• What range of choices am I offering my player? Are there both violent and nonviolent ways to accomplish something? Is the player rewarded in any way for minimizing casualties, or is he punished for ignoring them? 我为玩家提供了哪些选择？是否有暴力和非暴力两种完成任务的方式？玩家是否会因为尽量减少伤亡而得到奖励，或者会因为忽视伤亡而受到惩罚？

• In many games, the end—winning the game—justifies any means that the game allows. Do I want to define the victory conditions in such a way that not all means are acceptable? 在许多游戏中，游戏的最终目的——赢得游戏——证明游戏所允许的任何手段都是正确的。我是否想以并非所有手段都可接受的方式来定义胜利条件？

• Are any other ethical questions present in my game world? Can my player lie, cheat, steal, break promises, or double-cross anyone? Can he abuse, torture, or enslave anyone? Are there positive or negative consequences for these actions? 我的游戏世界中是否还存在其他道德问题？我的玩家可以撒谎、欺骗、偷窃、违背承诺或出卖他人吗？他可以虐待、折磨或奴役他人吗？这些行为会产生积极或消极的后果吗？

• Does my world contain any ethical ambiguities or moral dilemmas? How does making one choice over another affect the player, the plot, and the gameplay? 我的世界中是否存在伦理模糊或道德困境？做出一种选择比做出另一种选择对玩家、剧情和游戏有什么影响？

• How realistic is my portrayal of violence? Does the realism appropriately serve the entertainment value of the game? 我对暴力的描述有多真实？这种真实感是否恰当地服务于游戏的娱乐价值？

Realism and Abstraction 真实和抽象

As we said in Chapter 2, games can be divided very roughly into two categories, realistic and abstract. Realistic games make an effort to model the real world, and when playing them you can rely on real-world common sense. Abstract games bear little resemblance to the real world and have arbitrary rules that you have to learn somehow. However, it isn't really that simple. Realism is not a dichotomy, but a continuum. All games, no matter how realistic, represent an abstraction and simplification of the real world. Even the multimillion-dollar flight simulators used for training commercial pilots are incapable of turning the cockpit completely upside down. This event is (we hope) so rare in passenger aircraft that it's not worth the extra money it would take to simulate it.

正如我们在第二章中所说，游戏大致可分为两类：现实游戏和抽象游戏。现实游戏努力模拟现实世界，玩游戏时你可以依靠现实世界的常识。而抽象游戏与现实世界几乎没有任何相似之处，游戏规则也是随意制定的，你必须通过某种方式来学习。然而，事实并非如此简单。现实主义不是二分法，而是一个连续体。所有游戏，无论多么逼真，都是对现实世界的抽象和简化。即使是用于培训商业飞行员的价值数百万美元的飞行模拟器，也无法将驾驶舱完全颠倒过来。这种情况（我们希望）在客机上非常罕见，因此不值得花额外的钱去模拟它。

Players and game reviewers often talk about realism as a quality of an entire game, but, in fact, it is a quality that differs in individual areas. Many games have highly realistic graphics but unrealistic physics, or realistic economic models but unrealistic user interfaces. For example, a good many first-person shooters accurately model the performance characteristics of a variety of weapons—their rate of fire, size of ammunition clips, accuracy, and so on—but enable the player to carry about 10 of them at once with no reduction in speed or mobility. Therefore, realism is not a single dimension of a game world, but a multivariate quality that applies to all parts of the game and everything in it. (If you're mathematically inclined, think of realism as a vector over every aspect of the game, with values ranging from 0, entirely abstract, to 1, entirely realistic. However, no value will ever equal 1 because nothing about a game is ever entirely realistic—if it were, it would be life, not a game.)

玩家和游戏评论员经常把逼真度作为整个游戏的品质来谈论，但事实上，真实感是一种在个别领域存在差异的品质。许多游戏的画面非常逼真，但物理效果却不真实，或者经济模型逼真，但用户界面却不真实。例如，许多第一人称射击游戏都精确地模拟了各种武器的性能特征——它们的射速、弹夹大小、精确度等等，但玩家却可以同时携带大约 10 种武器，而速度和机动性却丝毫不减。因此，真实感并不是游戏世界的一个单一维度，而是一种适用于游戏所有部分和所有事物的多元质量。(如果用数学语言描述，可以将真实感视为游戏各方面的一个向量，其值从 0（完全抽象）到 1（完全真实）不等。但是，没有一个值能等于 1，因为游戏中没有任何一个方面是完全真实的——如果是这样，那就不是游戏，而是生活了）。

The realistic/abstract dichotomy is mostly useful as a starting point when thinking about what kind of a game you want to create. If you're designing a cartoony action game such as Banjo-Kazooie, you know that it's going to be mostly abstract. As you design elements of the game, you'll need to ask yourself how much realism you want to include. Can your avatar be hurt when he falls long distances? Is there a limit to how much he can carry at once? Do Newtonian physics apply to him, or can he change directions in midair?

