《科学美国人》评出2010年改变世界的十大创意和技术——游戏人生

原作者：
来源The Game of Life
译者saintson

The Game of Life

游戏人生

Bringing joysticks and scoreboards into our daily routine may be the key to making us better people by John Pavlus

将游戏手柄和记分牌引入我们的日常生活，或许是让我们变得更好的关键所在。约翰·帕夫卢斯撰

one day soon, as you stand in front of the bathroom mirror brushing your teeth, you may see, alongside the morning headlines, a scoreboard that ranks your household’s current carbon footprint versus your neighbors’. Your electric toothbrush will beep to notify you that dutiful brushing twice a day every day for the past six months has earned you enough points for a 10 percent discount on your next checkup. You take a shower (a brief one, so as not to jeopardize your family’s enviable energyconsumption score and the tax benefits it confers), get dressed and log in at your home-office computer for the morning meeting. Now that you and your co-workers appear on-screen as personalized avatars, you can answer your e-mail during meetings without appearing rude. And ever since arbitrary sales quotas were replaced with personalized “life meters” (which swell onscreen to reflect real-time, positive feedback from your clients), you’ve felt more purpose and ownership over your daily tasks. It’s going to be a great day.  

将来某一天，当你浴室刷牙的时候，你会从你面前的镜子中看到新闻头条，旁边还有一个记分牌，上面列出了你与邻居目前的“家庭碳足迹”排名。你的电动牙刷会发出声音，提醒你注意一天保证刷两次牙，会让你在过去的6个月中，赚得足够分数，以获得下一次健康体检的9折优惠。你洗完澡（一个简短的淋浴，否则会影响家庭令人羡慕的能耗分数以及它带来的税收减免），穿好衣服，登陆家庭-办公计算机，参加公司晨会，因为你和同事都以个性化的头像出现在电脑屏幕上，所以你可以边参与讨论边回复邮件，完全不必担心失礼。另外，自从个性化的“生活测定计”（你客户的积极反馈会实时显示在屏幕上）取代了随意的销售配额，你会感觉生活更有目标，更能掌控自己每天的任务，这一天也将会变得非常顺利。

A future in which almost every aspect of your life includes a gamelike experience is all but inevitable, says videogame designer and Carnegie Mellon University researcher Jesse Schell. He and a bevy of game designers and psychologists are convinced that the key to a society of healthier, more productive and more engaged citizens lies in bringing gaming into daily life. “We think of games as trivial, but they’re really just a way of rapidly engaging our problemsolving abilities,” Schell says. “If the game is designed well enough, any problem can go in there,” from changing your diet or learning a new language to understanding Middle East conflicts or reducing your carbon footprint. “These are problems that many of us can’t or don’t want to engage with, but games can change that because, by definition, any successful interactive system will make people want to engage.”  

在未来生活的方方面面不可避免地带有游戏一般的体验。电子游戏设计师、美国卡内基·梅隆大学研究人员杰西· 谢尔如是说，他和一群游戏设计师以及心理学家坚信，使公民更健康、提高工作效率、更有事可做的关键是将游戏引入生活。谢尔说：“我们通常认为游戏不值一提，但它们实际上是一种能快速提高解决问题能力的方式，如果游戏设计得足够好，任何问题都可以从中解决”，不论是改变饮食，或者学习一门新的语言，还是理解中东冲突，抑或是减少碳足迹。“这些都是很多人不能或者不想参与的，但是游戏可以改变这一切，因为从理论上讲，任何成功的交互系统都会使人们愿意参与其中。”

An essential ingredient of this new game of life is the proliferation of realtime data from GPS-enabled mobile devices, cheap networked sensors and other technologies. “All of this personalized data lets us start measuring behaviors that we could only measure in games or virtual worlds before,” says Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We can see what motivates and engages people in great detail and apply that knowledge to things that people don’t often find engaging, like remembering to take medication or keeping track of energy use.”  

