Text | The Internet refers to the north, the author | ERYA, edited | Pu Fan
If you want to choose the hottest commercial keywords in the recent year, then the only thing that can bring challenges to the "metaverse" is probably "virtual people".
From Tsinghua University's artificial intelligence model "Hua Zhibing", to the virtual person "AYAYI" in the field of content e-commerce, to Vanke's best employee of the year "Cui Xiaopan", Xiaoguo Culture has also launched a virtual talk show actor "Mei Shitian", whether it is "hard technology", "high-tech" and "Generation Z", almost all walks of life are trying to find ways to brush up on the sense of existence by launching their own "virtual people".
Even the "metaverse" is pasted upside down.
For example, in December last year, a media sector research report released by Northeast Securities, researchers on page 51 of Lehua launched, from the rice circle economy "idol collapse phenomenon" virtual idol group "A-Soul" listed as a "meta-universe investment case" - only A-Soul fans have a "questioning" attitude towards this point of view, they asked "what is the relationship between A-Soul and the meta-universe, why has it become a meta-universe investment case", the number of views barely exceeded 2000, And soon someone gave the standard answer:
"The metacosm is divided into two concepts: the physical universe and the virtual universe, and the virtual universe includes everything in the virtual."
(Then launched the taunt)
At the beginning of the year, the explosion of "gel" further hammered out the fact that the metacosm is essentially a virtual human economy. Industry media are discussing "whether the gel has grabbed the meta-universe ticket" and "whether the jelly is meta-universe social", the fission spread between users is handed over to pinch the face to complete, and the opening screen poster also writes "trend wear".
However, the "virtual person" has a natural BUG, and the market does not accept it all according to the assumptions of capital. Especially for the core audience of "virtual people" theory, "young people", on the one hand, the "metacosm" linked to virtual idols has become an almost paragraph-like existence among young people, on the other hand, the behavior and interaction that virtual idols can achieve at present are too few, and enterprises attach so much importance to digital people that young people who are already facing work pressure are somewhat chilling.
I used to like Hatsune Mirai, Luo Tianyi can also decompress, now how can virtual idols come to grab their jobs?
The more realistic situation is that for enterprises, in addition to their determination to develop new technologies, virtual people are far from having the ability to innovate business models, and for virtual idols in the cultural industry, the risk of "middle people" has also become the sword of Damocles hanging above the head of the "collapsed house". How to look at "virtual people" is not like the best choice for the outlet, and the existence of the factor of "people" can easily push consumers into the "uncanny valley" of business.
In contrast, if we are really going to set off a wave of "virtual new infrastructure" in the "virtual universe" space, "virtual pets" seem more suitable for bringing young people in. From the ancient Takuma Songzi to the later Aether cat and ether dog, the characteristics that virtual pets have always had are actually what companies want to get in the metaverse.
Virtual Idols: The awkward end of the virtual economy
The bottlenecks that may occur in the development of virtual people have been intuitively reflected in virtual idols. As the most mature product in the concept of "pan-virtual person", virtual idols have developed to today and claim to be able to complete most of the daily behavior of "being an idol trainee" on their own, and have a relatively clear definition and use guidelines.
Ai Media Consulting divides the application field of virtual idols into four major sections: food and catering, enterprise service, FMCG and entertainment industry. In these four sections, the early Hatsune Mirai, Luo Tianyi, and the hottest A-Soul girl group that the public is more familiar with belong to the entertainment section, while the virtual idols in other fields have not set off too many waves - neither can we see how the company operates and people, and the virtual people have not really completed the "independent" work.
In short, the existence of virtual idols in most enterprises and service fields is more like occupying a pit in a new technology field, while maintaining the presence of the industry, broadening people's acceptance of virtual people.
(Midea's two virtual employees with a lot of virtual idol color)
This phenomenon of collective casting nets on virtual idols reflects two problems.
The first is that the virtual idol of the enterprise operating from the top down deviates from the reason why the virtual idol was originally popular, that is, content co-creation.
Virtual idols before Vtuber — such as Hatsune Mirai and Lo Tianyi — were created by the operators, and most of the content was created by fans. Despite the current pursuit of stunning technology and visual presentation, virtual idols are increasingly cooperating with capital and appearing on the TV stage for linkage, but virtual idols such as Luo Tianyi still have a large number of co-created content. Instead, virtual idols/digital people who serve the business simply tell the public that there is such a thing and then there is no splash of content.
(Luo Tianyi still has a lot of co-creation content in the B station)
This leads to the second problem - the embarrassment of the use of the scene. In general, virtual idols are more of a pastime in daily life, such as live broadcasting, fan creation and consumption of secondary content, and only a rare moment will face non-core groups on the big stage on TV.