现实与抽象的二分法主要是作为一个起点，用来思考你想要制作什么样的游戏。如果你正在设计一款卡通动作游戏，如《班卓熊大冒险》，你就会知道这款游戏大部分都会是抽象的。当你设计游戏元素时，你需要问自己想要加入多少真实感。你的化身从很高的地方摔下来会受伤吗？他一次可以携带的物品数量有限制吗？牛顿物理学是否适用于他，或者他能否在半空中改变方向？

On the other hand, if you're designing a game with a presumption of realism—a vehicle or sports simulation, for example—then you need to think about it from the other direction. What aspects of the real world are you going to abstract? Most modern fighter aircraft have literally hundreds of controls; that's why only a special group of people can be fighter pilots. To make a fighter simulation accessible to the general public, you'll have to remove or simplify a lot of those controls. Similarly, a fighter jet's engine is so powerful that certain maneuvers can knock the pilot unconscious or even rip the plane apart. Are you going to simulate these limitations accurately, or make the game a little more abstract by not requiring the player to think about them?

另一方面，如果你在设计一款以现实主义为前提的游戏——例如汽车或体育模拟游戏——那么你就需要从另一个方向来考虑。你要抽象现实世界的哪些方面？大多数现代战斗机都有数以百计的控制器；这就是为什么只有特殊人群才能成为战斗机飞行员。要想让普通大众也能模拟战斗机，就必须移除或简化其中的许多控制装置。同样，战斗机的发动机功率非常大，某些机动动作会将飞行员击昏，甚至将飞机撕裂。你是要准确模拟这些限制，还是让游戏变得抽象一些，不需要玩家考虑这些限制？

As we have said, every design decision you make must serve the entertainment value of the game. In addition, every design decision must serve your goals for the game's overall degree of realism. Some genres demand more realism than others. It's up to you to establish how much realism you want and in what areas. During the design process, you must continually monitor your decisions to see if they are meeting your goals.

正如我们所说，你所做的每一个设计决定都必须服务于游戏的娱乐价值。此外，每一个设计决定都必须服务于你对游戏整体真实感程度的目标。有些类型的游戏比其他类型的游戏需要更多的真实感。你需要确定在哪些方面需要多少真实感。在设计过程中，你必须不断检查你的决策，看它们是否达到了你的目标。

The Save-Game Issue 保存游戏问题

Saving a game takes a snapshot of a game world and all its particulars at a given instant in time and stores them away somewhere. The player can then load the snapshot, return to that instant in the game world, and replay the game from that point. This might seem like a fairly straightforward thing to offer the player, but, in fact, it has consequences both for the player's experience of the game—the story he's creating as he plays—and for the way the player actually plays. Saving and restoring a game is technologically easy, and it's an essential tool for testing and debugging, so it's often slapped in as a feature without much thought about its effect on gameplay. As designers, though, it's our job to think about anything that affects gameplay or the player's experience of the game, and that includes the save-game feature.

保存游戏是将游戏世界及其所有细节在某一特定时刻的快照保存到某个地方。然后，玩家就可以加载快照，回到游戏世界中的那个瞬间，并从那时起重新玩游戏。这看起来似乎是为玩家提供了一件相当简单的事情，但事实上，它对玩家的游戏体验——玩家在游戏过程中创造的故事——以及玩家实际玩游戏的方式都有影响。保存和还原游戏在技术上非常容易，而且是测试和调试的必备工具，因此它经常被当作一项功能来使用，而不会过多考虑其对游戏性的影响。但作为设计者，我们的职责是考虑任何会影响游戏性或玩家游戏体验的因素，这其中也包括保存游戏功能。

Saving a game stores not only the player's location in the game, but also any customizations he might have made along the way. In Michelle Kwan Figure Skating Championship, for example, the player could customize the body type, skin tone, hair color and style, and costume of the skater. The player could even load in a picture of her own face. The more freedom the player has to customize the avatar, the more data must be saved. Until recently, this has placed a limit on the richness of games for console machines. Games for personal computers could almost always be saved because PCs had disk drives available, but the feature came more slowly to console games. The oldest console machines, which simply emulated arcade machines, often had no way of saving games because they had no storage medium. If the player wanted to leave a game and come back to it later, he could only pause it and leave the console turned on. As a result, most of the games for these machines tended to feel a lot like arcade games as well. They were not designed to be played for a little while and then returned to a day or two later; they had to be played through in one sitting or abandoned.

