Fourteen years ago, two young men who had never met before, met as two bears on a virtual island.
After a brief encounter, the children were separated. Then childhood fades and grows into adulthood. They were surprised to find that the original real-world life, the game as early as more than ten years ago told them: tired to death, make a little money, to save a long time, you can buy a favorite thing.
It was a romantic little thing, because fourteen years later, they were reunited.
Written by 丨Jing Xinyu Editor 丨 Zhang Rui Produced 丨 Tencent News Gu Yu Studio
Bear Mountain Bear Sea
In 1967, Stanley Milgram, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, discovered that it only takes an average of six people to connect to each other to get two strangers to know each other, which is known as the six-dimensional space theory. If the professor does experiments in today's developed Internet, he will be surprised to find that without six degrees, the online world is a thread. For example, the two protagonists of our story, Xiao Orange, a 26-year-old female in Zhuhai, Guangdong Province, and a 22-year-old male Xiao Platoon in Zhenjiang, Jiangsu Province, have grown up healthily in the vast land of Shenzhou and have never met, but their connection is hidden in the vast and complex code of the vast ocean of the online world: fourteen years ago, on a virtual island, they met as two bears. We'll explain this later. A tall girl who studied Chinese international education at university and is now an institutional tutor – you can imagine that she has been tortured for the past year. On the Internet, she actively and unscrupulously shows herself, introducing her favorite movies, dramas and music to strangers on Weibo, and star chasing provides her with a lot of life power, but the objects are very fickle, the first is the Flywheel Sea, then Katie Perry, Britney Spears, to Grayson Chase, Orlando Bloom... Recently, her favorite is Ding Haiyin in "The Pretty Sister Who Often Invites to Dinner".
In her waveless life, the only thing that can be called persistence is a childhood game, insisting on being a bear, and searching the Internet for the strange name "Pai Shan Lie" every once in a while.
In Zhenjiang, Jiangsu Province, 1,500 kilometers away, Xiao Pai, a 22-year-old senior boy, is in a deep pit in civil engineering. He worked as a trainee construction worker at the construction site, "really tired, 007, basically no personal time", but in general, he remains optimistic about the future, he will tell you loudly and cheerfully, "I am a millennial baby!" Like many boys, from the fifth grade onwards, his pocket money was given to the owner of the Internet café, and the game has been on the stage of his life ever since. Last year, league of legends team EDG won the global S championship, and he participated in the dorm carnival, "all blown up." Over the years of playing the game, he has played countless IDs, a very old and deprecated one called, "Pai Shan Lie". That's also the name of a bear.
Pull the memory back to 2007. In the era of QQ prevalence, the vast majority of people have to feed a QQ pet on time every day, product manager Wang Haibing participated in the QQ pet experience meeting held in Shanghai, a girl told him that when the parents of dual workers go out to work, they will lock her back at home, and the only thing that accompanies her is "QQ pet". This made Wang Haibing realize that "today's Chinese children lack partners." "In three years, the number of only children in China will reach 150 million. Later, Wang Haibing resigned to found Moore Manor, and this cultivation community game, together with Orbi Island and Sail, became the common memory of the childhood of the only child of a generation of 90s and 00s. All three games were launched around 2008, when the Internet industry was about to take off, and the target players were all students aged 6-14.
Everyone's life is being changed by the Internet, even elementary school students. Little Orange, a fifth-grade elementary school student living in Zhongshan, Guangdong Province, registered for Obi Island, and she has a natural affinity for bears, and becoming an Obi Islander means becoming a bear, she chose orange fur and named herself Little Orange Bear.
Soon, as soon as her daily homework was completed, she transformed into a bear and devoted all her leisure time to Orbi Island until she was kicked out by the system at 10 or 11 p.m., "You were blown out of the island by a demon wind" – perhaps the earliest anti-addiction system. The game's interface is simple and the color saturation is very high, similar to the kind of stick figure book peddled on the first floor of Xinhua Bookstore. Every week, the bears on the island receive the main quests released by the system, such as playing a football game during the World Cup, finding mysterious dark forces, or decrypting fallen objects in outer space. Think you don't have to work as a bear? No, Orange spends most of her time sorting books in the library or as a waiter in a restaurant to buy items to decorate her home. Of course, having made enough money, people's desires usually point to buying a house — in a bunch of tomato houses, pumpkin houses, and tree houses, Little Orange is fond of a house like the balloon house in the Movie "Flying House": simple, light, and the roof is covered with blue glass. She remembered that it cost nearly 5,000 gold coins, and she saved up for a long, long, long time to become a house owner.
