Chapter 18. The Future of Gaming 游戏的未来

For our last chapter, we're going to indulge in a little blue-sky speculation about what the future of gaming might hold. It's clear that the commercial game industry has only begun to scratch the surface of what interactive entertainment can do. We are still a long way from exploiting the full potential of this medium.

在最后一章，我们将沉浸在对游戏未来的美妙猜想中。很显然，商业游戏产业对于互动娱乐的发展还只是刚刚起步。我们距离充分挖掘这一媒体的潜力还有很长的路要走。

Gaming Hardware 游戏硬件

Many aspects of game design are independent of the hardware running the game: subject matter, theme, and art style, for example. Nevertheless, the future of interactive entertainment is closely tied to the future of computing hardware. At the moment, the principal emphasis in hardware design is on making games look and sound better, and, indeed, the amount of audiovisual improvement in the last 20 years has been astonishing. But game hardware does much more than that: It determines how complex and how smart the games can be. And that, in turn, affects the kinds of games that we can make. We have just started to build games that simulate the behavior of humans, for example, at a level above the trivial. For more powerful simulations, we need more powerful machines.

游戏设计的许多方面与运行游戏的硬件无关，例如主题、题材和艺术风格。然而，互动娱乐的未来与计算机硬件的未来息息相关。目前，硬件设计的主要重点是使游戏的外观和音效更加出色，事实上，在过去 20 年中，视听效果的改善令人惊叹。但游戏硬件的作用远不止于此：它决定了游戏的复杂程度和智能程度。而这反过来又会影响我们可以制作的游戏种类。例如，我们才刚刚开始制作能够模拟人类行为的游戏，而且是在微不足道的水平上。为了实现更强大的模拟，我们需要更强大的机器。

Specialized game hardware might include dedicated neural network processors and voice-recognition or speech-synthesis chips. We might see special chips dedicated to solving path-finding problems or to simulating thousands of cellular automations such as ants in an anthill or soldiers on a battlefield. In the farther future, there could be chips that know the grammatical rules of a language and can generate real dialogue on the fly rather than prerecorded responses. Whether such gear gets out of the laboratory and into consumer products is another story; it depends more on what it costs to build than on how useful it is to games. But hardware R&D for games is already taking place, and it will increase now that game development is starting to be recognized as a legitimate subject of academic study.

专用游戏硬件可能包括专用神经网络处理器和语音识别或语音合成芯片。我们可能会看到专门用于解决寻路问题或模拟成千上万个细胞自动机（如蚁穴中的蚂蚁或战场上的士兵）的专用芯片。在更遥远的未来，可能会出现了解语言语法规则的芯片，并能即时生成真正的对话，而不是预先录制的回答。至于这些设备能否走出实验室，进入消费类产品，那就另当别论了；它更多地取决于制造成本，而不是对游戏的实用性。不过，用于游戏的硬件研发工作已经在进行，而且由于游戏开发开始被认为是一门合法的学术研究课题，这种研发工作还会增加。

In the next few sections, we talk about some of the game hardware that's commonplace today and where we see it going.

在接下来的几节中，我们将介绍一些目前已经很常见的游戏硬件，以及我们认为这些硬件的发展方向。

Location-Based Entertainment 基于位置的娱乐

Location-based entertainment is a fancy term for any kind of computer gaming in which you play somewhere besides your own home. Typical kinds of location-based entertainment are video arcades, group ride simulators, and individual networked simulators.

定位娱乐是一个花哨的术语，指的是除了在自己家里玩之外，还可以在其他地方玩的电脑游戏。典型的定位娱乐有视频街机、集体乘车模拟器和个人联网模拟器。

Video Arcades 视频街机

Video games were first introduced to the public as arcade machines because their computing hardware was too expensive for ordinary people to afford. These were extremely popular, and video arcades proliferated throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. However, as microprocessors and memory became cheaper, the home video game console appeared and offered serious competition to the arcades. Parents liked home consoles, too; kids could play at home rather than down at the mall, and although there was a higher up-front cost to buy the machine and games, you could play them endlessly for free. The arcade game format is also very limiting for the game designer because the games have to be designed to make money every minute or two.

视频游戏最初是以街机的形式向公众推出的，因为其计算硬件过于昂贵，普通人买不起。这种游戏机非常受欢迎，整个 20 世纪 80 年代和 90 年代初，街机游戏机如雨后春笋般涌现。然而，随着微处理器和内存变得越来越便宜，家用视频游戏机出现了，并与街机展开了激烈的竞争。家长们也喜欢家用游戏机；孩子们可以在家里玩，而不是去商场，虽然购买机器和游戏的前期成本较高，但你可以免费无休止地玩。街机游戏的形式对游戏设计者也有很大的限制，因为游戏必须设计成每一两分钟就能赚钱。

The heyday of big video arcades is over, except in entertainment locations such as movie theaters and theme parks, and in places where kids are likely to be stuck for a while with nothing to do, such as airports or hotels. This doesn't mean that arcade machines are dead—only that they will never again occupy the niche that they did when video games were new. They now have to compete with home console machines. Many arcade machines create their appeal by offering something that you can't get at home, such as expensive hardware—a driving simulator with a force-feedback steering wheel, pedals, and a gearshift, for instance. Such games will certainly continue to exist, but the high cost of manufacturing them means that they will have to charge a lot to make back their initial cost.

除了在电影院和主题公园等娱乐场所，以及在机场或酒店等孩子们可能暂时无事可做的地方，大型视频街机的鼎盛时期已经过去。这并不意味着街机已死——只是它们再也不会像电子游戏机刚刚问世时那样占据市场细分领域。现在，它们不得不与家用游戏机竞争。许多街机通过提供一些你在家里无法获得的东西（比如昂贵的硬件）来吸引人——比如配有力反馈方向盘、踏板和换档装置的驾驶模拟器。这类游戏肯定会继续存在，但制造成本高昂意味着它们必须收取高额费用才能收回初始成本。

Group Ride Simulators 集体游乐模拟器

A group ride simulator is a room designed to give a small audience—typically 20 or 30 people—the impression of riding in a vehicle. The floor is actually a large platform, typically fitted with theater seats mounted on pistons. The audience faces a large movie screen on which a story is shown, and the pistons cause the floor to move up and down to increase the feeling of movement. Surround-sound speakers complete the effect.

集体游乐模拟器是一个专为给小型观众（通常为 20 或 30 人）提供乘车体验的房间。地面实际上是一个大平台，平台上通常装有安装在活塞上的剧院座椅。观众面对一个大型电影屏幕，屏幕上播放着一个故事，活塞使地板上下移动，以增加运动感。环绕声扬声器使效果更加完美。

Ride simulators are extremely expensive, costing several million dollars to build. Most are not interactive at all, but they just consist of a short movie with an accompanying script that controls the movement of the floor. However, it wouldn't be difficult to make these simulators interactive by giving the viewers something to do that affects what they see on the screen. At the moment, the movies are mostly made on film to present a high-quality cinematic experience, but they could easily be replaced by a computerized 3D environment. The audience can be given weapons or other controls whose effects are seen on the screen. These could also have an effect on the platform. If some of the players handle a large gun, for example, the pistons could simulate the gun's recoil. We can certainly expect to see continuing advances in the realism of the experience.

游乐模拟器非常昂贵，建造成本高达几百万美元。大多数模拟器根本不具备互动性，它们只是由一部短片和随附的脚本组成，脚本控制着地板的运动。不过，让这些模拟器具有互动性并不难，只要让观众做一些事情来影响他们在屏幕上看到的内容就可以了。目前，电影大多采用胶片制作，以呈现高质量的电影体验，但它们很容易被计算机化的 3D 环境所取代。观众可以获得武器或其他控制装置，其效果可以在屏幕上看到。这些也会对平台产生影响。例如，如果一些玩家操作一把大枪，活塞就可以模拟枪的后坐力。我们当然可以期待体验的逼真度不断提高。

Ride simulators won't ever become a large-scale phenomenon like video arcades were; they're just too expensive. Because they have to admit people in groups for short periods, they require a large audience who can afford the time and who are willing to wait in line for a while. This makes them perfect for theme parks and resorts. The future of such simulators is dependent on the economy in the same way that tourism and all forms of expensive leisure entertainment are.

游乐模拟器不会像视频街机那样成为一种大规模的现象，因为它们太昂贵了。因为它们必须让人们短时间内成群结队地进入，所以它们需要有大量的观众，这些观众能够支付得起时间，并且愿意排一会儿队。因此，它们非常适合主题公园和度假村。这种模拟器的未来取决于经济，就像旅游业和所有形式的昂贵休闲娱乐一样。

译者注：游乐模拟器在迪斯尼乐园和环球影城主题乐园里面非常普遍和热门，它们的形式有很多，比如过山车，摩托车，越野车，等等。游乐场景通常很大，有电影般的布景设计、电脑数字化的投影、环绕立体声、喷雾装置，风扇，等等多种方式提升用户身临其境的感觉。

Individual Networked Simulators 个人联网模拟器

Individual networked simulators are groups of small enclosed cubicles, sometimes called "pods" or "cockpits," each designed for one person or perhaps two. The pods are networked together to play a single game so that people can compete against each other alone or in teams. These simulators are not usually owned by individuals. They are installed in shopping malls and similar places, and players pay to play for a certain amount of time. They offer high-quality, multi-player gaming, usually of vehicle-based action games such as flight simulators or mechs. Because the player is usually completely enclosed, these games also offer a highly immersive experience. The BattleTech Centers (www.virtualworld.com) are a good example.

个人联网模拟器是一组封闭的小隔间，有时称为“吊舱”或“驾驶舱”，每个隔间可容纳一人或两人。这些舱室通过网络连接在一起，可以进行单人游戏，这样人们就可以单独或组队相互竞争。这些模拟器通常不为个人所有。它们安装在购物中心和类似场所，玩家付费玩一定时间的游戏。它们提供高质量的多人游戏，通常是以车辆为基础的动作游戏，如飞行模拟器或机甲。由于玩家通常处于完全封闭的环境中，这些游戏还能提供身临其境的体验。BattleTech Centers（www.virtualworld.com）就是一个很好的例子。

The arrival of the Internet—and especially broadband connections—has reduced some of the demand for these centers. Although the quality of the experience playing on a PC is not as immersive, it's also much cheaper, and you don't have leave home to do it. We expect that networked simulators will remain a small niche market with demand proportionate to their price. They will, of course, continue to benefit from improvements in computing hardware, but as with ride simulators and the fancier arcade games, the majority of their production cost is in the mechanical rather than the electronic gear, and that's not going to change as rapidly.

互联网，尤其是宽带连接的出现，减少了对这些中心的部分需求。虽然在个人电脑上进行游戏的体验质量没有那么身临其境，但价格却便宜得多，而且还可以足不出户。我们预计，网络模拟器仍将是一个小众市场，需求量与其价格成正比。当然，它们将继续受益于计算机硬件的改进，但与游乐模拟器和更高级的街机游戏一样，它们的大部分生产成本都在机械装置而非电子设备上，这一点不会迅速改变。

Home Video Game Consoles 家庭视频游戏主机

Game consoles have won the hearts of consumers, and they're here to stay. Designing a game console is tricky business because the manufacturer has to balance the console's cost against its computing power, to compete against other consoles on both price and performance. Unlike PCs, consoles can't be customized over a whole range of performance characteristics. Instead, all consoles of a given model are identical (or nearly so) so that any game made for that model is guaranteed to run correctly. This means that the manufacturer gets only one chance to design it properly. We see a number of trends in console machine design that will affect gaming in the future.

游戏主机已经赢得了消费者的青睐，并将继续风靡全球。设计游戏主机是一项棘手的工作，因为制造商必须平衡游戏主机的成本和计算能力，在价格和性能上与其他游戏主机竞争。与个人电脑不同的是，游戏机无法在整个性能特性范围内进行定制。相反，特定型号的所有游戏机都是相同的（或几乎相同），因此为该型号制作的任何游戏都能保证正确运行。这意味着制造商只有一次机会来正确设计游戏。我们看到游戏机设计的一些趋势将影响未来的游戏。

Consoles Get More PC-Like 主机越来越像 PC

There's no doubt that home game consoles will continue to take advantage of the growth in computing power: faster CPUs, more memory, better audio and video technology. These will have the greatest impact on the look and feel of the games we play. More important, however, home game consoles are starting to take on some of the characteristics of their more powerful cousin, the PC: disk drives and networking capability. It won't be long before this also includes such things as video cameras and voice-recognition facilities, with all the implications for multi-player gaming that those represent. These features will enable console players to have game experiences currently available only on PCs: to download and store game upgrades or new scenarios on a disk drive, for example, and to play against other people around the world. As consoles get more PC-like hardware, we can expect to see an ongoing convergence between console and PC games.

毫无疑问，家用游戏机将继续利用计算能力的增长：更快的 CPU、更大的内存、更好的音频和视频技术。这些都将对我们所玩游戏的外观和感觉产生最大的影响。然而，更重要的是，家用游戏机开始具备其更强大的表亲——个人电脑的某些特性：磁盘驱动器和联网能力。不久的将来，家用游戏机还将配备摄像机和语音识别设备，这些都将对多人游戏产生影响。这些功能将使游戏机玩家获得目前只能在个人电脑上获得的游戏体验：例如，在磁盘驱动器上下载和存储游戏升级或新场景，以及与世界各地的其他人进行对战。随着游戏机的硬件越来越像个人电脑，我们可以预见游戏机和个人电脑游戏将不断融合。

The Relationship of Consoles to Other Media Player 主机和其他媒体玩家的关系

Game consoles are now capable of playing audio CDs and video DVDs, which means that there's little need to own a separate media player for each of those devices if you already own a console. We don't expect that game consoles will entirely supplant standalone versions of those devices because some people will want media players without the gaming capability. Nevertheless, we believe that consoles will be an increasingly important part of the family's "entertainment center," the cluster of equipment located underneath the TV. One game console with a built-in DVD drive and hard disk drive could replace four separate dedicated machines: the CD player, the DVD player, the VCR, and a digital video recorder such as the TiVO service. Consoles have the potential to become complete computerized "entertainment managers," if their manufacturers want to take them in that direction.

游戏机现在可以播放音频 CD 和视频 DVD，这意味着如果你已经拥有了一台游戏机，就没有必要再为每种设备单独购买一个媒体播放器了。我们预计游戏机不会完全取代这些设备的独立版本，因为有些人需要的是没有游戏功能的媒体播放器。尽管如此，我们相信游戏机在家庭“娱乐中心”（位于电视机下方的设备群）中的地位将日益重要。一台内置 DVD 驱动器和硬盘驱动器的游戏机可以取代四台独立的专用设备：CD 播放机、DVD 播放机、录像机和数字视频录像机（如 TiVO 服务）。如果制造商愿意，游戏机有可能成为完整的电脑化 “娱乐管理器”。

Add-On Devices 附加设备

We believe that the market for add-on devices such as dance mats and other specialized controllers will continue to grow. As game playing occupies an increasingly larger slice of people's leisure-time entertainment, they will invest in gear accordingly. Although only a minority of gamers will buy them, these devices' profit margins are much higher than those of the base machines, making them a lucrative source of revenue for the hardware manufacturers. And such gadgets do make the experience of playing games designed to take advantage of their particular features much more enjoyable.