But for B-side virtual idols, it is unrealistic to invite fans to co-create daily content. The virtual idol from the enterprise can be seen as a "marketing department employee" in essence, for the "marketing department employee" to create content is not the end but the means, if there can be a more effective "new promotion" method than "creating content", the marketing department is obviously willing to turn. Without a long-term content creation strategy, it is difficult for virtual idols to further appear in front of the public.
This contradiction makes the company's layout of B-side virtual idols, at least for now, a hot but unflattering move.
Compared with the more mature cultural and entertainment field of virtual idols, there is also a contradiction: can virtual idols really "never collapse"? These four words have even become the slogans that A-Soul carried with it when it debuted.
The term "collapsed house" refers to the fact that due to love or some bad behavior, love beans cause people to collapse, and fans cannot continue to project emotions on them. This is the most representative controversial topic in the rice circle economy, and the classic debate is whether the basis for the existence of "ta" is a natural person or a product after commercial packaging (typical such as Wang Yuan smoking, Lu Han and Guan Xiaotong officially declaring love, etc.)?
In principle, virtual idols seem to be able to avoid this trap, "ta" even if the business ability is not good, will not be like the real person to fall in love, have bad deeds, right?
But this only works theoretically. Those who have been in contact with the V circle know that the "middle man" is actually a key role in the virtual idol, which refers to the real person who plays the virtual idol behind the virtual idol, and is actually the direct content creator, which is the bottom limit for the color of the virtual idol. B station UP master "Old Jiang Ju Reliable" believes that what the V circle audience likes is actually the complete image of the virtual appearance of the virtual idol and the gradual integration of the middle person, such as jia le, who is set as a cool guy, gradually shows the soft sister side under the role of the middle person, and this has won more fan love.
However, even if the real life of the people in the middle is not investigated has become the political correctness of the V circle, when the "middle people" have an unexpected situation, the reaction of fans is the same as the collapse of the rice circle. The members of A-Soul have experienced the storm of changing the real identity of the middle man after the discovery.
There is more than one similar incident. The first digital student of Tsinghua University mentioned at the beginning, "Hua Zhibing", was questioned after the official release of the video, that the prototype may be just an original video from the B station UP main "caviar sauce", "Hua zhibing" is just a skin change.
Further afield, the middle man dates back at least to the 18th-century "Turkish chess puppet", where an Austrian magician built an automatic chess device to please the Grand Duchess, defeated many nobles, and was finally exposed as a scam of a chess master hiding in a machine. In other words, virtual idols are not really virtual.
Through the above analysis, it can be seen that virtual idols do not seem to be the best choice in addition to the determination of enterprises to express their determination to enter the meta-universe, it lacks a clear industrial positioning, there is no content co-created by the public, and what supports "never collapsing" is the privacy boundary that may be broken at any time - just a layer of moral constraints on top of the logic of the rice circle, and many virtual people have not even been seen by the public.
Virtual Pets: The other end of the spectrum
Before imagining the market prospects for virtual pets, let's look at such a terrier chart.
This picture implies two key messages: first, the tiger, as the king of the hundred beasts, actually needs to regain its popularity in the image of a "cat" - the "Tiger Down the Mountain" emoji of this year's fire is a typical case, and the basic starting point of this group of emojis is to use the tiger image to get more favor with the logic of the cat; second, the cat will get more young people's love with a virtual image and ID card.
Moreover, several of Gao Zan's comments believe that it is the child's ID card plus the cat's head and not their own, so why give birth? Another comment is that if you still want to raise children, why not just keep a cat?
This is a microcosm, the current young people are far more tolerant of pets than people, and young people who are afraid of having children, marriage, and complex interpersonal relationships are more willing to become "shovelers". According to the data of Ai Media Consulting, 58.4% of the single population in China will have pets in 2021, and the proportion of pets in the non-single group will be 26.3%.
The companionship of pets is obviously very worth mining, and the virtualization of pets is even more interesting.
Take the cat as an example, the cat in ancient times because it can protect the books from rats and enter the family of the reader, and over time there is a companionship emotion, the Song Dynasty poet Lu You once wrote "The creek firewood is soft and felt warm, I and the tanuki slave do not go out" reflects the companionship characteristics of the cat. After arriving in modern society, some scholars believe that the emotional sustenance function of cats is more structured: the phenomenon of living alone is increasing, young people lack intimacy in the city, and can only pin their emotions on cats, which is why cat coffee, cat emojis and so on.