Little Orange's Cottage Little Orange
In the same year, Xiao Pai, an eight-year-old boy who was far away in Xianyang, Shaanxi Province, bought his first thick desktop computer at home. He was the typical dual-career child— his parents were busy at work, locked him up at home for years, and like many boys of this age, he fell in love with the virtual world of computers, but not enough to master the technology of shooting games at once. Cultivation games are the best enlightenment, he remembers, most of his classmates play Moore Manor and Purcell, he tried to follow the trend, but these two games require mailbox registration, for boys who have not yet mastered the input method and only type with two fingers, how to type @is a problem that cannot be solved.
In desperation, he chose Obi Island and became a bear. When registering the ID, he thought of a name, "mountains and seas", two fingers on the keyboard blankly jumped left and right, the screen with the cursor showed "Paishan fierce fight", he wanted to delete, in a panic and pressed enter, confirmed.
Row of mountains hit small platoons
In the early years, the developers of Obe Island declared that one of the purposes of developing games was to promote social interaction among children. And the way children start friendships is always simple. In the square in the game, every weekend, the bear mountain bear sea, bustling, a bear hit a sentence, hello, this sentence will appear on the player's head, the oncoming bear also quickly replied, hello. Or throw a snowball at someone and send it to the other side, why did you hit me? Then I added friends. Work together, make money together, and go to each other's message boards at each other's homes to step on each other. They don't know each other's names, where they live, what they look like, and the chat in the game is limited to play, and only the farewell words when they go offline will pull back to reality, "I'm going to make up for class", "I'm going to start school, see you next semester." ”
In Little Orange's impression, one day, in the game, she was followed by a strange bear, wherever she went, the other party followed, out of curiosity, they added friends. Xiao Pai's memory of this encounter was not so clear, and he thought later that he must have thought that the clothes she was wearing that day were more beautiful.
Little Orange Bear in Zhongshan, Guangdong Province, and Paishan Lieda in Xianyang, Shaanxi Province, became game friends. They worked together to earn money, bought a house and land, and after more than a year, they disappeared.
The real world comes and goes
In those years, Little Orange added hundreds of friends to Obi Island. The wide range of types is also quite in line with the ecology of the early Internet: playing well needless to say, thinking that the other party is a boy and then having a feeling of admiration, it turns out that the other party is actually a girl who is angry and black, thinking that the other party is a good person, so he told the other party to help him do the task, and then the number was stolen. To sum up, friendships, (fake) love, and cheaters.
In the category of friendship, fourteen years later, she is also thinking, why is she obsessed with Paishan Lie? One reason is that she and many people added QQ, in other words, the island ran out of the island, and the missing PaiShan Lieda lay quietly in the friends list. Another reason is funny to say, but it is a serious thing to put on the child: most of the other friends are girls, often because of "today you pay attention to her, but ignore me" and have conflicts, and then write a small essay on the message board to break up. Friendship with a boy is much simpler, two people playing together. In Little Orange's impression, it was a taciturn, shy boy.
On the other end of the computer, Xiao Pai described himself as a child, "lively and cheerful, optimistic and generous", so why give people the impression of introversion? "Because I can't type!"
The little platoon showed me that he really couldn't type back then
Nowadays, it is difficult for them to tell the details of what they have done together in the vast amount of time they have spent together, but when they recall to me on the phone, their voices will immediately fall into the joy of the past, a feeling that once immersed, they cannot extricate themselves. They will go out of their way to emphasize how simple childhood joys and happiness are.
Little Orange remembers that she loves to play a shooting game with Pai Shan Lie that requires double cooperation, pay attention to the direction of the wind and the strength of the design, double PK, she can always win the small row. You know, today's player who opens a mobile game, the fun of his game may be hidden in the headset, and the passionate linkage of teammates (or it may be abusive) is adrenaline-pumping. But back then, you can also harvest happiness by playing games with strangers completely by tacit understanding. After the release of the weekly main quest, Little Orange and Little Platoon often study together and give each other inspiration. On days when they don't want to work, they often go fishing in Dingdong Creek together. Fishing, as a classic setting in the cultivation game, makes generations of players addicted, how boring the action of repeatedly dropping the fish hook is, and how direct the handle is when the handle vibrates the big fish on the hook.
