意淫遊戲大作《我的世界》爲誰打造

Last week, American tanks rolled into Denmark and the Stars and Stripes were hoisted over a park in downtown Copenhagen. But you will not have seen this particular invasion on the news. It happened in the pixelated world of the video game Minecraft.

前一陣子，美國坦克駛入丹麥，星條旗在哥本哈根市中心的一座公園升起。但是你在新聞上看不到有關此次入侵的消息。這件事發生在電子遊戲《我的世界》(Minecraft)的像素世界裏。

Minecraft is an oddity in today’s games industry, where there are two shortcuts to making a smash hit. The first is to develop a smartphone or tablet game whose simple puzzles get dramatically harder after a few hours. The developer can make the game itself free, then tempt players to pay up when they get stuck on a tricky level and want to skip ahead. This is the business model behind King, maker of Candy Crush, and Zynga, creator of FarmVille.

《我的世界》是當今遊戲業的一個另類。在遊戲業躥紅有兩個捷徑。第一個捷徑是開發一款難度在開玩數小時後急劇增加的智能手機或平板電腦遊戲。遊戲開發商可以推出一款本身是免費的遊戲，然後誘使玩家付費，以跳過不易攻略的關卡。這是King和Zynga兩家公司的經營模式，前者是《糖果粉碎傳奇》(Candy Crush)的製造商，後者是《FarmVille》的創造者。

The second approach is to spend millions on a console game with a huge marketing budget, high-tech graphics and perhaps even some Hollywood talent (Kevin Spacey stars in the latest Call of Duty). It is a high-risk strategy with potentially high rewards: Grand Theft Auto 5 clocked up $1bn in sales in its first three days when it was released last September.

第二種方法是投入大筆資金開發單機遊戲，並投入龐大預算進行營銷，以繪有高科技圖形海報做宣傳，甚至是邀請好萊塢巨星參演（凱文•斯佩西(Kevin Spacey)就在《使命召喚》(Call of Duty)最新款遊戲中擔任主角）。這種策略風險大，回報也高：去年9月發佈的《俠盜獵車手5》(Grand Theft Auto 5)在開售3天內就取得了高達10億美元的銷售業績。

Minecraft is altogether more wholesome. A stealthy success, it now counts 100m users without the snazzy graphics and steroidal storylines of a studio blockbuster, or the time-wasting ease of a mobile game. You start in a blocky landscape of trees, flowers and earth. There is no tutorial level to ease you in and no prompt telling you what to do, yet somehow you work out how to build an elaborate world. Then, at night, the monsters come out.

《我的世界》總體來說更爲健康。它悄無聲息地取得了成功，現在有1億玩家，但它沒有通常的遊戲鉅製裏炫目的畫面或故事情節，也不像手機遊戲那樣允許玩家悠哉地花大把時間攻略。你在一片只有樹木、花朵和土地的斑駁地貌上開始了遊戲。沒有練習模式供你練手，也沒有提示框告訴你要去做什麼，然而你在不知不覺中摸索出了一套創建複雜世界的方法。到了晚上，怪物開始出沒。

The uncompromising interface is probably why so many parents are baffled by their children’s love of Minecraft. (The game’s primary audience is boys between 11 and 16.) Neither a violent power fantasy nor a mindless button-mashing cartoon, Minecraft is more like Lego – and by that I mean the Lego of my childhood, a squat tub full of bricks, not a special £70 kit tied to a movie. It is about imagination, and – just as important – the long, slow process of turning your imagination into reality.

許多家長對孩子熱衷《我的世界》百思不得其解，很可能是因爲其遊戲界面有些單一。（該遊戲的主要受衆是11-16歲間的男孩子。）《我的世界》既不是一款“武力制霸”的幻想遊戲，也不是一款漫不經心地點點鼠標就能通關的卡通遊戲，它更像是樂高——我是指我兒時那種的一大桶樂高積木，而不是與某部電影綁定的標價70英磅的專款積木套裝。它是關於想象力的遊戲，且同樣重要的是，它是一款關於將想象付諸現實這一漫長緩慢過程的遊戲。

Minecraft does not come with predetermined goals. Most of the biggest worlds were made in “creative” mode, where you have instant access to all the textures items available in the game and you never run out of life. But there is also a “survival” mode, where even the sword you need to fight off Zombie Pigmen has to be forged from planks and ingots.

