The Mechanics of Tension紧张感的机制

紧张、压力和悬念，好比是恐怖游戏的“面包”和“黄油”。最好的恐怖游戏总是慢慢地收紧紧张的线圈，然后在不完整的瞬间爆发中释放它。在某种程度上，这是参与感的极致：玩家如此着迷于游戏体验，以至于使自己的身体都变得紧张起来。Tension, stress, and suspense: these are the bread and butter of a scary game. The best horror games slowly tighten the coil of tension and then release it in short, incomplete bursts. In some ways it is the apex of engagement: the player is so enthralled with the experience that it causes him physical stress.

优秀的恐怖游戏都有自己的主题，它超越了廉价的鬼屋刺激。恐怖设计的目的就是使玩家的参与感最大化，并创造更深层次的情感投入。注意：最好的恐怖游戏会利用恐怖故事引人入胜的天然特点向玩家娓娓道来。恐怖游戏能够讲述其他类型的游戏可能无法讲述的主题，惊吓玩家的目的是让他们接受所有你想表达的其他东西。Good horror games have an agenda, and it goes beyond cheap haunted house titillation. Horror design is about maximizing player engagement and creating a deep emotional investment. Make no mistake: the best horror games use the engaging nature of scary content to speak to their players intimately. Horror games can address topics that other genres might not be able to support. The purpose of scaring the player is to allow them to be receptive to all the other things you want to say.

当然，游戏中的大多数“惊吓”并非直接来源于游戏设计，而是来源于恐怖故事本身。背景、气氛和角色是吸引玩家并使他们毛骨悚然的基础，但是游戏有

它自己独特的处理方式：玩家互动和游戏机制。在游戏中惊吓玩家的问题并不包含在故事叙述中，它延伸到了游戏设计的每个方面，这就是为什么在游戏中制造紧张感对游戏策划来说是如此有吸引力的原因。Of course, most of the scares in games are not the direct result of game design but rather of storytelling. Setting, atmosphere, and characters are fundamental to hooking the player and raising the hairs on their neck. But games have other tools at their disposal: player interaction and game mechanics. The problem of scaring the player in a video game is not contained to narrative. It extends to every aspect of the game design. This is why creation of tension in video games is a fascinating problem for game designers.

这篇文章所讨论的是恐怖游戏的机制，而非情节和叙事，是给你的故事带来冲击性的游戏系统设计，你可以把它当作一个我们在设计自己的恐怖游戏——《死亡秘密》时所尝试过的模式的总结。《死亡秘密》已经在十月份在 Gear

VR上市，明年年初将会登陆 Steam和 PS。这篇文章不是恐怖设计的注意事项，而是如何利用游戏机制制造紧张感的一些想法。This article is about the mechanics of scary video games. It is not about plot or narrative, but rather the design of game systems intended to give your story punch. You can read this as a summary of the patterns we experimented with when developing our mystery/horror game Dead Secret, which shipped for Gear VR in October and arrives on Steam and Playstation early next year. This isn’t intended to be a proscriptive document about horror design but rather short list of ideas for using game mechanics to build tension.

Pay Attention!注意下文所涉及的模式，其目的是让玩家忘记外面的世界而专注于眼前的游戏。Thomas Grip（《失忆症：黑暗后裔》、《活体脑细胞》）称这种状态为“存在感”——一种真实存在于游戏世界的感觉。这些模式的设计目的同样还包括让玩家保持轻微的不平衡。游戏机制通常是通过重复让玩家逐渐了解其运行规则，重复在某种意义上就像例行公事，而例行公事无疑是毫不费力的。为了吓住玩家，我们要让他相信他没有被控制，规则可能随时会因他改变，他对游戏的解读是根本不完全的。恐怖游戏一定要在给玩家制造这种容易受伤的虚弱的感觉不是随机发生和挫败之间保持一个很微妙的平衡。The intent of the patterns below is to make the player so focused on the video game in front of him that he forgets about the outside world. Thomas Grip (Amnesia: The Dark Descent, SOMA) calls this the “sense of presence,” the feeling of actually being in the game world. These patterns are also designed to keep the player slightly off-balance. Game mechanics are often about recognizing patterns through iteration. Iteration is a form of routine, and routines are comforting. To scare our player we need him to believe that he’s not in control, that the rules may change on him at any time, and that his read of the game is fundamentally incomplete. Horror games must maintain a delicate balance between creating this vulnerable, impotent feeling without coming off as random and frustrating.

