Tan Yanfeng, vice president of Sheng Qu Games: Technological innovation is the source power of the development of the game industry

On December 15th, the 2021 China Game Industry Annual Conference was held in Guangzhou, and Tan Yanfeng, vice president of Sheng Qu Games, made a keynote speech at the "Science and Technology Symbiosis Sub-Forum" of the conference.

In his speech, Tan Yanfeng said: "Games are a super complex interdisciplinary product, scientific and technological innovation is the source of power for the development of the game industry, and games have become a new tool for people to understand the world, Sheng Qu Games in recent years relying on its own advantages, trying to integrate games with other fields." ”

Tan Yanfeng: The theme of today's forum is to discuss the symbiotic relationship between games and science, and Sheng Qu Games has been working in the game industry for more than 20 years and is deeply touched by the huge potential of games in terms of technological value. In recent years, there are also some ideas and layouts in the application of game technology, and here I will make a simple sharing and exchange with you.

First of all, the game is a super complex interdisciplinary product, what exactly is the game? In the public's impression, the game is an entertainment product, but as a practitioner of the game industry, we are very clear that entertainment is only a function presented by the game, in essence, it is a super complex interdisciplinary product, including systematic program development, original art creation, modeling, materials, lighting rendering, bone setting and animation, special effects, etc. A series of disciplines and projects, and with the progress of the times, the technology content of the game is becoming more and more high. Want to make a top level of business of this kind of product, the development difficulty is becoming more and more difficult, there is a very intuitive evidence, "Tetris" presumably everyone should have played, this product was launched in 1984, its thank you staff is only 24 people, but today, a 3A-level product development, often need thousands of developers, collaborative years to complete. Released in 2018, "Wild Lands 2", its development team actually reached nearly 4,000 people, and the core team was almost 2,000 people. Although the number of developers does not ultimately determine the quality of a game, it is enough to reflect the complexity of making a game today. But on the other side of the game's technical side, what kind of game to make? What kind of content does the game want to express? In fact, it often carries a lot of subjective ideas and ideas of game producers, which may be the reason why the game is called the ninth art.

Secondly, scientific and technological innovation is the source of power for the development of the game industry. The development of video games has exceeded 50 years, from the earliest cassette games to today's multi-platform games, we often lament that the current games are becoming more and more exquisite, and the scenes are becoming more and more realistic. Science and technology is the primary productive force, history has repeatedly proved this truth, and the basis for the birth of online games, is the development of Internet information technology, the progress of the game industry, is also inseparable from the promotion of Internet technology, more powerful game engines, more intelligent AI systems, more advanced 3D rendering technology, is constantly liberating the productivity of games, so that games have more powerful performance performance, richer interactive experience, and promote the development of the entire game industry.

For example, since the day the game was born, the performance of the game has been limited by the performance of the hardware side, developers usually first consider the adaptation of the user terminal, and now with the help of the latest technology, we are trying to break this shackles, like "Original God" and other games have begun to apply multi-terminal interoperability technology. Not only that, we also began to explore the cloud, based on 5G, cloud games of this computing technology, the game is put in the cloud to run, the rendered video screen through the network to the terminal, really get rid of the limitation of terminal performance. Of course, there is a word that has been discussed a lot lately: metaverse, of course, which is a more distant thing.

No matter what form the game of the future will appear in front of us, the progress of science and technology is pushing us to break the boundary between virtual and real, bringing a more immersive virtual game experience.

The third is that we believe that the game technology tree is creating a super digital scene, because the development of technology allows us to see the possibility of unlimited evolution of games, in the past we used better technology to improve the performance of games, and at the same time in order to pursue better game performance, and constantly promote the iterative upgrading of game technology. Under this cycle, the technology tree of the game is constantly lit up by us. At this time, we began to find that game technology seemed to be more powerful than we thought, and began to empower new scenes and become catalysts for the growth of new things. Then perhaps you have noticed that games are playing a role in cultural inheritance, public services, educational applications, technological innovation, and so on. For example, Foldit, which is a public science game, is used for the prediction of protein structure, protein docking and protein design research, last year Foldit launched a puzzle, inviting global players to jointly design a protein structure that can bind to the new crown virus spike protein, to help researchers study how to block the binding of viruses and human receptors, this collection of a large number of users from different fields, with different knowledge backgrounds of the power, perhaps only in the game can do. Of course, there are many more such examples, for example, the game's engine technology has been widely used in areas such as autonomous driving, digital twins, smart cities, aerospace, medical surgical simulation, and so on. Through the way of digital simulation, so that the relevant fields with intelligent, dynamic, visual way, show the process and results of simulation, 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, but also for humans to learn new skills to create.

In recent years, Sheng Qu Games has relied on its own advantages to try to integrate games with other fields. In the field of digital medicine, we believe that games will play a huge role, through the combination of digital technology and brain neuroscience, we can decipher and regulate the transmission of brain nerve signals, thereby helping the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric diseases. In the past, doctors' judgment of such diseases was more based on experience, and now, we have more intuitive feedback similar to game data, which can better help doctors to make judgments, and will also alleviate the problem of insufficient medical resources for mental illnesses, just like we have a cold and fever to go to the hospital for routine blood examinations, whether there is inflammation in the body, it is easy to reflect from the data. What Sheng Qu Games has done is to build such a system in the field of brain science based on our experience of having a large amount of user game data feedback, which is better than the feedback based on brain nerve signals to "prescribe the right medicine".

Last year we and Zhejiang University set up a legendary innovation research center of Zhejiang University, in fact, it is specialized in brain science, as well as the application of digital drugs in this area of research, there are also some preliminary research results, such as we and Zhejiang University Children's Hospital cooperated to launch a digital therapy new drug, "attention intensive training system", in fact, this is used to treat attention deficit and other hyperactivity disorders, has been in Zhejiang University Children's Hospital clinical trials, has a more obvious effect.

In addition, Sheng Qu Games has also launched a vr screening and training system for children with autism based on virtual reality immersion simulation and interactive system, a VR assessment and rehabilitation system for cognitive impairment launched in deep cooperation with Chen Tianqiao and Luo Qianqian Research Institute (TCCI), and a screening and rehabilitation system for Alzheimer's disease, etc., which have gradually entered the substantive application field. The development of the game industry to this day has exceeded our past imagination. We also have reason to believe that the role of games in the future will be far more than we can imagine today. Maybe one day, the world we designed in the game may also be realized in the real world.

That's what I'm going to share today, thank you.

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