《Journey》情感体验创作过程编辑本段回目录
《Journey》是游戏领域中罕见的瞄准情感体验并得以实现的一款作品。虽然这没有太大意外，但从初始理念入手，而后制作出影响众人的作品实则是个艰辛过程。
该作开发者Jenova Chen在DICE峰会上提到：“根据早期概念艺术，电影题材是根据情感分类的。但在电子游戏中可以获得何种感受？答案通常是成就感。这是电影所无法满足的情感。”
因此在开发《Journey》时，他希望将成就感与赋权感融入在线玩法中，让玩家互相照应。《Journey》创意成型于2006年。那时他已经有3年的《魔兽世界》经验。他坦言：“当时的我是个足不出户的书呆子”，但他仍想要一些社交互动。他试图从《魔兽世界》中获得，但所有在线玩家压根不关注他人。他表示：“当我投入越多时间，我会遇到越多玩家，然后更加意识到自己只身一人。”
journey(from nerd4sure)
他指出：“因此我们ThatGameCompany从情感入手，并基于此开发游戏。”《Journey》的目标是在虚拟世界中传递一种敬畏感与净化感。为此，Jenova Chen首先调查了玩家的在线玩法。“我听说大多数在线玩家都相当吝啬，且令人讨厌，你压根不想与他们交流，甚至互动。”
大部分游戏中的角色都会携带代表能力的物品（游戏邦注：比如枪支、刀剑等）。接着你还会获得提供更多能力的物品，Jenova Chen表示：“这是种能力循环，首先你会思考如何利用这些能力占领其它物品？”
为了不再着眼于能力与交流方面，你必须让游戏中的玩家真正关注他人。Jenova Chen称道：“我希望这种互动是种情感交流，而不是相互搏斗。”
做法
为此，你必须排除所有转移玩家注意力的嘈杂因素，比如大背景事件与环境噪音。Jenova Chen指道：“另外还应排除能力因素。如果目前只有我与另一位玩家在线，而且我还持有枪支，那我应采取有何举动？”
接着你会删除其他一些玩家，营造出两人之旅。他表示：“突然，另一位玩家成为焦点。”然而，此时应让这些玩家们体会到一种情感。要集中他们的注意力存在难度！因此他们保证在线游戏中不存在HUD。Jenova Chen指出：“我们的首要目标是移除在线大厅设置。其次，大部分游戏中的玩家都有对应名称与ID。且名字有点咄咄逼人。”
因此他们删除这些元素，只在尾声显示你所合作的对象，而且《Journey》不允许玩家进行直接交流，甚至邀请好友。他表示：“这种做法违背了众多在线游戏理念，也许我们会因此放弃病毒式传播渠道，但我们却得着重于情感体验。”
接下来是促使玩家合作。《Journey》中有个资源支持玩家飞翔一小段距离，但他们并不确定用法。最先资源是有限的。但Jenova Chen指出：“人们表示不想与他人合作，也许是担心他们消耗此资源。”
因此，他们试图赋予资源循环性能，即在某个玩家使用完后仍会存在，那样另一个玩家能紧随其后继续使用。但人们总觉得其他玩家已耗尽该资源功能。最后，他们赋予它无限模式，此时玩家既不会厌恶对方，也没有喜爱感。
同时，他们希望玩家们采用推拉结合方式，搀扶着攀上顶峰。但在深渊处互推对方等于置人于死地。因此他们删除这种物理机制，现在，当你接近其他玩家时，你会同时获得能量与资源分配。而互相配合便可飞向天空。Jenova Chen表示：“接着他们彼此互有好感。这看似简单，但并不直观。而且我们耗费了大量时间才得到此结果。”
净化感
他解释道：“为达到净化感，好莱坞会采用三幕架构。情感强度的最大改变会创造出净化感。”
但如果你想要的是敬畏洗礼，那该怎么做？为此，Jenova Chen研究了Joseph Campbell的英雄之旅理论，划分出转化结构。接着划分人类的生命周期。结果发现它们完美覆盖这三个方面，现在他拥有自己的结构与弧度。其实，如若将其绘制成波形图时，该团队便可借此构造游戏世界的总体地貌。
困难
Jenova Chen表示，我们很容易就能让音乐家与美工交流情感，但在互动上颇具难度。在第一个开发年头，该作以失败告终。那时他们没有从中获得自己想要的情感强度。他指出：“人们讨厌这款游戏。他们认为其结局相当糟糕，令人讨厌。”
他表示：“那时，从山底登上顶峰的情感变化不够明显，同比废墟关卡更缺乏刺激性。”但他透露玩家更喜爱结局以角色坠落收场。Jenova Chen解释道：“因为那里有条急流瀑布。这应该是最好的悲剧结局。”
此时，他发现自己可以选择推出，或是再投入一年时间完善结尾，创造出净化感。幸运的是，索尼允许他们再试一年。
在调整方面，最初人们认为爬山部分相当乏味。结果他们在其中设置一整套新动画，让玩家觉得有点受挫感。接着他们还删除背景中的某些内容，包括飞翔的石蛇，并添加建筑物进行遮掩。他指出：“这样便是把整个氛围转化为真正玩法。”
他表示：“甚至是死亡场景，我们还添加诸如山脉渐渐消失等元素让你丧失希望。”借此赋予该作更多迷人成分。
但最后我们仍将山峰设置在铁轨上，且仅有此路。Jenova Chen称道：“问题是，即使整款作品看起来是个叙事模式，但其玩法并非如此。当陷进铁轨时，你在山峰上别无选择。因此我们打开铁轨。方便玩家四处走动。同时还增加冲浪行为。”他补充道：“我们的宗旨是保证你在到达终极目标时，所有内容都具有可玩性，包括最终走向光明。都应充满自由感。”
结果，最终版本取得成功。实际上它相当精致，且最终设计文档如同一张图画表格。他称道：“我们已推出这款作品，它是一场人生之旅。但我最担心的是玩家的反应。”
但出乎意料的是，玩家开始相互道歉，并在TGC论坛上发帖，表示对放弃这款作品的歉意。Jenova Chen指出：“我从未想过《使命召唤》的玩家会这样说。他们喜欢在游戏结尾的雪地上画个心形图案，意在表示感谢。”