Thinking in Context在场景中思考

作为一个恐怖游戏策划，你最重要的工作就是使玩家专注于恐怖故事的场景而不是游戏的后台系统。我们希望玩家将自己当作游戏的主角，而不仅仅是作为解决谜题的第三者。这一理念试图将玩家的思维模式从“解决系统问题”（思考数值、上下限、设计模式，甚至战术策略）转移到“解决场景问题”（“这个纸条是谁留下的？”“怎样才能离开这里？”）。这样的理念在其他类型的游戏里可能会被认为是“糟糕的设计”，因为它阻止了玩家试图像玩魔方一样去“解决”一个游戏。但这些规则是有意义的，因为玩魔方完全没有试图决定哪一个“古代遗迹”最有可能作为对抗有“很多名字的人”的武器来得可怕As a horror game designer your most important task is to focus the player on narrative context rather than underlying game systems. We want the player to be thinking as if he is his avatar rather than a third party solving a puzzle. Many of the ideas listed here try to move the player’s mode of thinking away from “systemic” problem solving (thinking about stats, min/maxing, design patterns, or even tactical strategy) to “contextual” problem solving (“who sent this note?” or “how do I get out of here?”). Some of these patterns are “bad design” in other genres because they prevent the player from attempting to “solve” the game like a Rubix Cube. But these rules have purpose: solving a Rubix Cube is a lot less scary than, say, trying to determine which Ancient Relics are most likely to serve as a weapon against He Who Has Many Names.

Meaningful Failure有意义的失败一种让玩家融入游戏环境的方法，就是使“失败”对玩家和他的角色来说都有意

义。游戏结束一般表现为主角的死亡，但我们怎么才能使虚拟角色的死亡和玩家有关呢？One way to align the player to the game context is to make failure meaningful to both the player and his avatar. Reaching Game Over usually means death for the protagonist, but how can we make a virtual avatar’s death relevant to the player?

一种普遍的方法就是不要在此处设置保存点，那样如果玩家死亡，他就会丢失进度。这是很有效的，尤其是当保存点本身很有趣时（比如《异形：隔离》的慢保存系统）。不过这种保存点的概念已经过时了，《黑暗之魂》是这种“以紧张作为进度成本”的系统的更为现代的版本。

A common approach is just to space save points out so that the player loses progress if they die. This is effective, especially when the save points themselves are interesting (see Alien: Isolation’s slow save point system), but the general concept of save points has fallen out of vogue. Dark Souls is a more modern version of this tension-as-progress-cost system.

Another method is to make the actual failing stressful. Indie horror games Five Nights at Freddy’s and Slender do this by combining failure with an in-your-face pop-out scare (see below). We chose this method in Dead Secret to allow for save-anywhere behavior.

This model uses the threat of a startling event to stress the player out about surviving.

另一种方法就是让失败也给玩家带来惊吓。独立恐怖游戏《玩具熊的五夜后宫》和《Slender》选择了将失败与具有挑衅性的弹出式的惊吓（下文）相结合，我们在《死亡秘密》中也选择了这种方式，不过玩家可以在任何地方保存进度。这种模型让失败也变得吓人，从而迫使玩家想方设法生存下去。

Rule Obfuscation规则困惑隐藏游戏运行中的数值，迫使玩家结合游戏场景思考，而不是考虑和游戏系统本身有关的问题。如“我还有多少生命值？”“敌人能看见我吗？”“这是正确的前进方向吗？”“这个 Boss需要多少枪才能干掉？”在其他类型的游戏中，一个好的 UI一般会直接给予玩家这些信息，而对于恐怖游戏，最好是通过一些抽象的环境因素来显示这些数据。比如说，《生化危机》和《寂静岭》系列习惯使用“健康”、“警告”、“危险”这样笼统的分类来描述生命值，虽然它们也像其他游戏一样在后台监测着 HP。《生化危机》同时使用角色动作来抽象地表达生命值，当主角前倾并捂着他的肚子，你也许不能确切地知道你离死亡到底有多近，但你肯定知道撑不了多久了。Hiding the numbers that run the game simulation forces the player to think in context rather than systemically. How much health do I have left? Can the enemy see me? Is this the right way to go? How many shots will this boss take to bring down? In other