Later, Xiao Orange also played some very popular mobile games, but she was no longer the social girl on the island with hundreds of friends, she never played with strangers, "always felt scolded." Xiao Pai did the opposite, becoming the kind of player who often quarreled with strangers, and he felt that in the later games, "people are for themselves, I have to win or I have to show my value through some way." Everyone has a lot of pressure to play games and don't know why. But when I was a child, I felt very happy just to have friends to play with on the line. ”
Another important activity on Obi Island is to go to a friend's home to interact and leave a message. After saving money to buy the particularly expensive house like "Flying House", Little Orange suggested that the small platoon also change shotguns. The matter of persuading friends to buy a house has not changed for eternity. She left a message, "Hope you save money to buy a garden cottage, like me, that's fine!" Not long after, Xiao Pai saved money to buy his favorite houseboat, and on the day of the deal, he walked around the world hall and pulled others to visit his home. After seeing the new house, Xiao Orange left a message, "You have really made great progress, oh, listen to my little orange words, will not suffer losses in front of you!" Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh ”
Small row of houseboats Small rows
If for Xiao Pai, the good friends in the game are a kind of beautiful companionship, then all this means more profoundly to Xiao Orange. Her real-life friends at school had brought her an unspeakable, invisible, and long-lasting injury. "At that time, the people on our side were more exclusive, and some classmates knew that my mother was from a province, so they would make some jokes, and I felt that it hurt my self-esteem." They'll laugh and say, your mom is a fishing girl, just say these words... And playing in the game, these people are so cute, it is very pure to say, what did you do today? Or if you like to play with that kind of thing, you feel so relaxed and chat with these people. ”
Childhood came to an abrupt end after Little Orange entered junior high school. As the pressure of schoolwork increased, the number of times she landed on the game gradually decreased, and a sad self-discipline was established, "I myself am afraid that if I play too much, I will not be able to concentrate on learning." What's more, her attention was also partially distracted by the flywheel sea, and the star-chasing journey began. In high school, the number of logins is even less, occasionally into the game, do nothing, just go around, in a daze.
She didn't change her ID or the décor of her home, where colorful bouquets, fountains, and game consoles lingered in the virtual world for fourteen years, and a friendship tree with blue fruit—it had to be irrigated by enough friends to blossom. After junior high school, she raised another one, which is still bare. With each login, there are more and more black avatars in the friends list. She completely forgot about the small platoon. In the last year of high school, she worked hard and was admitted to a university in Wuhan.
Friendship tree Small orange
"It's a bit like the old days of my parents, when there was a sea of people, and some people sat in the same car with you, got out of the car, and left, and that's it, coming and going."
Small platoons also rarely landed. When he grew up, he suddenly found that the money earned from working in the game was becoming less and less valuable, "Later, there was a task, picking up ore can earn 100,000 yuan, I think oh, this game has changed." 」 "Most Animal Friends must have had a similar experience: initially, they were satisfied with the daily sale of stones, and later, millions of kohlrabi trades were not alarmed - in this regard, the game, like reality, inflation is the embodiment of human desire and utilitarianism (in the game, the game manufacturer's inexhaustible desire to make money leads to a bloated economic system), in reality, economists think of various ways to confront it, but just like human nature always has a dark side, in the end it can only be left to it. In any case, this is the rule of the adult world, and children can only understand it when they grow up. What's more, the boy's interest in games has shifted rapidly, and since the fifth grade has become a regular visitor to internet cafes, his love for games is as fickle as a little orange chasing stars: "Crossfire", "Counter War", "QQ Flying Car", "League of Legends", "CSGO"...
