So, the headlines say somebody else has died due to video game addiction. Yes, it's Korea again.
What the hell? Look, I'm not saying video games are heroin. I totally get that the victims had other shit going on in their lives. But, half of you reading this know a World of Warcraft addict and experts say video game addiction is a thing.
嗯 最近呢 报纸的头条说又有人因为沉迷游戏而死了。
这是怎么了？我不是说电脑游戏是海洛因。我当然知道这些沉迷在游戏里的人在现实中可能很受伤或很孤独，但是沉迷魔兽世界这个现象或者专家叫兽说的沉迷网络游戏还是比较严重的。所以我就想问问。

So here's the big question: Are some games intentionally designed to keep you compulsively playing, even when you're not enjoying it?
是不是有些游戏故意设计成让你不断的去玩，即使你一点也没享受？
Oh, hell yes. And their methods are downright creepy.
当然有，而且他们的那些招数有时候真的挺令人毛骨悚然的!
#5. Putting You in a Skinner Box
把你当小白鼠

If you've ever been addicted to a game or known someone who was, this article is really freaking disturbing.
如果你曾沉迷于某个游戏或者知道那么个人沉迷，那么你肯定觉的下面这篇文章很恶心。
http://www.world-science.net/exclusives/081111_gaming.htm
It's written by a games researcher at Microsoft on how to make video games that hook players, whether they like it or not. He has a doctorate in behavioral and brain sciences.
这篇文章是一个在微软的游戏研究员写的，内容是说怎么让游戏钓住人，能不能让玩家喜欢。这个人比较厉害，有行为学和脑科学的博士学位。

His theories are based around the work of BF Skinner, who discovered you could control behavior by training subjects with simple stimulus and reward.
他的理论基于B. F. Skinner。这个人发现，控制生物的行为只需要用简单的赏罚措施来训练目标。
He invented the "Skinner Box," a cage containing a small animal that, for instance, presses a lever to get food pellets.
他发明的Skinner box斯金纳箱 ，用来控制小动物，比如拉一个杆或者按按钮就可以得到食物

This sort of thing caused games researcher Nick Yee to once call Everquest a "Virtual Skinner Box."
这玩意的发明导致了游戏研究者 Nick Yee 把《无尽的任务》称为Skinner虚拟实验室。
So What's The Problem?
问题在哪？
Gaming has changed. It used to be that once they sold us a $50 game, they didn't particularly care how long we played.The big thing was making sure we liked it enough to buy the next one.
现在游戏的本质已经变了。曾经一个游戏要50块钱，厂商也不会特别关心我们究竟玩多久。游戏只要做的好玩以此来确保我们还买下一作。
But the industry is moving toward subscription-based games like MMO's that need the subject to keep playing--and paying--until the sun goes supernova.
但游戏的商业化逐步向前使基于用户群的游戏比如MMO大型多人在线，需要用户一直玩下去并且一直付钱直到地球爆炸，太阳毁灭，春哥去世。

Now, there's no way they can create enough exploration or story to keep you playing for thousands of hours, so they had to change the mechanics of the game, so players would instead keep doing the same actions over and over and over, whether they liked it or not. So game developers turned to Skinner's techniques.
不过他们没有办法创造一个足够大的探索的空间或者故事背景让你玩个好几百年，所以他们必须得改变游戏的机理，让这些玩家不管喜欢还是不喜欢，能坚持一直做重复无聊的事情。所以这些游戏设计师就用了Skinner方法
This is a big source of controversy in the world of game design right now. Braid creator Jonathan Blow said Skinnerian game mechanics are a form of "exploitation." It's not that these games can't be fun. But they're designed to keep gamers subscribing during the periods when it's not fun, locking them into a repetitive slog using Skinner's manipulative system of carefully scheduled rewards.
这个目前在游戏设计方面是一个很大的争论。《时空环境》的设计者 Jonathan Blow认为Skinner这种模式的游戏机理是一种剥削形式。它不是那种“好玩的游戏”，而是设计出来让玩家定期辛勤地劳作，通过Skinner用来控制生物的奖赏惩罚制度把他们牢牢的栓在电脑前不断的猛击鼠标键盘。
Why would this work, when the "rewards" are just digital objects that don't actually exist? Well...
你想问为什么这种方法会奏效，那些奖励都只是一些电子代码啊? 那么请看下面。
#4. Creating Virtual Food Pellets For You To Eat
设计一些虚拟精神食粮供你吃

