Abstract

Games have become a new culture in our lives but why did that happen? It may be because art, stories and the music in games are so much more accessible to young people than books or other media. Games are shaping culture and they often are blamed for encouraging violence and wasting time. But games are not the evil products of modern technology, they are just tools. It is up to their designers to have them express ideas, to teach and train us to have more positive lives.

如今游戏已经成为了一种不可忽视的文化现象，其原因在于：比起书本等传统媒体在年轻一代中的影响力，游戏中的音乐，画面以及故事内容更容易被大众所接受。游戏正在参与塑造当代大众文化的过程，然而由之产生的负面影响，比如宣扬暴力，浪费时间却成为众人吐槽的地方。游戏不是什么现代科技的邪恶产物，到底是为社会带来坏影响还是好影响，说到底取决于设计者的选择。

I. Introduction

The origins of digital games can be traced back to the early 1950s, but digital games did not reach mainstream popularity until the 1970s and 1980s. As a young person born in the late 1980s, my generation grew up with digital games. We are the video game generation. We live in a world where we have always been shaped culturally by literature, history, art, music and media, but now games are becoming one of the dominant new media in the young generation’s lives. Games have changed us, our brains, our subconscious and how we think. How can games influence us for better lives? If we see the world through the lens of games, will games be our tools to change the world?

最早的电子游戏诞生于50年代早期，但是到了七八十年代才逐渐在大众文化中流行起来。作为80后，我们是跟着电子游戏的发展一同成长起来的一代人。如果说文学、历史、艺术、音乐等媒体塑造了人类过去灿烂的文明。那么当游戏作为一种强势新媒体出现以后，他一定从某种程度上改变了新一代年轻人的思维，潜意识和思考方式。那么游戏是怎样影响我们的呢？它有可能成为改变世界的工具吗？

II. Historical, Theoretical, Artistic Context

Research published by Carnegie Mellon University claimed that the average young person today in a country with a strong gamer culture spends 10,000 hours gaming by the age of 21. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers: The Story of Success says that it takes roughly 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field. So what exactly are gamers getting good at? In the United States 10,080 hours is the time children spend in school from fifth grade to high school graduation. The amount of time we spend on games actually is the same as education. What are games teaching us?

卡内基梅隆大学的研究表明，在游戏产业发达的国家里，年轻人在长到21岁前平均会花费一万小时的时间在玩游戏上。一万个小时，这个时间听起来是不是很耳熟？Malcolm Gladwell在Outliers这本书里曾经提到过著名的一万小时定律：要成为某个领域的专家，需要10000小时的刻意训练。所以玩家们到底在什么方面变得超凡了呢？在美国一万零八十个小时是一个孩子从五年级到高中毕业所需花费在学校里的时间，那么当我们花去了跟基础教育一样多的时间在玩游戏上，游戏到底改变了我们什么呢？

In order to find some answers to those questions, we may need to consider how games influence our subconscious. Psychology researchers have been trying to find a way to trained our minds or to induce modes of consciousness to clear the mind and ease many health concerns, such as depression and anxiety. One method is hypnosis. During the hypnotic state, a person can concentrate intensely on a specific thought or memory, blocking distraction. He can easily experience time disappearing. He can concentrate totally on his response to the instructor’s suggestion that he will block all other external stimuli. Does that sounds familiar? It’s actually extremely similar to what happens to a gamer. If we are playing games for hours, this state continuous to affect us even after we quit the game. We may find the image still playing back in our minds. When we close our eyes the vision becomes even more clear. Games can easily reach our subconsciousness and give us suggestions subliminal.

为了找到这个问题的答案，我们需要先思考一下游戏是怎样影响我们的大脑潜意识活动的。心理学家一直在试图通过一种手段来降低大脑意识活动，从而治疗某些诸如抑郁或者焦虑的心理疾病。其中的一种方法就是催眠。在催眠状态中，人可以将注意力高度集中在一个特定的念头上从而屏蔽其他干扰。在催眠状态中你会感觉不到时间的流逝，你的注意力完全停留在引导者发出的指令上，而对于其他干扰显得视而不见充耳不闻。这个状态听起来是不是有些似曾相识？这种体验与一个高度沉浸在游戏世界里的玩家的经验无比相似。如果我们连续玩上好几个小时的游戏，当退出游戏后，刚才打小怪兽的过程依然会在脑海中循环播放，当我们闭上眼睛的时候这个画面甚至会变得更加清晰。游戏可以很容易的达到我们的潜意识层级，在不知不觉中向我们传递信息。

Game designing is a business, a way to make a living. And it’s true, gaming is a hot startup sector. But because games can deliver messages to our subconsciousness, we should take more care with the content of the messages hidden in the games. Is it about money, violence or hope?

