Text/Wang Dan
In recent years, more and more products have tried to broaden the value of "games". To be precise, games are no longer just "fun" – many games are beginning to actively "add material" to help other groups in society have a voice.
For example, after "Genshin" broadcast the Dixia character PV on February 23 this year,
A large number of players spontaneously donated to Project Hope
。 Project Hope's official WeChat public account later tweeted "5 days, more than 90,000 people donated, hope to shine because of you" on March 1, indicating that the 5 million crowdfunding goal of "Project Hope 1+1 Education Aid Action" has been achieved.
As early as 2020, Ark of Tomorrow cooperated with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and other organizations to launch the "Symbiosis of 10,000 Kinds" activity, and donated the proceeds of the activity to relevant foundations for domestic Yangtze finless porpoises and snow leopards and their habitat protection projects.
At the end of last year, a game that also included public welfare content went from China to the world - a text adventure game called "Man in the Woods" appeared at the United Nations Climate Change Conference and the Biodiversity Conference, which was also the first domestic game to appear in the latter's event.
Some people may think that this kind of small game with obvious public welfare purposes, the gameplay must be quite boring, and you can clear the level with just "a little". This is not the case with Man in the Woods, which requires players to think and choose.
In the game, the player, as the "Selector", will embark on a journey through time and space to experience the story of different identities. And the ultimate goal of this journey is to let the selector find a correct path of his own in the wrong choice of either/or, and awaken the consciousness of nature.
The plot of the game unfolds with the palm oil product industry chain as a clue, and players need to experience the stories of consumers "people in the city", marketers "people in the tower", and producers "people in the park", and make the right choices to solve the dilemma they face.
Doesn't that sound simple? But it's not – the game distracts players with the wrong options.
Sometimes, the game also puts real-world problems in front of the player. For example, if the player, as a palm grower, needs to earn money to support his family, do you choose to make quick money to steal trees, or risk trying experimental planting that is not necessarily profitable but sustainable? The player can choose to steal logging, which will indeed allow the "person in the park" to get a lot of labor fees, but at the same time, it will also make him and his family lose their original living environment, and his daughter will also ask: Dad, the forest has been cut down, where do we go in the future?
By making choices in different identity stories that favor the coexistence of man and nature, players can usher in the happy ending of the game - the "man in the forest" orangutan lives a leisurely life, which tells children that humans have the same love for nature as orangutans.
Conveying public knowledge while being challenging and fun earned Man in the Woods a 90% positive rating on Steam.
"The Man in the Woods", which lasts only half an hour, is not a complex game, but the team behind it is not simple - it was jointly developed by Nanjing Hongshan Forest Zoo, WildBound, Star Heavy Industry, G4G (Game for Good), and supported by the Sustainable Palm Oil Roundtable Initiative (RSPO). Environmental organizations, link platforms, consultancies, game companies, zoos, they don't seem to have much to do with each other, but they came together because of Man in the Woods.
Recently, Grape Jun talked with Brother Q, founder of Star Heavy Industry and the person in charge of G4G, about the story behind "Man in the Woods" and their views on games + public welfare. And the beginning of all this needs to start with an unusual zoo.
01
"Like-minded people
It's always going to come together."
You may have heard of Nanjing Hongshan Forest Zoo (hereinafter referred to as "Hongshan Zoo"). Compared to other zoos, it does have some special places, such as this zoo does not have animal shows, but has a dedicated wildlife rescue center. In addition, the zoo is quite active on social platforms such as Weibo and B station, and has also co-produced videos with "Director Fox" Xiaoliang and others with more than one million views. It can be said that Hongshan Zoo is closer to the young group.
Part of the video of Nanjing Hongshan Forest Zoo Station B
In the view of the director, the current zoo has a different responsibility and mission than the traditional zoo. Previously, in the eyes of tourists, the zoo may have been just a place of entertainment. But now the zoo, in addition to species protection, also conveys animal protection information, so that visitors can establish a sense of protecting wild animals, respecting life, and revering nature.
At a 2021 event, Red Mountain Zoo met with WildBound, a consultancy, and explored the question: How can young people pay more attention to topics such as wildlife conservation and wild habitat?
Following this question, they thought of the game, and also thought of the "protagonist" of the game - Hongshan Zoo once had a orangutan named "Leshen", which is the first captive orangutan in East China, and the first orangutan in China to learn to draw. The director believes that Lexen represents an ambassador from the wild to the city, breaking down the barriers between humans and animals.
Orangutan "Le Shen"
Since then, they have contacted G4G, a business-oriented think tank and link platform with the core mission of "illuminating the positive value of games". As a link platform, G4G can provide docking support for governments, institutions, enterprises, organizations, game teams, etc. For example, if Hongshan Zoo wants to solve the pain point of conveying information to young people through games, then G4G can help recruit the right team to participate in the production.
