第一章 为什么写

WHY WRITE THIS BOOK?
Our kids took to games at a very early age. Games were all around them, and I brought home a crazy amount of them because of my work. I suppose it’s no surprise that children model their parents. But my wife and I are also voracious readers, and the kids were resistant to that. Their attraction to games was more instinctive. As babies, they found the game of hide-the-object to be endlessly fascinating, and even now that they are older it elicits an occasional giggle. As babies there was an intentness about their alien gaze, as they tried to figure out where the rubber duckie had gone, that showed that this game was, for them, in deadly earnest.
我们的孩子很早就开始玩游戏了。因为我的工作，我带回家了大量的游戏。我想孩子以父母为榜样并不奇怪。但我妻子和我也是贪婪的读者，孩子们对此很抵触。他们对游戏的吸引力更多的是出于本能。当他们还是婴儿的时候，他们发现藏东西的游戏是无穷无尽的迷人之处，即使现在他们已经长大了，这个游戏偶尔也会引起咯咯的笑声。当他们还是婴儿的时候，他们那种异样的眼神就显得很专注，他们试图弄清楚橡皮小鸭去了哪里，这表明，对他们来说，这个游戏是非常认真的。

Kids are playing everywhere, all the time, and often playing games that we do not quite understand. They play and learn at a ferocious rate. We see the statistics on how many words kids absorb in a day, how rapidly they develop motor control, and how many basic aspects of life they master—aspects that are frankly so subtle that we have even forgotten learning them—and we usually fail to appreciate what an amazing feat this is.
孩子们随时随地都在玩，而且经常玩我们不太懂的游戏。他们以惊人的速度玩耍和学习。我们看到了多少单词统计一天孩子吸收,如何快速开发电机控制,他们master-aspects多少生活的基本方面,坦白说如此微妙,我们甚至忘记了学习——我们通常没有认识到这是一个了不起的壮举。

Consider how hard it is to learn a language, and yet children all over the world do it routinely. A first language. They are doing it without assigning cognates* in their native tongue and without translating in their heads. Much attention has been paid to some very special deaf kids in Nicaragua,* who have managed to invent a fully functional sign language in just a few generations. Many believe this shows language is built into the brain, and that there’s something in our wiring that guides us inexorably towards language.
想想学一门语言有多难，然而全世界的孩子都在学习。第一语言。他们没有在母语中指定同源词，也没有在脑中进行翻译。在尼加拉瓜，一些非常特殊的失聪儿童受到了极大的关注，他们仅用了几代人的时间就发明了一种功能齐全的手语。许多人认为，这表明语言是大脑内置的，在我们的线路中有某种东西引导我们不可避免地学习语言。

image.png

Language is not the only hardwired behavior. As children move up the developmental ladder, they take part in a variety of instinctual activities. Any parent who has suffered through the “terrible twos” can tell you that it’s as if a switch went on in the child’s brain, altering his or her behavior radically. (This phase lasts beyond just the age of two, by the way—just a friendly warning.)
语言并不是唯一的固有行为。随着孩子的发展，他们会参与各种各样的本能活动。任何经历过“可怕的两岁”的父母都会告诉你，这就好像孩子的大脑发生了一个开关，从根本上改变了他或她的行为。(顺便说一句，这个阶段只会持续到两岁以上，这只是一个善意的警告。)

Kids also move on from certain games as they age. It was particularly interesting to see my kids outgrow tic-tac-toe—a game I beat them at for years, until one day all the matches became draws.
随着年龄的增长，孩子们也不再玩某些游戏。看着我的孩子们长大后不再玩井字游戏，这是一种我多年来一直在玩的游戏，直到有一天所有的比赛都变成了平局，这是非常有趣的。

