Title：Studying gamers teaches us a lot about games too

标题：关于玩家的研究告诉了我们很多关于游戏的事情

Quantic Foundry is a company that's made it its business to understand and quantify gamer motivations. To that end, it's collected detailed information on more than 140,000 gamers, identifying their favorite games and what makes those titles most attractive. The output of that research is multifaceted, but perhaps the most interesting part of it has been the below chart identifying the relative cognitive burden that each game asks for.

Quantic Foundry （齐次铸造厂？不知道怎么翻译）是一家致力于理解和量化游戏玩家动机的公司。为了这个目的，它收集了超过140000游戏玩家的详细信息，确定他们最喜欢的游戏，以及这些游戏为何最有吸引力。研究的结果是多面的，但是其中最有趣的部分或许是下面这个图表中标识出的每个游戏所需要的相对认知负担。

Grand strategy titles like Civilization and Europa Universalis require more "thinking, **ning ahead, and making decisions," whereas Counter-Strike is a good example of a game that throws up "fast-paced action and gameplay that rewards rapid reactions." That much is intuitively obvious, however plotting all these various games against one another gives a sense of the proportional difference between them. And it also illustrates the challenge and demands inherent in each game: Football Manager moves at a languid pace, and even though few would argue it's an easy game, it falls into the "easy fun" category here because it doesn't make any great impositions on the player. Dota 2, on the other hand, mixes fast reaction requirements and complexity to the very edge of being too difficult and demanding to be fun.

大型策略游戏例如文明或是欧陆风云需要更多的“思考，预先计划以及决策制定”，而反恐精英则是那些突出“快速行动以及奖励快捷反应的游戏进程”的游戏中的一个典型。这看起来很符合直觉，但是把这些游戏画在一张图里却给人以中它们之间的难度成比例的错觉。它也展示了了每个游戏每个游戏内禀的挑战和要求：足球经理以一个较为温吞的速度行动，尽管少数人会争议它是否算是一个简单的游戏，它却仍然被归进了“简单的快乐”的类型中，因为它不会对玩家产生任何巨大的影响。而DOTA 2则把快速反应要求以及复杂性混合到了接近太难要求太高，以至于不再有趣的边界。

DOTA 2 IS ALMOST TOO HARD TO BE FUN

dead game 几乎快要难到不有趣的地步了。

"There’s a cognitive threshold beyond which forcing you to make complex decisions under time pressure is simply not fun **e," says Quantic. The company hopes its data will prove attractive to game designers eager to position their titles appropriately on this excitement / strategy matrix, though there doesn't appear to be a clearly superior approach. The most addictive and popular games show up in every category, with the heroin-like Hearthstone sitting close to the middle.

“存在着一条认知阈值，如果超过它，也就是说强迫你在时间压力下做出复杂的选择，就不再有趣了，”Quantic说。这家公司希望它的数据可以受到渴望把它们的作品放置在刺激/策略矩阵中的合适位置的游戏设计者的欢迎，尽管似乎并没有一个绝对优化的选择。最让人上瘾的游戏出现在所有的内心中，而位居正中的则是具有主角光环的炉石传说。