In early December 2021, the exposure of a game called "Most" detonated major online communities - benches waiting for dinner at roadside stalls, sleepy workers, noisy street scenes in the downtown area and salesmen who sweated and distributed leaflets, "scavengers" who did not forget to pick up cans on the way to the end of their work... Such a title with a "grounded" labor picture will undoubtedly make people think of it.
In the game "Most", we are presented with the truest appearance of the life of the laborer
For a long time, our cultural "consumer goods": movies, TV series, games or novels are more based on the theme of "dream-making", creating a dream that we cannot experience in real life, and living a completely different life. There are not many games like "Most" that put that vivid, warm, but painful real life in front of us, and yes, they can really be counted as —
The "minority" among game producers
In November 2020, Weed and 1d, along with some friends who formed the indie game studio U.Ground Game Studio, told me: "The core members are all old people in the game industry. So the production ability is OK. During this period, "the number of people has been fluctuating between 8-10 people", and from the word "fluctuation" I have captured a hint of embarrassment, because it represents the in and out of the studio members - for them, doing a stable job in a big game factory will be much more expensive, and going out to such a small studio to do a "cold" theme of a single-player game from scratch undoubtedly does not seem to be a good deal.
Members of U.Ground Game Studio at work
In real life, perhaps the spirit of romance never dies — romance represents not counting gains and losses, but chasing love wholeheartedly, and "love" is also the key word weed describes U.Ground Game Studio. It is not difficult to understand why they choose to make a game that they want to make for the love of their hearts, but in fact, I am personally curious why a group of white-collar workers like them, who are at least worry-free about work, have chosen to do such a game that reflects the life of blue-collar workers and migrant workers (at the bottom of society), and what they get is a more idealistic answer, they feel that today's literary and artistic workers pay attention to too few works on the lives of working people, so there is a sense of social responsibility, because -
The "majority" are a group of people who are close and far away from us
"Most" is a group of people who are very close and far away from us, and each of us is inseparable from this group of people in all aspects of life, such as the courier brother who delivers the courier, the delivery man at lunch, the maintenance worker who repairs the gas at home, etc., but we rarely really try to understand the life of this group. "1d" repeatedly mentioned two words to me: "help" and "empathy" - this is their original intention to make this game, to eliminate our prejudice against the "majority", to make society pay more attention to the living conditions of this group. As one of the studio leaders, "1d" spent a period of time as a college student volunteer in an OEM factory in Zhongshan City for a while, during which time he ate and lived with the workers, which was probably the first time he entered the "majority" of life as an intellectual. Perhaps this formal experience formed a bond, and later when he saw similar social news, literary works, and stories, he would unconsciously recall the past, which was probably an important psychological incentive for him to want to make such a game as "Most" later.
The world of blue-collar workers is very close and far away from us
It doesn't seem difficult to make a game about the "majority" of the blue-collar working class, because the blue-collar workers are almost the representatives of the "ordinary", but it is not easy to go deep into this "ordinary" - we can see that in the plot of those TV series, the plot that is often a short emotional entanglement in the parents is relatively realistic, and the professional plot that is far away from the screenwriter's real life, such as the rich and the noble or some highly professional positions, it is easy to "distort", after all, it is easy to be the audience of other people's lives. It's hard to get into someone else's life.
"Most" is based on realistic recruitment test questions
In a sense, the producers of the game industry also have similarities with the screenwriters of TV series, and they often need to "take materials" for content that is far away from their ordinary lives, such as "Tenho No Michi Inahime", which has amazed players in 20 years, which is a game made by the production team members after planting a round of rice, so that they can truly present every detail of rice cultivation in the game - that is, the parts that we have not been exposed to players who seem to understand. In the game demo of "Most", there are also some very good details that amaze me - not only those elements of the direct perception level such as the street scene, storefront, dialect and food stalls that highly restore life, but also some of the content in the game link, such as the "recruitment examination" of the factory in the picture above is based on the real recruitment examination of an electronics factory in 2020, as a person whose academic qualifications are about to be capped, I originally thought that these were all sending scores for me, but I did not expect it to be wrong twice: I saw the wrong 5 + 5 * 5 and think wrong "triangle cuts off a corner".
The production team of "Most" took materials from the construction site
For the "Most" production team, the most important thing is to reflect this "authenticity". Producer Weed emphasized: "I strongly oppose our team to compile the hearts of blue-collar workers and compile their stories", and there have been many monologue paragraphs and other copywriting depicting the "inner drama" of laborers, which were eventually abandoned by the production team, because it was only an "imaginary laborer's heart", and could not fully reflect the real ideas of laborers. In order to allow players to experience the "original" life of blue-collar workers, the game has done its best to investigate and use objective values and objective reports as much as possible, but the game is not real life after all, and if you want to balance the fun of the game with the reality of reality, then -
How should a realistic "life simulator" be designed?