Most addiction-based game elements are based on this fact:
Your brain treats items and goods in the video game world as if they are real. Because they are.
大多数游戏成瘾都基于以下这个事实：
你的大脑把游戏物品当成真实存在的东西。事实上，游戏物品确实有价值。
People scoff at this idea all the time ("You spent all that time working for a sword that doesn't even exist?") and those people are stupid. If it takes time, effort and skill to obtain an item, that item has value, whether it's made of diamonds, binary code or beef jerky.
有人冷嘲热讽玩游戏的人：就为了一件虚拟的武器你能浪费你所有的人参？其实这些人想错了。如果某件东西需要花费很多时间精力和技术，那么不论这件物品是用钻石做的，还是二进制码构成的，还是牛肉做的，他都是有价值的。

So picture the rat in his box. Or, since I'm one of these gamers and don't like to think of myself as a rat, picture an adorable hamster. Maybe he can talk, and is voiced by Chris Rock.
想象一个关在笼子里的一个小白鼠，噢，既然我自己也老玩游戏，当然不愿意承认自己是小白鼠。那就想象是精灵鼠小弟行了吧。

If you want to make him press the lever as fast as possible, how would you do it? Not by giving him a pellet with every press--he'll soon relax, knowing the pellets are there when he needs them. No, the best way is to set up the machine so that it drops the pellets at random intervals of lever pressing. He'll soon start pumping that thing as fast as he can. Experiments prove it.
如果你想让它不停的按按钮，你会怎么做呢？如果你不在它按按钮的时候奖励它食物，它显然就不会再去按了。最牛逼的办法就是设定个程序根据按按钮的次数按照不定的几率的掉落食物，那么它马上就会不停的按按钮。实验证明了这点。

And that's hardly the most ridiculous aspect of the game.
当然那显然不是这样游戏最离谱的地方。
Now, in addition to the gambling element, you have thousands of players in competition with each other, to see who can be the most obsessive about opening the chests. One woman tells of how she spent her entire evening opening chests--over a thousand--to try to win the daily prize.
She didn't. There was always someone else more obsessed.
除了赌博元素外，你跟其他成千上万的玩家还有个排名，互相攀比看看谁开的箱子最多。有个妹子就说她曾经花整个晚上在开箱子--开了1000多个箱子就为了得当日日常奖励。她最后也没有得到,因为总有人比她开的多.
So What's The Problem?
Are you picturing her sitting there, watching her little character in front of the chest, clicking dialogue boxes over and over, watching the same animation over and over, for hour after hour?
问题在哪？
你是不是能到想象那个妹子坐在电脑前，看着她的人物在箱子前，不断开箱子，点对话，看同一个动画效果无数次？

If you didn't know any better, you'd think she had a crippling mental illness. How could she possibly get from her rational self to that Rain Man-esque compulsion?
如果不懂她在做什么的话，你会以为她有严重的心理疾病 ：“她怎么可能从一个好妹子变成了一个窝在家里的宅？”
BF Skinner knew. He called that training process "shaping." Little rewards, step by step, like links in a chain. In WoW you decide you want the super cool Tier 10 armor. You need five separate pieces. To get the full set, you need more than 400 Frost Emblems, which are earned a couple at a time, from certain enemies. Then you need to upgrade each piece of armor with Marks of Sanctification. Then again with Heroic Marks of Sanctification. To get all that you must re-run repetitive missions and sit, clicking your mouse, for days and days and days. Boobies be damned.
BF Skinner管这种过程叫塑形.用小奖励,一步一步,一环扣一环地把你控制住.
在魔兽世界里,你想要来套T10,首先它有五件,然后你还要至少400个冰霜徽章.
这些冰霜徽章也要花时间在特定的怪物上得到.然后你还需要用"印记"换更好的T10.
所以你又得回去原来的地方继续刷怪,日日夜夜,不停的点着鼠标. Boobies be damned（啥意思）。

Once it gets to that point, can you even call that activity a "game" anymore? It's more like scratching a rash. And it gets worse...
一旦你明白了,你还管这些叫"游戏"吗? 这更像是挠蚊子包,越挠越痒.并且还变的更恶劣了....
#2. Keeping You Pressing It... Forever
让你一直点击鼠标,直到永远.

