Gamers learn to grow up
It is official: women really do make up the more creative half of humankind.
Will Wright, one of the founding figures of the video games industry, should know. Around half of his audience is female - a rare thing in a male-dominated medium. “Men are happy to sit there shooting the target over and over and over, blowing shit up,” says Mr Wright. “They have simple goal structures.”
Women, though, want more - not necessarily something different, just better. “They are more creatively driving the experience. They want a higher standard in interactive games,” he says. “It doubles your market if you can start appealing to the other half of the people on the planet.”
A cerebral Californian with a decidedly geekish demeanour, Mr Wright represents a different side to the games industry. He makes big intellectual claims for a medium that, to an older generation, often seems to have little purpose other than to pump up the adrenaline levels of bored teenagers.
Parents “look at [video games] and freak out,” says John Seely Brown, a technology industry veteran and visiting scholar at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication. “They see them as having no value at all except developing twitch-speed in teenagers.”
Mr Wright's work is an object lesson in how games are evolving into a valuable part of the mainstream entertainment industry, according to supporters such as Mr Seely Brown. The claims that the developer and others make for his games may sometimes sound extravagant: but with video games now claiming a market as big as Hollywood's box office receipts, the medium is starting to demand serious attention.
Mr Wright developed his first game, SimCity, 20 years ago, at a time when personal computing was still the preserve of a handful of hobbyists. A piece of simulation software for building make-believe cities, the idea came when he was writing the software to create objects to be blown up from a virtual helicopter.
“I found I was having much more fun on the creative side than I was going around bombing things,” he says.
SimCity became one of the early successes of PC gaming and spawned a successor: The Sims, which revolves around a virtual community where the player partly controls the actions of characters who are also driven by basic human needs programmed into their behaviour.
That makes it the game world's version of a TV reality show, says Neil Young, general manager of Maxis, the division of Electronic Arts, the games giant that now owns the game. Together, SimCity and The Sims have gone on to sell more than 37m copies.
To Mr Wright, The Sims demonstrates two features that set interactive games apart from other forms of entertainment. One is the way they act as the focal point of online communities, creating new ways for people to interact.
A complex ecosystem has evolved around The Sims, with fans creating their own characters or storylines and giving these away online. “The currency is recognition and exposure,” says Mr Wright. “People are spending time creating cool objects - a lot of them aren't spending much time playing the game any more. For them, that is the meta-game - playing within the community.” Online communities that have built up around games have given many children the chance for types of social interaction they do not normally get, says Mr Seely Brown.
“Most social life for teenagers in the past was based on gossip - ‘who's prettier', things like that,” he says. Games communities “transcend the sort of gossip communities you get in high school”.
While the community that developed around the first Sims game was accidental, Maxis - where Mr Wright now holds the title of senior secret product developer - has set out consciously to build a community around Sims2, the sequel that comes out later this month.
It released the software tools in May for players to create their own characters for the new game and more than 50,000 are already available online, says Mr Young. That makes the game a software platform which, like Microsoft's Windows, gains from the creativity of developers who adopt it, he adds.
A lot of what goes into “community management” such as this involves “the cross-pollination of ideas and content,” says Mr Wright. “How do we build the most thriving community online, how do we nurture it? We have to let the business model follow from that.”
One idea is to turn the Sims into a marketplace where players can buy and sell content, says Mr Young. The new version of the game will come with a built-in internet browser, so players will be able to connect to content online without leaving the game. Within a year, the aim is use this facility to create a commercial marketplace, says Mr Young.
The second, and more distinctive, feature of video games is the ability of users to influence the outcome of what is happening on screen.
Mr Wright calls this the power of “agency” - something he contrasts with the “empathy” that characterises traditional story-telling, whether in books or movies. Whereas empathy involves the imaginative leap needed to sympathise with a fictional character, “agency is all about what will happen if I do something”, he says.
“Both empathy and agency are mechanisms for education,” he says, because they are ways that human beings learn about the world. “Our brain has reward circuits for both of these. It says: ‘That's fun, that's fun, keep doing it, that's good for you.' ”
In Sims2, the possibilities increase exponentially. Characters' hopes and fears are based on one of five basic personality traits chosen for them, and the interaction with other characters in different settings creates a wide range of outcomes.
“It immerses you in some pretty complex phenomena,” says Mr Seely Brown of the original Sims. “You begin to understand systemic causality” - how an action leads to indirect consequences in a social setting. The aim of all game design, says Mr Wright, is to create these different levels of outcome that players discover for themselves - whether the game is a basic “first person shooter” or part of the genre created by the The Sims, known as “god games”.