游戏确实是一个有很强商业价值的行业，是一个热门的生财工具。但是如果你意识到它有多容易影响人类的集体潜意识，你或许会在设计的时候更加认真谨慎，小心的去筛选游戏所传达出来的信息。你所传递给玩家的是拜金主义？浮躁和暴力的心态？还是快乐和希望？未来，你想生活在充斥着怎样的一群人的世界里？

Games are not what they look like on the surface. When we look at games, we see that the storyline has very little relationship to the actual shape of the game. Games cover up the structure underneath — they cover it up with game art, music, and experience. We all know languages have their limitation. Long narrative dialogue will not be the tools for game designers to communicate with players. Visual language and sound design become the mouth and tongue for a game. Every image has its psychology reflection, even a basic shape can speak to us if we arrange it properly. For example, circle represents the notions of totality, wholeness, the self, the infinite, etc. The psychologist CG Jung thought the antithesis of the square standing for the ultimate state of Oneness, with octagon in between. Kandinsky also talks a lot about his theory of the basic shape in his book Point and Line To Plane. Artists and psychologists have researched visual languages, color theory, and graphic metaphor. These theories also can be used to create game art. Many indie gamers are inspired by fine art and they’re trying to make their games unique art. A puzzle game Monument Valley concept drawings by company artist Ken Wong is an exploration. Its visual style was inspired by Japanese prints, minimalist sculpture, and was compared by critics to M. C. Escher drawings and Echochrome.

游戏不像它表面上看起来的那样肤浅。游戏的故事性有时候表面上看起来与玩法结构并无紧密的联系。游戏的故事有时候是潜藏在内的，潜藏在美术，音乐，和体验设计中。我们都知道语言是有局限性的。大段的长对白有时并不是游戏设计师向玩家传达信息的最好工具。视觉，听觉代替语言成为游戏的传达手段。

每个图形都有它的心理学映射，即使是最基本的形状只要经过高明的排列组合也能传达出特定的意义。比如说，圆形代表了完全，圆满，自我和无限循环等等。心理学家荣格认为一个放在正方形里的八边形的图形，其所具有的完全对称特性，象征了合一的终极状态。康定斯基也在《点线面》这本书里写到了很多关于基础形的理论。艺术家和心理学家一直在研究视觉语言，色彩理论和图形的象征意义。这些理论同样适用于游戏的视觉设计中。很多独立游戏人在传统艺术中去寻找自己的创作灵感，比如著名的解迷游戏《纪念碑谷》的设计师Ken Wong就曾表示，他的设计灵感就是从日本浮世绘，极简设计和埃舍尔的画中得来。

纪念碑谷
埃舍尔

Another language system in games is music and sound design. Normally we tend to consider music as melody and rhythm. It’s invisible. But if you have sound editing experience in audio software, you can see any sound could be visible as an audio wave. Let’s try to see music as a wave. It contains three parts: amplitude, frequency and unique patterns. The amplitude is tone, frequency is pitch and pattern is timbre. All sounds have these three elements, so any sound could be music. The reason we can easily find rhythm in music and singing is because the rhythm is obvious, but if we loop any sound including speech, we can find it has rhythm, too. So the sound design in games is not just limited to music, it’s also used for feedback and to support mood. It is like the monologue in dramas, it contains emotion and information. If we see audio as a long frequency, low wave with dark timber it will be a sad sound while a short frequency, high wave with bright timber will be happy, the emotion we can feel here depends on our cultural expectations, since game reinforce our cognition of sound patterns. In the game Journey (see fig. 2) the sound designer built a specific language system so that talking is more like singing in the game world. This breaks the barriers of language and gives back the original beauty of music as a form of universal understanding. It has been proved by players that sound could be a successful emotional communicator for people.

除了视觉以外听觉也是游戏的传达媒介。通常我们倾向于认为音乐是由节奏和韵律组成。是不可见的。但是，如果曾经在音频编辑软件里编辑过音频就会知道，所有的声音都可以表现为可以看见的一段波长。那么如果我们以波的角度去思考音乐，它含有三个部分：振幅，频率和特定的模式。振幅影响了音调，频率影响了音高，模式决定了音色。音调，音高和音色组成了所有的声音。所以从这个方面来说所有的声音都可以是音乐，只要他们以特定的组合排列起来。而我们倾向于认定只有乐曲才是音乐的原因是：乐曲中的节奏很容易被我们识别出来，而人脑只对能够识别的模式有所反应。但是如果我们循环播放一段声音，让这段音频足够长，且有可识别的模式不断重复出现，那么即使只是讲话的声音，我们也能从中发现韵律。（这就是很多鬼畜视频听起来很有节奏感的原因）

