"On the picture, we can't surpass the movie, on the sound effect, we are not as good as the sound, our advantage is all in the interactivity." We will have nothing without it. When it comes to the evaluation of the quality of the game, the famous game designer Sid Meier once ranked interactivity before technology and art, and believed that fun is the root of the game.
It is true that with the development of software and hardware technology and the industry, we have become accustomed to the demands of graphics, but it is undeniable that the innovation of game interactivity has not been synchronized. "Good looking but not careful" has become the most complained point for players when the current game products are launched. If a game with beautiful graphics can attract players to enter, the detailed design can continue to impress the players, and the design team and players can continue to interact benignly under the long-term operation, how much energy does such a game have to burst out?
Gamelook tries to find answers in existing games on the market.
A few days ago, I participated in a unique activity. Because of the epidemic, I was unable to get together with my friends for the New Year, but I was pulled to see a fireworks party created by everyone online. On the evening of December 31st, a friend sent a game recording, and saw a series of blessings to me in the sky where fireworks bloomed, accompanied by the countdown clock sound, and countless strange friends' New Year's wishes that kept popping up around me, making me immersed in the scene, as if I had truly traveled through time and space to become one of them, and I had the idea of setting off fireworks to write my wishes.
This fireworks design that interacts with players in real time has stimulated my curiosity to experience the game in depth, and I found that this interaction is not unique in Harry Potter: Magical Awakening, and there are many details in the game that have long been online.
For example, when a player logs in to the game, he can see himself playing guitar and listening to music with his dormmates, and can invite friends from the same club and academy to dance.
Play guitar and listen to music with dorm roommates
In the game, the player gently invites friends to dance
The author went to the game community to turn around, and found that after the "Christmas Celebration" was opened, the upgraded magic camera function has also become a player interactive social weapon, players can pan, rotate, zoom in and out and other free switching perspectives, while cooperating with 5 kinds of filters and action systems, taking photos of fashionable blockbusters. In addition, highly interactive features and activities such as letter custom sweaters and magic scrolls have also won the love of a large number of players, and they are competing to share their own creative content on major social platforms, stimulating the continuous heating of related topics.
"Cross Station" community members spelled out "Weasley Our King" group photo
Weibo user @Peach _baby share a photo of himself using a magic camera
As an industry practitioner, I like to hear about the way players and game designers continue to interact inside and outside the end, and the key to the long-term operation of a game is to interact with players in depth. A good interactive experience can often help the player enter a very immersive flow state, when the game is no longer a fragmented, dispensable pastime, but can give the player a high degree of focus and a sense of achievement and enjoyment.
In the case of Light Encounter, which pursues innovative socialization and makes players feel warm, the game does not have a "nanny-level" novice tutorial like most products. Although the cost of learning increases to a certain extent, it also achieves the design goal of helping each other and forming "goodwill and connection". In subsequent updates, Light Encounter also updated the master-apprentice system to further enhance the unique experience of players helping each other.
"Light and Encounter" advocates social networking: "Just meeting is beautiful"
The design concept of "official stage, player singing" has become more and more popular in recent years and has been recognized and welcomed by players. For example, the representative sandbox product "Minecraft", the lackluster but popular "Valheim: Temple of Heroes", and the 2020 TGA mobile game of the year "Among Us" all include players as the main body of game creation. The official role is more to provide a gameplay framework, and the content and experience of each game are created by the most direct participants, that is, players.
The player who understands the player best is the player himself, which is actually the secret of a good interactive atmosphere.
Of course, game developers must provide a relatively friendly environment in order to stimulate players' creativity and desire to express themselves. It is not difficult to see from the above cases that the game design team needs to pay full attention to the player experience and interaction needs in order to promote the formation of a good interactive atmosphere between the game and the player, thereby establishing the player's trust in the game and stimulating the player's high expectations for subsequent iterations.
Although from a certain point of view, this expectation is a huge pressure, but only enough internal sincerity and external pressure can truly create a product with phenomenal potential.