“In a game, there's really a problem, or set of problems, that we're selling,” he says. “One way I think of games, as a designer, is the possibility space. What are the different states I can get into in that game, what are all the worlds I can experience?”
Technological advances have greatly extended those possibilities. But while raw processing power has changed the look of games and the range of worlds on offer, there is still much more to do in developing better algorithms to describe how humans behave, says Mr Wright.
“We're getting better and better at thinking of the higher order, or shape, of the mathematical space” in which games take place, he adds. “Now these games are becoming more of a system through which people play out their own personalities.”
So the next time you see a twitchy teenager glued to a video game, beware of making a hasty judgment: you just might be witnessing a rich and complex educational and social experience. Especially if the player concerned is female.
用游戏培育创造力
正式告诉你吧，女性确实构成了人类更富于创造性的那一半。
视频游戏业的创始人之一威尔?赖特（Will Wright）了解这一点。他的用户大约一半是女性，这在一种男性主导的媒体中是一件稀罕的事情。“男人喜欢坐在那里一遍又一遍地向目标射击，炸得天翻地覆，”赖特先生说，“他们的目标结构很简单。”
但是女性的希冀更高，她们不一定想要不同的东西，而是想要更好的东西。“她们更富于创造性地体验着游戏。她们希望互动游戏具有更高水平，”他说。“如果你能开始打动地球上另外这一半人，你的市场就会翻番。”
赖特先生是一个聪明的加利福尼亚人，举止又稀奇古怪，他代表了游戏业的另一面。他对一种媒体提出了很高的智力求诉，在成年一代眼中，这种媒体除了把没精打采的青少年的肾上腺素刺激起来以外，往往显得没有什么用处。
父母们“看着看着（视频游戏)就被激怒了，” 高科技业界资深人士、南加利福尼亚大学安能堡大众传播学院（Annenberg School for Communication）访问学者约翰?西利?布朗（John Seely Brown）说。“他们觉得视频游戏毫无价值，只会让青少年发展出一种抽疯似的速度。”
赖特先生的工作是一最佳范例，据西利?布朗等支持者所称，他演示出游戏怎样发展成为主流娱乐业的一个颇有价值的部分。开发商及其他人对赖特游戏的说法，听起来有时未免夸张。但是，由于视频游戏目前可以自诩拥有一个很大的市场，不亚于好莱坞的票房收入，这种媒体已经开始引起人们的认真关注。
赖特先生20年前开发了他的第一个游戏模拟城市（SimCity），当时个人电脑还只是极少数电脑迷的独占物。模拟城市是一个建造虚幻城市的仿真软件，当这个构思出现在他的脑海时，他正在编写另一个软件，创造从一架虚拟直升飞机上爆炸出来的东西。
“我发现，比起到处搞爆炸，我在这种创造性游戏方面得到了更大的乐趣，”他说。
模拟城市是早期PC游戏的成功作品之一，并引发了一个后代产品，即The Sims。The Sims以一个虚拟社区为中心而开展，在这个社区里，游戏玩家在一定程度上控制着其中各种角色的行动，由于程序将人类的基本需求置于这些角色的行为之中，所以他们也受这些需求的驱动。
这一点，使得The Sims成为社会传真电视节目（TV reality show）在游戏世界里的一种版本，Maxis公司总经理尼尔?杨（Neil Young）说。Maxis公司是目前拥有The Sims的游戏业巨头Electronic Arts的下属公司。SimCity和The Sims两种游戏累计已售出超过3700万份拷贝。
在赖特先生看来，The Sims证实了两个特点，这两个特点将互动游戏与其它娱乐形式区别开来。一个特点是互动游戏充当了在线社区的焦点，创造了人际互动的新方式。
