4 years ago, the mobile game "Listening to the Rivers and Lakes" was launched. In the more than 1,400 days since its launch, it has received nearly 1 million downloads, about 120,000 active users, and the peak frequency of the in-game chat system has reached 218,000 in a single day.
In today's gaming market, that number is unscalcular. But Listen to the River is not a game designed for everyone — it has no graphics, just a simple black background, and all the content relies on sound to interact with the user. To put it more simply, it is a game that can be played by sound alone.
The vast majority of players in Listening to the Rivers and Lakes are visually impaired. Prior to this game, the needs of visually impaired players were often masked by widespread disregard and broad accessibility. Occasionally, their voices will come out of some hidden corners, expecting a response: Can you make a fun game specifically for visually impaired players?
Old Don is doing this, he has been doing it for 4 years.
Make games for demand
One day last December, in Don's office, I opened Listening to the Rivers and Lakes. The game has just been updated, with 12 new activities, and a mechanical female voice reading out the details one by one, which took about 10 minutes. After listening to the last one, I have completely forgotten what the first one said.
"Can't remember, right?" Old Don smiled and said, "But they [visually impaired players] can remember." ”
One of the few texts in "Listening to the Rivers and Lakes"
Old Tang was in his 40s, of medium build, with a pinch of fairly pronounced white hair in front of his forehead. He is now the CEO of Mind Interactive. When he introduced himself to the outside world, he called Mind Interactive "a small game research and development company", and spent 4 years to produce a free screen reading tool "Mind Accessibility Assistant", the game "Listening to the Rivers and Lakes" and the social platform "Love to Laugh". These apps are well known for their online stores and social media, but they have formed a rather lively circle among visually impaired users.
In Don Sr.'s self-description, he didn't think at first that he would develop a game. He graduated from a prestigious university, studied in Europe, started a business at the age of 25, and his first cooperation object was the first brand of electronic education in the 1990s. In 2002, he went alone to talk with the other party with annual sales of 1.5 billion yuan and developed small language products together. At that time, electronic products were still priced according to hardware configurations, and profits were based on volume, but Old Tang and his small language products broke through this law.
"I learned later that this was a vertical and a market segment, and there was not much of a concept at the time. All I know is that someone told me that if I had this need, I would consider whether it could be achieved. Old Don said. This idea of making products to meet demand was also reflected in every business he followed: he did translation software, did e-learning, and until the advent of smartphones.
"It was about 2004 and 2005, when all kinds of MP3s and MP4s were still very popular, and electronic dictionaries were selling well, but after the smartphone came out, I immediately realized that this thing was the future, and I transformed into mobile phone development." Old Don said. Now it seems that this is of course a correct decision, but when Old Tang first did mobile phone software development, the boss of the market was still Symbian, Apple mobile phone just listed, Android system in the 1.0 stage, so he walked through many detours.
For Don Sr., exposure to the visually impaired community was an accident. When a friend approached him, he said that a visually impaired user asked if he could make them a device for reading novels. At that time, he did not want to do hardware, but because he was in the empty window period and had a procurement pocket, he finally made it. It wasn't something that Old Don was satisfied with, but in the process, he began to understand the needs of the visually impaired.
According to the 2016 "Basic Report on Internet Visually Impaired Users in China", the number of visually impaired people in China is more than 13 million
There are more contacts, and visually impaired players come to ask Old Tang if he can make them a game, and they are willing to spend money for the game.
Old Tang believes that this demand is very reasonable and in line with his business logic. But after a detailed study, he found that the demand for these people is PC games - in the era when smartphones are not yet popular, the price is still expensive, and the cottages are flooded, people do not have the concept of mobile games, and the popularity of PCs in the visually impaired community is not high, "8 out of 10 people may not have computers, and they will not use computers", and PC games have no room for promotion.
Soon, the golden age of smartphones arrived, followed by the explosion of mobile games. People can buy a mobile phone that can play games for more than 1,000 yuan, and developers with a keen sense of smell have earned their first pot of gold in the mobile app store.
After 2008, barrier-free design has become the standard of smart phones, and smart phones have gradually become popular among the visually impaired. After that, Don Sr. waited and watched until 2016, when he felt he could try to play games for visually impaired players on his mobile phone.
Don Sr. has never made a game, nor has he ever been exposed to people in the game development circle. His idea is simple: with the demand, with the users, with the market, then form a team and make the game.
"But I never thought it would be so difficult to form a game development team." Old Tang said that he has started a business many times, formed various teams, and has been very smooth, only the game is not smooth.