我们相信，舞蹈垫和其他专用控制器等附加设备的市场将继续增长。随着玩游戏在人们闲暇娱乐中的比重越来越大，他们会相应地投资购买设备。虽然只有少数玩家会购买，但这些设备的利润率远远高于基本机器，因此成为硬件制造商利润丰厚的收入来源。而且，这些小玩意儿确实能让玩家在玩游戏时享受到更多的乐趣，这些游戏都是为了利用它们的特殊功能而设计的。

HDTV 高清电视

The Achilles' heel of all home console machines is their output device, the conventional television. The television's low-resolution, 25- to 30-frames-per-second refresh rate and 4:3 aspect ratio are just adequate for displaying movies and TV shows, but they don't allow either the detail or the speed available on personal computer monitors.

所有家用游戏机的致命弱点都在于其输出设备——传统电视。电视机的分辨率低，刷新率为每秒 25 至 30 帧，宽高比为 4:3，这对于显示电影和电视节目来说已经足够，但却无法比拟个人电脑显示器上的细节和速度。

We think that the growing popularity of high-definition television (HDTV) will significantly improve home console gaming. A wide screen offers a more natural viewing experience, allowing events to take place in the player's peripheral vision. The higher resolution will allow for more detailed images and more complex user interfaces. A number of Xbox games already support HDTV resolutions, and as HDTV becomes the standard, all new generations of consoles will certainly do so.

我们认为，高清电视的日益普及将大大改善家用游戏机的游戏体验。宽屏幕能提供更自然的观看体验，让玩家的周边视野中发生事件。更高的分辨率将使图像更加细腻，用户界面更加复杂。许多 Xbox 游戏已经支持 HDTV 分辨率，而随着 HDTV 成为标准，所有新一代游戏机也必将支持 HDTV 分辨率。

Personal Computers 个人电脑

The personal computer is a little more than a quarter of a century old now, and it looks set to be here for a while. Although the appearance and capabilities of the PC (by which we mean all personal computers, not just the IBM PC and its clones) might change, even a hundred years from now people will still want a computing device on which they can read and write, do research, and process information. There's no reason that that device shouldn't also provide them with interactive entertainment.

个人电脑问世至今已有四分之一个多世纪，而且看来还将继续存在下去。尽管个人电脑（我们指的是所有个人电脑，而不仅仅是 IBM PC 及其克隆机）的外观和功能可能会发生变化，但即使在一百年后，人们仍然需要一台可以读写、研究和处理信息的计算设备。这种设备没有理由不为他们提供互动娱乐。

Of course, personal computers are going to become more powerful. They will get better sound systems and larger, higher-resolution monitors. Development of graphics hardware will continue to drive—and be driven by—computer games, and this will enable richer, more detailed scenes. As with home consoles, sheer computing power will make the biggest difference in the way games look and feel on the PC.

当然，个人电脑的功能会越来越强大。它们将拥有更好的音响系统和更大、更高分辨率的显示器。图形硬件的发展将继续推动电脑游戏的发展，这将使游戏场景更加丰富、更加细腻。与家用游戏机一样，纯粹的计算能力将使 PC 上游戏的外观和感觉产生最大的不同。

Add-On Devices 附加设备

Over the last few years, we've seen a variety of specialist hardware for serious gamers: force-feedback joysticks and steering wheels, automotive and airplane pedals, and so on. Those will continue to sell—there's no particular reason for them to die out—but they won't ever routinely be bundled with PCs because the demand for them is too small to justify the expense. Virtual reality gear fits into this category as well. It's expensive and unnecessary for most personal computing tasks, so it is unlikely to ever be routinely bundled with personal computers.

在过去几年中，我们看到了各种面向严肃游戏玩家的专业硬件：力反馈操纵杆和方向盘、汽车和飞机踏板等等。这些硬件将继续热销——没有什么特别的理由让它们消亡——但它们不会经常与个人电脑捆绑在一起，因为对它们的需求太小，售价太高。虚拟现实设备也属于这一类。它价格昂贵，而且对于大多数个人计算任务来说没有必要，因此不太可能与个人电脑捆绑在一起。

Even with advances in handwriting recognition, the pen will not replace the keyboard as the primary interface for the personal computer. The typewriter superseded the pen as a means of creating text because it was faster and less tiring to use, and that won't change. The combination of keyboard and mouse is perfect for most applications except actual drawing. Professional artists use digital pens (graphics tablets) with personal computers, but few other people do, and pens certainly have little use in gaming. There has been a certain amount of debate about gesture-recognition devices, but they, too, have the disadvantage that they're tiring. Nobody wants to have to wave his hands around for hours at a time. This is exactly why the mouse was invented in the first place: Early researchers recognized that the touch screen, or any system that requires you to lift your hands from the desk, was impractical for prolonged use.

即使手写识别技术不断进步，笔也不会取代键盘成为个人电脑的主要接口。打字机取代钢笔作为创建文本的工具，是因为它使用起来更快、更省力，这一点不会改变。键盘和鼠标的组合非常适合大多数应用，但实际绘图除外。专业艺术家会在个人电脑上使用数码笔（绘图板），但其他人很少有人这样做，而且笔在游戏方面确实没有什么用处。关于手势识别设备也有一定的争论，但它们也有累人的缺点。没有人愿意连续几个小时挥舞双手。这正是鼠标发明的初衷：早期的研究人员认识到，触摸屏或任何需要将手从桌面上抬起来的系统都不适合长时间使用。

Voice recognition, on the other hand, has tremendous potential in gaming—more even than in business applications. Although dictation is faster than using a keyboard, talking eventually becomes tiring and makes for a noisy, distracting office environment. But games are noisy anyway, and suspension of disbelief will be greatly enhanced by being able to shout "Group one, charge!" rather than pressing the 1 key and clicking a menu item labeled "Charge." And, of course, microphones are already very much in use for communication between players in multi-player gaming; this will only increase with the growth of broadband Internet connections.

另一方面，语音识别在游戏中的潜力巨大，甚至超过了商业应用。虽然听写比使用键盘更快，但说话终究会让人疲惫，而且会使办公环境变得嘈杂、令人分心。但是，游戏本来就是嘈杂的，如果能大喊一声“第一组，冲锋！”，而不是按 1 键和点击标有“冲锋”的菜单项，就能大大增强信任感。当然，在多人游戏中，麦克风已经广泛用于玩家之间的交流；随着宽带互联网连接的发展，这种情况只会越来越多。

Why Consoles Won't Kill Off the PC 为什么主机不会淘汰 PC

Every time a new generation of consoles comes out, a number of pundits pop up on the Internet and in the gaming magazines to proclaim that the PC is dead as a gaming platform. They're thinking about the fact that the game console now closely approaches, or even surpasses, the computing performance of the PC at a much lower price. And as we said in the previous section on consoles, we can expect to see a growing convergence between console games and PC games as console hardware begins to include such features as disk drives and Internet access.

每当新一代游戏机问世，互联网和游戏杂志上就会冒出许多专家，宣称 PC 作为游戏平台已经死亡。他们认为，现在游戏机的计算性能已经接近甚至超过个人电脑，而价格却低得多。正如我们在前面关于游戏机的章节中所说，随着游戏机硬件开始配备磁盘驱动器和互联网接入等功能，我们可以预见，游戏机游戏和个人电脑游戏之间的融合会越来越紧密。

Nevertheless, the PC is here to stay as a gaming device because its appeal is not based on its performance characteristics alone. The most important difference between the PC and the console is not its hardware, but simply where you sit when you use it. The PC is designed to be used at close range by a single person because that's how we need to use it when we're working on documents or surfing the Internet. Certain games—construction and management simulations, for example—are best played that way as well. The game console, on the other hand, is designed to be used by one or more people, sitting farther away so they all can see. This is great for multi-player experiences such as sports or fighting games, okay for flight simulators and action games, and terrible for any game with a complex, multi-level user interface. That's the area in which PCs excel.

尽管如此，PC 仍将是一种游戏设备，因为它的吸引力不仅仅在于其性能特点。PC 与游戏机最重要的区别不在于硬件，而仅仅是在于你使用它时坐的位置。个人电脑是为单人近距离使用而设计的，因为我们在处理文件或上网时需要这样使用它。某些游戏——例如建设和管理模拟——也适合这样玩。而游戏机则是为一人或多人使用而设计的，坐在较远的地方，这样大家都能看到。这对于多人体验，如体育或格斗游戏来说很棒，对于飞行模拟器和动作游戏来说还可以，而对于任何具有复杂、多级用户界面的游戏来说则是糟糕的。这正是个人电脑擅长的领域。

Controversial Subject Matter 有争议的主题

Another reason why consoles won't kill off the PC as a game platform is that the PC is the only platform on which you can explore controversial subjects. To publish a console game, you have to obtain the approval of a publicity-conscious hardware manufacturer. Recently, Canadian artist Robin C. Pacific produced Babes in the Woods, a game whose object, among other things, was to find pubic hair for a Barbie doll and whose culminating reward was to enter The Great Yoni. You probably won't see this particular title on the Nintendo GameCube anytime soon. The best thing about the PC is that anyone who has one can create a PC game. Neither a profit-gobbling license nor a hugely overpriced development kit is needed, which is why the PC is where the most cutting-edge work is always done.

游戏机不会淘汰 PC 作为游戏平台的另一个原因是，PC 是唯一可以探索有争议主题的平台。要发行游戏机游戏，你必须获得一个注重公众形象的硬件制造商的批准。最近，加拿大艺术家罗宾·C·帕斯菲克洋制作了《森林中的宝贝》，这款游戏的目标之一是为芭比娃娃寻找阴毛，最终奖励是进入“伟大的外阴”。任天堂 GameCube 上可能很快就看不到这款游戏了。个人电脑的最大优势在于，任何人只要拥有一台个人电脑，就可以制作个人电脑游戏。既不需要攫取利润的许可证，也不需要价格高昂的开发工具包，这就是为什么最前沿的作品总是在 PC 上完成的原因。

Continuous Technological Advancement 技术不断进步

Finally, the technical quality of PC games will always eventually surpass that of the games on any given console machine. This is because a console machine is an inexpensive device that remains technically static from its launch until it is finally superseded by a new model. The PC, on the other hand, is an expensive device that continues to improve year on year. (There have been a few efforts to construct console "upgrades," such as the Sega 32X and CD drive add-ons for the Genesis, but none was really successful—people don't seem to want to upgrade their game consoles.) If you have a game design that demands the very latest technology, the PC is the only place you can put it.

最后，PC 游戏的技术质量最终总会超过任何特定游戏机上的游戏。这是因为游戏机是一种价格低廉的设备，从推出到最终被新机型取代，技术上一直处于静止状态。而个人电脑则是一种价格昂贵的设备，性能逐年提高。(曾有过一些游戏机“升级”的尝试，如世嘉 32X 和 Genesis 的 CD 驱动器插件，但都没有取得真正的成功——人们似乎并不想升级他们的游戏机）。如果你的游戏设计需要最先进的技术，PC 是你唯一的选择。

Handheld Game Machines, PDAs, and Telephones 掌上游戏机，PDA 和手机

From the simplest toys that play only one game on a black-and-white LCD screen, to the latest color cartridge-based machine, handhelds are a hugely popular gaming medium, especially for children. Rugged, portable, and relatively cheap, they offer increasingly sophisticated games that until recently could only be played on much more expensive machines.

从最简单的只能在黑白液晶屏幕上玩一种游戏的玩具，到最新的彩色卡带机，掌上游戏机是一种大受欢迎的游戏媒介，尤其是对儿童而言。它们坚固耐用、便于携带、价格相对便宜，却能提供越来越复杂的游戏，而在此之前，这些游戏只能在昂贵得多的机器上才能玩到。

There's a lot of talk about the convergence among handheld devices, and although it's bound to happen, that doesn't mean that all handheld devices will merge into a single, universal portable computer. There will always be mobile telephones without any real game-playing facilities for people who only want a telephone, and there will always be low-end handhelds with no wireless capability. Nobody wants their four-year-old racking up long-distance charges by accident.

关于掌上设备之间融合的讨论不绝于耳，虽然这是必然发生的事情，但这并不意味着所有掌上设备都会合并成一台通用的便携式电脑。对于只想打电话的人来说，没有真正游戏功能的移动电话总会存在，没有无线功能的低端掌上设备也总会存在。谁也不希望自己四岁的孩子一不小心就花掉大笔长途电话费。

The practical limitations of handheld devices are not in their computing power, which will continue to grow, but simply in their physical dimensions. A handheld can't get bigger than a certain size without becoming a nuisance to carry around. Although you can get a very enjoyable gaming experience from a handheld device, it will never be as immersive as sitting in front of a high-resolution monitor with big speakers and a subwoofer jarring your bones.

掌上设备的实际限制并不在于其计算能力（计算能力将继续增长），而仅仅在于其物理尺寸。掌上设备的尺寸不能超过一定范围，否则就会成为携带的麻烦。虽然掌上设备能给你带来非常愉悦的游戏体验，但它永远比不上坐在高分辨率显示器前，用大扬声器和低音炮震撼你的骨头那样身临其境。

We expect to see a slow but steady growth in gaming for handheld devices. Telephones and phone-equipped PDAs offer the most potential because players can compete against each other. Single-player PDA games and dedicated handhelds of various sorts will necessarily remain fairly lightweight. Without a CD-ROM or DVD drive, handhelds can't produce the "big" gaming experiences of a Baldur's Gate. But handhelds offer excellent growth potential for games for the casual gamer—someone who wants to play for 10 or 20 minutes as a break from the daily routine.

我们预计，掌上设备游戏将出现缓慢但稳定的增长。电话和配备电话的掌上电脑最具潜力，因为玩家可以相互竞争。单人掌上电脑和各种专用掌上设备的游戏必然会保持相当轻量级的特点。由于没有 CD-ROM 或 DVD 驱动器，掌上电设备无法提供《博德之门》那样的“大型”游戏体验。但掌上设备为休闲游戏玩家提供了极好的发展潜力——休闲游戏玩家可以在日常工作之余玩上 10 或 20 分钟的游戏。

Virtual Reality 虚拟现实

Virtual reality is a term for a technology that tries to make the player forget where he really is and to feel as if he's in the game instead. In practical terms, this means loading him down with a helmet that includes earphones and a pair of miniature liquid-crystal displays for stereo vision, as well as a position sensor that can determine what direction he's looking. VR was considered something of a holy grail for gaming a few years ago, but it has almost dropped out of sight again. The gear is expensive, and unless it's carefully calibrated to the individual user, it tends to give people motion sickness.

虚拟现实是一种技术术语，它试图让玩家忘记自己身在何处，而仿佛置身于游戏之中。在实际应用中，这意味着给玩家戴上一个头盔，其中包括耳机和一对微型液晶显示器（用于立体视觉），以及一个位置传感器（用于确定玩家的视线方向）。几年前，VR 还被认为是游戏界的圣杯，但现在几乎又淡出了人们的视线。这些设备价格昂贵，而且除非根据用户个人情况进行仔细校准，否则往往会让人产生晕动症。

Still, there's a lot of potential for the technology. If you've ever seen a really good 3D movie—one projected with polarized light, not the old red-and-green glasses—then you know how powerful the effect of stereo vision is. On a big screen, occupying all your peripheral vision, it really does make you feel as if you're in the scene. To do this on a computer means computing two different images, one for each eye—and, of course, that requires twice as much graphics processing power. To reduce what's called "visual stress"—making the eye work harder than it normally does—VR gear must operate with high resolution at a high frame rate and with sharp focus.