Interestingly, it is not difficult to observe the industry hits in recent years such as "Harry Potter: Magical Awakening", "Light Encounter", "Ark of Tomorrow" and so on, they all have strong social attributes and gradually out of the circle of the second creation ecology. So the question is: is this deliberate, or is it a choice that meets the needs of users, or is it simply a coincidence?
Gamelook believes that the designer's intentions and the player's love are the biggest background colors of a game's two-creation ecology.
In other words, the active user ecology, as well as the good atmosphere based on ecological development, is difficult to be promoted unilaterally by developers or players, and must be the result of two-way selection between game designers and players, which means that players have a strong willingness to interact, and developers must also guide and create a good interactive environment. More precisely, in addition to the need for continuous iteration of content and quality, game designers continue to meet the needs of player interaction.
So as early as the beginning of the launch, based on the user's strong social sharing and creative expression tendencies, the first activity launched by Harry Potter: Magic Awakening was related to interaction: all players painted on a public drawing board, which not only satisfied the player's desire to create, but also expressed the original intention of the official to create a player's ideal magical world.
Some time ago, the game upgraded the "Magic Scroll" and "Lottie's Drawing Board" gameplay, and the previous painting designer and the entire player group dialogue is different, this time is a one-on-one communication, encouraging players to depict the exclusive "My 2021 Magic Memories", to maximize the player to create a free creative environment. It seems that in the eyes of designers, players don't want to set standards or be told what is best and what is the most fun to play. Rather, I want a world of full freedom, a stage to show myself. The official role is actually involved in becoming a witness to the player's happy memories.
Weibo user @Deerbit de Lamb co-creation within the end
Breaking the boundary between reality and virtual with life-like interaction, so that players can interact in the game like reality, is also the only way for countless blockbusters to become famous.
For example, the MMO with social networking as the main selling point has spawned a large number of boutiques such as "World of Warcraft", "Fantasy Journey to the West", "Tianya Mingyue Knife" and so on, which are good at integrating life events such as making friends and marriages in daily life into the game, and making the game a new daily life outside of independent reality.
Another popular product in 2021, "Magic Tower", represents a new round of MMO exploration of interaction. In addition to the integration of the theme of the two-dimensional, the gameplay of the integration of the open world, "Magic Tower" also advocates the "light social" design, on the one hand, the online rewards are processed independently to avoid the problem of the struggle for treasure chest resources; on the other hand, it also makes casual supplements to the online, such as adding lightweight interactive gameplay such as kicking football, climbing, flying and swimming, and bringing a more immersive interactive experience on the basis of leisure.
Social but not mandatory to differentiate Towers from other MMOOs
There is a line in the movie "One By One" that says: "After the invention of the film, human life has been extended at least three times longer than before." "In the same way, the reason why players love games is that games are the ninth art, which can be based on reality but beyond reality, making people's lives more exciting."
Huang Yifeng, CEO of Eagle Corner Network, also pointed out at this year's game industry annual meeting that after having enough content accumulation, game manufacturers will naturally turn their attention to the boundaries of the industry and broaden their creative space.
Breaking boundaries doesn't mean breaking the "fourth wall" in a way that allows the characters to talk directly to the player, as meta-games like Under The Legends and Heartbeat Literature Club do. The Peking Opera characters to the game's "Original God", the "Against the Water Cold", which brings the eight characters into the marriage and the two sides of the matching degree reference, and the "Harry Potter: Magical Awakening" that allows players to meet in the game for the New Year, actually break through the creative space of traditional games and bring players a unique immersive interactive experience.
"Against the Cold Water" integrates the eight characters into the marriage system to increase the sense of realism
This is a rather risky approach, and you could even say that to some extent, the designers have given the player the choice of the game cap. Luckily, they met a bunch of strict and purely good players.
Many times, GameLook is reluctant to think of games as a pure entertainment, it obviously carries more, more than a game, it is more like a group of players hard to find the spiritual home: they really love the world.
Launching new gameplay and activities is essentially equivalent to a tacit way of communicating between the game and the player.
