经济与社会科学2021sciencedirect.com
业余爱好者在创作新颖桌游上胜过专业设计师
Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games
进阶 · 约 35 分钟读完前置知识：游戏设计基础、创新与新颖性度量、统计回归分析
导读
这篇论文比较业余爱好者与专业设计师在桌游创作中的新颖性，可能借助 BoardGameGeek 的机制分类等数据构建新颖性与知识多样性指标，结论是爱好者作品在机制组合上更具新颖性。评论则集中质疑新颖性定义、指标效度，以及把商业约束差异误读为设计能力差异。
HN 关注点：“业余胜专业”的反直觉结论，讨论焦点是新颖性如何测量，以及商业激励是否才是专业设计更保守的真正原因。
HN 评论精选
这几条评论里：质疑 2 补充 1 亲历 1
质疑质疑新颖性和知识多样性指标，并指出研究混淆了商业约束与个人能力。
作为游戏开发者，唉。第一，新颖性的测量很差：基本就是根据 BGG 机制本体论判断游戏是否表现出新颖的机制混搭。这是糟糕的新颖性定义，忽略了玩法（有趣系统、挑战、循环）和非玩法（虚构、设定、呈现等）等游戏设计其他方面。谁会把新颖性定义为“机制混搭”？第二，知识多样性基于 BGG 报告的设计师做过多少类型，这同样可疑，还会导致奇怪效果：想象因为亚马逊显示萨尔曼·鲁西迪、托尔金或翁贝托·埃科只写一两个类型，就说他们知识多样性低！而且就算接受这些，实际效应也不强：散点到处都是，趋势线拟合很差。最后，主要问题是：比较爱好者（为自己开心做想做的）与专业设计师（做需要卖出不止几份的产品），当然会发现爱好者更自由地实验疯狂的机制排列，但这混淆了个人能力与情境约束。如果专业设计师像爱好者一样不受商业约束，会怎样？
60654查看英文原文
Gamedev here. Sigh. One, the measurement of novelty is bad: it's basically the measure of whether the game exhibits a novel mashup of mechanics according to the BoardGameGeek ontology of mechanics. This is a terrible definition of novelty, as it ignores all of the other aspects of game design, both in gameplay (interesting systems, challenges, loops) and non-game play (fiction, setting, presentation, etc). Who measures novelty as "mashup of mechanics"? Two, the measure of knowledge diversity is based on BGG reports of how many genres the designers have worked in. This is, again, not only questionable, but also leads to weird effects: imagine knocking Salman Rushdie, JRR Tolkien, or Umberto Eco for having low knowledge diversity because Amazon says they write books in only one or two genres! But fine, even assuming that, the actual effects are not strong. Looking at the figures, the scatter plots are all over the place, and the trend lines fit poorly. And finally, the main problem is: sure, if you compare hobbyists (who make what they want for fun) with professionals (who are making a product that needs to sell more than a small handful of copies), of course you're going to find that hobbyists are more free to experiment with wild permutations of mechanics. But in doing so, they conflate personal ability with situational constraints. What about professional designers if they were able to work without commercial constraints, like hobbyists?
质疑新颖性不等于质量，专业性的核心是稳定产出。
这类现象在各种创意领域都出现过，但它忽略了稳定性，而稳定性是专业性的主要标志。是的，如果你无视所有规则和规范，有时能想出遵循规则的人永远想不到的惊艳之作；但大多数时候只是垃圾。
jonplackett查看英文原文
This kind of thing has been shown in all sorts of creative endeavour. But it ignores consistency, which is the main mark of professionalism. Yeah, if you disregard all rules and norms sometimes you come up with something AMAZING that no-one following the rules could ever conceive of. But most of the the time it's just crap.
补充差异源于风险与激励结构，而非知识多样性。
专业设计师承受不起失败，所以做“安全”、很可能奏效的设计。这不是关于“知识多样性”的结果，而是关于激励的结果。
lmm查看英文原文
Professional designers can't afford failure, so they make "safe" designs that are likely to work. This isn't a result about "knowledge diversity", it's a result about incentives.
亲历跨领域亲历：商业约束会导致更保守、更通用的设计。
这不限于桌游设计。我做个人项目时可以很有创造力，做出好看的应用程序；但作为为别人工作的职业开发者，我必须遵循一些指南，结果可能是无聊、通用外观的东西。不过这种无聊通用的东西让我能稳定维持体面生活。
mkl95查看英文原文
This is not exclusive to board game design. When I work on a personal project, I can be really creative and produce some good looking applications. However, as a professional developer working for someone else, I have to follow some guidelines that can result in boring, generic-looking stuff. This boring, generic-looking stuff allows me to consistently make a decent living, though.
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- 2021Hacker News 讨论帖220 分 · 148 评
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