In indie games and even the entire game industry, Chen Xinghan and his studio ThatGame Company's "Journey" can be said to be an iconic work.
With simple gameplay and a moody art style, Wind Traveler has made more people believe that games can also be art. As the game's tenth anniversary approaches, ThatGame Company co-founder and CEO Chen Xinghan mentioned the game's impact on the industry and himself in a recent interview with foreign media GI, and said when referring to the $160 million financing that he and ThatGameCompany hope to make the game industry's "Snow White" and "Toy Story" and let the game be respected by the mainstream as an art form.
In the interview, Chen Xinghan rarely recalled the embarrassing time before the release of "Wind Traveler", the company once had a debt of 200,000 US dollars, because it could not pay wages, the team had no choice but to disband, even if Chen Xinghan now has a halo, but there have been dark moments, reflecting the difficulty of the survival of the independent game team.
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This weekend marks the tenth anniversary of the Release of Journey by the BeatGame Company on the PlayStation 3 platform.
A gloomy and wordless adventure in the Desolate Lands, the design of Wind Traveler was very rare at the time, a game developed by an independent team with a distinct artistic bent that received special attention from mainstream platform holder Sony.
The player's goal is simply presented, with a mountain in the distance that seems to beckon to you, a beam of light projected from a crack in the top of the mountain, and a plant-like path between them, constantly energizing the player's limited ability to fly, creating a path to the location.
The story is not as easy to understand as the player used to see, and the hieroglyphic clip art outlines the demise of a civilization. The player character resembles a strategic portrait of a personality, an individual in a robe with pointed, angular legs, no arms, no gender, and no facial details outside of the eyes.
Even the game's multiplayer mode reveals as little information to the player as possible, matches players together without common game guidelines, and minimizes communication between them. There's a button to make characters sound, mainly to draw attention to an area, or to let the player know where each other is, but that's about it. There is no username except the last letter, no matchmaking lobby, no chat function, voice, or text.
The game was a successful work with both word-of-mouth and commercial performance, and eventually won the Game of the Year Award at GDC and DICE, and was also highly praised by many European and American industry media.
To mark the tenth anniversary of the release of Wind Traveler, ThatGame Company co-founder and CEO Chen Xinghan talked about the lessons he learned from the game for more than a decade.
Cultivate your story with games: Player behavior depends on the environment you provide
Chen Xinghan said, "When I made this game at that time, I never expected to get so many positive reviews. When the game was released in 2012, we received a flood of letters and emails from players who shared their stories and talked about what the game meant to them. ”
Although the player stories he heard were somewhat compelling, such as that of a player who fell into a frozen lake as a child and died clinically for nearly two minutes, saying that the game was closer to that feeling than he could describe, Chen Xinghan was shocked by a story that he had listened to more than a dozen times.
In each of these stories, players tell Chen that they have lost their loved ones shortly before playing the game, and begin to think that their companions in the game are actually their relatives saying goodbye to them in the game.
Chen Xinghan said, "When they play through the game together, it helps them relieve their grief and help them let go of the past until their loved ones go to a better place." I never thought that the game had healing power and could help people, but it changed the lives of many people, and that was the biggest surprise for me. ”
These stories are brought through planning decisions in the multiplayer mode of Wind Traveler.
"Exposing the PSN IDs of other players is an inappropriate way to potentially destroy emotions immediately," Chen said, "it's not enough to just hide the player's PSN ID, because we noticed that the PlayStation cross-media bar provides a feature where you can see the names of recent interactive players, and we had to work with Sony to find ways to block those names until the end of the game." ”
Usernames weren't the only criteria that ThatGame Company ignored at the time.
"We also removed gender and age tags, just like the way the characters were designed, we also removed the arms of the player characters, so they couldn't fight or push each other for fun or offense," Chen said. We've removed the design of personal belongings so players don't have to stay away from each other to avoid being stolen or competing for resources. ”
Although Chen said that this was something he did not clearly understand at the time, since then, he has begun to pay more attention to how developers give players context to shape their behavior.