Players consume content too quickly, and official productivity is difficult to keep up with user demands, resulting in weak follow-up operations, which is a common problem facing the current game industry. The more popular the product, the broader the audience base, and the more severe the challenge. Especially for vertical track products, such as two-dimensional and IP products, core players and fans are only basic disks, and the game is destined to go to a more differentiated attribute and a more diverse demand group.
To produce content that users love, you first need to hear the voice from the user. Moreover, bottom-up voices are often easily distorted, and only an equal conversation relationship can extract the true connotation of players' needs. At the same time, this official interaction with the player must take place in a harmonious environment.
So we can see that an excellent development team is always keen to encourage players to participate in interaction, creation and sharing, and often launches a series of related activities to support, good at extracting real and valuable ideas from massive player opinions and creative content, and forming a design direction for the long-term development of future games.
CCTV reporter Wang Bingbing once confessed in a B station video, just a few tens of minutes of interview, in fact, it is difficult to really understand the interviewee, only the reporter and the interviewee for a period of time, can find clues.
In GameLook's view, the secret of the popularity of many popular products lies in the fact that all its behaviors are aimed at "getting along" with players, rather than the cold relationship between the service and the serviced, so it can create a good interactive atmosphere based on the functions that players need.
For example, "Harry Potter: Magical Awakening" players get together to take photos to celebrate the New Year, and behind them rely on the alphabet custom sweater, upgraded magic camera and other functional designs to achieve together. "Ark of Tomorrow" is a New Year party spontaneously organized by players, and the active Erchuang ecology of "Original God" is also related to the official support of eagle point networks and Mihayou's enlightened attitude towards Erchuang.
Members of the in-game community "Half Puffs" spell "Happy New Year" together
In fact, simply launching novel gameplay content can indeed get huge user responses in the short term. However, when the initial heat fades and players return to rationality, only a deep and benign interaction mode can maintain the emotional connection between the two, and continuously improve the reputation of the game in the subsequent long-term operation.
In GameLook's view, content updates are tactical diligence, while interaction mechanisms are strategic vantage points. Only by working the mechanism of transcending content and properly delegating power to the player is the code for the success of a good game. You know, the innovation of the interaction mechanism brings infinite possibilities, which can not only help the long-term operation of the game, but even create more opportunities for the continued rise in popularity and jump out of the single game identity.
Some people have compared game operation to running a relationship. This sentimental description not only highlights the difficulties of the product operation process, but also highlights the importance of the official intention to interact with players.
Indeed, compared with creating a first hit, how to continue to interact with players in depth after becoming popular, and long-term promotion of word of mouth, is the biggest challenge that every game must face.
Many products regard social networking as a long-term way out, but social networking alone cannot explain the growing number of "social fear" players. Unlike many products that insist on socializing but are limited to routines, the success paths of the aforementioned "Harry Potter: Magical Awakening", "Light Encounter", "Original God", "Ark of Tomorrow" and other excellent products are inside and outside the game, creating a sticky social system with a good interactive atmosphere.
Breaking through the shackles of the numerical framework, getting rid of the kidnapping of the commercial system, filling every detail of the game with happiness in the game environment full of temperature, guiding players to interact with other players based on enthusiasm, based on love, and interacting with other players, this is the real appearance of the game.
Some people may feel that strong IP and even opportunities build a good interactive and social premise, and ordinary products are actually difficult to reproduce. GameLook does not deny this view, but privately believes that always insisting on maintaining frank and in-depth communication with players and designing positive products based on user needs is the key to enhancing the interactive atmosphere between the two sides and ensuring that long-term operations continue to heat up.
The success of any good product is not limited to itself. Technology and art can indeed best show the progress of the game era, but excellent interactivity is the part that really touches the soul of the game and can attract a steady stream of players.
We hope that products like Harry Potter: Magical Awakening will set a new paradigm for more game developers, and even the industry as a whole, helping more developers build more great products and continue to provide players with a superior entertainment experience. Judging from the current level of intentions of game designers, it is difficult not to look forward to the performance of these popular games in the new year.
····· End ·····
GameLook Daily Game Industry Report
Global vision / depth is material