不过，这项技术的潜力仍然很大。如果你看过一部非常棒的 3D 电影，一部用偏振光而不是老式红绿眼镜放映的电影，你就会知道立体视觉的效果有多么强大。在大屏幕上，它占据了你所有的周边视线，确实让你感觉仿佛身临其境。要在电脑上实现这一点，就意味着要计算两幅不同的图像，每只眼睛一幅——当然，这需要两倍的图形处理能力。为了减少所谓的“视觉压力”——让眼睛比正常情况下更努力地工作——VR 设备必须以高分辨率、高帧频和高清晰度来运行。

We think there's a future for virtual reality in games, but it's several years off yet. The quality of the helmets needs to get much, much better, and the cost needs to get much, much lower. In any case, VR is unlikely to become the standard way of playing. Many people like to play console games in groups, and they enjoy interacting with their friends as they play. Shutting out the rest of the room with a VR helmet will significantly degrade that experience. VR will probably be at its best in single-player or multi-player networked games.

我们认为虚拟现实技术在游戏中的应用是有前景的，但还需要几年的时间。头盔的质量需要大大提高，成本需要大大降低。无论如何，VR 不太可能成为标准的游戏方式。许多人喜欢集体玩主机游戏，他们喜欢在游戏过程中与朋友互动。如果戴上 VR 头盔将房间的其他部分隔绝在外，这种体验将大打折扣。在单人或多人联网游戏中，VR 可能会发挥出最佳效果。

The Future of Game Programming 游戏编程的未来

The way we program computers, even after 50 years of doing it, is still slow, exacting, and error-prone. Almost all the efforts to devise better kinds of programming languages and better ways of programming have been ignored by the industry in general and game programmers in particular, who usually trade convenience and even reliability in exchange for execution speed without a second thought. Game programmers are notoriously conservative; it took many years to persuade them to program in high-level languages rather than "down on the bare metal," and it took many more to use object-oriented techniques and project-management tools. Even today there's still something of a cult of machismo among the more hard-core programmers, each trying to outdo the others to squeeze a few more instructions per millisecond out of the hardware.

我们为计算机编程的方式，即使已经沿用了 50 年，仍然是缓慢、繁琐和容易出错的。业内人士，尤其是游戏程序员，几乎对所有旨在设计更好的编程语言和编程方式的努力都视而不见，他们通常会不假思索地用便捷性甚至可靠性来换取执行速度。游戏程序员的保守是出了名的；花了很多年才说服他们使用高级语言而不是直接操作硬件底层代码编程，而使用面向对象技术和项目管理工具则花了更多时间。即使到了今天，在更硬核的程序员中间，仍然存在着一些大男子主义的崇拜，每个人都试图超越其他人，从硬件中每毫秒多挤出几条指令。

Most game machines contain a single general-purpose central processing unit and one or more dedicated graphics processing units. Their CPUs follow the traditional one-instruction-at-a-time model that goes all the way back to the Jacquard loom. This design was originally intended for computing ballistics tables for artillery guns, not for simulating complex scenes or looking five moves ahead in a chess game. However, it seems firmly entrenched, and we believe that until there is a completely new paradigm in computer hardware design, software will continue to be programmed in much the same way that it has been for the last 20 years. Because computers are designed to perform mathematical calculations, our models are all still mathematical rather than, say, neurological. Mathematics has the advantage that it's highly abstract and can be applied—with varying degrees of accuracy—to nearly anything.

大多数游戏机都包含一个通用中央处理器和一个或多个专用图形处理单元。它们的中央处理器采用传统的一次执行一条指令的模式，这种模式可以追溯到提花织布机。这种设计最初是用于计算火炮的弹道表，而不是用于模拟复杂场景或在国际象棋游戏中展望未来五步。然而，这种设计似乎已经根深蒂固，我们相信，在计算机硬件设计出现全新范式之前，软件的编程方式仍将与过去 20 年的方式大同小异。由于计算机的设计目的是进行数学计算，因此我们的所有模型仍然是数学模型，而不是神经模型。数学的优势在于它高度抽象，几乎可以应用于任何事物，而且准确度各不相同。

However, despite the fact that the near future doesn't look as if it will offer any major changes to the way computers are built and programmed, we do expect to see a number of advances in computer programming, and these will have a distinct effect on game development as well.

然而，尽管在不久的将来，计算机的构造和编程方式似乎不会发生重大变化，但我们确实有望看到计算机编程方面的一些进步，而这些进步也将对游戏开发产生明显的影响。

Scene Representation 场景表现

We've separated scene representation from animation because they represent two different kinds of programming problems. The current state of the art is to represent a scene as a set of textured surfaces whose shapes are defined by a database of polygons. 3D graphics-acceleration hardware is essential for doing this quickly. It works very well for the simple problem of displaying objects in a room, so now most of the graphics programming effort has turned to harder challenges: creating lighting effects, particle effects, fog, and so on.

我们将场景表示与动画制作分开，是因为它们代表了两种不同的编程问题。目前的技术水平是将场景表示为一组纹理表面，其形状由多边形数据库定义。三维图形加速硬件对于快速完成这一工作至关重要。对于显示房间中的物体这一简单问题，它的效果非常好，因此现在大部分图形编程工作都转向了更难的挑战：创建照明效果、粒子效果、雾等等。

As for the future, there could come a time when hardware support for drawing polygons seems as antiquated as hardware support for drawing lines does now. There are at least three other ways in which scenes can be displayed, and there might be more that we haven't envisioned.

至于未来，也许有一天，绘制多边形的硬件支持会像现在绘制线条的硬件支持一样过时。至少还有其他三种方式可以显示场景，也许还有更多我们没有想到的方式。

Mathematical Representations 数学表现

At the moment, scenes are represented as data: thousands or millions of points in 3-space that define the corners of the polygons that make up the surfaces that we see. This data normally is created in a 3D scene editor such as Maya, and they take up a lot of memory. They're particularly expensive as a way of representing curved surfaces because they have to break down the curve into a large number of straight lines.

目前，场景是以数据的形式表示的：三维空间中的数千或数百万个点定义了多边形的边角，这些多边形构成了我们所看到的表面。这些数据通常在 3D 场景编辑器（如 Maya）中创建，会占用大量内存。由于需要将曲线分解成大量直线，因此作为表示曲线表面的一种方式，它们的成本尤其高昂。

Another way of representing a scene is by describing it as a series of mathematical equations that describe the surfaces, whether curved or flat. Two techniques currently under investigation are nonuniform rational B-splines (NURBS) and Bézier patches. Program code uses the equation to calculate the shapes of the surfaces and project them onto the screen. It takes more computing power than drawing polygons, but it allows the artist to represent more curves in less memory.

另一种表示场景的方法是将其描述为一系列描述表面（无论是曲面还是平面）的数学公式。目前正在研究的两种技术是非均匀有理 B 样条 (NURBS) 和贝塞尔曲面。程序代码使用方程计算曲面的形状，并将其投影到屏幕上。与绘制多边形相比，这种方法需要更多的计算能力，但却能让艺术家用更少的内存来表现更多的曲线。

Procedural Scene Representation 程序化场景表示法

Instead of storing a database of points or mathematical equations, you could "paint" a scene algorithmically by writing program code that generates an image on the fly—a chair subroutine would draw a picture of a chair, for example. This extends traditional object-oriented programming, in which programmers write code that determines how objects behave, to include the concept of code that determines how they look as well. Unlike raw image data, a drawing algorithm can be given new parameters to tell it to draw things in a variety of ways. A program called AARON has already used this technique to create 2D paintings of people and objects.

与存储点的数据库或数学公式的不同，你可以通过编写程序代码来“绘制”场景，从而即时生成图像——例如，椅子子程序可以绘制一张椅子的图片。在传统的面向对象编程中，程序员编写的代码决定了对象的行为方式，而这一概念也扩展到了决定对象外观的代码。与原始图像数据不同，绘图算法可以被赋予新的参数，告诉它以各种方式绘制事物。一个名为“AARON”的程序已经利用这种技术绘制出了人物和物体的二维画。

Real-Time Ray Tracing 实时光线追踪

Ray tracing is an extremely slow but powerful technique in which the color of each pixel on the screen is computed, one by one, from a three-dimensional model of a scene, including its light sources. The idea is that each pixel is hypothetically "lit" by a ray of light coming from within the scene somewhere, and the process computes where it originated and what happened to it. Because it computes each ray of light individually, ray tracing can display the effects of mirrors, lenses, translucent surfaces, and anything else that affects light as it travels. The process normally takes many hours to generate a single still frame. Ray tracing is often used to create special effects in movies because for each frame of the movie, it has to be done only once. In a computer game, in which things are changing on the fly 30 times a second or more, it's much too slow—for now. But there could be a time when real-time ray tracing is made possible by hardware accelerators.

光线追踪是一种速度极慢但功能强大的技术，它根据场景的三维模型（包括光源）逐个计算屏幕上每个像素的颜色。这种技术的原理是，假设每个像素都被来自场景中某处的光线“点亮”，然后计算光线的来源和发生了什么。由于光线追踪可以单独计算每一束光线，因此可以显示镜子、透镜、半透明表面以及其他任何会影响光线传播的物体的效果。生成一个静止画面通常需要数小时的时间。光线追踪通常用于在电影中制作特效，因为电影中的每一帧画面只需进行一次光线追踪。而在电脑游戏中，事物每秒会发生 30 次或更多的变化，因此这种方法目前来说太慢了。不过，通过硬件加速器实现实时光线追踪可能会成为现实。

It's impossible to predict which lines of research will prove fruitful. One thing is certain: Whatever is the hottest, most exciting state-of-the-art technique today will be yesterday's news a few years from now. This is one of the reasons a designer should avoid creating designs dependent on a specific piece of hardware—they age too quickly.

现在还无法预测哪些研究方向会取得成果。但有一点是肯定的：无论今天最热门、最令人兴奋的先进技术是什么，几年后都将成为过时的东西。这也是设计师应避免设计依赖于特定硬件的原因之一——它们过时得太快了。

Animation 动画

In film and television, animation is pre-rendered and can be refined in the studio until it looks right in every scene. In computer games, however, animation must be displayed on the fly, often without any way to adjust it to account for differences between one scene and another. This is fairly easy when animating rigid mechanical objects such as machines, and it is very difficult with soft, deformable objects such as people and animals. When the action being animated is self-contained and has a natural cycle, such as a person running in a straight line along a flat surface, it looks pretty good. However, there are a number of ways in which computer game animation can be improved in the future.

在电影和电视中，动画是预先渲染好的，可以在工作室中不断完善，直到在每个场景中看起来都是正确的。但在电脑游戏中，动画必须即时显示，通常无法根据场景之间的差异进行调整。在制作僵硬的机械物体（如机器）的动画时，这还算容易，但要制作柔软、可变形的物体（如人和动物）就非常困难了。当动画中的动作自成一体并具有自然循环时，例如一个人沿着平面直线奔跑，看起来就很不错。不过，计算机游戏动画今后还可以在很多方面加以改进。

Facial Animation and Speech Generation 面部动画和语音生成

The human brain contains special neurological wiring that responds specifically to faces, and the face transmits a huge amount of data about the emotional state of the speaker. Obviously, prescripted facial animation performing in conjunction with fixed audio clips of the character speaking is already commonplace, but the holy grail of facial animation is on-the-fly lip synchronization with artificially generated speech. We've reached the point at which we can do this with rather wooden, robotic-seeming characters, but truly natural-sounding speech will come in time. The other aspect of facial animation, emotional display, also shows great promise. At the moment, a few games are doing this in a fairly clumsy way—a raised eyebrow or a frown—but before long we will be able to do more subtle expressions.

人脑中包含特殊的神经线路，能对人脸做出专门的反应，人脸传递着有关说话者情绪状态的大量数据。显然，预设的面部动画与角色说话的固定音频片段结合在一起已经是司空见惯的事，但面部动画的最高境界是与人工生成的语音同步。我们现在已经可以做到让角色看起来相当木讷、像机器人一样，但真正自然的语音还需时日。面部动画的另一个方面——情绪显示也大有可为。目前，有几款游戏以一种相当笨拙的方式实现了这一点——扬眉或皱眉，但不久之后，我们就能做出更微妙的表情了。

Inverse Kinematics 反向运动学

Computer animation involving interactions between two objects often doesn't look right. Consider the simple motion of walking uphill. With each step, the walker's forward foot should stop descending at a point higher than his rear foot because the ground is higher there. The angle of his ankles should also be different from what it is on flat ground because his feet are sloping upward from back to front. If you use the same walk cycle that you would use on flat ground, the walker's forward foot will appear to descend into the earth, and his ankles will be at the wrong angle. To correct these errors, it's possible to use a programming technique called inverse kinematics to compute where the heel and toes should stop based on the height of the ground it will contact. The data for the position and orientation of the legs is then modified to account for the different height of the surface. This has to be done at every step, to compensate for changes the angle of the surface. If the terrain flattens out or starts to slope downhill, the positions of the legs must change to reflect that.

涉及两个物体之间相互作用的计算机动画往往看起来不对。请看一个简单的上坡行走动作。每走一步，步行者的前脚应该在比后脚高的地方停止下降，因为那里的地面更高。脚踝的角度也应该与在平地上不同，因为他的脚从后向前向上倾斜。如果使用与在平地上相同的行走周期，步行者的前脚似乎会向下陷入地面，脚踝的角度也会错误。要纠正这些错误，可以使用一种名为逆运动学的编程技术，根据脚跟和脚趾接触地面的高度计算出脚跟和脚趾应该停在的位置。然后修改腿部位置和方向的数据，以考虑到地面的不同高度。每走一步都必须这样做，以补偿地面角度的变化。如果地形变平或开始下坡，双腿的位置也必须随之改变。

Inverse kinematics have a great many uses besides walking. In reaching out to pick up an object, for example, the distance the character's arm extends naturally depends on how far away the object is. If the animation for extending the arm is fixed, the model must be the same distance from every object it is going to pick up. If the model is too far away, its arm will stop moving before the hand reaches the object, which will then appear to float up in midair. If the model is too near, its hand will appear to pass through the object. By using inverse kinematics, the model's arm can be made to stop extending at the point at which the hand touches the object.

除了行走，逆运动学还有很多其他用途。例如，在伸手拾取物体时，角色手臂伸展的距离自然取决于物体的距离。如果伸展手臂的动画是固定的，那么模特与要拾起的每个物体的距离都必须相同。如果模特离得太远，它的手臂会在手到达物体之前停止运动，这样物体就会漂浮在半空中。如果模特太近，它的手似乎会穿过物体。通过使用逆运动学，可以使模特的手臂在手接触到物体时停止伸展。

Inverse kinematics are computationally expensive compared to using fixed animation, especially when there are large numbers of animated people moving around in complex environments such as a cocktail party. But research is underway, and as processors become more powerful, we can expect to see more of this technique.