genres giving the player easy access to this information is generally considered good UI. For horror games, it’s better to only reveal data through some contextual abstraction. For example, Resident Evil and Silent Hill have traditionally used rough categories to display health (“Fine,” “Caution,” “Danger”), even though under the hood 在后台 they track hit points like every other game. Resident Evil also uses character animation to communicate health. You might not be able to tell how close you are to death, but when the protagonist bends forward and holds their stomach you know it’s pretty bad.

隐藏信息和规则可以防止玩家在游戏中绘制一条安全路线（译者：这样的路线通常是缺乏游戏性的），这也给游戏带来了不确定性，当玩家不能确切地知道后台程序是怎样工作的时候，他只能依靠环境和情节来做出决定。Hiding information and rules prevents the player from charting a safe route through the game via min/maxing. It also removes certainty from any given system. When the player can’t be sure exactly how an underlying system works he must rely on the environment and story to inform his decisions.在《死亡秘密》中，我尝试通过移除“安全屋”的概念来达到这个目的，游戏中没有一个地方可以保证玩家是没有危险的。游戏中的敌人——一个带着头巾和面具的杀手，会在任何地方、任何时候出现，至少，我希望玩家是这么认为的。In Dead Secret I tried to do this by removing the concept of a “safe room.” There is no space where the player can be sure that they are out of harm’s way. The antagonist, a hooded killer in a Noh mask, can show up anywhere, at any time. At least, that’s what I’d like the player to believe.

Heart Rate Elevation

心率加快有一项可靠的心理学研究表明，当人处在生理觉醒的状态时更容易受到惊吓，其原理是被称为“唤醒的错误归因”的大脑错觉（译者：自行科普“吊桥效应”）。它需要一种兴奋的生理状态，此时玩家的心率上升，肾上腺素加速分泌，并开始流汗。当恐怖的画面出现在电视上时，处于这种状态的玩家可能会受到一种错误的情绪影响，大脑有可能会误将这种状态当作是对恐惧的生理反应，而使他真的感到害怕。There is some pretty solid research that suggests that people are more likely to feel scared if they are in a state of physical arousal. The mechanism involved is a brain hack called “misattribution of arousal.” It requires an elevated physiological state, which means the player’s heart rate is up, adrenaline is pumping, and he’s starting to sweat. When paired with scary content coming out of the TV, a player in this state may be susceptible to a “false” emotion. There’s a chance that his brain will mistake the physical response for fear and actually cause him to become afraid.

“错误的归因”是一种强有力的情绪控制形式，但它有严格的要求：它只在人主观上没有意识到自己处于被唤醒状态时才起作用。心理学家通过给实验对象注射肾上腺素证明了这一点，肾上腺素所制造的虚假情绪只有在实验对象不知道对他们做了什么时才起作用。要在游戏中使用“错误的归因”，你一定要让玩家在没有察觉的情况下兴奋起来。Misattribution is a powerful form of emotional control. But it has a critical requirement: it only works when the subject is not cognizant their own state of arousal. Psychologists showed this in tests by giving shots of adrenaline to subjects. Synthesizing false emotions was only possible when the subject didn’t know what they’d been dosed with. To use misattribution in a game you must get your player excited without him realizing it.

“沙赫特-辛格双因素模型”将情绪描述为自动唤醒和环境因素的产物，当大脑把一些现成的环境因素作为生理唤醒的原因时，错误的归因就会出现。The Schachter-Singer Two-Factor model describes emotion as the product of autonomic arousal and a contextual label. Misattribution can occur when brain uses some readily available context as justification for physical arousal.