The little platoon of high schools spent in "either playing basketball or playing games," and he grew into the kind of boy who you would like to believe he wouldn't be smoothed out by life. He and his girlfriend agreed to be admitted to a university in Zhenjiang, so he secretly modified his volunteers against his parents' wishes, and because he was in such a hurry, he did not even study the major carefully. Later, he was admitted to the civil engineering major in a vacuum, but his girlfriend was not admitted, and the long-distance relationship did not last long. After college, he bought a Shenzhou notebook to use to surf the Internet, and one day in October 2018, in boredom, he began to log on to his computer one by one to play games he had played before, including Orbi Island.
Opening the game, the small platoon is surprised to find that players can no longer load into the game for a few seconds, but constantly click crosses to close the pages that induce you to recharge with fancy activity. At some point, Obi Island introduced a human image, and players can choose to show their faces as bears or people on the island - as a human, there will be richer costumes, of course, it may cost more money. Standing helplessly on the street in the game, he found that the street was full of people, and he was the only bear.
Small rows
The little row full of question marks clicked on the list of friends, a black, mouse sliding around, stopping at "Little Orange Bear", he remembered that this was a good friend who had played games together. He went to her home, where the décor had never changed, and on the message board he wrote, "Remember me?" I remembered that we were playing together nine years ago. ”
In Wuhan, Little Orange spent four years of relaxed, fun-based college. For four years, whenever she encountered something unhappy, a fight with her boyfriend, or a setback in her studies, she would open Orbi Island and shop online. For those changes that discourage old players, Little Orange has a magical shielding ability. She didn't spit out as angrily as Xiao Pai, but she never accepted it. She never snares kryptonite, and she resolutely turns off the temptation pages that keep making you human, just be a bear, go up to see her colorful furniture every three or five minutes, and then go offline. In her senior year, the graduation season came, and she decided to return to Guangdong to live. Maybe it was a sudden sadness one day, maybe there was some bad news she had forgotten now, she opened her black Dell notebook, landed on Obie Island, and the message board jumped out of the small line of greetings from six months ago.
Childhood memories came flooding in on the eve of entering society. "The first feeling is that I am very happy, as if I am not alone in recalling my childhood. I quickly replied to the message, but the reply was useless, because [the game] wouldn't push that kind of thing. She replied, "Oh my God, I just went to Orbi Island and saw your message, so emotional!" I don't know when you'll be online again. I always remember you hahahahaha! ”
Message board small row
The time has come to 2019. In September of the previous year, QQ Pet announced that it would stop operating. People receive dozens of pushes from various apps every day on their smartphones, but in the web game of Orbi Island, you can only see the message if you log in in person. After a short stay on the island, The platoon immediately threw himself into the heat of university life, forgetting his former messages. Little Orange graduated, became an institutional tutor, and supported herself with her own hands, and she was surprised to find that the original real-world part-time job, Obi Island had told her more than ten years ago: tired to death, make a little money, save a long time, you can buy a favorite thing, such as the same colorful, brilliant balloon house as in the "Flying House" movie.
"I want to be a bear all the time."
Since he had not received a reply from PaiShan, Little Orange began to try to search for this ID on some social software. At first, she thought it would be easy, but nothing came of it, and she didn't even have a duplicate ID for her to try and make mistakes. Every time she landed on Obi Island, the delayed reply intensified her belief in finding the small platoon, and slowly, this search became a routine action, an obsession, and in order to expand the scope of the search, she even went to Google, thinking about what surprises might be in the foreign language world.
After being disappointed again and again, on June 2, 2021, she landed on the game and left a message for the small platoon.
"I'm Little Orange." Orbi Island is about to swim! I don't know if you can go online and see my message. Hopefully, we can play together again. ”
Small oranges
Sometimes, she also questions herself, does she really have to find this person? "When I was a child, I remember it well, and when I grew up, if I went to contact, I felt that this person felt different from when I was a child, would I have a feeling of innocence when I was a child? Will it shatter a little? There is a consideration for this. But I still want to contact him to see if he remembers, and if he remembers, that's enough. In November last year, finally, in another hopeless search, she searched for a Weibo post from the @retarded bar official Weibo:
You all say that I am mentally retarded, but in fact, only I have kept the agreement that we did not grow up together
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A microblog that happens to describe childhood. Little Orange had an intuition that this was the fierce fight she was looking for. She immediately clicked on the comments, wanting to see if there would be more clues, a person named @ in fact, I am a user with lemons said, "PaiShan Beat this child from a young age is mentally retarded." Not so much, she sent a private message to this user, "Hello, sorry to bother, a little presumptuous, do you know a person named Paishan Lieda?" ”
Her instincts were right. Xiao Pai's college life continued high school, "playing games, learning, sports", of course, he is also an active Internet user, and fell in love with posting in Baidu's mentally handicapped bar, enjoying the pleasure of calling on friends to come and comment after posting. Baidu Tieba is the only platform he keeps the ID of "Paishan Lieda", he once tried to change his name, failed, he can't figure out why, can only keep this strange name.
