虚拟游戏开发天才回归现实世界

    今天的玩家通过社交媒体呼吁变革，同时确实影响了游戏业发展和游戏相关政策，还让像微软公司这样的巨头改变了Xbox One的相关政策，对此您怎么看？

    我认为很好，因为这就是我一直以来深信不疑的事情——让玩家深度参与进来，不仅是游戏发售以后，还要在发售前请他们参与，听取他们的意见。游戏正在成为玩家之间的基础社区，他们在社区里做一些很了不起的事情，包括分享内容，开展竞赛，建立社交关系。这是我感兴趣的游戏类型，同时也是游戏业目前的发展方向。我倾向于把游戏迷，尤其是那些铁杆游戏迷看成共同开发者。这些人对我们的项目富有激情，他们会把我们的游戏推荐给其他人，让他们也一起玩。他们越是觉得自己在开发过程中有一定的主动权，而不仅仅是客户的话，结果就会越好。微软这样的公司坐下来认真倾听、理解玩家的需求，同时予以回应，很触动我。一家规模这么大的公司能这么积极响应用户需求很了不起。正是这些公司让我们能够留在这个行业，继续开发游戏。

    另一方面，这也是互联网特有的现象，即5%的人制造了所有的不和谐音。有时候他们代表了其余95%的人，有时候则没有。很多时候这5%的人会提出一些匪夷所思的复杂功能，而作为一个游戏设计人员，你明白这么做会让大部分人没法玩这种游戏。有些人会希望你只给超级死忠粉丝设计游戏，这样一来我们就会把其他95%的玩家拒之门外，所以必须清醒地理解他们的意见。不过当这5%的人真的代表了其他95%的人的想法时，那就是很有价值的意见了。（财富中文网)

    译者：清远

    What are your thoughts of the power that gamers have now to voice change through social media and actually impact game development and game policies and move a giant like Microsoft to change its Xbox One policies?

    That part I think is great because that's something that I've always believed in -- getting the players very involved not just after the game ships, but even before and try to listen to them. The kind of games I'm interested in, and actually the way games are going, is they're becoming far more baseline communities of people playing the game and doing a lot of cool stuff peer-to-peer, whether it's content sharing or competition or forming social connections. I tend to think of the fan base, especially the hardcore fan base, as co-developers. These people with a passion for your project are going to go out and sell your game to other people and pull other people in. The more they feel like they have some ownership over the process and they're not just kind of customers, the better. To see a company like Microsoft actually sit back, listen, and understand the fans and respond to them is impressive. For a company that size to be that responsive is great. These companies are the ones that obviously keep us in business and allow us to make games.

    On the other side there's the Internet thing where 5% of the people are making all the noise. Sometimes they represent the other 95%, sometimes they don't. A lot of times the 5% are asking for ridiculously elaborate features, and as a game designer you know that's going to make the game inaccessible to everybody else. There are these people that want you to push a franchise in a super hardcore direction, and therefore we're going to close it off to 95% of the players, so you have to understand what kind of feedback that they're giving you. But when it's something that's 5% representing the other 95 that will probably feel the same way, then I think it's really valuable.