If the rise of virtual idols in the past two years is related to the collapse of real idols, then the rise of virtual pets also has a social background of having to give up on real pets.
Virtual pets can be traced back to 1996's Bandai's Tamagotchi, also known as the electronic chicken. At that time, Japanese policy stipulated that pets were not allowed in offices and apartments, on the other hand, Japanese houses were relatively small and did not have much space to keep pets, so one of the designers, Makoto Yaki, came up with the idea of making a virtual pet.
This means that virtual pets are designed from the beginning to act as a replacement for pets, designed to alleviate the mental stress of modern people, balance emotional needs and limited cost of living.
The technology of Takuma Gezi is not complicated, there are only four buttons for feeding, sleeping, taking medicine, cleaning feces and other eight interactive operations, and the main program can be completed by a single-chip microcomputer. Therefore, after being introduced to China around 2000, a large number of imitations of more than a dozen yuan were sold at the entrance of the school (counter prices ranged from one hundred to three hundred), which indirectly promoted the expansion of the audience of virtual pets: from office workers to primary school students.
(Takuma Gezi's technical interaction model, source "Electronic Production")
But at that time, the development of mobile communication equipment was still in its infancy, people's entertainment through electronic devices was almost equal to zero, "virtual pets" were once regarded as "flood beasts" in this strange environment, and people's discussion of Takuma Gezi was more about whether this "toy" would affect children's learning. For example, thailand's minister of education at the time signed an order requiring schools under the jurisdiction of the ministry of education to prohibit the inclusion of electronic pets in schools. There are even third-party intermediaries that host electronic pets in many places.
It is worth mentioning that in addition to Takuma Kaeko, which is mainly for girls, Bandai also launched the "Digital Tyrannosaurus Machine", a virtual pet machine with battle elements, to open up the male market, and its most famous peripheral product anime "Digimon" was introduced to China in the early 00s and received great praise, when children could watch a complete Digimon in the summer. This also laid the groundwork for the introduction of Takuma Gezi and the Digital Tyrannosaurus Beast in China in the near future.
According to the timeline, this group of children with digital tyrannosaurus machines in their hands grew up, and their lifestyles quietly coincided with the background of the birth of "Takuma Songzi", and naturally became the first consumers of companionship games like Traveling Frog.
The popularity of smartphones has further promoted the recognition of virtual pets by Chinese consumers.
Around 2010, with the full popularization of 4G, smart phones began to become the just needs of young people's lives, a large number of ideas that previously needed to rely on independent electronic devices to achieve with the help of smart phones, got low-cost realization opportunities, "virtual pets" is one of the biggest beneficiaries. Minorities have pointed out that the original child-oriented app "Talking Tom" – this virtual pet that was almost the first to appear on smartphones – also attracted a large number of adults because of smartphones.
On the other hand, the increase in social pressure has also given China's youth groups a need for emotional sustenance, and this kind of companion-based game often has a simple game mode, does not emphasize the use of time, and is characterized by collection and cultivation rather than battle, just like the golden recipe of "collecting, cultivating, exchanging, and adding" summarized by Nintendo for 52 years. The accompanying virtual pet travel frog mentioned above is a typical example of this type of game, and there are also cat backyards of the same type, and there are still netizens who still bring frog physical dolls to the real scene to punch in.
Of course, if you only say that there is a sense of companionship, another kind of mediated pet experience also has a considerable degree of emotional companionship function - cloud pets.
According to the data of Huge Arithmetic, the total number of videos related to the "cat" and "dog" topics on Douyin will exceed 300 billion in 2021. For most content consumers, such a huge amount of content obviously helps their emotional catharsis.
However, this enthusiasm is a problem for content producers, because they need to think about how to form their own IP in pet videos and continue to output content, and over time consumers see another kind of pet videos with "people in the middle" thinking behind them, and they are also facing the risk of collapse.
Weibo's well-known blogger "Memories Special Vest" has experienced excessive consumption of pets - posing for pets, recommending pet sterilization but allowing their pets to breed, etc. - and caused great controversy.
(Pet blogger collapse has a similar effect on consumers, from "Evelyn")
In this way, the logic of cloud pets is actually "the psychological companionship brought by the pet - the trouble of real pets + the risk of taking on the blogger's collapse", while the logic of the virtual pet that has shown a revival trend in the past fire can be summarized as "the psychological companionship brought by the pet - the trouble of real pets + the randomness that the real pet will not have".