《我的世界》不預先設定目標。大多數規模最大的世界是在“創造”模式下創建的，在“創造”模式中，玩家可以及時獲得遊戲中出現的所有種類的方塊，而且你永遠不會玩完。而在“生存”模式中，即使是用來擊退殭屍豬人的劍也需要玩家用木板和鑄塊來鍛造。

You can build anything. Minecraft players have made cruise liners, rocket ships and even basic computers, as well as pixel-perfect recreations of Minas Tirith in Lord of the Rings. The version of Denmark recently plundered by American users’ tanks was created by a Danish government agency to show off its mapping data; the one terabyte download was so popular that extra servers had to be installed to deal with demand. (The agency reacted stoically to the destruction of its model and has pledged to reboot it from scratch. As one user pointed out on the Minecraft forums, Vikings are no strangers to destruction.)

你可以建造任何東西。《我的世界》玩家已經造出了遊輪、火箭船甚至是初級計算機，還用像素完美還原出了《指環王》中的米那斯提力斯城堡(Minas Tirith)。近日被美國玩家的坦克攻陷的丹麥國模型，是一家丹麥官方機構爲顯示其地圖數據的強大而創建的，該模型在玩家中大受歡迎，容量有1TB，開發商不得不安裝額外的服務器來滿足玩家的下載需求。（該丹麥機構對其模型遭毀給出了堅忍的迴應，保證要重新建造一個新模型。就如一位玩家在Minecraft論壇指出的那樣，維京人對破壞並不陌生。）

To those who hope that the computer games industry has something to offer beyond beefcake soldiers and money-grabbing puzzles, this cybernetic dreamscape is cause for optimism. In 2013, its developer Mojang made profits of SKr816m (about £74m), and employed 39 people. It has rejected the quick cash-in IPO in favour of slowly developing new titles. As a result, the Minecraft community is thriving, with stars such as Joseph Garrett, 23, who has earned enough from the 159m monthly views of his YouTube tutorials to quit his day job.

對那些期望電腦遊戲業除猛男士兵和撈錢的智力遊戲之外還能提供某些新東西的人來說，他們有理由對此款由玩家操控建造夢境之地的遊戲感到樂觀。2013年，該遊戲的開發商Mojang只僱傭了39名職員，卻創造了8.16億瑞典克朗（合7400萬英鎊）的利潤。它摒棄了通過上市籌得快錢的道路，而選擇慢條斯理地開發新遊戲。《我的世界》玩家隊伍因而發展壯大，23歲的約瑟夫•加勒特(Joseph Garrett)就是其中一名明星玩家，他在YouTube上的視頻教程有1.59億的月點擊量，他因而獲得了可觀的收入，也辭掉了日常工作。

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell attributes part of Bill Gates’s success to having been born at the right time to take advantage of the Altair 8800, an early do-it-yourself computer kit. The popularity of Minecraft offers the same sort of opportunity to today’s children: the next Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid is probably building their own private city somewhere in its landscape right now, block by block.

在《異類》(Outliers)一書中，馬爾科姆•格拉德韋爾(Malcolm Gladwell)將比爾•蓋茨的成功部分歸功於他出生在了正確的時機，因而可以充分利用“牽牛星8800”(Altair 8800)，一款早期個人電腦。《我的世界》的流行爲現在的孩子提供了同樣的機會：下一個弗蘭克•格里(Frank Gehry)或者扎哈•哈迪德(Zaha Hadid)很可能正在《我的世界》中的某處一磚一瓦地創建自己的城市。

In fact, that is probably Minecraft’s biggest success. It has smuggled an educational game past children, and few of them have noticed that it is the pixelated equivalent of eating their greens.

事實上，這很可能就是《我的世界》的最大成功之處。它把教育遊戲悄悄帶到孩子們當中，但是很少孩子注意到這款像素遊戲像吃蔬菜一樣有益。

The writer is deputy editor of the New Statesman

本文作者是《新政治家》(New Statesman)雜誌副主編。