"A lot of people have a very negative impression of people being mean and aggressive online, especially voice chat," Chen said, "I now think it's not that people are so mean, it's the environment they're in that shapes that behavior." Two people spraying each other in a Call of Duty shootout may be playing Windwalker together the next minute. It's the same people, these young console gamers, who will run up to our forums and leave a message saying, 'No matter who was playing with me just now, I'm sorry I didn't get to the end with you because my mom really needs my help.' But I hope you see this post because it was a really good experience. These people even apologized to people they didn't know, and they were the same people. ”
"At the end of the day, we humans are polite and compassionate only in a compassionate environment. When you throw a guy into battle and give them a gun, the first thing they think is, 'How do I protect myself from being killed?' Or, 'Can I kill someone with this gun?' Imagine if you were given a first aid kit, it would change their thinking and behavior patterns. ”
For Wind Traveler, Chen Xinghan said that the key to creating a healthy environment for player interaction is to give them a sense of awe.
"Essentially, it makes them feel small and helpless, and we believe that this feeling of helplessness makes people open up and connect with each other," Chen Xinghan said, "because when you realize how small and fragile your own life is, it's easy to think about how small and fragile other people's lives are, so you are more likely to think about how to help others, or how the two of you can become stronger together." ”
"But most of the games focus on simulated competition, which is an ability fantasy for boys who don't have much freedom, and when you give them too much ability, what they're thinking is, 'Who has the greater ability?'" I'm Superman, you're Batman, who's stronger? But if we were all refugees in war, we might not think about who is stronger than the test through duels, and we may think about how to survive. ”
The decision to limit multiplayer mode to two people also comes from the same approach. Early in the game's development, Chen said they tried to design the game around three or four players, but soon found that the idea of "us" and "them" often appeared, and if a group of people wanted to do one thing and another person wanted to do something else, he would be left behind or left behind, and they found that a disappointing experience ran counter to the emotional reaction they wanted to trigger in the game.
Chen Xinghan said that ThatGame Company's current game, the spiritual sequel to "Wind Traveler", "Light Encounter", is trying to solve the above problems, and he is satisfied with the current results.
"Deep down, I've always wondered if this question can be solved with a larger number of users, and can I create an emotional connection between more than two people," he said. So "Light Encounter" is our next challenge. If you could actually chat with more than just two players, would you still be able to protect the community and create a place where people can show the bright side of humanity instead of making people think about the dark side? ”
The impact of success on individuals: from dissolving companies to influencing industry trends
The Wind Traveler, and people's reactions to the game, also changed Chen Xinghan's life.
"Personally, it makes me feel very lucky," he says, "and we're always thinking about struggling artists, artists who grow up tend to be lonely and eccentric, who tend to think outside the box and are in the minority, which is a relatively lonely life." ”
"But art connects artists with users, knowing that some of the things you put in your life, some of the things you care about, what you dream about, some of the things you think about every day, can reach a lot of people, and they can hear your voice and appreciate your work, and it's like an extension of their love for you." I felt loved and not alone, it was a great experience for IE, and that gratitude also gave me inspiration to make the games of the future. ”
Considering that Wind Traveler has dragged on a tough R&D cycle longer than originally planned, that's a pretty good return.
Chen Xinghan said, "What happens in the minds and news of artists affects the game, 'Wind Journey Man' is a very difficult game to make, and our struggles in the development process are also reflected in the final struggle level of the game, which is a reflection of the developers behind the project." ”
Unfortunately, a large number of people left the HatGameCompany before they could enjoy the results of their work. By the time the game was released, the studio was stretched thin, and Chen said they were in debt of $200,000 at the time.