Such a special project also made G4G raise a sense of mission. In G4G's view, the protection of orangutans is not only about the orangutan species, but also about everyone's life and the world in which everyone lives.
G4G sent out a game project recruitment invitation in August last year, and then received a response from Q brother. Brother Q began to do gamification design in 2011, and later founded the Star Heavy Industry team, and one of the team's business orientations is to create games with positive value content, such as their previous "Chang'an Yeming", which reflects the impact of players' choices on all living beings through a different kind of Westward Journey story, and arouses players' resonance and thinking.
At that time, Star Heavy Industries was also planning to make a game that reflected the concept of animal protection, so it hit it off with G4G and joined the "Man in the Woods" project. In this way, several teams that seemed to have no intersection came together. The director of Hongshan Zoo later recalled the incident and said he and his colleagues believed that like-minded people would always come together.
02
How to make the game "break the wall" to reality
In some ways, there are quite a few coincidences in this cooperation - Brother Q is from Nanjing, and the location of the Hongshan Zoo is on his hometown. In addition, Brother Q himself is also very passionate about nature, he has 4 cats at home, as well as rutin chickens, roosters, turtles, etc., and occasionally wild tree frogs and black thrushes break into the house.
Brother Q's cat
Through being close to nature, Brother Q discovered many common characteristics between animals and humans. Coincidentally, in the process of developing "Man in the Woods", Brother Q's own baby was born, and Hongshan Zoo also welcomed a baby orangutan "Chestnut" at the same time, and through docking and communication, Brother Q felt more and more that there were many similarities between orangutans and humans.
However, for the game "Man in the Woods", G4G and Star Heavy Industries do not want it to just make players aware of the commonality between animals and humans - this game is actually an "invitation" to invite more people to be aware of the impact of their actions on the environment and help them learn how to support animal protection through practical actions.
Brother Q believes that many people are not unaware of animal protection and environmental protection, but do not understand which animals and plants need to be protected and how to protect them. He talked about how he once saw a skink in the lobby of a hospital, and others thought it was just a slightly peculiar looking small animal, and ignored it, but it was actually a national second-class protected animal. Finally, with the reminder and help of Brother Q, several people worked together to escort it to the grass outside the building. In Brother Q's opinion, if these people had known that skinks were protected animals from the beginning, they might have lent a helping hand earlier. The purpose of "Man in the Woods" is to try to popularize these animal protection knowledge for players.
With only 3 people in the production team, the development of "The Man in the Woods" took only 1-2 months. Brother Q said that the short time does not mean that the game content is less, and the real reason for the fast research and development speed is that Star Heavy Industries itself has accumulated experience in text adventure games, and the team already has a set of standard industrialization processes. In addition, the illustrations of "People in the Woods" are all completed by AI - Star Heavy Industries has its own AI module, and the team "feeds" some of the manually drawn illustrations to the AI for training, and then allows the AI to draw illustrations with the same style.
In addition, Brother Q's own experience accumulation in the past 10 years has also made the production of "Man in the Woods" smoother. When someone asks him how long it will take to make a game that is currently star-heavy in depth, he will ask, "Do you want to ask about production time, actual development time, or preparation time?" If it is to ask about the preparation time, then I can only tell you - 10 years. ”
With experience and technology, the production team saved a lot of time in art and programming, which also allowed them to focus more on polishing the text content. The Man in the Woods is a game designed to impress players with a story, so organizing and debugging the text becomes the most important part. The Red Mountain Zoo and G4G also provided a lot of help at this stage, such as providing orangutan documentaries and finding experts from environmental groups such as the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and the RSPO to review the game content.
Some branching options in the game
Looking back at the research and development process, the head of G4G said that the biggest challenge they encountered was to deal with the information difference between the game circle and the animal protection circle. For example, animal protection organizations do not understand the style of game art and the cost of art, and Star Heavy Industries may not understand the relevant guidelines for animal protection. G4G plays a coordinating role between the two.
The challenges for the production team are different from those of G4G. Considering the public welfare purpose of "The Man in the Woods", they were undecided about the core player base in the early stages of the game design. Brother Q hopes that this game can be recognized by outsiders in the game circle, which means that Star Heavy Industry needs to subvert the previous user portrait design ideas. To this end, the production team designed interactions as simple as possible to reduce player learning costs and set up as many branches as possible to improve immersion.
In addition, in order to make the game experience "break the wall" to trigger players' understanding and cognition of reality, in addition to teaching players animal protection knowledge in the game, the production team also designed some special content. For example, at the end of the game's flow, players are given a "Reality Challenge Sheet." The tasks in the table range from a relatively basic understanding and understanding of orangutans to a slightly more difficult way to distinguish the environmental labels of products, guiding players step by step to make changes in actual action.