That extended moment when tic-tac-toe ceased to interest them was a moment of great fascination to me. Why, I asked myself, did mastery and understanding come so suddenly? The kids weren’t able to tell me that tic-tac-toe is a limited game with optimal strategy. They saw the pattern, but they did not understand it, as we think of things.
当他们对井字游戏不再感兴趣的那一刻，对我来说是极具吸引力的一刻。我问自己，为什么掌握和理解来得如此突然?孩子们不能告诉我井字游戏是一种带有最佳策略的有限游戏。他们看到了模式，但他们不理解它，就像我们思考事物一样。

This isn’t unfamiliar to most people. I do many things without fully understanding them, even things I feel I have mastered. I don’t need a degree in automotive engineering to drive my car. I don’t even need to understand torque, wheels and how the brakes work. I don’t need to remember the ins and outs of the rules of grammar to speak grammatically in everyday conversation. I don’t need to know whether tic-tac-toe is NP-hard or NP-complete* to know that it’s a dumb game.
这对大多数人来说并不陌生。我做了很多事情，但并没有完全理解它们，甚至有些事情我觉得我已经掌握了。我不需要汽车工程学位就能开车。我甚至不需要理解扭矩，车轮和刹车是如何工作的。在日常会话中，我不需要记住语法规则的来龙去脉，才能说得合乎语法。我不需要知道一字棋是np困难还是np完整*就知道它是一款愚蠢的游戏。

image.png

I also have plenty of experiences where I stare at something and simply don’t get it. I hate to admit it, but my typical reaction is to simply turn away. I feel this way often these days now that there’s some (OK, a lot of) gray at my temples. I find
myself unable to relate to some of the games that everyone tells me I should be
playing. I just can’t move the mouse quite as fast as I used to. I’d rather not play
than feel that inept, even if the other players are friends of mine.
我也有很多这样的经历，我盯着某样东西看，但就是看不懂。我讨厌承认这一点，但我的典型反应就是直接转过身去。最近我经常有这种感觉，因为我的太阳穴有一些(好吧，很多)灰色。我发现自己无法理解那些每个人都告诉我应该玩的游戏。我只是不能像以前那样快速移动鼠标了。即使其他玩家是我的朋友，我也宁愿不玩游戏。

That’s not just me saying, “I can’t cut it in Internet play! Damn 14-year-old kids.” My reaction isn’t mere frustration; it’s also got a tinge of boredom. I look at the problem and say, “Well, I could take on the Sisyphean task of trying to match these folks in every new game as it comes out, but frankly, repeated failure is a predictable cycle, and rather boring. I have better things to do with my time.”
这并不是说，“我不能在网络游戏中剪掉它!”该死的14岁的孩子。”我的反应不仅仅是沮丧;它也有一丝无聊。我看着这个问题说道:“好吧，我可以承担起在每款新游戏中匹配这些人的任务，但坦白地说，重复的失败是一个可预测的循环，而且相当无聊。我有更重要的事情要做。”

From everything I hear, this feeling is likely to increase as I age. More and more novel experiences are going to come along, until sometime in 2038 when I’ll need the assistance of my smart-ass grandkid to flibber-jibber the frammistan because I won’t be able to cope with the newfangled contraptions.
从我所听到的一切来看，这种感觉可能会随着我年龄的增长而增加。越来越多的新奇体验将会出现，直到2038年的某个时候，那时我将需要我那聪明的孙辈的帮助，来摆弄那个不合框架的机器，因为我将无法应付这些新奇的装置。

Is this inevitable?
这是不可避免的吗?

When I work on games that are more my speed, I can still crush them (mu ha ha ha). We read all the time about people who play Scrabble or other mentally challenging games delaying the onset of Alzheimer’s. Surely keeping the mind active keeps it flexible and keeps you young?
当我致力于更符合我速度的游戏时，我仍然能够打败他们。我们一直在阅读有关玩拼字游戏或其他具有精神挑战的游戏的人推迟阿尔茨海默病发作的报道。保持思维活跃可以让它保持灵活，让你年轻，这是真的吗?