"We couldn't afford anybody's salary at the time, we had a celebration, we retreated into the mountains, celebrated, and then disbanded the company, so everybody had to get back to work," he said. ”
The crisis was short-lived, and Chen said that it took ThatGame Company up to 6 months to start getting sales share from Sony, and the studio raised millions of dollars after the game's release, but this time was so long that a large number of key talents left the studio. However, Chen Xinghan revealed that many people who left returned to work in the company.
In addition to changing the studio's list of creators, Wind Traveler also changed the company's reach to some extent. The Wind Traveler also became the end of Sony's collaboration with Three Games of ThatGame Company, the first two being Flow and Flower. Even though the first two games performed well, they made Chen realize that console platform owners like Sony were not the ideal partners for him to achieve his goals.
Chen Xinghan said, "What really made me realize is that due to the accessibility of game emotions, I found that ThatGame Company's games should be experienced by a wider range of users, and I feel that our team's mission is to make games for everyone, not just hardcore console players." We decided to help ThatGameCompany achieve its mission, and our next game needed to be available to everyone, playable on console, mobile, and PC platforms. We started with the mobile game version because it was the most difficult platform to develop, and we all knew what happened later. ”
Since the release of Wind Traveler, the company's revenue has increased significantly, but Chen Seems to be equally proud of the impact the game has had on the studio.
"I think it's a good thing for the industry because more people are starting to think about drama games with strong emotions, and I think that's what the gaming industry really lacked at the time, when there was no shortage of great combat, driving and sports simulation games, we were missing more emotional, more subtle and more artistic games."
Game users have grown, he said, and their tastes in the entertainment space have changed.
"After Wind Traveler, we've seen a lot of strong emotional drama over the last decade, some of them indie games, some of them AAA games, which is a big change, and I think players now prefer gameplay to drive emotional narratives. Once upon a time, emotional stories only appeared in cutscenes, but now, a lot of games can even make you cry when you play, which for me is a big step forward in the game industry. ”
Dilution Effect: That Game Company Wants to Do Snow White and Toy Story in the Game Industry
Despite all this progress, it's clear that Chen is still sensitive to how the rest of the world sees the game industry. When announcing a $160 million financing, The Official Announcement of ThatGame Company quoted Chen Xinghan as saying, "Our goal is to elevate the game to a recognized art form... Animated films have category definers such as Snow White and Toy Story, and we will continue to work hard to achieve such goals in the field of games. ”
Asked whether games are an art form or not, the unanswered question, Chen said that everything has changed a lot in the past few decades, and games have been considered an art form by generations of people who grew up playing games.
"On the other hand, games are far from being recognized as an art form by the mainstream, and from 2014 to the present, I call it the 'Great Dilution' of the game industry,' he said. Thanks to the expansion of social and mobile games, we've seen a 10-fold increase in the number of users getting game content. But most of the new games on mobile games and social platforms focus on pure growth rather than winning respect. While more high-quality art games are available every year, this dilution effect has dramatically changed the public's perception of the gaming industry. ”
"I judge whether a game is a respected art form, and the criterion is how people react when I tell people to make a game themselves. I want games to be respected art, and I want people to react the same way they hear about writers, choreographers, architects, or filmmakers. ”
"In 2005, people told me, 'You people ruined our children because you made them addicted and violent,'" Chen said. Today, mainstream society still believes that games are mainly babysitters for parents to send their children, ways to relieve stress, or addictive things. 'Spiritual opium' and 'virtual gambling' were mentioned by many governments last year. Recently, when I told people outside of the game industry that I was making games, someone said, 'I've heard that making games is very profitable, how much do you make?' How many shifts did you add? ’”
Even though there is still some way to go in the mainstream society's understanding and acceptance of the game, Chen Xinghan is clearly happy about the current development and proud of the role that Wind Traveler has played in this process.
Chen Xinghan said, "Ten years later, I am very grateful for what has happened. It's also a bit strange because we're expanding the size of the company, and when I interview people, they tell me, 'I played Wind Traveler when I was 13.'" It makes me feel really old, but at the same time, it's reassuring that the game has changed the way people think about the game. ”
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