For example, the traveling frog just mentioned has this randomness. In the game, the player prepares different foods for the "frog son" will trigger different travel times (wild vegetable sandwich corresponding to rushing away, mountain garlic pie corresponding to going home early, pumpkin bagel corresponding to long journey...). Different combinations of props will also produce different travel destinations, different visiting friends like different gifts, and so on. This kind of companionship game guide is to some extent to crack the randomness of this experience.
Of course, whether this kind of strategy violates the original intention of the game, and whether the strategy can exhaust the conditions triggered by the event, is another question.
(There is a large collection of raiders about traveling frogs in the Little Red Book)
It's not just the current cultivation game that has this randomness. On the surface, the earliest Takuma Gezi is only catering to IP, but in fact, it is also broadening the way to develop randomness. For example, the earliest takuma song set is that the way of pet breeding will affect the final appearance of the pet, and in the joint model with EVA launched in recent years, it is known that the respondent "Ilsan Classmate" said that he can cultivate more than 20 kinds of apostles - higher than the 18 kinds set by TV, and even raise the father of the male protagonist, Tsubondo. In the joint version of Takuma Kaeko and the anime Ghost Blade, nine different forms can eventually be cultivated, and they will randomly encounter "ghosts" to fight with them.
If this randomness is extended forward, virtual pets will undoubtedly become one of the most likely sections of the empty concept of the metacosm.
What is the future of virtual pets?
Before the concept of the metaverse was proposed, there was already a personalized, randomized virtual pet known as the "Crypto Kitties".
This is a game based on blockchain or NFT (non-fungible token) technology. According to the computer newspaper, in the initial stage of the game, the developers of the game sold 100 genesis cats, and every 15 minutes there was a generation 0 cat birth that could be bought and sold. Each cat in the game looks different, and genes can be passed on to the next generation, and the children born of the mating of two computer cats will inherit 256 genomes of each, affecting appearance, personality characteristics, etc., with a total of 4 billion possibilities of change. Each crypto cat is unique and owned by the user.
This kind of game with a strong random and personalized experience is characteristically in line with the basic characteristics of the metaverse, that is, people have a unique and exclusive experience, and the random database is large enough.
However, the disadvantage of the "crypto cat" connecting with virtual pets is that it is still judging electronic pets by financial value and rarity. In crypto cats, the fertility rate of kittens born the more times and the later generations are bred will decrease, and the closer to the 0th generation or the more unique the appearance of the cat, the more expensive it is.
This means that there is no value measure of its own in the game, and the general value is still the economic value of the virtual pet, and the real companionship of the pet is not highlighted. The so-called decentralization of the blockchain is still running under the center of the economy, and the exclusive value of individuals to cats is second.
At the same time, it also means that the gameplay of crypto cat is also similar to most of the game of blockchain technology, which is essentially still a game based on currency transactions, and this emphasis on financial value actually deviates from the core of the pet game of randomness and companionship to a certain extent.
The rise of AR technology also opens up another possibility of randomness and propriety. The 2016 fire of the AR game Pokémon made by Niantic was the beginning of the connection between pets and AR technology, and the game can be connected by placing virtual sites and virtual pets in real locations, and the randomness of this combination of virtual and reality is that players can capture random Pokemon in a random location that passes by.
In 2019, Google also launched the AR animal feature in the search engine. Users can search for animals in the search engine to open the AR card and view the interaction between animals and real space through 3D and AR. There will even be primitive animals, which are impossible to see in reality, and can interact with real space through AR technology.
However, the limitation of the current AR technology is that there is no way to customize the pet image they want to see, and the image that consumers see is determined by the platform. But being able to search for random animals in a random physical space already has a rudiment of a virtual fusion of reality.
So back to the beginning, the metaverse that everyone pays attention to can be combined with some existing characteristics of the current situation to carry out the future development of virtual pets. On the one hand, the characteristics of randomness, personalization, and the combination of reality and virtuality shown in the current metaverstem planning have been presented in the existing virtual pet products: the personalized image generation of Takuma Gezi, the traveling frog, and the high randomness of AR virtual animals already exist. On the other hand, the virtual idol kernel, which is currently known to the public as a metacosm, does not reflect the characteristics of the metacosm, which is neither completely virtual nor lacks a sense of long-term and unbroken companionship.
But then again, the concept of the metaverse has only developed to the present with some fragmented characteristics, which exist in most of the existing scenes, such as Dr. Yin Ye commented in "Round Table Pie New Year School": "I have never seen anything when I play games, and Monopoly is also a metacosm." ”
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【4】 Ai Media Consulting: Pet economy industry data analysis: 58.4% of single people in China will have pets in 2021
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【10】 Huge Arithmetic: 2021 Douyin E-commerce Pet Economic Insight Report
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