Tan Yanfeng: Games have become a new tool for understanding the world

The symbiotic development relationship between games and technology is becoming a hot topic in the game industry. On December 15th, the China Game Industry Annual Conference Science and Technology Symbiosis Sub-forum was held in Guangzhou, aiming to present the symbiotic development relationship between games and technology, display the innovative achievements of the game industry driven by science and technology, imagine new scenarios spawned by scientific and technological progress, and jointly promote the integration of digital reality and help digital economic growth.

Tan Yanfeng, vice president of Sheng Qu Games

Tan Yanfeng, vice president of Sheng Qu Games, was invited to attend and shared the understanding and corresponding layout of Sheng Qu Games in terms of game technology in online form. He said that games are essentially a super complex interdisciplinary product, the development of the game industry comes from technological innovation, and game technology is breaking the shackles of the scene, shining in more cutting-edge fields, empowering the development of the digital economy and industry.

Scientific and technological innovation: the source of power for the development of the game industry

In most eyes, games may be equated with entertainment products, but in Tan Yanfeng's view, entertainment is just a function presented by games. The current game development is a complex systematic project, including systematic program development, original art creation, modeling, materials, lighting rendering, bone setting, animation, special effects and many other disciplines and projects, and with the progress of the times, the technology content of games is becoming higher and higher.

This is evidenced by the change in the number of developers. Released in 1984, Tetris had only 24 people to acknowledge, but by 2018, the development team for the open-world game Red Dead Redemption 2 had reached nearly 4,000 people, including nearly 2,000 core personnel. Although this change does not determine the quality of a product, it is enough to reflect the complexity of the current big production level of product development.

Tan Yanfeng said that the basis for the birth of online games is the development of Internet information technology, and the progress of the game industry also comes from the promotion of Internet technology. From the earliest cassette games to today's multi-platform games, more powerful game engines, more intelligent AI systems, and more advanced 3D rendering technology are constantly liberating the productivity of games, so that games have more powerful performance performance, richer interactive experience, and promote the development of the game industry.

This progress is now breaking the "shackles" on the hardware side. He takes cloud games as an example, since the birth of the game, its performance has been limited by the performance of the hardware side, and game development often needs to consider the adaptation with the user terminal. With the development of 5G and cloud computing technology, games can run in the cloud, and the rendered video screen is transmitted to the terminal through the network, truly getting rid of the limitation of terminal performance, which is conducive to the further improvement of game expression, or bringing new interaction methods.

Break through a single application scenario to maximize the value of game technology

It is worth mentioning that under the cycle of two-way empowerment evolution of games and technology, game technology is also breaking a single application scenario and beginning to become a catalyst for emerging things. Last year, a public science game, Foldit, launched a puzzle online, inviting players around the world to design a protein structure that binds to the spike protein of the new crown virus, helping researchers study how to block the binding of the virus to human receptors.

Not only that, the game's engine technology has been widely used in autonomous driving, digital twins, smart cities, aerospace, medical surgery simulation and other fields, through digital simulation, so that related fields with intelligent, dynamic, visual way to show the simulation process and results, both improve efficiency, but also more intuitive. "Games have become a new tool for people to understand the world, in fact, the most primitive games are also created by humans to learn new skills." Tan Yanfeng said.

Brain science and digital medicine are also considered areas where games can be played. Through the combination of digital technology and brain neuroscience, it is possible to decipher and regulate the transmission of brain nerve signals, thereby helping the diagnosis and treatment of patients with mental illness. In the past, doctors' judgments about such diseases were more based on experience, but intuitive feedback similar to game data can help them make better judgments and alleviate the problem of insufficient medical resources for mental illnesses.

According to Tan Yanfeng, what Sheng Qu Games is currently doing is to build such a system in the field of brain science based on its feedback experience of having a large amount of user game data. Last year, Sheng Qu Games established the Legendary Innovation Research Center of Zhejiang University with Zhejiang University, which cooperated with the scientific research forces of universities to do research on brain science and digital drug applications.

Regarding the future of the symbiotic development of games and technology, Tan Yanfeng used two "beyond imagination" to describe. He said: "The development of the game industry to this day has exceeded our past imagination, and we have reason to believe that the role and application field of game technology in the future will far exceed our imagination today." ”