游戏中的声音设计绝对不仅仅局限于好听的背景音乐，声音设计的主要目的是用来提供反馈和塑造气氛。就像戏剧里独白的作用，起到了传递情绪和信息的作用。一段看起来振幅低而平缓的波长，听起来也像看上去一样忧伤而沉郁，而一段短促而振幅高的音频听起来也如看起来那样亢奋欢快。当然我们所感受到的情绪与我们成长的文化背景很有关系，而游戏对音乐的使用和传播又在全球玩家中加强了这种情绪上的共同认知。在游戏风之旅人的声音设计中，设计师有意建立了一套特殊的吟唱系统作为游戏的语言系统。制作人陈星汉曾表示这样的有意设计是为了打破不同语言间的交流障碍，让玩家感受到纯碎的陌生人与陌生人在游戏中相遇所带来的感动。而从玩家的反馈中可以看出，他们确实做到了这一点。

Many educators considers that everybody has one of the three basic ways to process the world: visual, auditory or kinaesthetic. Games create a full sensory experience to get your attention and make you fall in love with it. Players explore game worlds using auditory, visual, and even body languages by interactive processes. Games could be efficiency tools for education. That’s why many education games have come out for teaching children with more fun and effective ways. Like Scribblenauts Remixand Math Doodles.

很多教育学家认为所有人都有三种认知世界的方式：视觉，听觉或者触觉。游戏创造了全感官的体验来让你爱上它的世界。玩家在视觉，听觉和肢体的互动中来认知游戏的世界。这就是为什么游戏可以是很好的学习工具的原因，而很多教育类游戏确实广受家长们的欢迎。比如Scribblenauts、 Remixand 、Math Doodles.

Instead of passing judgment on young peoples addictive to games, we need to take a deep look at why games are more attractive to them then their real lives? If our lives are designed to be as exciting as game play, would it be easier for us to handle the tasks in our real lives? American game designer Jane McGonigal. has a theory about what elements make a game, they are: goal, rules, feedback systems and voluntary participation. Let’s think about one type of game from these properties. The goals in this game are not that clear, you don’t know why you play it. The rules are not fair to everyone and it changes a lot without prompts. The feedback is weird, you don’t know when you will get feedback to your actions and sometimes they’re lying to you, you won’t distinguish which activity will benefit you, become more confused and with no clear sign for finishing the level. Most of all you can’t quit the game, everyone has to be in this game whether you like it or not. Does that sound fascinating? But it’s a real game we play everyday, it has a name called Our Real Lives. Probably that’s why many young gamers spend so much time in the digital world. Life is a mystery with a lot of struggling to a young person. By switching to the digital world, gamers can release the frustrating on their real lives, games fulfill people’s hunger for success, collaboration, provide an opportunity fighting for a goal, etc. If we have chance to advance life as a game, what can we do?

确实，因为让很多人沉溺于游戏的世界而无法自拔，游戏一直是以一个耗费大家生命的坏东西的形象出现在大家的心目中。但是比起一味地批判游戏带来的坏影响，去深入思考一下为什么游戏就比现实生活来的更有吸引力，这才是我们应该要研究的部分。如果我们的生活可以设计的像游戏这么有趣，那么人人是不是都会爱上自己现在的生活？美国的游戏设计师Jane McGonigal有一个关于到底是什么元素造就了游戏的理论，她认为游戏有四大要素：目标、规则、反馈系统和自愿参与。如果从这四个要素的角度来分析，那我们试想一下，如果有这么一款游戏，它的目标并不清晰，你甚至不知道你为什么要玩这个游戏，要做些什么；它也没有告诉你明确的规则，而且规则对每个玩家都不一样，并且在你毫无防备的情况下他就改变了；它的反馈系统也很烂，经常出错，还会发给你错误的信息；最糟糕的是你还不能退出，喜不喜欢都必须玩下去。听起来是不是玩起来很闹心？但是这样的游戏我们每个人都在玩，它就叫做“生活”……大概这就是为什么很多人更愿意活在游戏的虚拟世界里的原因了。现实过于骨感，而游戏填满了我们的饥荒。如果你有机会像设计游戏一样亲自去设计自己的生活，你会怎样做？