保存游戏不仅可以保存玩家在游戏中的位置，还可以保存玩家在游戏过程中进行的任何自定义设定。例如，在《关颖珊花样滑冰锦标赛》中，玩家可以自定义滑冰运动员的体型、肤色、发色和发型以及服装。玩家甚至可以载入自己的脸部照片。玩家定制化身的自由度越大，必须保存的数据就越多。一直以来，这限制了主机游戏内容的丰富性。个人电脑的游戏几乎总是可以保存的，因为个人电脑有磁盘驱动器，但主机游戏的这一功能出现得比较慢。最古老的主机只是模拟街机，由于没有存储介质，往往无法保存游戏。如果玩家想离开游戏稍后再回来玩，他只能暂停游戏并让主机一直保持开机。因此，主机上的大多数游戏给人的感觉也很像街机游戏。这些游戏并不是为了让玩家玩上一小会儿，然后过一两天再回来玩的，而是必须一口气玩完或直接放弃。

Now that the Microsoft Xbox includes a hard disk drive, console machines can finally save games just as complex as personal computer games. This doesn't necessarily mean that Xbox games will be just like PC games—there are still important differences between consoles and PCs—but one significant barrier to rich gaming on consoles has been removed.

现在，微软 Xbox 配备了硬盘驱动器，游戏机终于可以像个人电脑游戏一样复杂地保存游戏了。这并不一定意味着 Xbox 游戏将与个人电脑游戏一样——游戏机与个人电脑之间仍然存在重要差异，但游戏机上丰富游戏的一个重要障碍已经消除。

Reasons for Saving a Game 保存游戏的原因

Three reasons exist for saving a player's game or allowing him to save it:

保存玩家的游戏或允许玩家保存游戏有三个原因：

• Allowing the player to leave the game and return to it later. This is the most important reason for saving the game. In a large game, it's an essential feature. It's not realistic and not fair to the player to expect him to dedicate the computer or console machine to a 40-hour game until it's finished. 允许玩家离开游戏并在稍后返回。 这是保存游戏的最重要原因。在大型游戏中，这是一项必不可少的功能。如果期望玩家在电脑或游戏机上投入到一个长达 40 小时的游戏中，直到游戏结束，这是不现实的，也是对玩家不公平的。

• Letting the player recover from disastrous mistakes. In practice, this usually means getting the avatar killed somehow. Arcade games, which have no save-game feature, traditionally give the player a fixed number of "lives" and chances to earn more along the way. Console action games have tended to follow the same scheme. Richer games, such as role-playing or adventure games, usually give the player only one life but allow him to reload a saved game if his avatar dies or he loses any possibility of winning the game. 让玩家从灾难性的错误中恢复过来。 在实践中，这通常意味着玩家的化身会被杀死。街机游戏没有保存游戏的功能，传统上会给玩家固定的“生命”数量，并在游戏过程中有机会获得更多的生命。主机上的动作游戏也往往遵循同样的方案。更丰富的游戏，如角色扮演或冒险游戏，通常只给玩家一条生命，但如果他的化身死了或他失去了赢得游戏的任何可能性，则允许他重新加载已保存的游戏。

• Encouraging the player to explore alternate strategies. Saving the game is a useful feature in turn-based strategic games because it lets the player learn the game by trying alternative approaches. If one doesn't seem to work, he can go back to the point at which he committed himself to one plan and try another approach. 鼓励玩家探索其他策略。 在回合制策略游戏中，保存游戏是一项非常有用的功能，因为它可以让玩家通过尝试其他方法来学习游戏。如果其中一种方法似乎行不通，他可以返回到他选择一种计划前的位置，尝试另一种方法。

Consequences for Immersion and Storytelling 沉浸和讲故事的后果

Saving a computer game is not part of its gameplay. The act of saving a game takes place outside the game world, even if it changes the way the player plays inside the game world. It destroys the suspension of disbelief. If a game is immersive and tries to create the illusion that the player inhabits a fantasy world, the act of saving a copy of the fantasy world destroys the illusion. One of the most significant characteristics of real life is that you cannot return to the past to correct errors you have made. The moment you allow a player to do this, you acknowledge that the fantasy world is only a game.