"I communicate with engineers, I communicate with planners, I communicate with a lot of people, and I find myself unable to understand basic business logic with them." At that time, Old Tang and everyone he found talked for more than two hours, the first 20 minutes, he would talk to each other about users, about scale, about their spending power, but many people did not care about these, replaced by flow, channels, and purchases. They looked at Old Tang and said that they had to pay tuition when they entered the game circle.
Old Don didn't quite understand this. He still feels that it is possible to make users what they need and pay for them.
One window
I tried to play "Listening to the Rivers and Lakes" by myself. Put on the headset, click on the app icon on the phone screen, except for the initial logo and basic information, the game does not have any screen performance. Occasionally, a few dots of light appear on the screen, but if you don't listen to the sound, you can't tell what these dots of light represent.
Like many games, Listening to the River and The Lake also has an "opening CG", which is completely expressed in sound: the sound of the wind blowing through the leaves, the sound of rushing footsteps, the impact of the sword, the shout of injury, forming a month of black wind high, two heroes dueling scene.
Most of the game's story moves forward with character dialogue, with exciting passages with music, backgrounds, and more complex performances. Things like action prompts and UI are reminded by narration descriptions. Follow the prompts step by step, and it is convenient to advance the plot, battles, training levels, and even lessons. Aside from the fact that voice manipulation takes more time, there is hardly any obstacle felt. It took me almost an hour to get the protagonist down the hill.
The development team made "3D audio" the main feature of "Listening to the Rivers and Lakes"
For Don Sr., these designs, which now seem convenient, are the result of a long period of exploration by the development team. "First of all, it is completely different from the logic, such as interaction, generally from the aspects of vision, hearing, and touch, of which touch is often guided by visual and auditory instructions, and vision is the most important input method to guide interaction." Once the vision is gone, the auditory sense can only be used to respond with the touch. Don said that in order for sound to provide more information, many designs need to completely overturn their original cognition.
This is also the reason why "Listening to the Rivers and Lakes" has adopted sound effect performances in many places, rather than purely voice descriptions. "That's too wordy, it's inefficient, and the players are tired." Don Sr. said it was a compromise because describing all the scenes purely in speech was like "sending a map of a few megabytes byte byte."
Where sound must be used, the narration speed is also faster than ordinary audio and video. Old Don said that this speed is in line with the habits of visually impaired players, ordinary people feel fast, but more suitable for them.
Old Tang gave me another example: in the general game, the character's health, blue amount, equipment, and skills do not need to be described, and they are written with numbers and words, and the player can see it. But in Listening to the Rivers and Lakes, these have to be read out in speech, and many players will deliberately remember this set of numbers. "Once, a player came to complain that the game had bugs and deliberately lowered his equipment level," Don said with a smile, "We went to check the backstage and found no problems, and it turned out that he misremembered." ”
Beyond the game content, there are many more troubles that need to be solved. Old Tang said that the most complex and onerous task of the development team is actually model adaptation - not only to adapt to the new mobile phones and new systems that are constantly being sold, but also to be backward compatible with old mobile phones and old systems, and the scope of this "backward compatibility" is unexpected by many people.
Mind interactive office daily
"'Listening to the Jianghu' still supports the Android 6.0 system - in fact, it used to support 5.0, but now it really can't." Don said, "You can see a lot of phones that have been discontinued in the game's adaptation list, as well as some custom machines that ordinary people have never heard of." If we list all the mobile phone models of our users, it is almost a Chinese smartphone museum. ”
Users are not without money to buy mobile phones. Old Don said that a lot of times it's not a matter of money. For visually impaired users, they have to go through a long adaptation process when they get a new mobile phone, and someone needs to be familiar with their usage habits and help them set up, even so, they need to grope for use. Many people simply do not change their mobile phones because of lack of help, or the cost of adaptation is too high, the old mobile phone is broken, and then buy an exact same one.
Old Tang does not want to lose users because of adaptation, many times, he and his team will take the initiative to contact users, telling them that if you do not know how to use the mobile phone after changing, you can always ask us; if it is inconvenient, let the family contact us. What makes Don Sr. pessimistic is that there are still not many users who come to them.
"I don't know if they changed their phones or if they didn't change their phones and gave up the game." Old Tang said that they hope that users to seek help is not only for commercial considerations, "If those players do not play "Listen to the Jianghu", to play other games can also be, but for the visually impaired players too few games, "Listen to the Jianghu" is actually a window for their entertainment, social networking, if the mobile phone is not compatible, this window may be closed. ”
Don said he would keep the window open for all players as much as possible, "once the window is opened, it can't be closed again."