Now, the big difference between our Skinner box hamster and a real human is that we humans can get our pellets elsewhere. If a game really was just nothing but clicking a box for random rewards, we'd eventually drop it to play some other game. Humans need a long-term goal to keep us going, and the world of addictive gaming has got this down to a science. Techniques include...
小白鼠和人的最大区别在于我们人可以选择别的游戏.如果一个游戏真的只是开箱子随机得物品的话,我们最终就会玩别的去了.人类需要一个长远的目标来坚持继续向前.
让人沉迷的游戏用以下科学方法拴住玩家.
Easing Them In
First, set up the "pellets" so that they come fast at first, and then slower and slower as time goes on. This is why they make it very easy to earn rewards (or level up) in the beginning of an MMO, but then the time and effort between levels increases exponentially. Once the gamer has experienced the rush of leveling up early, the delayed gratification actually increases the pleasure of the later levels. That video game behavior expert at Microsoft found that gamers play more and more frantically as they approach a new level.
由浅入深的吸引玩家.
首先,设计好"食物"让玩家很快聚集过来,然后随时间减慢"食物"的供应速度.这就是为什么MMO一开始都是升级容易,然后需要的付出和时间与等级就按比例的增加了.一旦玩家感觉到升级迅速的快感后,之后减缓的升级速度实际上增加了升级的快感.微软的游戏行为学研究人员发现玩家升的级越高,他们玩的就越狂热.
Eliminating Stopping Points:
The easiest way is to just put save points far apart, or engage the player in long missions (like WoW raids) that, once started, are difficult to get out of without losing progress.
But that can be frustrating for gamers, so you can take the opposite approach of a game like New Super Mario Bros. Wii, where you make the levels really short so it's like eating potato chips. They're so small on their own that it doesn't take much convincing to get the player to grab another one, and soon they've eaten the whole bag.
减少玩家的休息
最简单的方法就是把存档点设置的特别特比远,或者鼓励玩家做一个长线任务(比如WOW的25人本)一旦开始了,就很难主动停止,否则就前功尽弃.
不过肯定有玩家不吃这一套.所以这里有个从另外一个角度做的游戏:WII上的超级马里奥兄弟,游戏中关卡比较的短,给人的感觉就像吃一包薯片一样.吃了一片儿,意犹未尽,又吃一片儿,直到整袋吃完.

Somewhere in that bag is an angry dinosaur and a kidnapped princess.
这包薯片中藏着库巴和被绑的公主.
By the way, this is the same reason a person who wouldn't normally read a 3,000-word article on the Internet will happily read it if it's split up into list form. Are you ignoring boobies to read this? I've done my job!
顺便说一下这也是为什么一个人不会看一篇一整段3000字的文章,却会读那些分成细小段落的文章的原因.
Play It Or Lose It:
This is the real dick move. Why reward the hamster for pressing the lever? Why not simply set it up so that when he fails to press it, we punish him?
Behaviorists call this "avoidance." They set the cage up so that it gives the animal an electric shock every 30 seconds unless it hits the lever. It learns very very fast to stay on the lever, all the time, hitting it over and over. Forever.
不玩你就输了
这是一个比较*操*蛋*的阴招.为什么因为小白鼠按键就奖励它?为什么不是设计成如果他不按,就惩罚他?
行为学家叫这个"avoidance避免".他们设计这样的笼子让每隔30秒就给动物一个电击，
除非它按那个按钮。动物也学的非常非常快，永远在按钮旁边，不停的按着按钮，一次又一次。