与使用固定动画相比，逆运动学的计算成本较高，尤其是当大量动画人物在鸡尾酒会等复杂环境中移动时。但研究正在进行中，随着处理器功能越来越强大，我们有望看到更多这种技术的应用。

True Locomotion 真实运动

At the moment, most computer animation moves a 3D model rather the way a marionette moves. A marionette wiggles its legs back and forth to look as if it's walking, but the puppet isn't really moving by pushing its feet against the ground. The same is true of computer models: The movement of the model through an environment is actually computed by a mathematical formula unrelated to the movement of its legs. Typically, the speed of the model either is fixed or varies according to a straight-line acceleration, as with a rocket. But if the movement of the legs doesn't actually match the speed of the model over the ground, it produces a visual anomaly: The character looks as if she is ice skating. This often appears in sports games because different athletes run at different speeds depending on their ability ratings, but they all use the same animation cycle for running. In most other games, all characters move at the same speed or at a few fixed speeds, each of which has its own properly tuned animation cycle. For now, only sports games have a wide and continuous range of speeds for all their athletes.

目前，大多数电脑动画都是像提线木偶一样移动三维模特。提线木偶来回摆动它的腿，看起来就像在走路，但木偶并不是真的通过脚踩地面来移动。计算机模特也是如此：模特在环境中的移动实际上是通过一个与其腿部运动无关的数学公式计算出来的。通常情况下，模特的速度要么是固定的，要么是按照直线加速度变化的，就像火箭一样。但如果腿部的运动实际上与模特在地面上的速度不一致，就会产生视觉异常：角色看起来就像在滑冰。这种情况经常出现在体育游戏中，因为不同的运动员根据其能力等级以不同的速度奔跑，但他们在奔跑时都使用相同的动画周期。在大多数其他游戏中，所有角色都以相同的速度或几种固定的速度移动，每种速度都有自己适当调整的动画周期。目前，只有体育游戏中的所有运动员都有广泛而连续的速度范围。

The solution to this problem, even more processor-intensive than inverse kinematics, is true locomotion—that is, simulating the movement of a body according to real physics acting on the body, involving its mass, strength, traction on the ground, and many other factors. If done properly, calculations should also take into account such features as the swaying of the person's body as weight shifts and the flexing and deformation of the feet under the changing load conditions of walking. True locomotion is common in pre-rendered animations such as the dinosaurs in the film Jurassic Park, but it has yet to be seen in computer games because we just don't have the processing power to do it in real time, especially for a whole field full of athletes. But it won't be long before we do. It's another thing to look out for in the coming years.

解决这一问题的方法是真正的运动，即根据作用于人体的真实物理原理模拟人体的运动，其中涉及人体的质量、强度、地面牵引力和许多其他因素，这甚至比逆运动学更需要大量的处理器。如果计算方法得当，还应该考虑到人的身体在重心移动时的摇摆以及双脚在不断变化的行走负荷条件下的弯曲和变形等特征。真正的运动在预渲染动画（如电影《侏罗纪公园》中的恐龙）中很常见，但在电脑游戏中还没有出现过，因为我们没有实时处理能力，尤其是对于满场的运动员来说。不过，我们很快就能做到。这是未来几年值得关注的另一件事。

Natural Language Processing 自然语言处理

Not long after computers were invented, early artificial intelligence researchers confidently predicted that they would have programs speaking and understanding English within 10 years. Fifty years later, we're not significantly closer to that goal. Computers do use language to communicate with their users, but it's almost entirely by means of prescripted sentences. Few programs have been devised that can express meaning by generating sentences from individual words, and those few usually do so over a very limited domain.

计算机发明后不久，早期的人工智能研究人员自信地预测，他们将在 10 年内开发出能说英语和听懂英语的程序。五十年后的今天，我们离这一目标依然相去甚远。计算机确实使用语言与用户交流，但几乎完全是通过预设的句子。很少有程序能通过从单个单词生成句子来表达意思，而且这些程序通常只能在非常有限的领域内使用。

It turns out that generating and understanding natural language is an exceedingly hard problem. Large areas of the human brain are devoted to it. Language comprehension involves much more than understanding the dictionary definitions of the words and the rules of grammar; it also takes into account the relationships between the speakers, their physical circumstances, the sorts of routine conversational scripts that we follow, and many other variables. To give an extremely simple example, a person who is drowning might shout "Help!" to those on shore, and a person on shore who can't offer help himself for some reason might also shout "Help!". The first person obviously means "help me" while the second means "help him." It's up to the listener to observe the situation and draw the correct conclusion about who needs help. Most of us could do this in a fraction of a second, but at the moment, no computer program can do so at all. A great deal of natural language comprehension is tied into something called "common sense," but common sense is so enormous and illogical that we don't even know how to start to teach it to computers.

事实证明，生成和理解自然语言是一个极其困难的问题。人类大脑的大部分区域都用于此。语言理解所涉及的远不止是理解字典中的词义和语法规则，它还需要考虑说话者之间的关系、他们所处的物理环境、我们所遵循的各种常规对话脚本以及许多其他变量。举个极其简单的例子，一个人溺水了，他可能会向岸上的人喊“救命！”，而岸上的人由于某种原因无法提供帮助，也可能会喊“救命！”。第一个人的意思显然是“救救我”，而第二个人的意思是“救救他”。这就需要听者观察情况，得出谁需要帮助的正确结论。我们大多数人都能在几分之一秒内做到这一点，但目前还没有计算机程序能做到这一点。很多自然语言理解都与一种叫做“常识”的东西息息相关，但常识是如此庞大和不合逻辑，以至于我们甚至不知道如何开始把它教给计算机。

Nevertheless, natural language processing will be extremely significant in the games of the future. There are two problems to solve: language recognition and language generation.

尽管如此，自然语言处理在未来的游戏中仍将发挥极其重要的作用。有两个问题需要解决：语言识别和语言生成。

Language Recognition 语言识别

Language recognition isn't the same as voice recognition, which we've already dealt with in the section on gaming hardware. Language recognition is the process of breaking down sentences to decode their meaning, and it is also called parsing. Computers aren't too bad at parsing sentences that refer to a tightly restricted subject. This is what compilers do as the first step in processing program source code. Source code, how ever, has extremely rigid rules and an unambiguous meaning for everything. English is much more complex, fluid, and illogical. Consider the sentence, "Alice told Betty that she would have to leave." Who would have to leave?

语言识别与语音识别不同，语音识别我们已经在游戏硬件一节中讨论过了。语言识别是分解句子以解码其含义的过程，也称为解析。计算机在解析涉及严格限定主题的句子方面并不差。这就是编译器处理程序源代码的第一步。然而，源代码有极其严格的规则，每件事都有明确的含义。而英语则要复杂、多变和不合逻辑得多。请看这样一个句子：“爱丽丝告诉贝蒂，她必须离开”。谁必须离开？

Giving orders in English will be a lot of fun, as long as it doesn't prove to be less efficient than doing it by other means. Most games provide a fairly restricted domain, so orders such as "Attack," "Hold your ground," and even "Start a diversion on the west side of the enemy base" won't be too difficult to interpret. But the real challenge for language recognition will be in games with simulated characters, with whom the player wants to have conversations. Early text-based adventure games did a certain amount of this, but most of that work was abandoned with the arrival of graphical adventure games and scripted conversations. For the moment, most programs that try to do language recognition sort of fake it, guessing what the player means from keywords in the input and responding more or less appropriately depending on how good the guess was. It will probably require several more decades of AI research before we can do language recognition well.

用英语发号施令会非常有趣，只要不比用其他方式效率低就行。大多数游戏都提供了相当有限的领域，因此诸如“进攻”、“坚守阵地”，甚至“在敌人基地西侧开始转移”之类的命令并不难解释。但是，语言识别的真正挑战在于游戏中的模拟角色，玩家希望与这些角色进行对话。早期的文字冒险游戏在这方面做了一些工作，但随着图形冒险游戏和脚本对话的出现，大部分工作都被放弃了。目前，大多数试图进行语言识别的程序都是伪造的，它们从输入的关键字中猜测玩家的意思，并根据猜测的准确程度做出或多或少的反应。要做好语言识别，可能还需要几十年的人工智能研究。

Language Generation 语言生成

Simple language generation—assembling prerecorded phrases into sentences—is less difficult than language recognition. Unlike parsing user input, which could be anything, as designers we can limit the scope of what a game character says and guarantee that it's grammatically correct. We're already starting to get good doing this and play it back smoothly, and this will continue to improve.

简单的语言生成——将预先录制的短语组合成句子——没有语言识别那么困难。与解析用户输入不同，用户输入可以是任何内容，而作为设计者，我们可以限制游戏角色所说内容的范围，并保证其语法正确。我们已经开始熟练地做到这一点，并能流畅地回放，而且还会不断改进。

In the near future, we can't expect to have wide-ranging conversations with artificial characters, but we ought to be able to simulate reasonable interactions in stereotypical sorts of situations: bartenders, gas-station attendants, invading aliens, and so on. For now, these will probably remain scripted conversations, but we might be able to replace the current mechanism, in which the game just delivers a canned piece of dialogue, with a sentence assembled from semantic fragments that vary somewhat depending on the character's state of mind. To give a trivial example, take the sentence "I don't know" as a response to a question to which the character doesn't have the answer. If the character feels sympathetic to the player, the software could add "I'm sorry, but" before the sentence; if the character feels unsympathetic, it could add, "and I don't care" at the end.

在不久的将来，我们不能指望与人工角色进行广泛的对话，但我们应该能够模拟在刻板印象中的各种情况下的合理互动：酒保、加油站服务员、入侵的外星人等等。目前，这些对话可能仍将是脚本对话，但我们或许可以用语义片段组成的句子取代当前的机制，即游戏只是提供一段预制对话，而语义片段会根据角色的心理状态而有所变化。举个微不足道的例子，以“我不知道”这句话来回答一个角色没有答案的问题。如果角色同情玩家，软件可以在句子前加上“对不起，但是”；如果角色不同情玩家，软件可以在句尾加上 “我不在乎”。

Real language use, in the sense of converting a character's mental desire to make a "speech act," along with the semantic content of that act, into an actual utterance, is a far harder problem. Games will undoubtedly be able to do it someday, but, as with language recognition, this is primarily a subject for AI research at the moment.

真正的语言使用，是指将角色做出“言语行为”的心理愿望以及该行为的语义内容转化为实际话语，这是一个难得多的问题。毫无疑问，游戏总有一天会做到这一点，但与语言识别一样，目前这主要是人工智能研究的课题。

Game Genres 游戏类型

It's nearly impossible to predict what new genres of games might arise in the future. American designers never anticipated the dance simulations that have recently come from Japan. Rez, the abstract music/shooting game from Sega, could be the first in another. There will undoubtedly be more as the medium expands.

要预测未来会出现什么新类型的游戏几乎是不可能的。美国的设计师们从未预料到日本最近推出的模拟舞蹈游戏。世嘉公司推出的抽象音乐/射击游戏《Rez》可能是另一种游戏中的第一款。毫无疑问，随着游戏媒介的扩展，还会有更多的游戏出现。

One thing is certain: For interactive entertainment to grow, we have to be open-minded and willing to explore. Why didn't American game designers invent the dance simulation themselves? Probably because the idea of making a game about little girls dancing was just too uncool. The notion that gamers are all adolescent boys is clearly outdated, yet many designers persist in building games as if they were the only market.

有一点是肯定的：互动娱乐要发展，我们就必须思想开放，勇于探索。为什么美国游戏设计师没有自己发明模拟舞蹈？可能是因为制作小女孩跳舞游戏的想法太不酷了。游戏玩家都是青春期男孩的观念显然已经过时，但许多设计者仍然坚持制作游戏，好像他们是唯一的市场。

To invent a game in a genuinely new genre, you have to throw out all your preconceived notions about computer games and start from scratch with two simple questions: What activities do people think are fun? and Can that activity reasonably be turned into a computer game?

要发明一款真正新类型的游戏，你必须抛弃对电脑游戏的所有成见，从两个简单的问题入手，从零开始：人们认为什么活动有趣？ 这项活动能否合理地转化为电脑游戏？

In the meantime, we'll discuss what we think will happen in some existing genres.

在此期间，我们将讨论我们认为在一些现有类型中会出现的情况。

Action Games 动作游戏

The challenges in action games arise mostly from their twitch elements: motor skills, coordination, and timing. To a lesser extent, they also include puzzle solving and exploration—figuring out where to go and what to do to survive and pass through the level. These are well-understood elements of an action game's design. Most of the advances in action gaming in recent years have been in the game's content rather than in the nature of the challenges it offers. Banjo-Kazooie, for example, was a very successful game about a bear (Banjo) carrying a bird (Kazooie) around in his backpack. This peculiar bird-bear avatar enabled the designers to create a number of unique moves that would have been incongruous if the avatar were just a bird or just a bear. Soul Reaver was a game about a maimed vampire with only a limited ability to fly. Toy Story, of course, was based on the movie and was all about toys in a suburban environment. This kind of imaginative thinking will keep action games moving forward rather than stagnating.

动作游戏中的挑战主要来自其动作元素：运动技能、协调和时机。在较小程度上，它们还包括解谜和探索——找出去哪里、做什么才能生存并通过关卡。这些都是动作游戏设计中广为人知的要素。近年来，动作游戏的进步大多体现在游戏内容上，而不是游戏所提供的挑战的性质上。例如，《班卓熊大冒险》是一款非常成功的游戏，讲述的是一只熊（Banjo）背着一只鸟（Kazooie）到处跑的故事。这种奇特的“鸟熊化身”让设计者能够创造出许多独特的动作，如果化身只是一只鸟或一只熊，这些动作就会显得很不协调。《勾魂使者》是一款关于一个残缺不全、只有有限飞行能力的吸血鬼的游戏。当然，《玩具总动员》是根据电影改编的，主题是郊区环境中的玩具。这种富有想象力的思维将使动作游戏不断向前发展，而不是停滞不前。

First-person shooters represented a big leap forward when they appeared, but what was new about them was mostly the quality of the display and the richness of the environment rather than the concept itself. Multi-player first-person gaming goes back at least as far as the early 1980s, when a game called MazeWars was programmed for the short-lived Xerox Alto workstation. Since then, most of the advances have been evolutionary rather than revolutionary: nonrectilinear rooms and stairs (the biggest differences between the original Castle Wolfenstein 3D and Doom), a greater variety of weapons and enemies, and so on. We can expect to see continuing evolutionary advancements in the first-person shooter genre, providing better graphics, better sound, and especially better enemy AI.

第一人称射击游戏的出现代表了一大飞跃，但其新颖之处主要在于显示质量和丰富的环境，而非概念本身。多人第一人称游戏至少可以追溯到 20 世纪 80 年代初，当时一款名为《迷宫战争》的游戏是为昙花一现的施乐 Alto 工作站设计的。从那时起，大多数游戏的进步都是进化性的，而不是革命性的：非直线的房间和楼梯（最初的《狼堡 3D》和《毁灭战士》之间最大的区别）、更多种类的武器和敌人等等。我们可以期待看到第一人称射击类游戏不断进步，提供更好的画面、更好的音效，尤其是更好的敌人 AI。

Thief, one of the most innovative action games in recent years, turned the shooter on its head by actively discouraging shooting. It was still a first-person game in which the player was armed with a variety of weapons, but the goal was to steal things rather than to kill people, to get through as much of the game as possible without firing a shot. Stealth, not violence, ensured success, but the game still required both hand-eye coordination and puzzle solving in the best traditions of the action genre. We hope to see more action games that explore alternative kinds of actions and approaches to victory.