"Ordinary People"
When developing "Listening to the Rivers and Lakes", Lao Tang set two principles for the team: one is not to buy, and the lesson money should be restrained; the other is to pay attention to social networking, so that players can easily meet more friends in the game as much as possible, or pull friends to play the game.
They sound the exact opposite of the design principles of mobile games that are popular on the market today. I asked Don Sr. why he was doing this.
Old Tang said that this is more suitable for the needs of the visually impaired players, including consumer needs and social needs.
Old Tang did not elaborate on the flow figures of "Listening to the Rivers and Lakes" in the past 4 years, only saying that "there is a slight surplus, and it can also support steady expansion." "One of the very interesting things, we have investigated, the proportion of big R, small R, and unclassified players in listening to the jianghu is basically the same as in ordinary mobile games." Old Tang felt that this might show that his thinking was not wrong.
In terms of in-game social, the development team invests more. They combine the social platform love to laugh and "Listen to the Jianghu", players make friends in the game, can directly go to the social platform chat, similarly, friends they know on the social platform, you can immediately open the game to play together.
Some of the dubbing in the game is also done in the office
"It's the same thing, make it as convenient as possible for players." Old Tang explained that for visually impaired players, closing one application on the mobile phone, opening another application, and then returning to the original application, this set of operations is very cumbersome, and most mobile phones on the market do not support it. For convenience, the development team tied the game directly to the social platform.
Old Tang believes that social networking is one of the important reasons for the successful operation of "Listening to the Rivers and Lakes" for 4 years. After gaining a deep understanding of the visually impaired community, he found that the needs of these players were not exactly the same as those of ordinary players. "General games and applications weaken social because now we have too much social interference, everyone is too tired, and some environments are not suitable for social environments." Old Tang said, "But many visually impaired players usually have a lot of time, they play games not just for the game, they may also want to pass the time and want to meet new people." What's more, the vast majority of players in "Listening to the Rivers and Lakes" are also visually impaired, and they will not have much pressure to communicate and are more active. ”
Most of the visually impaired players' social circles are concentrated within this group. After making friends in the game, many people will further develop to meet offline. Old Tang said that just what he had heard, there were hundreds of couples who knew, fell in love, and got married in "Listening to the Rivers and Lakes".
"It's actually the same old problem behind this." Old Tang said that in daily life, the needs of visually impaired people are to treat them as ordinary people, but it is not as simple as it sounds. On the one hand, barrier-free facilities are not so perfect, and incidents such as blind lanes are occupied often; on the other hand, many people have difficulty grasping social distancing with visually impaired people.
Old Don felt that the latter point was actually more important than the previous one. He gave an example: Many visually impaired people have strong life skills, a blind cane can walk the world, but sometimes the kindness of others will scare them. "For example, when crossing the street, there are certainly many people who are eager to help, but if someone goes directly to pull their blind cane, it is very scary."
According to Old Tang's understanding, treating visually impaired people as ordinary people means maintaining the same boundaries with them as ordinary people, and only helping when the other party takes the initiative to ask for help.
Mats, water basins and toys for guide dogs
As if to confirm his statement, there are many visually impaired employees in mental interaction, but there is no obvious barrier-free facility in the office. Everyone skillfully operates the computer, chats with the people around them, and when it's time to eat, they pull out their mobile phones and order takeout.
Developers, streamers, e-sports, short videos
In another conference room, I met Koko, who was the main program member of the development team, commuting two hours a day to and from work. This was his first full-time programming job, and before that, he was an indie game developer who had built his own game platform and invited other indie developers to put their games on it and publish them.
As a back-end developer, Koko doesn't think the difference in vision has much of an impact on his work. The planning colleague sent him the documentation of the planning plan, he read it with the screen reading software, and then began to do it, and there was occasional discussion in the middle. The only difference is that the document given to him contains very few pictures, and if there are, they will be described in text.
Koko himself loves to play games, especially "eating chicken". He told me that visually impaired players are not unable to play aggressive games, and sometimes, because of lack of vision, they are more focused, and the level is not lower than that of normal vision.
Old Tang also agreed with his statement: "I know a few visually impaired players, playing 'King of Fighters', I am not their opponent at all. ”
When they developed Listening to the Rivers and Lakes, they also considered making it a game that both visually impaired and vision-impaired players can play, just like many games on the market that include "accessibility mode". But in the end, Don Sr. gave up, thinking about the fairness of the game.