一种常用的悄无声息地提升玩家的生理状态的方法，是使用困难而且不可预测的游戏系统。比如，使用一个能够调动情绪的高风险战斗模型，在这个模型中，只要玩家的守卫挂了，任何低等级的敌人都可能打败玩家。《生化危机》的资源定量配给以及令人尴尬的控制使得每一次与敌人遭遇都充满戏剧性；《死魂曲》则把玩家削弱到每一次战斗都是生死决斗的程度。同样的道理，困难的按键操作，比如说实体按键，似乎也是可以采用的。比如《牺牲之夜》——一款无聊的房间游戏，成功地做到了比它预期的更吓人，因为它强迫你在Wii的平衡板上行走，这无疑加快了你的心跳。A common way to subtly elevate the player’s physiological state is with difficult, unpredictable game systems. Condemned, for example, uses a visceral, high-stakes combat model. Any lowly enemy might defeat the player if he lets his guard down. Resident Evil’s resource rationing and awkward controls make every encounter dramatic. Siren disempowers the player to such a degree that combat always a risky move. Difficult physical activities, such as hard-core button mashing, seem applicable as well. This train of thought ends in some pretty off-the-wall ideas. Night of Sacrifice, a ho-hum haunted house game, manages to be scarier than it should be because it forces you to

walk in place on the Wii Balance Board, which raises your heart rate.下一次当你在玩一个困难游戏时，不妨先休息一会，然后检查一下手掌中的汗，看你是不是抓手柄抓得太紧了？你的心是不是在猛跳？如果是，你可能处于一种屏幕上的内容比其他时候更能影响你的状态。Next time you find yourself playing a hard game, take a break and check your palms for sweat. Have you been gripping the controller a little too hard? Is your heart racing? If so, you might be in a state in which the content on the screen is more affecting that it would otherwise be.

Character Design角色设计玩家肯定会感受到他所扮演的角色的恐惧，所以你需要一个很容易处于危险之中的角色，你所设计的角色会影响游戏的核心玩法，尤其是战斗和敌人的设计。要让一个强大的角色感到危险，你需要一个更强大的敌人。要不要制作以一个优秀的雇佣兵（他能从二楼破窗而出，也能把手榴弹从呼吸用的孔扔进屋里）为主角的恐怖游戏？The player must feel scared for his avatar, and therefore you need a character that is easy to put in danger. The design of your protagonist affects other gameplay systems, particularly combat and enemy design. To make a powerful character feel threatened you’ll need an enemy that is even more capable and overpowering. Making a horror game about a hot-shit mercenary who can jump out of second story windows and throw grenades through holes he’s just blown in doors? Fine, but you’ll need to come up with a threat so large and scary that even your ninja

gunman is overwhelmed. You might need to kick him down a few notches or take away his guns just to keep your enemy design reasonable. Resident Evil’s penchant for elite police officers correlates directly to the series’ love of giant tentacle monsters.可以，但你同时需要设计出一个强大到能够压倒你的角色的敌人，你可能需要削弱角色的等级，或者拿掉他的手枪，从而让你的敌人设计得更加合理。《生化危机》对于精英警察的偏爱与他们对巨型触手丧尸的迷恋有着直接关系。

相反，一个畏首畏尾的角色或者一个正常的角色更容易被威胁到。《寂静岭》采用普通人作为游戏角色，因为这些角色看起来更不可能在他们所处的严酷考验中生存下来。这个系列更热衷于木棍而不是手枪，因为使用木棍不会让这些角色强大多少。《失忆症：黑暗后裔》让玩家扮演一个手持油灯的考古学家——根本不是那种我们认为能够战胜终极邪恶的角色，《零红蝶》和《钟楼惊魂》则几乎是特意让女学生单独出现在一个恐怖的地方，《死魂曲》则以老师、学生以及其他普通人为主角。这些游戏的战斗和敌人设计则与玩家在游戏中的身份相匹配，许多敌人甚至不会反击。

Conversely, a disempowered or “normal” character is much easier to threaten. Silent Hill goes for average men and women because these characters seem less likely to survive the ordeal they find themselves in. The series prefers bludgeons to guns, as wielding these weapons does not give the characters too much power. Amnesia: The Dark Descent casts the player as an archaeologist with an oil lamp — hardly the sort we’d expect to overcome ultimate evil. Fatal Frame and Clock Tower use school girls alone in scary places almost exclusively. Siren’s cast features teachers, students, and other unextraordinary people. The combat and enemy design of these games feed back into the player’s in-game identity. Many of these titles don’t even provide a way to fight back.