Jenova Chen表示：“我们工作室的不少员工就去年上半年开始便无半分收入，我们是依赖自个积蓄完成这款作品的。”那时的工作室基本处在破产边缘。他不禁疑惑：“这样做值得吗？”相信玩家的道歉信已经给出了答案。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，作者：Brandon Sheffield）
The journey to create Journey — the quest for emotion
by Brandon Sheffield
ThatGameCompany’s Journey is one of those rare games that targets an emotional experience and actually hits it. This is no accident though, it was a laborious process to go from the initial concept to a game that actually affects people in legitimate ways.
“If you look at genres of films, they’re all divided by emotions,” said Jenova Chen during his talk at the DICE summit, from which the above early concept art is also taken. “But when you look at video games, what feeling do you get? It’s usually a feeling of accomplishment.” That’s what games can do that movies can’t, he says.
And with Journey, he wanted to marry that feeling of accomplishment and empowerment with online gameplay that would make players care about each other. Journey, as an idea, started in 2006. At that point he had been playing World of Warcraft for 3 years. “I’m a kind of nerdy guy who doesn’t like to leave the house,” he admitted, but he still wanted to have some social interaction. He tried to do this in WoW, but all the online chatter was about the game – nobody paid attention to each other. “The more I played this game, the more I encountered other players, the more I realized I was lonely,” he said.
“At that game company, we start with emotion, and we work everything around it,” he says, and for Journey, they were aiming for a feeling of awe, of catharsis, in an online world. Chen began by doing research into how people play online. “What I hear the most is online gamers are mean,” he says. “Most of them are assholes, you don’t want to talk to them, you don’t want to interact with them.”
In most games, the character carries something that represents power – gun, a sword, or something similar. Then you gain things that give you more power. It’s a power cycle, Chen says. The first thing you think in a game is, “How am I going to use my power over this other thing?”
To take the focus away from power, and away from contact, you have to make people in games really pay attention to each other. “I want the interaction to be about exchange of emotions or feelings, rather than exchange of blows,” says Chen.
But how?