《神偷》是近年来最具创新性的动作游戏之一，它通过积极阻止射击来颠覆射击游戏。它仍然是一款第一人称游戏，玩家可以使用各种武器，但目标是偷东西而不是杀人，尽可能在不开枪的情况下完成游戏。隐秘而非暴力是成功的保证，但游戏仍然需要手眼协调和解谜，这也是动作类游戏的优良传统。我们希望看到更多的动作游戏探索其他类型的行动和获胜方法。

Strategy Games 策略游戏

By far the largest unexplored area of strategy games is the human factor. Armies are led by generals, and generals have human strengths and weaknesses that have a profound influence on their performance in the field. Determination, imagination, daring, lateral thinking, personal courage, and sheer analytic intelligence all play important roles in military capability. So does the indefinable quality of leadership, an attribute that determines whether men risking their lives will be confident or fearful, which can sometimes turn the tide of battle all by itself.

迄今为止，战略游戏中最大的未开发领域就是人的因素。军队由将领领导，而将领在人性方面的优缺点会对他们在战场上的表现产生深远影响。决心、想象力、胆识、横向思维、个人勇气和纯粹的分析智慧都对军事能力起着重要作用。领导力这种难以定义的品质也是如此，它决定了冒着生命危险的士兵是自信还是恐惧，有时它本身就能扭转战局。

There have been efforts to quantify and simulate some of these qualities. As far back as The Ancient Art of War, players could choose to fight against simulated versions of Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, or Napoleon Bonaparte, each of whom was characterized as representing certain military attributes. We've also worked on simulating the psychological condition of soldiers themselves: Microsoft's Close Combat gave each soldier a state of mind that varied from courageous and confident to cowering in terror, unable to obey any order.

人们一直在努力量化和模拟其中的一些品质。早在《古代兵法》中，玩家就可以选择与模拟版的凯撒大帝、成吉思汗或拿破仑·波拿巴对战，他们每个人都被描述为代表了某些军事特质。我们还致力于模拟士兵本身的心理状态：微软的近距离作战让每个士兵都有不同的心理状态，有的勇敢自信，有的畏缩不前，无法服从任何命令。

Nevertheless, there's a great deal more to be done in this area. In most computer strategy games, there's no such thing as psychological operations, nor do they simulate the element of surprise, diversionary tactics, bluffing, feigned retreats to draw out the enemy, or lame-duck tricks to give an impression of weakness. Computer games tend to simulate soldiers as robotic killing machines, obeying whatever order they're given, even if it is suicidal, and unflinchingly standing their ground to the last man. With more processing power and richer, deeper simulations of human reactions, we will start to see war games that depict battles as they are really fought.

尽管如此，这方面还有很多工作要做。在大多数电脑战略游戏中，都没有心理战术这种东西，也没有模拟出其不意、声东击西、虚张声势、假装撤退以引出敌人，或者假装虚弱欺骗敌人的计谋。电脑游戏倾向于把士兵模拟成机器人杀人机器，他们服从任何命令，哪怕是自杀性的命令，并且坚定不移地坚守阵地，直到最后一人。随着处理能力的提高和对人类反应更丰富、更深入的模拟，我们将开始看到描绘真实战斗的战争游戏。

Another weakness of real-time strategy games at the moment is an overemphasis on economic production models. Players concentrate on achieving economic efficiency rather than strategic or tactical superiority. They treat their units as cannon fodder, relying on overwhelming the enemy with sheer numbers rather than with military skill—a tactic uncomfortably reminiscent of Field Marshal Haig at the Somme. Because they're only simulated soldiers, we don't have to care how many of them die, except insofar as it gives us fewer units to fight with. This represents an inaccuracy in the simulation. Real soldiers' morale is hurt when their leaders exhibit a flagrant disregard for the value of their lives, and their performance suffers accordingly. In the future, we can expect to see these details simulated properly, and players will have to take care of their soldiers to win.

目前，即时战略游戏的另一个弱点是过分强调经济生产模式。玩家专注于实现经济效益，而不是战略或战术优势。他们把自己的部队当作炮灰，依靠纯粹的数量而非军事技能压倒敌人——这种战术让人不自觉地想起索姆河战役中的海格元帅。因为他们只是模拟士兵，所以我们不必关心他们死了多少人，除非这会让我们减少可用于战斗的部队数量。这说明模拟不准确。如果领导者公然漠视士兵的生命价值，真实士兵的士气就会受到打击，他们的表现也会相应受到影响。在未来，我们可以期待看到这些细节得到适当的模拟，玩家必须照顾好自己的士兵才能取得胜利。

Role-Playing Games 角色扮演游戏

Computerized role-playing games still bear the marks of their heritage as pencil-and-paper, dice-based games. Many players like RPGs this way and enjoy fiddling around with their weapons, armor, and magic items to find the optimal combination of attack and defense potential.

电脑角色扮演游戏仍然带有纸笔游戏、骰子游戏的传统印记。许多玩家喜欢这样的角色扮演游戏，喜欢摆弄他们的武器、盔甲和魔法物品，以找到攻击和防御潜力的最佳组合。

Although there's a definite market for such games, we feel that the emphasis on statistics discourages a larger market, the casual player, from playing RPGs. Casual players want to have adventures and collect loot without having to study all the peculiar capabilities of their equipment or to spend a lot of time shopping for it at the local arms merchant. Other genres—action games and action adventures—offer that kind of gameplay, but for the most part, they have thin plots and little character development. We expect that the traditional numbers-oriented RPG will continue to exist but that a new type of RPG, a sort of hybrid between the action-adventure and the traditional RPG, will emerge over time to satisfy the needs of the casual player. It will have the plot and character-interaction elements of the RPG, along with the usual quest structure and character-growth components, but it won't require so much fiddling or buying and selling.

虽然这类游戏有一定的市场，但我们认为，对统计数据的强调阻碍了更大的市场，即休闲玩家对 RPG 游戏的兴趣。休闲玩家希望冒险和收集战利品，而不必研究装备的所有特殊功能，也不必花大量时间在当地武器商那里购买装备。其他类型的游戏——动作游戏和动作冒险——提供了这种玩法，但它们大多情节单调，人物性格发展不足。我们预计，传统的以数字为导向的 RPG 将继续存在，但随着时间的推移，将出现一种新型的 RPG，一种介于动作冒险游戏和传统 RPG 之间的混合体，以满足休闲玩家的需求。它将具有 RPG 的情节和角色互动要素，以及通常的任务结构和角色成长要素，但不需要那么多的摆弄或买卖武器。

Sports Games 体育游戏

As we've said elsewhere, sports games don't have a lot of room for creative growth. The game is defined by the nature of the sport. There are new sports from time to time, but they're created by their enthusiasts, not by computer game designers.

正如我们在其他地方说过的，体育游戏没有太多的创意发展空间。游戏是由体育运动的性质决定的。时不时会有新的运动项目出现，但它们都是由爱好者创造的，而不是由电脑游戏设计师创造的。

Sports games, of course, will continue to benefit from improvements in display technology and other kinds of hardware, and voice recognition could be a lot of fun when you're able to call plays and shout to your "teammates" on the field. But the greatest challenge in creating sports games, and the place where we can expect to see the most improvement in the future, is in artificial intelligence, especially in team games such as soccer. Two areas in sports games need AI: strategy, which we might also call play-calling or coaching, and tactics, the AI that controls the behavior of individual athletes on the field, especially in response to changing or unexpected play situations. Athlete AI is starting to improve already. We seldom see athletes doing things that seem to be patently stupid anymore—at least, not much more often than real athletes do things that seem to be patently stupid! Coaching is another matter, however. Games don't yet have the smarts to make up the tricks and clever moves that real coaches can devise, but perhaps they will in the future.

当然，体育游戏将继续受益于显示技术和其他类型硬件的改进，而当你能在场上指挥比赛并向“队友”喊话时，语音识别技术也会给你带来很多乐趣。但是，创建体育游戏的最大挑战，也是我们未来有望看到最大改进的地方，是人工智能，尤其是在足球等团队游戏中。体育游戏中有两个领域需要人工智能：一是战略，我们也可以称之为战术指挥或教练；二是战术，即控制场上运动员个人行为的人工智能，尤其是在应对不断变化或意想不到的比赛情况时。运动员的人工智能已经开始得到改善。我们很少再看到运动员做出明显愚蠢的事情——至少，比真实运动员做出明显愚蠢事情的频率要低得多！然而，教练则是另一回事。游戏还不具备智能，无法像真正的教练那样设计出窍门和巧妙的动作，但也许将来会有的。

Vehicle Simulations 交通工具模拟游戏

Although complacency is risky, if any genre of computer gaming can be said to be stable, it's probably vehicle simulations. Of course, there's much more that can be done, mostly in physics simulations and display technology, but, for the most part, vehicle simulations already offer all the gameplay that their fans could want. The aerodynamic models aren't realistic, but they're enough to provide all but the most demanding players with a feeling of authenticity. We could accurately model all the switches and levers in an F-15 fighter jet rather than just some of them, but doing so would make the game harder to play without adding enjoyment to the process.

虽然自满是有风险的，但如果说有哪种电脑游戏可以说是稳定的，那可能就是车辆模拟游戏了。当然，主要在物理模拟和显示技术方面，还有很多可以改进的地方，但在大多数情况下，车辆模拟游戏已经提供了其爱好者所希望的所有游戏玩法。空气动力学模型并不逼真，但足以让最苛刻的玩家感受到真实感。我们可以对 F-15 战斗机的所有开关和操纵杆进行精确建模，而不是只对其中的一部分进行建模，但这样做会增加游戏的难度，而不会增加游戏过程的乐趣。

The quality of the driver AI in racing games is pretty good at the moment. In racing, it's mostly every car for itself, and the cars have to stay in a restricted area, so the AI is chiefly needed for strategic decisions involving refueling, changing tires when rain is threatening, and addressing similar questions. We can probably expect to see this kind of decision making improve in the future. The casual player isn't likely to notice it very much, however.

目前，赛车游戏中的驾驶员人工智能质量相当不错。在赛车游戏中，大部分情况下都是每辆车为自己而战，而且赛车必须待在限制区域内，因此主要需要人工智能来做出战略决策，包括加油、在雨天更换轮胎以及解决类似问题。我们或许可以期待在未来看到此类决策的改进。不过，普通玩家不太可能注意到这一点。

Pilot AI in flight simulators could be improved somewhat, especially in cooperative missions. It's practically a foregone conclusion that if you're given an AI-controlled wingman in a computer game, he'll get shot down. It's not clear why wingmen seem to be so vulnerable. It could be that they're mostly designed to assist you rather than to protect themselves, so they take unnecessary risks.

飞行模拟器中的飞行员 AI 可以有一些改进，尤其是在合作任务中。在电脑游戏中，如果给你一个由人工智能控制的僚机，他就会被击落，这实际上是一个必然的结论。目前还不清楚为什么僚机看起来如此脆弱。可能是因为僚机的主要作用是协助你，而不是保护自己，所以它们会冒不必要的风险。

Construction and Management Simulations 建设和管理模拟游戏

For the most part, construction and management simulations don't use 3D engines, but they demand a lot of processing power from the CPU to simulate whatever system they're modeling. As computing power increases, we can expect to see such games modeling larger systems, or the same kinds of systems but in more detail. We also expect that they will eventually switch from the isometric perspective that seems to be the current standard, to a fully 3D perspective that enables players to zoom right in on the world and observe things at close range.

在大多数情况下，建筑和管理模拟游戏并不使用 3D 引擎，但它们需要 CPU 提供大量的处理能力来模拟所模拟的系统。随着计算能力的提高，我们有望看到此类游戏模拟更大的系统，或模拟同类系统，但细节更加丰富。我们还预计，这些游戏最终将从等距视角（似乎是目前的标准）转变为全三维视角，使玩家能够放大世界并近距离观察事物。

As the demand for games grows, we might also start to see simulations for niche markets: small groups of people interested in a particular subject that doesn't necessarily have broad appeal. For example, there could be simulations about gardening, automobile traffic, wildlife conservation, or electrical power distribution. What really limits growth in this area is the cost of development.

随着对游戏需求的增长，我们也可能开始看到针对利基市场的模拟游戏：小群体对不一定具有广泛吸引力的特定主题感兴趣。例如，可以有关于园艺、汽车交通、野生动物保护或电力分配的模拟游戏。真正限制这一领域发展的是开发成本。

Adventure Games 冒险游戏

Adventure games have stagnated somewhat in recent years. They don't get as much adrenaline flowing as action games or vehicle simulations, and they cost more to develop than other slow-paced games such as war games or city simulations. Nevertheless, we're confident that they won't disappear entirely. A small but distinct market wants games with strong plots and interesting characters, and as gaming matures, this market will grow.

近年来，冒险游戏的发展有些停滞不前。它们不像动作游戏或交通工具模拟游戏那样让人肾上腺素激增，而且开发成本也比战争游戏或城市模拟游戏等其他慢节奏游戏高。尽管如此，我们相信它们不会完全消失。有一小部分但独特的市场需要有强烈情节和有趣角色的游戏，随着游戏产业的成熟，这个市场将会增长。

Part of the appeal of adventure games is in the beauty of their locations. Because they move more slowly, players have the time to admire the details of their worlds. As a result, many of them still use painted 2D locations rather than 3D environments. The best 3D engines still can't reproduce the lush detail of an open-air market, for example, in which every pomegranate and bolt of silk is lovingly rendered. However, this will change, and we expect that, in time, more adventure games will be moving to 3D-rendered worlds simply because they offer more freedom to the player and more camera angles to the designer. With a 2D background, every change of perspective requires a new painting; with a 3D engine, the perspective can be adjusted easily to fit the circumstances in the game.

冒险游戏的魅力之一在于其优美的地点。由于冒险游戏的移动速度较慢，玩家有时间欣赏游戏世界的细节。因此，许多冒险游戏仍然使用绘制的 2D 场景，而不是 3D 环境。例如，最好的 3D 引擎仍然无法再现露天市场的繁茂细节，市场中的每个石榴和丝绸都被精心渲染。不过，这种情况将会改变，我们预计，随着时间的推移，越来越多的冒险游戏将转向 3D 渲染的世界，原因很简单，因为 3D 渲染的世界为玩家提供了更大的自由度，为设计师提供了更多的摄像机角度。在二维背景下，每一次视角的改变都需要重新绘制；而在三维引擎下，视角可以很容易地进行调整，以适应游戏中的环境。

Adventure games will benefit more than any other genre from advances in artificial intelligence. Good stories require believable characters, and to be believable, characters must speak and act normally.

冒险游戏将比其他任何类型的游戏都更受益于人工智能的进步。好的故事需要可信的角色，而要做到可信，角色的言行必须正常。

Broadband Networking 宽带网络

At the moment, the Internet is both slow and unreliable for gameplay use. It's slow because most players' connections are still made with modems over ordinary telephone lines, which can't transmit much data per second. It's unreliable because the Internet doesn't provide a continuous guaranteed amount of bandwidth to each user. Instead, packets of data on the Internet compete for transmission priority, and there is no way to be certain what route they will take or how long it will take to get there. This means that gamers can't play equally; those with longer "ping times" are at a disadvantage.