在《死亡秘密》中，主角 Patricia是个傲慢的而且生存能力很强的人，为了削弱她而又不限制她的个性、才智和雄心壮志，我们选择让她的一只手缠上绷带。

In Dead Secret, it was important that Patricia, the protagonist, be a self-sufficient and highly effective individual. To disempower her without curbing her attitude, intelligence, or gung-ho nature, we put her arm in a sling.

Pop-Out Scares弹出式惊吓弹出式惊吓就是一个意在使玩家大吃一惊的突发事件。许多玩家很讨厌弹出式惊吓，因为很难躲避，即使你知道它们就要来了，但还是会让你吓一跳。弹出式惊吓效果显著但缺乏生命力，也很容易使玩家感到疲劳，因此许多玩家将其视为廉价的游戏机制，一种游戏没有能力制造更加细节多样的惊吓的标志。

A pop-out scare is an sudden event intended to startle the viewer. Many players hate pop-out scares because they are hard to avoid. They can give you a jolt even if you know that they are coming. Pop-outs are effective but short-lived, and they tire the viewer out. Many players consider pop-out scares to be cheap mechanisms, the mark of a game without the legs to produce a more nuanced variety of fear.

我认为只要使用得当，弹出式惊吓就能达到很棒的效果。它的目的是转动紧张感的曲柄，它是需要一段时间预热才起作用的恐惧气氛的基础，它提醒玩家最好正襟危坐并保持专心，这种专心让玩家更容易受到随后有细微差别的袭击的影响I think that pop-out scares have great utility when used properly. The purpose of the pop-out scare is to wind the tension crank. It’s a primer 入门书，底漆 for slow-burning atmospheric fear 恐惧气氛 that takes a while to get going. The pop-out scare sends the message that the player had better sit up straight and pay attention. This focus makes them much more susceptible to a nuanced assault thereafter.

弹出式惊吓的目的并不是真的让玩家感到害怕，而是让他们担心下一个惊吓的出现，理想的情况是，不会有下一个。弹出式惊吓太多则会使你努力营造的紧张氛围过早的释放，太少则会使玩家在进入你营造的氛围之前就失去兴趣。在游戏初期，一两个惊吓点就足够让玩家在接下来的游戏过程中时刻提防。The point of a pop-out scare is not to actually scare the player but to make him worry about the next pop-out scare. Ideally, there should never be a next one. Too many pop-out scares and the tension you’ve worked so hard to coil is prematurely released. Too few and the player might lose interest before you really get your hooks in them. One or two startling events early in the game are enough to put the player on their toes for the rest of their play through.

这一模式的典型例子就是《生化危机》中第一只丧尸犬的攻击，玩了几分钟后，丧尸犬会突然破窗而入，吓玩家一跳。这一场景在《生化危机》中的效果堪称完美，因为它让玩家明白不能相信世界是没有危险的，它暗示玩家敌人可能会在任何时间突然袭击。这种惊吓在《生化危机重制版》中做的甚至更好，因为在重制版上市之前所有人都知道了丧尸犬，袭击在他们意料之中。但事实是，重制版中丧尸犬并没有出现。你以为它们会出现，而且当你经过窗户时有几块玻璃破裂了，但丧尸犬并没有出现。这同样达到了弹出式惊吓的效果，而且保持了新鲜感。这传达了另一个信息——游戏中的内容已经改变，当你知道改变了什么时你已经被吓住了。

The quintessential example of this pattern is Resident Evil’s first zombie dog attack. The dogs come jumping through the windows after a few minutes of play, startling the player. This moment works beautifully in Resident Evil,because it teaches the player that they cannot trust the world to be static. It suggests that enemies could come crashing down on them at any point. This scare is even better in the Resident Evil Remake. By the time that game shipped 上 市 everybody knew about the zombie dog sequence and was expecting it. But in the remake, the dogs don’t appear. You expect them to, and a bit of glass cracks off the window as you pass, but there are no zombie dogs. This takes the pop-out scare and twists it in a way that keeps it fresh and effective. The new message it sends is “we’ve changed things, and you’re not going to know how until it’s too late.” It’s a smart way to keep the player on their toes, which was the point in the first place.这是一种使玩家保持警惕的聪明的办法，这是设计中最关键的一点。

我不会告诉你们在《死亡秘密》中我们是怎么做的，因为这会让游戏失去悬念。

I’m not going to tell you what we do in Dead Secret because that would spoil things.