一种复杂的生态系统围绕着The Sims而发展起来，游戏迷们在这里创造自己的角色或故事情节，并在网上发送它们。“其流通过程也就是认可和披露的过程，”赖特先生说。“人们现在花费时间创造很酷的东西，很多人不再花太多时间玩游戏了。对于他们来说，这是在社区内部玩的超级游戏。”围绕游戏而建立起来的在线社区，使很多孩子得到了在正常情况下得不到的机会，去进行各种类型的社会互动，西利?布朗先生说。
“过去，青少年的社交生活大都建立在闲话基础上――‘谁更漂亮’啦，诸如此类，”他说。游戏社区“超过了你在高中的那种闲话社区。”
围绕第一代 Sims游戏发展起来的社区纯属偶然，然而赖特先生担任高级秘密产品研发领导人的Maxis公司，已经开始有意识地围绕Sims2建立一个社区了。The Sims的这一续集定于本月面世。
杨先生说，Maxis公司5月份发布了软件工具，供玩家为新游戏创造他们自己的角色，现在网上可玩的角色已有5万个以上。杨先生补充说，这就使Sims2游戏形成了一个软件平台，像微软公司的Windows一样，得益于采用该软件的开发者们的创造性。
这类属于“社区管理”的东西，很多都涉及到“理念和内容的交叉授粉”，赖特先生说。“我们怎样建成最兴旺的在线社区，我们又怎样培育它？我们的商业模式必须产生于这样的思考。”
一种设想是将这些Sims游戏变成一个集市，玩家可以在此买进和售出游戏内容，杨先生说。Sims游戏的新版本面世时将带有一个内设的因特网浏览器，因此玩家不离开游戏就能对内容进行在线连接。一年以内的目标是利用这一便利设施创造一个商业集市，杨先生说。
视频游戏的第二个更加与众不同的特点是，用户可以影响屏幕上所发生的事件的结局。
赖特先生把这种能力叫作“代理”，以此对照传统的讲故事的特点，即“共鸣”。“共鸣”是想象方面的必要飞跃，以便对某个虚构人物产生同情，而“‘代理’关心的则纯粹是：如果我采取一点措施，将会发生什么事情，”他说。
“共鸣和代理，两者都是教育机制，”他指出，因为它们都是人类认知世界的方式。“我们的大脑对这两者都有所鼓励。大脑说道：‘真好玩，真好玩，继续玩吧，这对你有好处。’”
在Sims2中，这种能力成指数增长。为角色选定5种基本人格中的一种，而基于这种人格他们产生着希望和恐惧；他们在不同环境下与其他角色的互动则产生了各种各样的后果。
“它使你陷入了某种非常复杂的现象，”西利?布朗先生谈到原版Sims时说。“你开始了解因果关系体系”，了解某一行动在一定的社会背景下如何导致一些间接后果。赖特先生说，所有游戏设计的目标，不外乎创造不同级别的后果，玩家自己去发现这些后果：游戏要么是一种简单的“第一人称射击游戏”（first person shooter），要么属于The Sims创造的流派，即所谓“上帝游戏”( god games)流派。
“在游戏中，我们确实是在出售一个问题、或一系列问题，”他说。“作为设计者，我对游戏的一个考虑角度是可能性空间。在那个游戏中我能进入哪些不同的状态？我总共能体验一些什么样的不同世界？”
技术的发达大大扩展了这些能力。数据处理能力改变了正在出售的游戏的外观、扩大了虚拟世界的范围，但是同时还需进一步努力开发更好的算法去描述人类的行为方式，赖特先生说。
游戏发生在数学空间，而“我们越来越善于思考数学空间的更高秩序或更高形态，”他补充道。“现在这些游戏更加成为一种体系了，人们通过这一体系释放出他们的性格。”
因此，下次你看见一个抽搐的青少年专注于某种视频游戏时，不要匆匆下结论，因为你看见的说不定是一场丰富多彩的教育和社会经历呢。如
果涉及到的玩家是女性，那就更要谨慎啦。
(back)MARKET TALK/HK: Daiwa Prefers CSA To CEA * The information is one hour delayed.
Airline shares up on overnight drop in oil prices; Cathay (0293) +1.4% at HK$14.10, China Eastern Air (0670) +0.6% at HK$1.57, China Southern Air (1055) +1.8% at HK$2.825. For exposure to China's aviation sector, Daiwa prefers CSA; says CSA 'commands stronger pricing power' vs CEA, also making inroads into expanding domestic market shares. 6-month target for CSA HK$3.10.(
股市快讯/香港：大和青睐中国南方航空(1055)，而非东方航空 * 资料一小时廷迟．
航空股上涨，受原油价格前夜回落推动；国泰航空(0293)涨1.4%，至14.10港元；中国东方航空(0670)升0.6%，至1.57港元；中国南方航空(1055)扬1.8%，至2.825港元；在内地航空股中，大和青睐中国南方航空；认为中国南方航空的定价能力强于中国东方航空，并且在提高内地市场占有率方面取得进展。大和将中国南方航空的6个月目标价定在3.10港元