目前，在游戏中使用互联网既慢又不可靠。说它慢是因为大多数玩家的连接仍然是通过普通电话线上的调制解调器进行的，每秒传输不了多少数据。说它不可靠，是因为互联网不能为每个用户提供持续的带宽保证。相反，互联网上的数据包会争夺传输优先权，而且无法确定数据包的传输路线或到达目的地所需的时间。这意味着游戏玩家无法平等地进行游戏；“ping 时间”较长的玩家处于劣势。

The arrival of asymmetric digital subscriber lines (ADSL), cable modems, and, above all, fiber-optic links (all collectively called broadband) will give users a much faster connection to the Internet, although this will still not guarantee a particular minimum speed. This will have two significant effects on the games of the future: electronic distribution and higher-speed gaming.

非对称数字用户线路 (ADSL)、电缆调制解调器，尤其是光纤链路（统称为宽带）的出现将为用户提供更快的互联网连接，尽管这仍然不能保证特定的最低速度。这将对未来的游戏产生两个重大影响：电子发行和更高速度的游戏。

Electronic Distribution 电子发行

Our current method for distributing computer and video games is ridiculous. The object is to transfer a string of bits from the publisher's computer to the player's, in exchange for some money going from the player back to the publisher. At the moment, this is done by pressing a plastic compact or DVD disc, putting it in a cardboard box, selling it to a middleman who operates a retail store in a shopping mall, and attracting a player who drives down to the mall and buys the cardboard box with the disc inside from the retailer. The player then puts the CD in her computer, transfers the bits onto her hard drive, and throws away the cardboard. A few weeks or months later, she's done with the game and throws away the CD as well.

我们目前发行电脑和视频游戏的方法非常荒谬。其目的是将一串比特从发行商的电脑传输到玩家的电脑，以换取玩家将一些钱还给发行商。目前的做法是，压制一张塑料光盘或 DVD 光盘，把它装进一个纸箱，卖给在购物中心开零售店的中间商，然后吸引玩家开车到购物中心，从零售商那里买下装有光盘的纸箱。然后，玩家把光盘放进自己的电脑，把内容传输到硬盘上，然后扔掉纸箱。几周或几个月后，她玩完了游戏，又把光盘扔掉。

Electronic distribution will eliminate most of the waste that this entails. No cardboard boxes; no plastic disks; no heat, light, and security guards for the retail store; and, above all, no cars and trucks driving around the country emitting pollution just to carry the bits (at 60 miles per hour) between point A and point B. Instead, those bits will travel directly from the publisher's computer into the player's computer. In theory, we could eliminate the retailers entirely.

电子销售将消除由此产生的大部分浪费。没有纸板箱，没有塑料盘，没有光、热，也没有零售店的保安，最重要的是，没有汽车和卡车在全国各地行驶，仅仅为了在 A 点和 B 点之间运送比特（以每小时 60 英里的速度）而排放污染。理论上，我们可以完全消除零售商。

Benefits of Electronic Distribution 电子发行的好处

Apart from eliminating the manufacturing waste, the single greatest benefit to electronic distribution is that it ends the battle for shelf space. At the moment, too many games are being developed for all of them to fit into a reasonably sized retail store. This means that the competition to sell them to retailers is fierce, and the biggest distributors have by far the best chance of getting their products on the shelves. Small-time developers and publishers simply don't have the sales and marketing clout to compete.

除了消除生产过程中的浪费，电子分销的最大好处就是结束了货架空间的争夺战。目前，正在开发的游戏数量太多，所有游戏都无法装进一个合理大小的零售商店。这意味着向零售商销售游戏的竞争十分激烈，而最大的分销商最有机会将其产品摆上货架。小型开发商和发行商根本不具备与之竞争的销售和市场影响力。

Electronic distribution will help to level this playing field. You need only one copy of a game on the distribution server, no matter how many people you sell it to, and you don't have to take down one product to make room for another one. Shelf space on the Internet is effectively unlimited. Furthermore, small developers can have attractive web sites just as easily as large publishers can. Without the need to develop expensive in-store displays or to commit marketing development funds to retailers, developers can run a very efficient sales operation directly to the consumer.

电子分销将有助于公平竞争。无论你把游戏卖给多少人，你只需要在发行服务器上拷贝一份游戏，而且你不必为了给另一个产品腾出空间而关闭一个产品。互联网上的货架空间实际上是无限的。此外，小型开发商也可以像大型出版商一样轻松拥有极具吸引力的网站。开发商不需要开发昂贵的店内展示架，也不需要向零售商投入市场开发资金，就可以直接面向消费者开展非常有效的销售活动。

This doesn't mean that small publishers will drive the giants out of business, however. The majority of a computer game's cost is not in the goods or the distribution, but in the marketing and development—paying all those creative people to build the game in the first place. Bigger publishers can afford to make bigger games, and bigger games will generally sell better than small ones. Bigger publishers can buy advertising space in magazines and on TV that small publishers couldn't begin to afford, and advertising sells games. They'll always have that advantage. But by taking away their control over retail sales, electronic distribution will improve the odds for small developers a little.

然而，这并不意味着小型出版商会使巨头们倒闭。电脑游戏的大部分成本并不在商品或发行上，而是在营销和开发上——首先要付钱给那些有创造力的人制作游戏。大型出版商有能力制作大型游戏，而大型游戏通常比小型游戏卖得好。大发行商可以在杂志和电视上购买小发行商根本买不起的广告空间，而广告可以销售游戏。他们永远拥有这种优势。但是，通过电子分销，他们失去了对零售的控制，小开发商的胜算就会提高一些。

Piracy 盗版

The game industry loses billions of dollars every year to piracy, and many people are concerned that electronic distribution will make piracy even easier. At the moment, sophisticated large-scale piracy requires fairly expensive machinery to counterfeit the specialized compact discs that most game machines require. Publishers will be reluctant to embrace electronic distribution if it makes work easier for the pirates. We believe that this problem is solvable, but further work must be done to do it. The game industry will have to find a way to digitally "tag" each unique copy of a game and to make sure that no two identical copies can run at once. It's likely that before long, games will require an Internet connection and will not run without one—which might not sit well with players.

游戏产业每年因盗版损失数十亿美元，许多人担心电子发行会使盗版变得更加容易。目前，复杂的大规模盗版需要相当昂贵的机器来伪造大多数游戏机所需的专用光盘。如果电子发行使盗版者更容易得手，那么发行商将不愿接受电子发行。我们认为，这个问题是可以解决的，但还需要进一步的努力。游戏产业必须找到一种方法，为每份独一无二的游戏拷贝贴上数字“标签”，并确保没有两份相同的拷贝可以同时运行。很可能在不久的将来，游戏将需要网络连接，没有网络连接将无法运行——这可能会让玩家感到不快。

Speed of Delivery 发行速度

The length of time it takes to drive to a retail store and buy a game is typically 30 to 60 minutes for people living in suburban areas. If you develop a severe hankering for a game, you can usually buy it and be playing it within an hour or so. You can't do that with the Internet as it exists today; the download speeds are too slow. For electronic distribution to offer real competition to retail shopping, it must be able to gratify that desire at least as quickly as shopping does.

对于居住在郊区的人来说，开车到零售店购买游戏一般需要 30 到 60 分钟。如果你对某款游戏情有独钟，通常一小时左右就能买到并玩上游戏。而现在的互联网却做不到这一点，因为下载速度太慢了。电子分销要想与零售购物形成真正的竞争，就必须至少能像购物那样迅速地满足人们的欲望。

Benefits of Retail Shopping 零售购物的好处

There are certain benefits to selling games at retail that electronic distribution won't provide. One is that the perceived value of a retail product is proportionate to the quality of its packaging. A beautifully printed box with a heavy manual inside gives the customer a warm feeling that she is getting her money's worth. (One of the reasons that cassette tapes didn't drive LP records out of the market was that customers liked the album art on LPs—and some mourned its passing with the arrival of the compact disc.) A CD in a jewel case alone feels cheap. A downloaded executable file on a computer doesn't feel like anything at all—although you can see the game running on your machine, there's no sense of having purchased something that you can hold in your hand.

在零售店销售游戏有一些电子发行无法提供的好处。其一，零售产品的感知价值与其包装质量成正比。印刷精美的包装盒和厚厚的说明书会给顾客一种物有所值的温暖感觉。(盒式磁带没有把黑胶唱片挤出市场的原因之一就是顾客喜欢黑胶唱片上的专辑封面——有些人还为光盘的出现而惋惜）。光是一张装在光盘盒里的 CD 就给人一种廉价的感觉。下载到电脑上的可执行文件给人的感觉是什么都没有——虽然你可以看到游戏在你的机器上运行，但却没有购买到可以拿在手上的东西的感觉。

Although you might think that this shouldn't matter, we feel that it will have a significant psychological impact at the one time of the year more important to the game industry than any other: Christmas. The interactive entertainment business is heavily dependent on Christmas gift giving, and the fact is that people like to see actual boxes under the Christmas tree—the bigger, the better. A slip of paper giving a web address where software can be downloaded isn't going to feel like much of a gift.

虽然你可能认为这并不重要，但我们认为，在一年中对游戏业来说最重要的时刻，这将会产生重大的心理影响：圣诞节。互动娱乐行业在很大程度上依赖于圣诞礼物的赠送，而事实上，人们喜欢在圣诞树下看到实实在在的盒子，越大越好。如果只是一张纸，上面写着一个可以下载软件的网址，那就不像是什么礼物了。

Retailers would also argue that buying in a store gives players the opportunity to look at games side by side and to ask questions of the staff. Although you can get more information by comparing game reviews online than you can by holding a box in either hand, many casual gamers don't bother to do that much research. Retail shopping offers the chance to browse in a way that online shopping simply doesn't. For all its convenience and efficiency, online shopping doesn't feel the same as running your eye over shelves full of games.

零售商也会争辩说，在商店里购买可以让玩家有机会并排观看游戏，并向店员提问。虽然通过比较网上的游戏评论可以获得比双手捧着游戏盒更多的信息，但许多休闲游戏玩家并不会费心去做那么多研究。零售购物提供的浏览机会是网购所不具备的。网上购物虽然方便快捷，但它给人的感觉并不像在满是游戏的货架上浏览一样。

High-Speed Online Gaming 高速在线游戏

Online games currently suffer a great deal from bandwidth bottlenecks. They have to be carefully designed to eliminate any advantage that one player might get by having a faster Net connection than another player. They also have to prioritize their data transmission so that the most important data has the highest chance of being delivered rapidly, while less important data is delivered later and can be dropped altogether if bandwidth conditions deteriorate. The Swedish company Terraplay has created an entire software system to manage this problem for game developers.

目前，在线游戏在很大程度上受到带宽瓶颈的制约。它们必须经过精心设计，以消除玩家因拥有比其他玩家更快的网络连接而可能获得的任何优势。它们还必须确定数据传输的优先顺序，以便最重要的数据有最大的机会快速传输，而不太重要的数据则稍后传输，如果带宽条件恶化，则可能被完全丢弃。瑞典公司 Terraplay 创建了一个完整的软件系统来为游戏开发商管理这个问题。

As with everything else they use—memory, processor speed, disk space—computer games expand to consume the bandwidth available, and this problem will not go away simply by increasing the available bandwidth a hundredfold or even a thousandfold. But more bandwidth will change the kinds of games that we can play and the ease with which we play them online. Right now, when players start playing large online games, they must either buy a CD full of the graphical data or download it all, a very time-consuming process. When the game's provider wants to make a whole new region available to the players, those players are forced to download the new graphics. Either they can do it all in one chunk, which means they have to sit around and twiddle their thumbs until it's done, or they can download it in the background as they play, which hurts gameplay performance. Having more bandwidth will certainly make this a more pleasant process.

电脑游戏不仅要占用内存、处理器和磁盘空间，而且还要消耗可用的带宽；即使带宽成百上千倍地提升，这个问题也不会消失。但是，更多的带宽将改变我们可以玩的游戏种类以及在线游戏的便捷程度。现在，当玩家开始玩大型在线游戏时，他们必须购买一张装满图形数据的光盘，或者全部下载下来，这是一个非常耗时的过程。当游戏提供商想向玩家提供一个全新的区域时，这些玩家就不得不下载新的图形。他们要么可以一次性完成下载，但这意味着他们必须坐在一旁搓拇指，直到下载完成；要么他们可以在游戏过程中在后台下载，但这会损害游戏性能。有了更多的带宽，这个过程肯定会更愉快。

Ultimately, speeds will get so high that players don't even notice them. Network connections will be as ubiquitous as electric lights are now. (Microsoft's Xbox Live network is already broadband-only.) When this happens, we can expect to see not just games, but entire online environments that people pop into and out of continuously during both their work and leisure time. We have the capacity to create part of William Gibson's vision of cyberspace right now—a "consensual shared hallucination"—but only slowly and, for the most part, in two dimensions. Extremely fast communication will enable us to make it a reality, whether for gaming, working, shopping, or doing any other activity. The technology isn't in doubt; the more important question is, who will control it?

最终，网络速度将变得如此之快，以至于玩家根本无法察觉。网络连接将像现在的电灯一样无处不在（微软的 Xbox Live 网络已经是纯宽带的）。到那时，我们看到的将不仅仅是游戏，而是人们在工作和休闲时间不断进出的整个网络环境。我们现在就有能力创造出威廉·吉布森所设想的网络空间的一部分——一种“共识共享幻觉”——但只是缓慢地，而且大多数情况下是二维的。无论是游戏、工作、购物还是其他任何活动，极快的通信速度将使我们能够将其变为现实。技术是毋庸置疑的，更重要的问题是，谁来控制它？

The Distant Future 遥远的未来

In the TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Picard relaxes by playing a computerized role-playing game in the holodeck, a place capable of temporarily creating (somewhat) solid matter, up to and including living things. While it's anyone's guess whether we'll ever develop the holodeck, Picard's "holonovels" have a lot in common with games that already exist: simulated characters, a fantasy setting, and a plot whose progress is influenced by the player. They do contain a few improvements over current games, however. Picard can interact with the people in the story in all the same ways that he could with real people, he isn't perpetually stopping to look at his statistics, and he doesn't have to stuff everything he sees into his pockets in case it might be useful later.

在电视剧《星际迷航：下一代》中，皮卡德船长在“全息甲板”上玩电脑角色扮演游戏，以放松身心。全息甲板是一个能够临时创造（某种程度上）实体物质，包括生物的地方。虽然谁也无法猜测我们是否会开发出“全息甲板”，但皮卡尔的“全息小说”与现有的游戏有很多共同之处：模拟角色、幻想背景和情节的进展受玩家影响。不过，与目前的游戏相比，它们确实有一些改进。皮卡德可以用与真人相同的方式与故事中的人互动，他不会总是停下来查看自己的统计数据，也不必把看到的所有东西都塞进口袋以防日后有用。

In this section, we'll talk about some of the things that might make Picard's experience come true.