As a free-to-play game, "Man in the Woods" has no revenue data, and we can't evaluate the game the same way we judge commercial games, but G4G and Star Heavy Industries have their own evaluation methodology. First of all, from the objective data, the number of players of "People in the Forest" on the Steam platform, itch.io platform, and WeChat mini games is currently about 8,000, which is not small compared to the effect of traditional forms of publicity. Secondly, the head of G4G specially introduced a set of SPSR evaluation framework jointly created by G4G and MIT, which aims to evaluate the success of the game through impact, project feedback, sustainability and other aspects.
Using these evaluation methods, G4G and Star Heavy Industries believe that "The Man in the Woods" has met their expectations - it has made players aware of orangutans, and may influence players' consumption behavior, and may also cause social behavior changes under players' word of mouth.
However, Brother Q still has some regrets about "The Man in the Woods".
On the one hand, he believes that the game has not yet triggered a significant long-tail effect. Brother Q hopes that more players will take the initiative to write their own feelings and related stories after playing, and also hope that some players can spontaneously carry out second creation or DLC production, but there is not so much actual feedback at present.
On the other hand, Brother Q said that the gameplay of "The Man in the Woods" is not satisfactory enough. Brother Q stressed that just because a game has a public welfare purpose, you can't ignore its gameplay. If the game can be more fun than most commercial games on the market, the team doesn't even have to worry too much about the cost of publicity, because self-propagation between players will keep the game noticed.
03
Convey positive values: Perhaps
Future trends in gaming
In the view of Star Heavy Industry and G4G, compared with other media, games have great advantages in conveying information - the exploration, competition, social and other elements of the game will subtly push players to pay attention to the information in the game and continue the game, which also makes it a "magic that can make people act voluntarily" in the responsible population of G4G. In the case of "Man in the Woods", players can only experience the next identity story after completing an identity story, and the game gives players a disguised reward in the process - the qualification to experience the next story.
That's why more and more organizations are now willing to try to use games to convey information, and G4G knows this well – shortly after the release of Man in the Woods, G4G helped connect the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum with the game team, and their work "Crested Ibis" was officially released in March this year.
The reasons why Star Heavy Industries chose to create a positive value game will be slightly more complicated. Brother Q said that Xingchen Heavy Industries has never done "public welfare games", but "games", which are products that compete with all commercial games. The team firmly believes that conveying positive value is the development trend of the future game industry - as the game experience is gradually enriched, the tastes and eyes of Chinese players have become more discerning, and conveying positive value can meet the new needs of players to a certain extent.
Judging from the situation in recent years, perhaps Xingchen Heavy Industry's view is correct. Just as "Egg Party" launched a vibrant tree-planting season event; "Peace Elite" helps rural children obtain space science education through the "Help Space Dream" activity; "Undetermined Event Book" characters' birthdays linkage children's rescue, Gull protection and other public welfare activities; "Onmyoji" launched the "Guardian Contract" stray animal public welfare activity... There are more and more cases of game + public welfare.
In addition to adding content to games that have already been launched, there are also many games that are designed with positive value transmission in mind: according to the ""Game +" in China 2022 research report, Tencent announced as early as 2018 that it would focus on the layout of functional games with the purpose of "exploring games and helping the future", and later launched the carbon neutrality-themed popular science game "Carbon Island"; In 2021, Shengqu Games cooperated with Zhejiang University Children's Hospital to launch "Intensive Training Number"; In 2022, Polk City and the optometry background team of Wenzhou Medical University jointly developed and launched "Happy Vision Planet", which uses gamification to optimize traditional strabismus amblyopia therapy.
Happy Vision Planet
Individual positive value games have even appeared in mainstream awards. For example, the single-player game "Hellblade: Senna's Sacrifice", the game decided to restore the world in the eyes of psychopaths at the beginning of its design, in order to let players understand and respect patients through the game. The game received 5 nominations in the 2017 TGA and eventually won 3 of them.
"Hellblade" won the TGA Award for Best Performance
However, the person in charge of G4G and Brother Q also mentioned that at present, some teams are forcing public welfare content in the game purely for the sake of "survival desire" and "political correctness". This kind of show situation is very easy to identify - the public welfare information is inserted bluntly, it is difficult to integrate with the game content, and regardless of the actual situation, even the player can feel the jerky sense of information implantation.
Take tree planting, not the more trees planted, the better, tree planting needs to consider the type of tree, planting spacing, height arrangement and other factors. Brother Q has seen a public welfare activity that ignores these practical skills before - a group of people planted more than 20 trees in less than 10 square meters and then grew away, and these huddled trees were likely to not live for more than 2 weeks.
In their view, if you really want to do a good job in game + public welfare, you should seriously consider how to integrate positive value content naturally and reasonably as early as the design stage. This is never easy, and it requires game makers to spend a lot of time researching the relevant knowledge. At the "Game +" forum of the 2022 China Game Industry Annual Conference held in February this year, Brother Q used "Man in the Woods" as an example to emphasize the importance of this matter: "If you want to do a good job, you must read literature, understand documentaries, and really understand the plight of orangutans like a researcher." ”