为什么《SOMA》里的厕所令人印象深刻

读到一篇谈游戏的厕所的旧文，里面提到了挺有意思的一点：开发者都对《SOMA》里的厕所印象深刻。

I asked several developers what their favourite videogame toilet was, and the same game kept coming up: Frictional’s psychological horror game Soma. “There’s an incredible toilet in the first few minutes,” says Brendon Chung. “You have fine analogue control over the toilet seat and flush handle. Flush it and you see the water swirling in the bowl. This is an absolutely luxurious amount of control reached by no other developer.

“One of the big problems in game design is figuring out what to fill the world with,” says Frictional’s Thomas Grip. “Offices and storage rooms are used a lot, but it can be hard to make them feel natural. But with bathrooms the space is well-defined and there are a lot of simple and fun interactions such as flush handles, stall doors, and hand-dryers.

"Many of the environments we go through in games are supposed to have been inhabited by humans. A game might be set in a laboratory, but it needs to make sense for people to be there. And if there are, or were, humans in your environment, you certainly need to fulfil two needs: eating and shitting. Food can be handled simply with, say, food containers littered around the place. But unless the situation is really dire, humans require a specialised place to do their business. So in a way, toilets are part of the justification for having that cool laboratory.”

There’s something about entering a bathroom in a horror game that somehow puts you on edge more than any other location. “Public toilets are strange,” adds Grip. “We’re surrounded by people as we do something that is very private to us. So there’s an underlying tension to visiting one. They make us feel vulnerable, which is perfect for horror. They have fluorescent lights that flicker. They’re usually white, which is a great contrast to filth and blood. Clinical yet dirty at the same time. The stalls are a great place to hide things in, and you can use the gap in the door to give players an early hint of something horrible inside. There are drains and faucets that drip and create nice ambient sounds. And there are mirrors, which you can do all kinds of scary stuff with.”

As for the process of building a videogame toilet, it can be a surprisingly tricky task. I ask Frictional artist Aaron Clifford, who created Soma’s peerless khazi, about the process. “The toilet was in good shape, but I wasn’t happy with the flush. It didn’t do it justice. It was impossible to make a decent swirling effect using particle systems, so I used an animated water texture that moved along a strip of polygons. Then all I had to do was bend and twist the strip to have the water flow down the bowl.”

来源：https://www.pcgamer.com/what-virtual-toilets-can-teach-us-about-the-art-of-game-design/