Games are a very good medium, its unique interactivity allows people to immerse themselves more quickly, and the ideas that the work wants to convey will leave a deeper impression, which makes it different from all the traditional media of the past. With the development of the industry, the game types are more diversified and the functions have become more mature. It can start to provide services for some vulnerable groups, and features like color blindness mode have basically been popularized in the game. Not only that, but there have also been works created for the voice of the disadvantaged. In 2013, a mobile phone decryption game called Blind Scene appeared, and the player played as a blind person, so it did not have any game screen and could only solve the puzzle with the help of voice prompts.
However, such games with a public welfare nature are only a minority after all, and the choice of themes and how to bring intuitive feelings to players are all difficulties in the creation of such games. In 2019, Tencent released a game called "Blue Bridge Cafe", which is a public welfare game from the perspective of AIDS patients. Out of curiosity about the content, I went to experience the game.
The game was released in 2019 and should already be officially available. This experience is not a trial version, but a way to experience the game (WeChat Mini Program, QQ Mini Program)
The story mainly tells the story of what happened between a coffee shop owner and three AIDS patients. The identities and experiences of the three patients are very different, but they are equally unfortunate to suffer from this disease. The "hedgehog" is an orphan who grew up without the love of his parents and made him abandon himself. Growing up on the street, he only learned of a group of fox friends, who fooled around in various places every day, and one of them was infected with AIDS without paying attention.
"Shuyi" is a mother, originally has a harmonious and happy family, on last year's birthday girlfriend gave her a party, after eating the girlfriend pulled her to the nightclub, the result of the next door to come to the table boy Dao, when she woke up again was already in a stranger's bed. When I went to the hospital, I found that I was already HIV positive. Her husband threw her out and wouldn't let her meet her daughter, for fear that she would infect her.
Chris is a singer-songwriter who retired from AIDS at his peak, he is also a gay man with a relationship. But as time goes on, Chris's condition will only get worse, and he is worried that he will not be able to leave with dignity in the future, so he chooses to break up with his lover.
The terrible thing about AIDS lies not only in the destruction of the body, but also in the erosion of the spirit. Suffering from such a disease seems to be doomed to life becoming fragmented. I think the developers hope that through these stories, players can experience what kind of world AIDS patients are in, so that more people can understand this group and establish a correct understanding. Surprisingly, Chris has a dual setting of AIDS patients and homosexuals in the game. Now there are indeed data showing that the proportion of AIDS transmission between homosexuals has increased rapidly in recent years, and by adding special AIDS patients such as Chris, it is indeed conducive to the public to form a correct understanding of AIDS.
However, the ideal is very full, and the reality is very bone. The entire game's flow is only about an hour and a half, which is very short, which makes the game unable to cram a particularly large amount of content. Although it looks like a text adventure game, it is actually very different, it has only one story line, there are very few interactive parts of the game, and only on certain occasions can we make a coffee or pull the coffee by ourselves.
The remaining interactions were only twice in the room to look for clues that helped us refine the information we had obtained.
Blue Bridge Cafe is not so much a game as it is a visual novel with some interactivity. It is more to play the role of popular science AIDS knowledge, through some reasonable storylines, let us understand the knowledge related to AIDS.
And if you want to use this product, people can understand this group and establish a correct cognition, which in my opinion is simply impossible. The biggest hard problem is that the overall process is too short, and the one-and-a-half-hour content is crammed into 3 AIDS patients who have experienced completely different experiences. The difficulties faced by this group, their mental activity, their methods of solving problems, these things cannot be fully described in a limited process time. In addition, it is worth mentioning that only two patients in the story explain the route of infection, but all of them are AIDS infection caused by sexual transmission, and none of the characters infected by blood transmission and mother-to-child transmission are infected. There is also only one text related to mother-to-child transmission in the whole text.
In addition to the lack of content due to the length of the process, "Blue Bridge Cafe" as a game work that focuses on real problems, the artistic processing component of the whole story is a bit too high. In the early days, there was basically no communication, "Shuyi" and her husband sat in the café, changed her husband's view of AIDS, and got the right to visit twice a week and take turns taking care of her daughter on weekends. When asked how to do it, the answer was "Witch's Magic"
I can understand that due to the limitation of time, if the story is to be completed smoothly, it can only be simplified by some methods. But "Blue Bridge Cafe" uses artistic processing to make the story get a fairy tale-like happy ending, but also lose the sense of reality. The problems encountered by the AIDS community were originally very real social problems, but due to the limitation of the length of the story, the game could not cause a wide range of discussions.
Coincidentally, another public welfare game that has been widely discussed by netizens and has attracted attention to vulnerable groups is also from Tencent's game dream-chasing plan. This game I believe many people have heard, the name of the game is called "See", is a game for the blind to speak. In the game you will play as a blind man, get on the bus in the way of a blind man, and go to the beach. The reason why this game caused a lot of discussion at the time was that players intuitively experienced the hardships of blind life. Faced with a road surface with almost zero visibility, you can only carefully navigate the city through blind lanes and blind canes. The unreasonable construction of blind lanes, the inability to cross the road alone, the anxiety of bus stops without knowing the number, these realistic problems make players feel extremely real, and their empathy for the plight of blind people is why it will cause such a wide discussion, so that more people can understand this group and form a correct cognition. Of course, this is also due to the subtle choice of the target group, the visual change is very intuitive, and it is easy for humans to feel the difference brought about by the visual change. But the plight of the AIDS population is more complex and cannot be visualized intuitively. This also makes the development of "Blue Bridge Cafe" more difficult.
The "blue" of the Blue Bridge Café is taken from the color of AIDS blockers, and the "bridge" refers to the bridge between hive prevention knowledge and the public. I hope that more such public welfare games can be played in the future, so that while we gain knowledge, more vulnerable groups can also stand freely under the sun.
A truly powerful country should not only be prosperous and powerful, but also free and equal. I hope that there will be more and more such public welfare games, and I also hope that one day in the future, the phenomena and problems in the game can be improved, and the demands and hopes of the vulnerable groups can be realized.