Геймдизайн. Рецепты успеха лучших компьютерных игр от Super Mario и Doom до Assassin's Creed и дальше

Traditional rock-paper-scissors has three viable strategies. But there is also a version of the game called rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock (my favorite outcome is “paper disproves Spock”). That version has five strategies, and all of them are viable because each has an equal chance of winning. And we can easily add more and more symbols to this game, up to an arbitrarily large number of viable strategies. But are we improving the game’s balance? Of course not. The game is no deeper than before. It’s just more complex. Adding more viable strategies didn’t make the game better.

Eventually, I got good at predicting movements. Map knowledge was easy, and aiming challenges were a nonissue. But Unreal Tournament wasn’t done. It reinvented itself again, into its final, consummate form: a pokerlike game of psychological trickery. I knew what my options were, and what my opponent’s options were, and how each of these options interacted. He knew all of this, too, and I knew that he knew, and he knew that I knew. When both players have a crystal-clear map of the mechanical game in their heads and the understanding to make near-perfect choices, the only thing left to manipulate is the mind itself. So Unreal Tournament became about provoking emotional outbursts, mixing up strategies to remain unpredictable, reading the opponent’s mind better than he can read yours. It became about wrapping your mind around his and destroying him. I never mastered that final reinvention because it is limitlessly deep.

For most of history, there were no game designers, and games were pieces of folk culture passed down through generations and enjoyed mostly by children. When adults played, it was typically as a short reprieve from their harsh, bland lives. In such a primitive environment, nobody needed a better term than fun to describe good games.

Today, we have more technology, professional game designers, and game players with ever-diversifying emotional appetites. To do our jobs well, designers must use more than one global term. Fun can’t possibly describe the diversity, power, and nuance of game-driven emotions. It would be like a chef describing every dish as either “tasty” or “tasteless.”