享受这一新型游戏般的人生，需要实现实时数据的增殖，有一些技术装备就是必不可少的，包括可以全球卫星定位的移动装置、便宜的联网传感器和其他技术。美国麻省理工学院行为经济学家丹·阿里利说：“所有这些个性化数据使我们可以开始测量一些在以前只能在游戏或者虚拟世界中测量的行为，我们可以极其详细地看出是人类参与各类活动的动机是什么，并将这些知识应用到于人们参与度不高的事中，例如按时吃药或者关注能源消耗等。”

“Game-ifying” a real-world system still requires more than just adding avatars and points. It requires fast, personalized feedback. Effective games “harness basic human motivational tendencies in elegant ways,” points out clinical psychologist Richard Ryan. Points, for example, aren’t rewards as much as a method of supplying real-time feedback for building competence. “Human beings are curious animals with a natural drive to play and master their environments,” Ryan observes. “Games do a good job of tapping into the intrinsic motivation that’s built into us by evolution.” According to psychologists,tapping those intrinsic incentives makes us feel as though we’re in control and that our actions have understandable consequences.  

将现实世界这个系统“游戏化”需要的不仅仅是添加一个头像和分数，还需要快速且个性化的反馈。临床心理学家理查德·瑞恩指出，有效游戏“能以一种优雅的方式驾驭基本的人类动机倾向”。例如实时反馈比分数更利于建立人们的竞争力。瑞恩观察到，“人类是一种充满好奇心的动物，与生俱来的天性就是游戏并掌控周围的环境。游戏有助于深入从进化论的角度了解人类的内在动机。”据心理学家所说，了解那些内在动机让我们感觉好像一切尽在掌握，我们行为的结果就变得可以理解了。

Yet games that work well in theory can quickly turn frustrating and counterproductive, Schnell admits. He even has a name for a future in which this kind of motivational backfiring becomes common: “the gamepocalypse.” The best insurance against it, he says, is to build bridges between talented game designers and technology leaders outside the entertainment field. Psychologist and games expert Byron Reeves agrees: “There are no psychological mechanisms that work for games that don’t work in real life. We have only one brain. The reward centers that are lit up by well-designed games will light up when we engage with any well-designed interactive system. They don’t have to be labeled ‘games’ with a capital ‘G.’ ”  

然而，谢尔也承认，理论上好的到了现实中很快就会变得令人沮丧，甚至适得其反。未来这种情况将很普遍，他甚至还为之命名为“游戏末日”。他说道，为了防止这一现象发生，最好的办法是为有才华的游戏设计师和娱乐界外的技术精英搭建一座沟通交流的桥梁。心理学家兼游戏专家拜伦·里夫斯对此表示赞同：“所有在游戏中有效的心理机制都适用于现实生活。我们只有一个大脑。如果精心设计的游戏会晖映在它的奖赏中枢，那么同样精心设计的交互系统也一样可以做到这一点。它们就没有必要给'游戏'贴上一个大写'G'的标签。”

That’s why researchers are optimistic about game-ification as a means of radically improving our world. Microsoft has used a gamelike program to increase employee retention in one division by 50 percent. First Things First, an experimental math curriculum used in five schools in Kansas and Texas, presents high school algebra and geometry as a series of 101 levels, encouraging students to master basic concepts at their own pace before moving up, as in a video game. In the four years since the program was implemented, all five schools have seen students register double-digit increases in state math tests; students at one school improved their scores by nearly 40 percent. Ryan is collaborating with Immersyve, a health care game consultancy, on creating a “virtual clinician” that uses an avatar-driven interface to make patients feel less intimidated when seeking medical consultations.  

研究者对把游戏作为一种从根本上改造世界的方式持乐观态度原因就在于此。微软公司利用一款类似游戏的软件，使一个部门的员工专注度提高了50%。在堪萨斯州和得克萨斯州的5 所学校开展了一个称作“要事第一”的实验性数学课程，将高中代数和几何知识划分为101 个等级，鼓励学生像玩电子游戏一样，先根据自己的进度掌握基本概念，然后再升级。自从这一项目实施以后的4 年里，在州数学考试中，所有5 个学校的学生的成绩都有了两位数的增长，其中一所学校的学生成绩提高了将近40%。瑞恩正在与一个叫做“Immersyve”的健康护理游戏咨询公司合作，开展一个名为“虚拟临床医生”的项目。此项目利用头像引导的界面，减少患者在问诊时的恐惧感。

“The game-ification of everything is not going to happen because of one system—it’s going to be a million different innovations in hundreds of directions, every time some new sensor gets invented,” Schell says. Each one making us a little bit better.

谢尔说，“一切事物的游戏化，不会因为某个系统的出现而突然发生——这一过程将依赖数百个方向上的数以百万计的创新，每时每刻都涌现出某种新的传感器的发明，”每一项创新都会让我们更好一点点。

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