The good news is that, represented by Weed and 1d, which I interviewed, there are plenty of fans of simulation games in the studio. They didn't realize it at first, and 1d thought they were playing strange games: ARMA, Microsoft Flight Simulator, The Kambala Space Program... Although these games may seem to have a variety of themes, they have one thing in common: they all represent simulations of the real world from the perspective of detail.
Hiroshi Suzuki's Shenmue series is also a game that obsesses with real-life simulations
So how to design a simulation game for "workers' lives"? In fact, my first reaction was to Yu Suzuki's Shenmue series – in the bustling towns and idyllic villages, the residents have their own lifestyles and trajectories, and you play a role to "immerse" in this environment, but after I experienced the demo of "Most", I found that this game may not be so different from what I imagined.
The first story script for "Most" begins with a huge debt
What is common in the stories in "Most" is not that the years are quiet, but that our characters need to carry the weight forward - in the first story script, the father owes debts and leaves it, the mother falls ill, the sister is still studying, and the only person who can repay the loan shark so that the whole family will not collapse is you who go to the county town to start working. So it's a goal-oriented game under a "highly stressful" design, where you need to raise $10,000 a month in the story, in addition to paying $100 a day in interest. This seems like an impossible task, because as a novice worker who can only do the day-to-day work, it is difficult to raise such a huge amount of money in a city without even eating or drinking for a month without relatives, let alone on the basis of his own food, clothing, housing and transportation.
The government's employment support gives the "majority" hope
But regardless of whether the ultimate goal can be completed, at least as a hit worker, "you" can see that little bit of hope, that is, the government-organized labor support and training programs - can let you learn basic job skills, and can introduce a variety of jobs suitable for "you" to complete, so when the game was first exposed, many players had some negative speculations about the game, which actually did not conform to the content and spirit of the game, and on the whole, this is still a very "positive energy" game. In this process, there will also be a lot of help from well-meaning people, and you can also form some emotional connection between you and them, according to the producer, this dialogue style and character communication design has some references to "Bliss Disco", obviously, they are not just playing simulation games.
The part of the work is some interesting mini-games
After starting to work "pay back", the style of the game began to show the characteristics of "time management belt teacher" - you need to get up in the morning to quickly pick up a most profitable job, and the content of the work is composed of a variety of interesting mini-games, such as "moving bricks" You need to complete as many singular numbers as possible according to the brick needs of the crane within the specified time, but the more complex the demand, the higher the additional bonus, which requires you to make a trade-off - and any "work" in the game has the saying that practice makes perfect. There will be a corresponding "cultivation content" for your physical ability and work skills, such as doing such a vigorous work will increase your "strength" attribute and work proficiency. This design undoubtedly makes people think of the "Like Dragon" series, and the production team 1d is also a senior fan of the "Like Dragon" series, he admitted to me that the design of the schedule refers to "This Is My War", and the idea of the work mini-game is borrowed from "Like a Dragon".
At the roadside stall, you can also have a game of chess
In the leisure time after work, you can complete some NPC plots, you can go to pick up waste for some change, and you can also test your (Quint) chess skills in the roadside chess endgame - from the content of the game demo, most of the endgames involved are easier, which can be seen as an official "backdoor" for the production team to the player.
You are deducted from your salary by the foreman and beaten
Of course, as the two accepted game producers have repeatedly emphasized, this is not a role-playing game with "story experience" as the core, but a "simulation planning" game in which we players as bystanders, in this process to experience and understand the lives of workers, then it will inevitably involve some of the dark side of it - you may encounter unfair treatment in order to fight for your legitimate rights, and you may also have some psychological problems because of loneliness or inferiority, these "pressures" Setting up a san value problem similar to that in "Dark Dungeon", in addition to "eating and wearing warm" and having a good place to sleep, we also need to take care of the mental health of the "hit worker" in order to make him smile in this city and realize his dreams.
In the eyes of the laborers, they see the light
Face the ordinary and beautiful joys of life
For the blue-collar working class, which carries the heaviest manual labor, perhaps the shadow of life has never dissipated from its side, but it is precisely because of the shadow that the light that dispels the darkness is more meaningful, which is the light that represents hope and enthusiasm in the eyes of the blue-collar workers of "Most", that is, the light that 1d, Weed and the rest of the production team see in the eyes of the blue-collar workers of "Most"—as Roman Roland famously wrote in Michelangelo's biography: There is only one kind of heroism in the world, that is, to love life after recognizing the truth of life. And the life of the laborers shown in "Most" is the best interpretation of this view: in real life, only oneself is one's savior, and only oneself is the little hero of oneself and one's family.
What time did he end the dream and he pressed the alarm clock
As usual, start your day
Busy work Busy harvest What to eat for breakfast
He and he maintained the pulse of the gears
Sweat turned into a rainbow on his body
The rhythm of the pace continues the river of life
Every little hero who fights silently in the post"
- Soda Green, "He Summers Summer"