To do this, you have to get rid of all the noisy stuff that distracts players from each other, like big background events and environmental noise. “Then we have to get rid of the power,” he says. “If I’m in a room online with another player, and I have a gun, what am I going to do?”
You then remove some of the other players, to make it just a journey between two people. “All of a sudden, the other player becomes the focus,” he says. But then you have to make these players actually feel an emotion. It’s tough to get players to focus their attention! So they made sure there was no HUD, and for online play, “our first goal is there is no lobby,” he says. “Second thing, in most games everybody has names and IDs. And most peoples names are very aggressive.”
So they removed all of that, just showing who you’ve played with at the end of the game, and didn’t allow players to talk directly, or even invite friends. “It’s very counter to a lot of these online conventions, and maybe we’re giving up the chance to be viral, but we had to focus on the emotion we wanted to present,” he said.
The next step was to get people to cooperate. They had a resource in the game that allowed you to fly a short distance, but they weren’t sure how to use it in this kind of online world. At first, resources were limited. “People said they don’t want to play with other people, because maybe they’ll take the resources,” he said.
So they tried making the resources re-usable — the resource would drop after one player used it, so another could follow behind and use it as well. But people felt like they were getting taken advantage of when others used their resources. Finally they made resources unlimited – then players didn’t hate each other, but they didn’t like each other.
One idea they had was to get people to push and pull each other so they can collaborate, climbing rocks and so forth. But people pushed each other into the abyss to kill each other. So they took away the physics — and now, when you get near to each other, you both get energy, a distribution of resources. You can fly if you’re together. “And then you love each other,” he said. “It’s very simple, but it was not very intuitive. It took us a lot of time to get to this conclusion.”
The Catharsis
“To reach catharsis, in Hollywood they use the three act structure,” Chen notes. “This huge change of emotional intensity, this creates catharsis.”
But if you want a catharsis of awe, how do you achieve that? Chen also studied Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey monomyth theory, and layered in its structure of transformation. He then layered in the actual life cycle of a human. He found that these three things all overlayed perfectly, and now he had his structure and arc. In fact, when charted as a wave graph, the team used this to create the general topography of the world.
The game sucks
It’s easy to get musicians and artists to communicate emotional levels, he says, but it’s very difficult in interactivity. And in the first year, the game sucked. They didn’t actually get the emotional intensity they wanted. “People hated it,” he said. “They would say the end is terrible. This game sucks.”
“The emotion of change, from the mountain to the summit is so small, it’s actually less exciting compared to the ruins level,” he said of the game at the time. But a revelation came when a player whose game crashed right at the end enjoyed himself more. “It’s because there’s a drastic fall,” Chen realized. “It’s kind of a great ending of a tragedy.”
At this point he realized they had the option to ship the game like this, or spend another year to fix the ending, to create this catharsis. They were lucky enough that Sony allowed them to take that extra year.
In terms of changes, originally people thought the mountain section was tedious. They put in an entire new animation set, to make the player feel a bit more oppressed. Then they took other things from the background, like the flying stone serpent, and added buildings to hide in, “turning atmosphere into real gameplay,” he said.
“Even with the death scene, we added things like actually fading out the mountain, to take your hope away,” he said. All these little things combined to make it feel much more engaging.
But the final summit was still on rails, with no option to stray from the path. “What happened is that even though the game looks epic, it doesn’t play epic,” he says. “There’s no freedom on the summit when you’re confined to a rail. So what we did was open up the rail. Players can go anywhere. We also added the surfing back,” he added. “We make sure everything before you reach the final end is completely playable, including the final walk toward the light. We give them freedom until the very end.”
And it paid off in the final product. In fact, it became so well-honed, that the final design document was a single graphical sheet. “We launched the game, and it’s about the Journey of a lifetime,” he asserts. “I was particularly nervous about how people were going to react to this game.”
But right away, people started apologizing to each other, posting on the TGC forum to apologize for quitting the game, and so forth. “I would never imagine a Call of Duty player would say this,” he said. “People like to draw hearts in the snow at the end of their game to show their gratitude,” he added.
“A lot of people in our studio were not paid in the last half year, and we paid out all our savings,” Chen says. The company actually went bankrupt, at the time. “Was it really worth all this,” he posed? Chen offered up this letter as an answer to that question. (source:gamaustra)