A theory called The Flow Channel was introduced in Jesse Schell’s book The ART of Game Design to provide a solution to advance experience of gamers. Flow theory is from the investigations of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of “optimal experience”. It is a state of consciousness that makes an experience genuinely satisfying. During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life. This positive state can be controlled by ordering the information that enters our consciousness, not just left to chance. By apply this experience in game design, we can help our players discover true happiness and greatly improve the quality of our lives. As a game designer, our goal is to keep our players in the flow channel for as long as possible. In order to control that, Jesse discovered five factors we should consider in game design, they are: Challenges vs. Skills, Anxiety vs. Boredom and the one that balances them all is Difficulty Balance. If the challenges of the game come up too slowly our player will switch to the Boredom realm and will possibly abandon it. On the other hand, if the challenges rise too fast our player will switch to Anxiety zone and they will likely to quit the game, too. Both anxiety and boredom drive the player to frustration. Our aim is to make the player stay in the flow. However instead of increasing difficulty in uniform acceleration (see fig. 3), Jesse suggests a better way of advance the experience is slightly decreasing and increasing the difficulty at a fixed rate. When a level is completed and the player moves to the next one, the difficulty is decreased a little bit for a while and given a short period for the player to feel powerful so the feeling of progress will be reinforced. However, after a while, we need to offer more challengers to avoid players entering the Boredom realm (see fig. 4). The Flow Channel concept is a very powerful one, not just to for game design, it also can be used in our life when we want to achieve goals.

Jesse Schell 的书《游戏设计的艺术》里介绍过一个用于提高玩家游戏体验的理论叫做“心流”（Flow Channel）。“心流”的理论最早是由心理学家Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi提出的理论。它指的是一种让意识达到极大满足的状态。在心流状态中，人们感到深度的喜悦，充满了创造力，并且感到完全的参与其中。这种极有力的积极状态并非偶然获得，人们可以通过控制信息进入我们的意识的顺序，来获得这种愉悦的感觉。通过在游戏里有意设计引导玩家达到这种心流状态，我们能够让玩家感到极大的喜悦从而提高他们的生活质量。作为一个游戏设计师，我们的目标是尽可能久的帮助玩家维持“心流”状态。为了做到这一点Jesse发现有五个重要的因素值得我们注意，他们是：挑战vs.技能，焦虑vs.无聊，以及平衡了以上两对最重要的一点，叫做难度平衡。如果挑战上升的太慢，玩家会进入无聊模式从而弃玩。如果上升的太快玩家就会进入焦虑模式，同样也有极大的可能弃玩。所以焦虑和无聊都会让玩家挫败感上升。我们的目标是让玩家保持在心流的通道里。然而比起让挑战和技能一起匀速直线上升（图1.），还有一个更高招的手段，那就是当玩家完成一个阶段的挑战后，在下一个阶段的开始让游戏难度稍稍降低一会，先让玩家享受一下胜利带来的力量，这样会加强过关的成就感，然后再提升游戏的难度。（图2.）心流理论不仅可以用于游戏设计中，他同样也可以在真实生活中帮助我们达到目标。

图1.

图2.

III. Conclusion

Designing games is a process for designing experience, designing joy. Gaming is an intuitive human activity, it’s not an evil product of modern technology. The exploration for developing games is an exploration for developing happiness. Using gaming theory to design our lives can make us more positive and happy. What can we learn from games to apply to our real lives to make them more fun? The advice from a game designer will be: design your life as a game. Set a clear goal and separate it into several levels, be careful about the difficulty balance, make yourselves stay in the Flow channel. Giving instant feedback is extremely important, giving credit for any achievement as well. Although life will not give us clear rules, we can set our own and it will release anxiety to make life easier. Collaboration with others to achieve the same goal will make achievement more satisfying. Linguistics is not the only tool for communication. Images, music even body language can be tools to dissolve communication barriers. Above all, live life as a gamer, keep your curiosity and passion, fight as a hero and achieve your Epic Win!

总结：

游戏是一门体验设计的艺术，快乐是设计的终极目标。游戏是人类自古有之的本能行为，它不是什么邪恶科技的产物。对游戏的思考就是对人类快乐和幸福的探索。用游戏理论来设计我们的生活可以让我们过的更加积极和快乐。那么回到最开始题目里的那个问题，游戏教会了我们什么呢？如何让我们的生活更加美好呢？

游戏设计师会这样告诉你：

用设计游戏的方法去设计你的生活。

制定一个清晰明确的大目标，然后将他们分解成符合你阶段性能力的小目标。让你的每一个挑战都可以停留在“心流”的愉悦状态中。

持续的提供反馈给自己是非常重要的，哪怕有一点点成就达成，都给自己一个及时的肯定。

虽然生活不会告诉你明确的规则，但是我们可以给自己一个明确的处事方法，并严格遵守，这会让你的选择更简单，从而降低焦虑感。

与他人一起完成一项挑战，将让你感到更大的满足。语言不是唯一的交流工具，图像，音乐甚至肢体语言都可以帮助你消除与他人相处间的障碍。

最重要的是：像玩家一样去面对生活！永远保持好奇心！永远保持激情！像个Hero一样去赢得你的史诗级胜利！