保存电脑游戏并不是游戏玩法的一部分。拯救游戏的行为发生在游戏世界之外，即使它改变了玩家在游戏世界中的游戏方式。这破坏了玩家的信任感。如果一款游戏让玩家身临其境，试图让玩家产生身在幻想世界的错觉，那么保存幻想世界副本的行为就会破坏这种感觉。现实生活中最重要的特征之一就是，你无法回到过去纠正你所犯的错误。一旦你允许玩家这样做，你就承认幻想世界只是一个游戏。

The essence of a story is dramatic tension, and dramatic tension requires that something be at stake. Saving a game in a game with a branching storyline profoundly affects the player's experience of the story. In the real world, decisions are irrevocable. Some can be changed later, their consequences modified at some point in the future, but the original decision itself cannot be unmade. But when a player follows first one branch of a branching storyline and then goes back in time and follows another branch, he experiences a very unnatural, unreal phenomenon. Dramatic tension is reduced because if the future can be altered by returning to the past at any moment and changing it, then nothing is really at stake.

故事的精髓在于戏剧张力，而戏剧张力要求有危机。在有分支故事情节的游戏中保存游戏会深刻影响玩家对故事的体验。在现实世界中，决定是不可更改的。有些决定可以在以后改变，其后果可以在未来的某个时刻修改，但最初的决定本身是无法取消的。但是，当玩家先跟随故事情节分支中的一个分支，然后回到过去再跟随另一个分支时，他就会体验到一种非常不自然、不真实的现象。戏剧张力会减弱，因为如果可以通过随时回到过去并改变未来，那么就没有什么真正的危险。

Ways of Saving a Game 保存游戏的方式

Over the years, designers have devised a variety of different ways of saving a game, each with their own consequences for immersion and gameplay.

多年来，设计师们设计了多种不同的保存游戏的方法，每种方法都会对沉浸感和游戏性产生影响。

Save to a File or "Save Slot" 保存到文件或“存档槽”

The most common way of saving a game is to allow the player to interrupt the play and save it either into a file on the hard drive that the player can name, or, more commonly, to allow the player to save it into one of a series of named "slots" that the game program keeps track of. When the player wants to replay the saved game, he tells the program to load it from the directory of files or slots. This mechanism is useful because it allows the player to keep several different copies, saved at different points, and to name them so that he can remember which one is which.

最常见的游戏保存方式是让玩家中断游戏并将其保存到硬盘上一个玩家可以命名的文件中，或者更常见的是让玩家将其保存到游戏程序记录的一系列命名“插槽”中的一个。当玩家想重玩已保存的游戏时，他就会告诉程序从文件目录或“槽”中加载游戏。这种机制非常有用，因为它允许玩家保存几个不同的副本，分别保存在不同的时间点，并为它们命名，这样玩家就能记住哪个是哪个。

Unfortunately, it's also the method most harmful to the game's immersiveness. The user interface for managing the files or save slots necessarily looks like an operating system's file-management tool, not like a part of the fantasy world that the game depicts. You can make it prettier with appropriate graphics, but it almost always takes the player out of the world and destroys his suspension of disbelief. Some games improve this a little by calling it the player's "journal" and making it look as if the saved games are being kept in a book.

遗憾的是，这也是最有损游戏沉浸感的方式。用于管理文件或存档槽的用户界面必须看起来像操作系统的文件管理工具，而不是游戏所描绘的奇幻世界的一部分。你可以用适当的图形把它做得更漂亮，但这几乎总是会把玩家带出这个世界，破坏他的信任感。有些游戏将其称为玩家的“日志”，并使其看起来像是将保存的游戏记录在一本书中，从而稍稍改善了这一问题。

Quick-Save 快速保存

Fast-moving games in which the player's avatar is in more or less constant danger (such as first-person shooters) frequently offer a quick-save feature. The player presses a single button to save the game instantly at any time, without ever leaving the game world. The screen displays the words "Quick saved" for a moment, but other than that, the player's concentration and immersion in the world are not broken. The player can reload the game just as swiftly by pressing a quick-load button. The game returns immediately to the place where the last quick-save was done, without going out of the game world to a file-management screen.