在本节中，我们将讨论一些可能让皮卡德的经历成真的事情。

Automated Programming 自动编程

Most game machines are single-CPU computers with dedicated graphics and sound-processing units. Their CPUs follow the traditional one-instruction-at-a-time model that, as we said earlier, was originally intended for computing ballistics tables for artillery guns. In the more distant future, it is bound to be replaced, although with what isn't at all clear. Neural networks hold a certain amount of promise for pattern recognition; so does massively parallel computing. Molecular transistors are a certainty; quantum computing is probably not far behind. We might begin to see programming by evolution, using the principles of natural selection to create programs without human intervention. This has already been done to create simple electronic circuits, with successful but startlingly peculiar results.

大多数游戏机都是单 CPU 计算机，配有专用图形和声音处理单元。它们的 CPU 采用传统的一次执行一条指令的模式，正如我们前面所说，这种模式最初是用于计算火炮的弹道表。在更遥远的未来，这种模式必将被取代，但取代者是什么还不清楚。神经网络在模式识别方面具有一定的前景；大规模并行计算也是如此。分子晶体管已是板上钉钉的事，量子计算可能也不远了。我们可能会开始看到进化编程，利用自然选择的原理来创建程序，而无需人工干预。在创建简单的电子电路时，我们已经采用了这种方法，并取得了成功，但结果却非常奇特。

It seems certain that eventually computers will learn to program themselves, although by that time they might bear no more resemblance to the machines we know today than the aircraft carrier does to the trireme—and probably less. For that to happen, computers will need a fundamental understanding of the nature of information and the way that it can be stored and manipulated. In particular, they'll have to be able to make the abstractions that human programmers do all the time. Teaching a computer to program itself to calculate mathematical formulas probably won't be that hard because most mathematical formulas are calculated using fairly simple algorithms anyway. The bigger challenge is to teach a computer to model imaginary situations mathematically, to solve the "story problems" that we remember from algebra class. The hardest part of a "story problem" was not solving the algebraic equations, but determining how the situation described could be modeled mathematically in the first place.

似乎可以肯定的是，计算机最终将学会自我编程，尽管到那时，它们与我们今天所熟知的机器的相似程度可能不会超过航空母舰与三桅帆船的相似程度，甚至可能更低。要做到这一点，计算机需要从根本上了解信息的本质以及信息的存储和处理方式。尤其是，计算机必须能够进行人类程序员经常进行的抽象运算。教计算机自己编程计算数学公式可能并不难，因为大多数数学公式都是用相当简单的算法计算出来的。更大的挑战在于教会计算机用数学模型模拟想象中的情况，解决我们在代数课上记忆犹新的“应用题”。“应用题”中最难的部分不是求解代数方程，而是首先确定所描述的情况如何用数学建模。

Intelligent Design Tools 智能设计工具

Automated programming doesn't mean, however, that game designers are doomed to extinction. Captain Picard's Dixon Hill stories are written by real people; they're just executed by a computer. People will always want to design games, and that's not going to change. What will change is the way we do the work. Rather than collaborating with a large team of programmers, artists, writers, and audio engineers, the game designer of the far future could be collaborating with a game-design tool, a program specifically constructed to assist in creating games. We can easily imagine a conversation that goes like this:

不过，自动化编程并不意味着游戏设计师注定要灭绝。皮卡德船长的迪克森·希尔故事是由真人编写的，只是由电脑执行而已。人们总是希望设计游戏，这一点不会改变。改变的是我们的工作方式。在遥远的未来，游戏设计师将不再与一个由程序员、艺术家、作家和音频工程师组成的庞大团队合作，而是与一个游戏设计工具合作，这个工具是专门为协助创作游戏而设计的。我们可以很容易地想象这样一段对话：

Designer: "We're going to want three kinds of aerial units: fighters, bombers, and transports."

设计师：“我们需要三种空中单位：战斗机、轰炸机和运输机。”

Computer: "OK. Have you figured out their operational parameters and combat capabilities?"

电脑：“好的，你想好它们的运行参数和作战能力了吗？”

Designer: "Not yet. But fighters are designed to attack anything in the air; they won't be able to attack ground targets. Bombers can attack both air and ground units. Transports have no weapons."

设计者：“还没有。但战斗机可以攻击任意空中目标；它们无法攻击地面目标。轰炸机可以攻击空中和地面单位。运输机没有武器。”

Computer: "Why would you ever want fighters if bombers have more functionality?"

电脑：“如果轰炸机的功能更强大，你为什么还要战斗机？”

Designer: "Because bombers will be slower and less maneuverable than fighters, and also more expensive. Compare the performance characteristics of the World War II B-17 with the P-51 Mustang. Also notice the manufacturing time and cost of each."

设计师：“因为轰炸机比战斗机速度更慢，机动性更差，而且也更昂贵。比较一下二战时期 B-17 和 P-51 野马的性能特点。还要注意两者的制造时间和成本。”

Computer: [reads history for a nanosecond] "Okay, I understand the principle. Do you want me to use those numbers as a baseline?"

计算机：[花了一纳秒阅读历史资料]“好的，我明白原理了。你想让我用这些数字作为基准吗？”

Designer: "Sure, what the heck? It'll do for now."

设计师：“当然，管它呢。现在就用它吧。”

Self-Adjusting Plots 自我调整剧情

One of the many weaknesses that computerized role-playing games suffer in comparison to tabletop RPGs is that their plots are fixed, designed in advance by the developer. As a player, you can ignore the plot if you like, but the game won't be very interesting and you won't go far. To see everything that the game has to offer, you have to meet the challenges that it presents. If you don't, nothing happens. Larger games typically offer several subplots to choose from, so you don't have to do everything in a strictly linear order; nevertheless, what you bought is what you get.

与桌面角色扮演游戏相比，电脑角色扮演游戏有许多弱点，其中之一就是它们的情节是固定的，是开发商事先设计好的。作为玩家，你可以无视剧情，但游戏不会很有趣，你也走不远。要想看到游戏中的一切，就必须迎接游戏中的挑战。否则，什么也不会发生。大型游戏通常会提供多个支线剧情供你选择，因此你不必严格按照线性顺序完成所有任务；不过，买到的就是得到的。

On the other hand, live role playing with a human dungeon master frees players to ignore the dungeon master's intended plot, wander around on their own, and explore areas of particular interest to them. Although this might be frustrating for the dungeon master—particularly if he has spent a lot of time devising an adventure for the party, only to have them completely ignore it—a good DM is capable of adjusting the game to suit the circumstances. The players are much more the masters of their own fates in live role playing. The DM also has the ability to adjust the nature of the challenge to suit the nature of the party—if it is badly damaged, he can surreptitiously see to it that they don't meet anything capable of wiping them out in an instant.

另一方面，与人类地牢主人一起进行现场角色扮演可以让玩家自由地忽略地牢主人预定的情节，自己四处游荡，探索他们特别感兴趣的地方。虽然这可能会让地下城主感到沮丧——尤其是如果他花了很多时间为玩家设计冒险，却发现他们完全忽视了这一点——但一个好的管理者有能力根据具体情况调整游戏。在现场角色扮演中，玩家更像是自己命运的主人。管理者也有能力调整挑战的性质，以适应队伍的性质——如果队伍受到严重破坏，他可以偷偷地确保他们不会遇到任何能够秒杀他们的东西。

This ability to devise new adventures on the fly and to adjust the difficulty of the game to match the abilities of the players is bound to appear in games in the future. At the moment, we have randomly generated adventures in games such as Diablo, but this really applies only to the layout of the rooms and the number of creatures in them. It doesn't change the personalities or dialogue of the non-player characters.

这种随时设计新冒险、根据玩家的能力调整游戏难度的能力必将出现在未来的游戏中。目前，我们在《暗黑破坏神》等游戏中看到了随机生成的冒险，但这实际上只适用于房间的布局和其中生物的数量。它不会改变 NPC 的性格或对话。

Artificial People 人造人

In 1950, the English mathematician Alan Turing proposed a famous test for determining whether computers are really thinking. Let a computer and a human each chat with another person, the Interrogator, in another room via teletype (today we would use instant messages). The Interrogator must ask them both questions and, on the basis of their responses, try to decide which is the human and which the computer. However, both are trying to persuade the Interrogator that they are human. If in a series of five-minute conversations the Interrogator correctly identifies the real human less than 70% of the time, the computer can be said to be thinking. (Turing's definition was slightly more complicated than this, but this is the generally accepted formulation.) Although it was largely abandoned as a serious goal of AI research, the Turing Test remains a popular informal standard for artificial intelligence.

1950 年，英国数学家艾伦·图灵提出了一个著名的测试方法，用来判断计算机是否真的会思考。让一台计算机和一个人在另一个房间里通过电传打字机（今天我们使用即时信息）与另一个人——审问者——聊天。审讯者必须同时向他们提出问题，并根据他们的回答来判断哪个是人类，哪个是计算机。然而，这两个人都在试图说服审讯者他们是人类。如果在一系列五分钟的对话中，审问者能正确辨认出真正人类的比例低于 70%，那么计算机就可以说是在思考。(图灵的定义比这个稍微复杂一些，但这是公认的表述）。虽然图灵测试作为人工智能研究的一个严肃目标已基本被放弃，但它仍然是人工智能的一个流行的非正式标准。

In game development, we have a similar challenge, but the bar is far higher. Turing's test required only that the computer converse in typed text. We hope someday to be able to simulate credible artificial humans, computer-generated characters who look, act, and speak just like real people. Doing this successfully requires vast improvements in many different areas: graphics, animation, physics, simulation, and, of course, many kinds of artificial intelligence. A computer-generated person should be able not only to converse in natural language, but also take part in a political debate or interpret another person's mood just as well as an ordinary human would.

在游戏开发中，我们面临着类似的挑战，但标准要高得多。图灵测试只要求计算机以打字文本进行对话。我们希望有一天能够模拟出可信的人造人，即计算机生成的角色，其外观、行为和语言都与真人无异。要成功做到这一点，需要在许多不同领域取得巨大进步：图形、动画、物理、模拟，当然还有多种人工智能。计算机生成的人不仅能用自然语言交谈，还能像普通人一样参与政治辩论或解读他人的情绪。

Computer games don't need to have artificial people, of course, any more than the telephone company has to have artificial operators. We can let human players play against one another, just as the phone company can hire real people to answer the phone. But artificial people are a key part of the "holodeck" fantasy and are probably its biggest challenge—perhaps even bigger than creating the mechanics of the holodeck itself. It's still a worthwhile goal for game development, even if the solution is centuries off.

当然，电脑游戏不需要人造人，就像电话公司不需要人造接线员一样。我们可以让人类玩家互相对战，就像电话公司可以雇佣真人接听电话一样。但人造人是“全息甲板”幻想的关键部分，也可能是其最大的挑战——甚至可能比创造全息甲板本身的机制更大。即使解决方法要经过几个世纪，这仍然是游戏开发的一个值得追求的目标。

Interactive Entertainment as an Art Form 作为一种艺术形式的互动娱乐

In thinking about the future of interactive entertainment, it would be a mistake to consider only the advances that are likely to take place in the world of commercial, mass-market gaming. That would be like assuming that the potential of cinema was limited to what you see in Hollywood blockbusters, or that the written word was capable of no more than Danielle Steel novels. Interactive entertainment is an art form, just as filmmaking and writing are. Unlike filmmaking and writing, however, it has not yet been recognized as an art form by the public at large.

在思考互动娱乐的未来时，如果只考虑商业化、大众化游戏世界可能取得的进步，那就大错特错了。这就好比假设电影的潜力仅限于你在好莱坞大片中看到的东西，或者书面文字的潜力仅限于丹尼尔·斯蒂尔的小说。互动娱乐是一种艺术形式，就像电影制作和写作一样。然而，与电影制作和写作不同的是，它是还没有被大众认可为一种艺术形式。

Film has the advantage that it is an outgrowth of drama, and, of course, drama was recognized as an art form by no less a figure than Aristotle. It took film a little while to achieve this status, but it is now unshakable. Computer games' roots are not in drama, however, but in gameplay. Their nearest noncomputerized parallels are board games and fairground shooting galleries, neither of which are or ever will be recognized as art forms. As a result, we face an uphill battle for recognition.

电影的优势在于它是戏剧的产物，当然，亚里士多德也承认戏剧是一种艺术形式。电影花了一点时间才获得这一地位，但现在已经不可动摇。然而，电脑游戏的根源不在于戏剧，而在于游戏性。与电脑游戏最接近的非电脑游戏是棋盘游戏和游乐场射击游戏，但这两种游戏现在和将来都不会被视为艺术形式。因此，我们面临着一场艰苦的争夺战。

Part of the reason that board games and shooting galleries aren't art forms is that they contain very little expressive content. Graphically, they're abstract and minimal, requiring a lot of imagination on the part of the players to pretend that the little cardboard counters are really troops and tanks. They also seldom include any narrative or characters. Computer games, on the other hand, have a lot of content, both visible and audible; they have a distinct artistic style; and they often have a great deal of characterization and narrative.

棋盘游戏和射击游戏之所以不是艺术形式，部分原因在于它们所包含的表现内容很少。从图形上看，它们抽象而简约，需要玩家发挥丰富的想象力，才能把小纸板计数器当作真正的部队和坦克。它们也很少包含任何叙事或人物。而电脑游戏则有大量的内容，包括可视的和可听的；它们有独特的艺术风格；它们通常有大量的人物描写和叙事。

Interactive Artwork 互动艺术作品

Most works of art require only passive observation, especially in traditional media such as painting, sculpture, and music. The observer brings his own knowledge and personal history to it, and these color his understanding and interpretation of the work, but the influence is entirely inside his own mind. He isn't asked to take an active, participatory role in creating the aesthetic experience.

大多数艺术作品只需要被动的观察，尤其是在绘画、雕塑和音乐等传统媒介中。观察者会将自己的知识和个人经历带入其中，这些知识和经历会影响他对作品的理解和诠释，但这种影响完全是在他自己的头脑中产生的。他并没有被要求积极地、参与性地创造审美体验。

There's no reason why works of art can't be interactive, however, and some are. In San Francisco, a science museum called the Exploratorium considers its exhibits to be works of art, and it actively seeks out artists to design them. Most of the exhibits are interactive, offering a learning experience as well as an aesthetic experience; they illustrate principles of nature, but also principles of design.

然而，艺术作品没有理由不具有互动性，有些艺术作品就具有互动性。在旧金山，一家名为“探索馆”的科学博物馆将其展品视为艺术品，并积极寻找艺术家来设计展品。大多数展品都是互动式的，既能提供学习体验，又能带来审美体验；既能说明自然原理，又能说明设计原理。

Not all interactive entertainment is art, but then, neither are all movies or all novels. Most movies—and most novels, too, for that matter—are merely light entertainment, popular culture. But just because James Bond novels and James Bond movies aren't generally considered to be art doesn't mean that film or the novel isn't an art form. Interactive entertainment is a collaborative art form in the same way that movies are, and it can be judged according to a variety of aesthetics the way movies are.