Negative Space留白在你的背景故事、关卡设计和游戏机制中为玩家留下想象的空间，给他们提供线索和提示，但是不要试图解释每件事情，这不仅是一种很好的叙述手段，也是驱使玩家专注于场景思考的方法。如果玩家正忙于分析关于谁有动机在温室用烛台杀害 Plumb 教授的线索，那他们很可能就不会考虑将你的游戏分解成一张真值表了。（译者：因为他们知道的信息太多了）

Leave space in your narrative, level design, and game mechanics to allow for player imagination. Provide the player with clues 线索 and hints 提示, but resist the urge to explain everything. Not only is this a good narrative tactic, it also serves to focus the player on contextual modes of thought. If the player is busy parsing clues

about who had a motive to kill Professor Plumb in the conservatory 音 乐学校 with the candlestick 烛台 , hopefully they won’t be thinking about decomposing your game into a truth table.留白也给玩家提供了重玩游戏的动力，比如另一种结局，还没有达成的成就，各种各样的其他存档等等。千万不要低估玩家想要榨干游戏的每个方面的决心，但不要直接显露你的目的。Negative space also creates motivation for replays, alternative endings, esoteric achievements, and all sorts of other retention systems. Do not underestimate the player’s wish to consume every last bit of the story, but never, ever show your hand.

Perception Hacks知觉扰乱一旦玩家开始从场景思考你的游戏，一种进一步提高紧张感的方法就是知觉扰乱，知觉扰乱就是一个一次性或者短期的游戏规则的修改，它足够微妙以至于玩家无法确定它是否发生了。如果操作得当，知觉扰乱会使人深感不安，因为它使玩家和游戏之间的基本交互都变得不可信了。

Once the player is thinking contextually about your game, one way to further increase tension is with perception hacks. A perception hack is a one-off or short-term modification of the game rules that is subtle enough that the player can’t be sure it is happening. When executed properly, perception hacks are deeply unsettling because they suggest that even the basic interface between the game and the player is unreliable and untrustworthy.《永恒的黑暗》是运用“知觉扰乱”的典型，它的特色是“第四破壁”这一不合常理的效果，这个效果不断变化而且非常有效（至少在第一次）。不过许多游戏使用的是更加难以察觉的知觉扰乱。在《回声之夜》中，游戏角色在其中

一个房间里比正常情况下走得要慢，这是个微妙的把戏，让这个房间感觉非常压抑。《寂静岭 4》中，当玩家接近一道门时，前进方向上的第三人称镜头就开始扭曲，这使得入口位置可以提前被感知。当玩家的视线离开某些物体时，甚至可以移走它们。《零红蝶 4》有时会将标准的物品收集动画搭配突然跳出的某个吓人的东西。The poster child for perception hacks is Eternal Darkness, which features fourth-wall-breaking insanity effects. The effects vary and are quite effective (at least the first time). But many games use subtler versions of the same idea. In Echo Night: Beyond, there is a room in which the character walks more slowly than normal. It’s a subtle trick, and it makes the room feel oppressive. Silent Hill 4’s third-person camera starts to twist about its forward vector as the player approaches a door, making the entrance feel foreboding. Condemned moves objects when you look away from them, and Fatal Frame 4occasionally co-ops the standard item collection animation with a pop-out event.知觉扰乱在低频使用时是最有效的，如同弹出式惊吓一样，它们迫使玩家时刻保持警惕和专注。允许这些微妙的元素被错过也是同样重要的，一定要让玩家觉得它们是很自然的，是可能发生在游戏的任何阶段的。虽然这意味着一些玩家可能会错过你的一些绝妙的惊吓元素，但他们一旦偶然遇到这些元素，将会有一种更令人信服的体验。Perception hacks are most effective when used infrequently. As with pop-out scares, they force the player to remain alert and focused. It’s also important to allow these sorts of subtle events to be missed. They must feel organic and natural, as if they could happen at any point in the game. Though this means that some players may miss your clever scare event, those that encounter it will have a much more convincing experience.在《死亡秘密》中，我们使用知觉扰乱让镜子变得不合常理，然后确保游戏发生的房间到处都是这种镜子。In Dead Secret we used perception hacks to make mirrors seem untrustworthy. Then we made sure that there are mirrors all over the house in which the game takes place.