在快速移动的游戏（如第一人称射击游戏）中，玩家的化身大概一直处于危险之中，因此游戏经常提供快速保存功能。玩家只需按下一个按钮，就可以随时快速保存游戏，而无需离开游戏世界。屏幕上会暂时显示“快速保存”的字样，但除此之外，玩家的注意力和对游戏世界的沉浸感不会受到影响。按下快速加载按钮，玩家可以同样迅速地重新加载游戏。游戏会立即返回到上次快速保存的地方，而不会离开游戏世界进入文件管理界面。

The disadvantage of quick-save is that it usually offers only one slot, although some games let the player designate a numbered slot by pressing the quick-save button and then a number key. He has to remember which slot is which by himself when quick-loading. Quick-save sacrifices flexibility to gain immersiveness and speed. It doesn't let the player name or manage multiple saved games, but it does allow him to save and load with minimal disruption to his suspension of disbelief.

快速保存的缺点是通常只提供一个槽位，不过有些游戏允许玩家通过按下快速保存按钮然后按下数字键来指定一个有编号的槽位。在快速加载时，玩家必须自己记住哪个是哪个槽。快速保存牺牲了灵活性，却获得了沉浸感和速度。它不能让玩家命名或管理多个已保存的游戏，但却能让玩家在保存和加载游戏时，尽量减少对其信任感的干扰。

Automatic Save 自动保存

A few games automatically save the state of the game as it progresses, so the player can leave and return at any time without explicitly having to save it. Sometimes they save continuously, but more often they save intermittently at checkpoints, which may or may not be revealed to the player when they occur. This is even less disruptive than quick-saving because the player never has to do anything. However, if this is the only method provided, the player can't choose to save at certain points along the way. If the player wants to restart at an earlier point, he's out of luck; and if the checkpoints are a long way apart, he might lose a great deal of progress in the event of a disaster. Continuous-save prevents the player from going back and undoing disasters. On the other hand, he can play the game confident that he can interrupt and resume it at any point.

有的款游戏会在游戏进行过程中自动保存游戏状态，这样玩家就可以随时离开并返回游戏，而无需明确保存。有时它们会连续保存，但更常见的是在检查点间歇性保存，检查点出现时可能会也可能不会显示给玩家。这种方法比快速保存的干扰更小，因为玩家无需做任何事情。不过，如果这是唯一的方法，玩家就不能选择在沿途的某些点保存。如果玩家想在更早的时间点重新开始，那就没戏了；如果检查点之间相隔很远，那么在发生失败时，玩家可能会损失大量的进度。连续保存功能可以防止玩家返回原点纠正失败。另一方面，玩家可以放心地进行游戏，因为他可以在任何时候中断并继续游戏。

To Save or Not to Save 存还是不存

Here we look at the arguments for and against saving, and we present our own perspective on the matter.

在此，我们将探讨赞成和反对保存的论点，并提出我们自己对此事的看法。

The Argument Against 反对的观点

A few designers don't allow players to save their games at certain points, or even at all. If the player can save and reload constantly, he can solve puzzles or overcome other obstacles by trial and error rather than by skill or brains. If the designer wants him to solve them in an uninterrupted sequence, saving and reloading defeats that challenge. Some games (The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, for example) avoid this by saving a game only at checkpoints or particular locations, forcing the player to play the game again from that point when he reloads. Saving and reloading also enables players to avoid undesirable random events. If the event occurs, the player can simply reload the game repeatedly until it doesn't occur.

一些设计者不允许玩家在某些时候保存游戏，甚至完全不允许。如果玩家可以不断地保存和重新加载，他就可以通过反复试验而不是靠技巧或头脑来解决谜题或克服障碍。如果设计者想让玩家以不间断的顺序来解决这些问题，那么保存和重新加载就会使这一挑战落空。有些游戏（如《塞尔达传说：时之笛》）为了避免这种情况，只在检查点或特定地点保存游戏，迫使玩家在重新加载时从该点重新开始游戏。保存和重新加载还能让玩家避免不想要的随机事件。如果这种事件发生，玩家只需反复重新加载游戏，直到事件不再发生。

When you can save and reload at any point, nothing is at stake. Your avatar might die, lose money, or suffer some other disaster, but it can all be remedied simply by reloading the game. This takes away some of the challenge.