并非所有的互动娱乐都是艺术，但也并非所有的电影或小说都是艺术。大多数电影和大多数小说都只是轻松的娱乐和大众文化。但是，詹姆斯·邦德小说和詹姆斯·邦德电影一般不被视为艺术，这并不意味着电影或小说不是一种艺术形式。互动娱乐与电影一样，也是一种合作的艺术形式，可以像电影一样根据各种美学标准来评判。

Requirements for Recognition 获得认可的要求

For interactive entertainment to be recognized as an art form, it must do some of the things that other art forms do, the things that people expect of art forms. We believe that game developers and publishers, and people who write about the game industry, can take several concrete steps to help it achieve that status.

互动娱乐要想被承认为一种艺术形式，就必须做一些其他艺术形式所做的事情，做一些人们对艺术形式所期望的事情。我们认为，游戏开发商和发行商，以及撰写有关游戏产业的文章的人，可以采取一些具体步骤来帮助游戏产业获得这一地位。

We Must Devise Principles of Aesthetics 我们必须制定美学原则

More than 20 years ago, Chris Crawford mentioned in his book The Art of Computer Game Design that the interactive entertainment medium needs principles of aesthetics. It remains true today. We're not much farther along than when he wrote that, though, for two reasons.

20 多年前，克里斯·克劳福德在其著作《电脑游戏设计艺术》中提到，互动娱乐媒体需要美学原则。时至今日，这句话依然适用。不过，与他写这本书时相比，我们并没有走得更远，原因有二。

First, the serious study of computer games has only just begun. The commercial world is too busy churning out games as fast as it can to think deeply about them, and until recently, the academic world has ignored them as childish toys rather than important elements of popular culture. This is starting to change, and as we begin to see real analysis of computer games, principles of aesthetics will arise.

首先，对电脑游戏的认真研究才刚刚开始。商业界忙于以最快的速度生产游戏，无暇对其进行深入思考，而直到最近，学术界还将其视为幼稚的玩具，而不是大众文化的重要元素，对其视而不见。这种情况正在开始改变，随着我们开始对电脑游戏进行真正的分析，美学原则也将随之产生。

Second, computer games have been a rapidly moving target. Games have changed, at least in appearance and depth, far more in the last 20 years than movies or television did in any 20-year period of their history, partly because of the rapid development of new hardware. The principles of interactive entertainment aesthetics should perhaps be independent of hardware developments, but this is easier said than done. It took 20 millennia to go from cave paintings to color photography; computer games have made a similar journey in two decades.

其次，电脑游戏是一个迅速发展的目标。在过去的 20 年里，游戏至少在外观和深度上的变化远远超过电影或电视在其历史上任何 20 年的变化，部分原因是新硬件的快速发展。互动娱乐美学的原则或许应该独立于硬件的发展，但说起来容易做起来难。从洞穴壁画到彩色摄影用了两万年的时间，而电脑游戏在 20 年内也走过了类似的历程。

However, we're already on the right track. We've all seen games that were clunky and awkward to use and others that were smooth and seamless. We've all noticed games with tacky, slapped-together graphics and others with elegant and atmospheric graphics. These are good first approximations for game aesthetics. At the moment, they are purely surface impressions, the equivalent of showing basic competence at oil painting or music composition. To be a great painter or a great composer, you must go beyond basic competence; you must reach out and touch your audience's soul. Interactive entertainment is capable of doing this, but it seldom does, and we have yet to devise an aesthetic for it.

不过，我们已经走在了正确的道路上。我们都见过笨拙难用的游戏，也见过流畅无缝的游戏。我们都注意到，有的游戏画面俗气、七拼八凑，而有的游戏画面优雅大气。这些都是对游戏美学的初步概括。目前，它们只是纯粹的表面印象，相当于展示了油画或音乐创作的基本能力。要成为一名伟大的画家或作曲家，你必须超越基本能力；你必须触及并触动观众的灵魂。互动娱乐有能力做到这一点，但它很少这样做，我们还没有为它制定出一种美学。

Our Awards Must Change 我们的奖项必须改变

The game industry is ridiculously full of awards, mostly given by magazines or web sites, some by trade associations and parents' pressure groups. Within the industry, however, we have a problem: We tend not to distinguish between art and craft in our awards.

游戏行业的奖项多得令人发指，大部分由杂志或网站颁发，有些由行业协会和家长压力团体颁发。然而，在游戏行业内部，我们有一个问题：我们在评奖时往往不区分艺术和工艺。

In the film industry, the Academy Awards are actually presented at two different ceremonies. One is the glittering spectacle that everyone knows, broadcast live on TV and attended by movie stars and Hollywood bigwigs. The other is for the technical awards. It's a much smaller affair, usually held in a hotel ballroom, and attended only by technical people, the film industry's craftsmen. The "big" Oscars that everyone hears about are all about art: acting, storytelling, art direction, music composition, and so on. The technical Oscars are all about craft: new equipment and techniques that have advanced the craft of moviemaking.

在电影界，奥斯卡奖实际上是在两个不同的仪式上颁发的。一个是人人皆知、电视直播、影星和好莱坞大腕云集的盛大典礼。另一个是技术奖项。规模要小得多，通常在酒店宴会厅举行，只有技术人员、电影业的工匠参加。每个人都听说过的奥斯卡“大”奖都是关于艺术的：表演、剧情、艺术指导、作曲等等。而奥斯卡技术奖的主题则是工艺：推动电影制作工艺发展的新设备和新技术。

We, on the other hand, have muddled this important distinction. You often see awards for "best graphics," but they don't state whether they're being given for technology or aesthetics. Some people think that "best graphics" means graphics that are displayed at the highest frame rate, or that use the most polygons, or that use sophisticated lighting and shading effects. That isn't good graphics, it's good graphic technology—good craft, but not good art. It's the same with sound; one award for "best sound" is supposed to encompass both music composition (an art) and 3D spatialization of ricocheting gunfire (a craft). As for those elements that Hollywood makes the most of—acting and storytelling—we typically give no awards at all. Small wonder, then, that these remain the weakest and most underappreciated parts of games.

而我们却混淆了这一重要区别。你经常会看到“最佳图形”奖，但这些奖项并没有说明是因技术还是美学而颁发的。有些人认为，“最佳图形”是指以最高帧频显示的图形，或使用最多多边形的图形，或使用复杂的光影效果的图形。这不是好的图形，而是好的图形技术——好的工艺，但不是好的艺术。音效也是如此；“最佳音效”奖应该包括音乐创作（一种艺术）和三维空间化跳弹射击（一种工艺）。至于好莱坞最擅长的表演和讲故事，我们通常不颁发任何奖项。难怪这些仍然是游戏中最薄弱、最不受重视的部分。

To be recognized as an art form, our awards must change to value the artistic merit of computer games, not merely their technological prowess or craft.

要想获得艺术形式的认可，我们的奖项就必须改变，重视电脑游戏的艺术价值，而不仅仅是其技术实力或工艺。

We Need Critics, Not Just Reviewers 我们需要批评者，而不仅仅是评论者

Like awards, the game industry is full of game reviews. In fact, that's where most of the awards come from: reviewers. But there's an important difference between reviewing and criticism. A review is a short essay whose purpose is to tell you about the game, to compare it with other similar games, and to give you an idea of whether you might like it and whether it's good value for the money. As they would say in the world of management consulting, it's a decision-support tool—it helps you decide whether to buy the game.

与奖项一样，游戏行业也充满了游戏评论。事实上，大多数奖项都来自于评论者。但评论和批评之间有一个重要的区别。评论是一篇短文，其目的是向你介绍这款游戏，将它与其他同类游戏进行比较，让你知道自己是否会喜欢这款游戏，以及这款游戏是否物有所值。正如管理咨询界所说，这是一个决策支持工具——它能帮助你决定是否购买这款游戏。

Criticism is not a decision-support tool. Criticism does discuss the basic competence of an art work, but it seldom goes into the question of whether it's good value for the money. The purpose of criticism is to increase understanding, to interpret a work of art in light not only of other, similar works, but also of the larger cultural and historical context in which it appears. It's not enough for critics to know all about other games. Critics must bring to their work a wide reading and an understanding of aesthetics, culture, and the human condition.

批评不是决策支持工具。批评的确会讨论艺术作品的基本能力，但很少会涉及是否物有所值的问题。批评的目的是增进理解，不仅要根据其他类似作品，还要根据作品所处的更大的文化和历史背景来解读艺术作品。批评者仅仅了解其他游戏是不够的。批评者必须广泛涉猎美学、文化以及人类状况，并把这些理解带入他们的批评文章中。

The movie 2001: A Space Odyssey is a perfect example of why an art form needs critics as well as reviewers. 2001 left the movie reviewers severely confused because it was almost impossible to compare to other movies. It had very little action: no car chases, no fight scenes, no romance, and almost no discernible plot. In fact, it contained very little acting either: The characters in it were intentionally dull and wooden. Movie reviewers simply didn't know what to say about it, and quite a few of them panned it because it didn't contain any of what they thought were "essential" elements of a movie. The film critics, on the other hand, had a field day. 2001 was rich with ideas, crammed with them right to the final frame. It provoked thought about everything from the origin of human intelligence (and perhaps human violence) to our ultimate destiny in the universe. Along the way, it looked at the sterile lives of astronauts and bureaucrats, poked fun at the way we eat, and raised questions about the wisdom of placing human lives under the control of artificially intelligent machines.

《2001：太空漫游》是一个完美的例子，说明了为什么一种艺术形式需要批评者和评论者。《2001》让影评人大惑不解，因为它几乎无法与其他电影相提并论。它的动作戏很少：没有追车、没有打斗场面、没有浪漫爱情，几乎没有可辨别的情节。事实上，它也没有什么演技：影片中的人物刻意表现得呆板木讷。影评人根本不知道该怎么评价这部电影，很多人批评这部电影，因为它没有包含任何他们认为的电影“基本”元素。而另一方面，批评者却对它赞不绝口。《2001》充满了各种想法，直到最后一帧都是。从人类智慧的起源（也许还有人类的暴力）到我们在宇宙中的终极命运，它引发了人们对一切的思考。一路走来，它审视了宇航员和官僚的无菌生活，嘲笑了我们的饮食方式，并提出了将人类生命置于人工智能机器控制之下是否明智的问题。

2001: A Space Odyssey is a great work of art and one of the most important movies ever made. But by conventional movie reviewers' standards, it was just a curiosity, perhaps even a failure. That is why the interactive medium needs critics as well as reviewers.

《2001：太空漫游》是一部伟大的艺术作品，也是有史以来最重要的电影之一。但按照传统影评人的标准，它只是一部好奇之作，甚至可能是一部失败之作。这就是互动媒体需要批评者和评论者的原因。

Breaking New Ground 开辟新天地

Ultimately, the greatest works of art are those that break new ground. They change the rules, challenge the established order, create new principles of aesthetics, and force the viewer to see something in a new way. But how to do it?

归根结底，最伟大的艺术作品是那些开辟新天地的作品。它们改变规则，挑战既定秩序，创造新的美学原则，迫使观众以新的方式看待事物。但如何做到这一点呢？

Some works of art deserve high praise because they are masterpieces of technique, taking a medium right to its physical limits while still demonstrating superb aesthetic feeling. Michelangelo's colossal statue of David is a good example. But although it's occasionally useful to take a medium to its limits as a technical exercise, it doesn't necessarily produce great art, especially if aesthetics are sacrificed or ignored for the sake of technical achievement. And the problem with doing this in computer games is that the limits are always changing. The challenge that Michelangelo faced, working in marble, is still the same for any sculptor working in the same medium. But in computer games, the medium changes almost week by week. Today's technical marvel is tomorrow's irrelevancy.

有些艺术作品值得高度赞扬，因为它们是技艺的杰作，在将某种媒介发挥到物理极限的同时，仍然展现出高超的审美感受。米开朗基罗的巨型雕像《大卫》就是一个很好的例子。不过，虽然偶尔将一种媒介发挥到极限作为一种技术练习是有用的，但并不一定能产生伟大的艺术，尤其是如果为了技术成就而牺牲或忽视了美学的话。在电脑游戏中这样做的问题在于，极限总是在不断变化。米开朗基罗在大理石上创作时所面临的挑战，对于任何在相同媒介上创作的雕塑家来说都是一样的。但在电脑游戏中，媒介几乎每周都在变化。今天的技术奇迹明天就会变得平平无奇。

Michelangelo's most important achievement in sculpting David was not technical, but artistic. The traditional way of portraying David was as victorious, armed and holding Goliath's severed head. Michelangelo chose instead to depict David before the battle, vulnerable but filled with a fierce courage. This had never been done before, and it set the work dramatically apart from its predecessors.

米开朗基罗雕塑大卫最重要的成就不是技术上的，而是艺术上的。传统的大卫形象是胜利者，全副武装，手持歌利亚的头颅。米开朗基罗却选择了描绘战斗前的大卫，他脆弱不堪，但却充满了凶猛的勇气。这在以前是从未有过的，这也让这幅作品与之前的作品大相径庭。

The Impressionist movement in painting is another useful example of what breaking new aesthetic ground is about. Impressionism challenged existing notions of what painting was for and what it was supposed to do. It asserted that the eye is not a camera, that painting need not be a photographic reproduction of reality. Yet Impressionism was not a new technology of painting; its tools were still canvas and paint. Rather, Impressionism was a new way of seeing.

绘画界的印象派运动是突破美学新领域的另一个有用的例子。印象派挑战了现有的关于绘画的目的和作用的观念。它宣称眼睛不是照相机，绘画不一定是现实的照相再现。然而，印象派并不是一种新的绘画技术；它的工具仍然是画布和颜料。相反，印象派是一种新的观看方式。

Interactive entertainment needs an Impressionism of its own, a daring, risk-taking movement to break through the tired old tropes—not a new way of seeing, but a new way of playing. We hope that you, our reader, might be our new Monet or Cassatt.

互动娱乐需要一种属于自己的“印象派”，一种敢于冒险、突破陈规的运动——不是一种新的观看方式，而是一种新的游戏方式。我们希望你——我们的读者——能成为我们新的莫奈或卡萨特。

A Few Final Words 最后几句话

This book doesn't include everything there is to know about game design—that would be a work of many volumes. Instead, we've tried to cover the key tasks in designing computer games, and to identify the recurring elements in the most common commercial game genres. We hope that our book has given you the foundations on which to build the design for the great game that you have in your head.

本书并不包括游戏设计的所有知识——那将是一部多卷本的著作。相反，我们试图涵盖设计电脑游戏的关键任务，并找出最常见的商业游戏类型中重复出现的元素。我们希望本书能为你提供一个基础，让你能设计出你脑海中的伟大游戏。

Computer games are the most important new entertainment medium since the invention of motion pictures. Uniquely among all forms of entertainment, they combine the interactivity of traditional gaming with the visual impact and narrative power of the movies. Put simply, computer games enable players to live out fantasies that they could never experience in real life, and this is the source of their enduring appeal. It is your task as a designer to turn those fantasies into immersive and rewarding games. Go to it, and good luck!

电脑游戏是自电影发明以来最重要的新娱乐媒介。在所有娱乐形式中，电脑游戏独一无二地将传统游戏的互动性与电影的视觉冲击力和叙事能力结合在一起。简而言之，电脑游戏能让玩家体验到现实生活中无法体验到的幻想，这就是电脑游戏经久不衰的魅力所在。作为一名设计师，你的任务就是把这些幻想变成身临其境、令人回味无穷的游戏。去做吧，祝你好运！