Sound Design声音设计很难夸大声音设计在恐怖游戏中的价值，上述许多模型没有声音也能够单独起作用。一个老练的声音设计员能够让即使最平淡的地方都变得令人不安，恐怖音效设计的细节不在本文的范围之内，但把声音或者音乐作为情绪表达的基本方式是值得考虑的。你为你的游戏设定背景音乐的基调，然后用声音来暗示情绪反应，从这方面来看，恐怖游戏的声音设计比美术和图像更为重要。It’s difficult to overstate the value of sound design in horror games. Many of the patterns above can be executed with sound alone, and a skilled sound designer can make even the blandest space feel ominous. The ins and outs of horror sound design are beyond the scope of this article, but it’s worth thinking of sound (and music) as your primary method for emotional messaging. You set the tone for your game and suggest an emotional response情绪反应 with sound. In this respect sound design is more important to horror games than art and graphics.在《死亡秘密》中，我们为每个房间都设计了独具特色的声音，我们创造了独一无二的音效、混响设置和脚步声效果，更不用说每个单独场景的背景声音，我的目标就是赋予每个房间一个有微妙差别的主题，一个当玩家再次进入房间就能马上意识到的声音标记。根据不同的房间，我们还使用音乐和抽象的音调来调节紧张的程度。我们发现许多“嗡嗡”的低音刺激比高音刺激效果更好，而研磨的声音能够显著地增加紧张感。最后，我们用Oculus的免费 3D Audio SDK来加强音频的立体感。In Dead Secret we designed each room to have a distinctive sound. We created unique ambient sounds, reverb settings, footfall effects, not to mention environmental sounds for each individual space. My goal was to give every room a subtle theme, an aural watermark that the player would recognize when revisiting rooms. Depending on the room, we also use music and abstract tones to ratchet tension up and down. We found that boomy stingers with a lot of bass 低音 worked better than stingers

with lots of treble 高音, and that abrasive研磨 sounds can increase tension dramatically. Finally, we spatialized our audio using Oculus’ free 3D Audio SDK.

Holistic Experience整体体验Though we put a lot of effort into making Dead Secret 死亡秘密 a creepy game, we did not anticipate how effective some players would find it. It’s difficult to predict how the various horror mechanics in your game will operate on a fresh pair of eyes. In our case, Dead Secret is apparently much scarier than I gave it credit for. I underestimated the power of some of the small additions we made near the end of development to the overall feeling of the game. Your horror game is a holistic experience, and while it’s hard to point at any one mechanic and claim that it creates tension in isolation, the sum of all these parts may surprise you.虽然我们投入了大量的经历去制作《死亡秘密》这一款惊悚游戏，但我们无法预见玩家能体会到多少其中的恐怖气氛，也很难预测游戏中的不同恐怖机制在一名玩家刚刚接触这类游戏时会怎么运作。《死亡秘密》显然比我所认为的还要吓人，我低估了我们在开发的结束阶段所加入的一些小细节对游戏整体感觉的效果。恐怖游戏带来的是一种整体体验，很难挑出单独的某一个机制说仅仅是它创造了紧张的感觉，所有机制的结合才会给你带来惊喜。Suspense and tension are hard feelings for games to generate. To scare the player and keep them scared you need to work full time, attacking their senses from every possible angle. The best horror games knock their players off balance with core game mechanics and then focus their attention on a scary narrative. You must think of every mechanic, every artistic choice, as in service to the

greater goal of keeping the player focused and feeling disempowered.

悬念和紧张是游戏中很难产生的情绪，你需要投入大量的时间，惊吓玩家并使他们保持恐惧，从任何可能的角度刺激他们的感官。最好的恐怖游戏能让玩家忘记核心的游戏机制，而只专注于恐怖的故事。你必须思考每一个技巧，每一项艺术选择，服务于更大的目标——使玩家保持专注并感受到安全感的丧失。

Horror isn’t easy, but the level of engagement参与程度 it offers is worth the work. It is an opportunity to have conversations with your audience that would otherwise be impossible.恐怖并不简单，但它所带来的参与程度配得上你的付出，这是一个其他游戏元素无法实现的与玩家对话的机会。