当你可以在任何时候保存并重新加载游戏时，就不会有任何危险。你的化身可能会死亡、损失金钱或遭遇其他灾难，但只要重新加载游戏就能补救。这就失去了一些挑战性。

The Argument For 支持的观点

We believe that these arguments against saving are spurious and are the sign of a lazy designer. Making a game harder simply by preventing the player from saving the game is a cheap way of creating a challenge out of nothing. For example, you could set up a situation in which the player has no way of knowing which of several options to choose (for example, selecting one of three identical corridors to walk down). If two contain deadly traps and one does not, and the player is not allowed to save before walking down them, you've guaranteed that two times in three he will have to go back and start the game over, no matter how good he is otherwise. This isn't fun or even a fair challenge. If you really want to make the game harder, devise harder challenges. Forcing the player to replay an entire level because he made a mistake near the end wastes his time and condemns him to frustration and boredom. As a designer, it should be your goal to avoid those feelings, not create them.

我们认为，这些反对保存游戏的理由都是站不住脚的，是设计者懒惰的表现。仅仅通过阻止玩家保存游戏来增加游戏难度是一种无中生有的低级方法。例如，你可以设置一种情况，让玩家无法知道从几个选项中选择哪一个（例如，从三条相同的走廊中选择一条走下去）。如果其中两条有致命陷阱，一条没有，而玩家在走下去之前又不允许保存，那么无论他在其他方面有多优秀，你都可以保证他三次游戏中有两次必须返回并重新开始。这并不好玩，甚至不是一个公平的挑战。如果你真的想让游戏变得更难，那就设计更难的挑战。因为玩家在游戏快结束时犯了一个错误，就强迫他重玩整个关卡，这不仅浪费玩家的时间，还会让他感到沮丧和厌倦。作为设计师，你的目标应该是避免而不是制造这些感觉。

If a player continuously reloads a game to avoid a random event or to solve some problem by trial and error rather than skill or intelligence, he is, in effect, cheating at solitaire. As the game's designer, you might not like it, but we don't feel that that is sufficient reason for denying the player the chance to save the game—he might need to save it for perfectly legitimate reasons. After all, cheating at solitaire says more about the player's character than anything else; if he wants to ruin the gameplay for himself, that's his business. Most games now recognize that players want—and even need—to cheat sometimes by offering cheat codes anyway.

如果玩家不断重新加载游戏以避免随机事件，或通过反复试错而非技巧或智慧来解决某些问题，那么他就像是在纸牌游戏中作弊。作为游戏的设计者，你可能不喜欢这样，但我们认为这不足以成为拒绝玩家保存游戏的理由——他可能出于完全正当的理由需要保存游戏。毕竟，在纸牌游戏中作弊更能说明玩家的性格；如果他想毁掉游戏，那是他的事。现在，大多数游戏都认识到玩家有时想要甚至需要作弊，因此都会提供作弊码。

The bottom line is that it's the player's machine. It's not fair to penalize him just because he has to go to the bathroom or because it's now his little brother's turn to play. Whether you implement save slots, quick-save, checkpoints, or continuous-save is up to you; there are advantages and disadvantages to each. But we strongly believe that players have a fundamental right to be able to stop playing when and where they want, without losing all that they have accomplished.

底线是，这是玩家的机器。因为他要上厕所或因为现在轮到他的小弟弟玩游戏而惩罚他是不公平的。至于是使用保存槽、快速保存、检查点还是连续保存，这取决于你；每种方法都各有利弊。但我们坚信，玩家有一项基本权利，那就是可以随时随地停止游戏，而不会失去他们已经取得的所有成就。

Putting It Together 总结

At this point, you should know when and where your game takes place. You will have answered a huge number of questions about what your world looks like, what it sounds like, who lives there, and how they behave. If you've done it thoroughly, your game world will be one that a player can immerse himself in, an integrated harmonious fantasy that he can believe in and enjoy being part of. The next step is to figure out what's going to happen there. That's covered in Chapter 4, "Storytelling and Narrative."

此时，你应该知道游戏在何时何地进行。你已经回答了大量的问题，包括你的世界看起来像什么、听起来像什么、谁生活在那里以及他们的行为方式。如果你做得很彻底，你的游戏世界就会让玩家沉浸其中，成为一个完整和谐的幻想世界，让玩家相信并乐于成为其中的一部分。下一步就是要弄清楚那里会发生什么。这将在第四章“讲故事和叙事”中讲述。