"After all, the visual conveys more information than the hearing, if the ordinary game is 'transformed' into an accessible game, from the perspective of content, the visually impaired player can know what is inside, but not from the perspective of response." Old Don said, "This will make the game unfair, once it is unfair, there is no playability, and a large proportion of visually impaired players will not play." ”
However, there are some visually impaired players who want to play "Eat Chicken" and play MOBA. Koko said they've also developed several games that feature confrontations, and more and more players are being drawn in. They formed a team and played e-sports games, and at the beginning of the game, there were anchors who served as commentators to explain to the "listeners" in the live broadcast room.
Visually impaired players also have their own esports tournaments
Visually impaired players playing esports may be a wonderful thing for ordinary people, but in mental interaction, they have been doing it for several years. Games, contests, bonuses, live streams, all costs are the responsibility of the company.
"Esports is a complete loss of money." Old Don said. But he didn't want to give up.
The reason is also simple. They want to find new possibilities for the visually impaired, careers, horizons, and more. Old Tang said quite bluntly: "Not all visually impaired people want to learn massage and do massage, they also want to learn more knowledge and skills, and do what they want to do." Otherwise, how can a teenager or twenty-year-old be happy to have a massage for a lifetime? He needed something else. ”
What they first tried was live streaming. Old Tang said that many players came to him, saying that they had tried it on other live broadcasting platforms, but it was very unsuccessful, and they hoped to have more opportunities. Old Tang thought about it and said well, if you can do it, let's try it.
Old Don designed the live broadcast function on love and laughter. Saying that it is live broadcasting, it is actually more like a large chat room, players do not have too many requirements for the talent and skills of the anchor, and hearing other people's voices and interacting with friends has become a common thing they do.
Later, young people said that when others play e-sports, we also want to play. Old Don's answer is the same: if you can do it, then try.
Old Tang himself has also opened live broadcasts and short videos, but not in love to talk and laugh, but a more mainstream platform, the content is also based on the daily life of visually impaired people, interests and hobbies to share. The most photographed is Tong Tong, she is young, good image, well-expressed, and has received a lot of praise. Tong Tong has a guide dog, a huge Labrador, and she takes him to and from work and shoots videos. When he wasn't working, Labrador walked around the office, and where there was food, he crouched on the side and waited.
During the New Year, a short video with a New Year's greeting written in Braille received more than 300,000 likes
The purpose of the company's live broadcast is different from that of the players. From the company's point of view, it is true that it wants to get more traffic and let more people understand the lives of the visually impaired, but this is not all. What is more desirable at the company level is that more and more visually impaired users or their families can see this place for visually impaired players to play and socialize.
Old Tang also knows that it is much more difficult for such content to get attention than those "Divine Comedy" and "Earthy Videos". On several occasions, the video of mental interaction has been on several hot searches in the name of public welfare, but Lao Tang found that 90% of the traffic brought by hot searches are curious normal people, and only 10% may be related to visually impaired people.
"If only there were more visually impaired players in those views, they could come to us and find more friends like them." Old Tang smiled and said, "Of course, if there are many people at once, we can't digest it, but then we can attract more people who are willing to do these things and make the plate bigger and bigger." ”
Old Tang also tried to drop the public welfare label in the past, using ordinary ways to promote games, live broadcasts, and short videos. He found it harder to generate traffic than to generate traffic in the name of public welfare.
"Before we took the money to do advertising, we couldn't even hear a ring. Even, I couldn't spend the money I was holding for publicity, and the other party didn't know what to do with the budget. Old Tang said, "There are still too few people doing these things." Old Don hoped that one day he would be able to spend the money.
Use business for public good
Old Tang likes to say the word "business", he joked that he is using a business model to do public welfare. He has 3 goals: first, to make what the company does valuable; second, to make him and his partners live with dignity; and third, to attract more people to do things with them.
Commercialization means they can survive, and at the same time, the public good has put them in many responsibilities. Old Tang said that this shows that on the one hand, they need to do the game well, and on the other hand, they must also operate it with enough care.
"Now 'Listening to the Jianghu' has become a threshold for visually impaired players to make games, and if other teams do not do as well as "Listening to the Jianghu", then the players will not buy it." Old Don said, "And once we do it, we have to keep doing it, if the game is stopped for a few months, the damage to such a group of players is very large." ”
At least for now, "Listening to the Rivers and Lakes" has been recognized by visually impaired players, which gives Old Tang the confidence to go further. He said they intend to make a new game that allows visually impaired and vision-impaired players to play together in a relatively fair environment, which could be a huge open world, and everyone's choices of good and evil will subtly affect the direction of the entire game environment, allowing players to have fun.
He wasn't sure when the new game would be finished. Before that, he still had to pay more in "Listening to the Rivers and Lakes".
(In the text, Old Tang, Koko, and Tong Tong are pseudonyms.) ）