Games don’t last forever, though. There just comes a point where you say,
“You know, I think I’ve seen most everything that this game has to offer.” This
happened to me most recently with a typing game I found on the Internet—it
was a cute game where I played a diver and sharks were trying to eat me. Each
shark had a word on its side, and as I typed the words in, the sharks went belly-
up.
不过，游戏不会永远持续下去。有一点你会说，“你知道，我想我已经看到了这场比赛所提供的一切。”最近，我在网上发现了一个打字游戏，我就遇到了这种情况-这是一个可爱的游戏，我扮演一名潜水员，鲨鱼试图吃掉我。每个鲨鱼都有自己的一个词，当我输入这些词时，鲨鱼们都趴了起来。

Now, I am a terrible formal typist, but I can hunt-and-peck at almost 100 words a minute. This game was fun, but it was also a piece of cake. After level 12 or 14, the game just gave up. It conceded. It said to me, “You know, I’ve tried every trick I can think of, including words with random punctuation in the middle,words spelled backwards, and not showing you the words until the last minute.So to hell with it; from now on, I’ll just keep throwing the same challenges at you. But really, you can quit now, because you’ve seen all I’ve got.”
现在，我是一个很差的打字员，但我能打字近100个字一分钟。这个游戏很有趣，但它也是小菜一碟。第12级或之后14，比赛就这样结束了。它承认了。它对我说，“你知道，我已经试过了
我能想到的窍门，包括中间有随机标点的单词，单词拼写向后，直到最后一分钟才向您显示单词。所以，见鬼去吧；从现在起，我将继续向你提出同样的挑战是你。但实际上，你现在可以辞职了，因为你已经看到了我的一切。”

I took its advice, and quit。
我接受了它的建议，我退出了。

Games that are too hard kind of bore me, and games that are too easy also kind of bore me. As I age, games move from one to the other, just as tic-tac-toe did for our children. Sometimes I play games with people who crush me and afterwards explain kindly, “Well, you see, this is a game about vertices.” * And I say, “Vertices? I’m putting down pieces on a board!” And they shrug, as if to say I’ll never get it.
太难的游戏使得我厌烦，它容易的也使得我厌烦，随着年纪增加，游戏由一个移动到另一个，就像井字游戏一样，他为我们的孩子做了些什么。有时我会和压垮我的人玩游戏。然后善意地解释，“好吧，你看，这是一个关于顶点的游戏。”*我说，“顶点？我正在把碎片放在一块木板上！”他们耸耸肩，好像在说我永远也得不到它。

That’s why I decided to tackle the questions of what games are, and what fun is, and why games matter. I knew I’d be going over well-trod ground—a fair amount of psychological literature has been written on developmental behaviors in kids, for example. But the fact is that we don’t tend to take games all that seriously.
这就是为什么我决定解决游戏是什么，有什么乐趣的问题是，为什么游戏很重要。我知道我会走在一条平坦的路上——一个集市例如，大量心理学文献都是关于儿童发展行为的。但事实是，我们不太重视比赛。

As I write this a lot of people happen to be exploring these questions. Games, in their digital form, have become big business. We see ads for them on TV,we debate whether or not they make more money than the movie industry, and we agonize over whether they cause violence in our children. Games are now a major cultural force. The time is ripe for us to dig deeper into the many questions that games raise.
在我写这篇文章的时候，很多人都在探索这些问题。游戏，在他们的数字形式，已经成为大企业。我们在电视上看到他们的广告，我们争论他们是否比电影业赚更多的钱我们为他们是否会对我们的孩子造成暴力而苦恼。游戏是现在是一股重要的文化力量。现在时机已经成熟，我们可以更深入地研究许多问题游戏提出的问题。

I also find it curious that as parents, we’ll insist that kids be given the time to play because it’s important to childhood, but that work is deemed far more important later in life. I think work and play aren’t all that different, to be honest. What follows explains how and why I came to that conclusion.
我也觉得奇怪，作为父母，我们会坚持让孩子有时间学习玩耍是因为它对童年很重要，但工作被认为更重要在以后的生活中很重要。我认为工作和娱乐其实没什么不同诚实的下面的内容解释了我是如何以及为什么得出这个结论的。