Mentally retarded, summed up in small rows, is the largest gathering place for original passages in China. He tried to explain to me the amusing here, and read me a passage in a serious tone, "Fish hide in the pond to hide from cats and cats." Then without waiting for me to respond, he laughed himself, "That's it! You think it's funny, but you think it's related to this kind of thing. One day in June 2021, after class, he went to the canteen to eat, and suddenly thought of Jay Chou's "Dandelion Convention", so he created the above paragraph. Two months later, this passage was carried by the mentally handicapped bar Weibo and appeared on Xiao Orange's computer.
After waiting for ten days without receiving any reply, an idea that should have been there for a long time hit The Little Orange: this could be a Baidu Tieba ID. She quickly opened Baidu Tieba and searched for "Pai Shan Lie", and within a second, the computer popped up the results for her, and a user whose avatar looked like a cat. The answer is close. Who else would use these four words as a screen name? Although it was already 00:47 in the middle of the night, she still left a message for the other party, "I don't know if you are a fierce fight on Ob Island?" ”
Got up the next morning and didn't respond. After lunch, the phone fell silent. Finally, at 17:12 p.m., she received a reply, "Yes yes yes, too yes, my mom, this is all right." ”
At that moment, they were all struck by a sense of magic. Little Orange felt as if she had gone through a lot of hard work to complete a search mission on Orbi Island and found a system-designated NPC. The other party remembered her, "I feel complete, enough, as if I can get what I lost back." And the feeling of Pai Shan Li beating is in line with his positioning of his own funny man, "I just thought, this is okay? "His brain is running fast, he is posted in the bar of the mentally handicapped, the other party will not think that he is really a mentally retarded, right?
They quickly added WeChat — too late for two friends who had been playing games together fourteen years earlier. That day, Xiao Pai couldn't wait to tell the story to his roommate, "both a particularly magical feeling and an indescribable touch." I feel that Grandpa Qinghui, my childhood life is really a scene pouring into my mind, maybe some pieces, I can't remember exactly, but on that feeling, it's really wonderful. ”
Only then did they know each other's ages and hometowns. It turned out that the people who were fishing by the creek together were a fifth-grade sister and a first-grade child. They found that they both had the same memes. They thanked the boy who couldn't type together for giving such a unique ID to guide the girl to him. Xiao Pai recalled a past event: one day he was at home and played a game with Little Orange, and when he was late for the clarinet cram school, there was a pool in the game, and he pressed the dancing button on the turtle in the middle of the pool and went out. The bear that represents him has been dancing in the same place, and when he returns from class, he finds that Orange has sent him countless messages and asks him, Are you stupid? The memories awakened, and they laughed together. They look across the network, thanks to the network.
That's about the end of the story. In February this year, this story of searching and reunion received 91,400 likes on Weibo, and people lamented in the comments that this is another Internet-style romance. I contacted Xiao Pai and Orange separately, and they were both happy to share the story, but it seemed that there was nothing more dramatic to tell about their reunion. They didn't talk much about WeChat, and they both maintained respect and a sense of boundaries for each other's private space. Xiao Pai is busy looking for a job to welcome the graduation season, Xiao Orange's industry has been hit hard in the past six months, and she has to comfort herself from time to time, "The uncontrollable life is the norm." ”
But their stories will always be remembered by the Internet, with the beauty of those fading childhoods and the innocence of the online environment. After I added Xiao Orange's WeChat, I saw that there was a bear in her name, and she still has a preference for bears. If Obi Island really taught her anything, it was to keep being herself, "to be a bear all the time." She said.
Producer| Yang Ruichun Editorial Director | Zhao Hanmo Responsible Editor | Jinhe Operating | Liu Xixi Wang Xinyun
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