This article is from WeChat public account:Touch (ID: chuappgame) , OF: pool Cheng, from the east FIG head IC
In November last year, Shirley suddenly realized that Dad spent too much time on the game every day.
She had never thought about this before.Until Dad came to Shenzhen to see her. When she got home from work, she chatted with her father, only to know that Dad had played 7 hours of “Happy Landlord” this day.
Shire is the game plan of Tencent Joy Game Studio. “Happy Landlord” is the game she is doing. Perhaps because of this, Dad spent a lot of time in this game. Not only do you play in your spare time, “sometimes eating together, he also eats while playing.”
“I support him to play games, but 7 hours is too long.” Shire said to me.
1.
Hiri’s father is a veteran player. “He likes to play real-time strategy games. When I was in elementary school, I took “StarCraft” and “Imperial Age” and played very well.” She entered the game industry and was influenced by her father from a young age. “Other children play.” The game will be embarrassing, but Dad only swears at me when I hang him.”
Hirley and Dad when they were young. “Speaking of it, there are few photos after growing up.” Shire said.
When she went to college, Dad got a cerebral infarction. Dad’s body is good, the cerebral infarction did not cause too serious consequences, but the disease still damaged his language ability and memory ability to some extent. After I was sick, my father retired in advance. His free time has increased, and the games he can play have become less. He can no longer play hardcore games with heavy strategies and operations. During that time, his life became boring and depressed.
“I later found out that he still remembers how to play chess.” Shire said, “I just happened to be in the project team of “Happy Landlords”, so since then he has started playing chess games.”
She is very happy that Dad can like her game. In addition to being able to pass the time, playing a proper board game will also help Dad’s recovery. “Although his memory and logic have no way to return to the previous level, butYou can slowly find some sense of accomplishment and exercise his thinking ability through some simple strategy games.
But Dad is playing too long. “After playing the game, it will also damage his health. For example, if you look down for too long, you will be tired. If you look at the screen for a long time, you will be tired.”
So she took her dad’s mobile phone and opened the game. “I told him, I will set a thing for you.” She entered the “healthy game” system of “Happy Landlords” and set up a “game convention” for her father: no more than one hour of continuous games, no more than three hours a day. .
At the time, this system was just launched for half a year. Her project team is constantly optimizing and iterating on this system.
“I told him that this system is also what I did. After you see it reminding you, you will be treated as a reminder of me.” Shire told me, “He said yes.” /p>
2.
For most players, Happy Landlords is still a casual game. Nearly 90% of players play no more than an hour a day. Like Shire’s father, there aren’t many players who spend seven hours a day in Happy Landlords.
Tencent Joy Game Studio monitors the player’s game data in real time. Through a formula that looks quite complicated, they calculate the “fatigue value” of the different gears for the player – divided into 4 gears of A, B, C and D, the fatigue level is increased in turn, and the D gear is defined as “ Extreme fatigue.” There are also 3 sub-levels under the D file, which is equivalent to more than 4 hours of continuous game or more than 6 hours of continuous game. The “fatigue patient” refers to the fatigue value of two days and more in a week to reach the D file.
According to the information provided by the studio, players who reach the D position each day only account for 0.11% of the overall player. But “Happy Landlord” is a huge user base, with a monthly active number of 100 million users – which shows that even a small number of 0.11% represents about 100,000 users.
The Landlords have a very wide range of players (pictured “Happy Landlords” offline game)
The heavy users of around 100,000 are not just middle-aged and older people. Although the average age of the user base of Happy Landlords is slightly larger than other mainstream games on the market, its main users are middle-aged and young people between the ages of 20 and 40. Obviously, long-term games are more likely to bring problems to the health of middle-aged and older people than those who are strong and strong.
The general manager of the studio, Katie, has been playing chess and card games for more than 10 years. From time to time, she will receive complaints from her colleagues about their parents’ addicted board games. “The company’s colleagues will come to me and say that Mom and Dad will not go out all day long, just play chess and play cards at home, please let us seal the parents’ game account.” Colleagues will also deliberately marry her,” The title can’t tell them!”
Not only “Happy Landlords”, but other chess games will receive similar complaints. Shirley told me that before the launch of the health engagement system, a family of players found them. “He said that his father is more than 60 years old. He is a cancer patient. He is in the stage of cancer rehabilitation, and then plays chess and go on his mobile phone all day.”
Family hopes that the studio can directly block the game account of the elderly, but from the process point of view, they can not do this, and do not want to treat a user like this. “The title is actually a very bad experience, he can’t play at all.”
Although the proportion of heavy users is small, the absolute magnitude is not low. How to treat these heavy users is still a dilemma. Chess games have a long life cycle and emphasize the companionship of users. “But when they are very addicted and feel that they affect their lives, they will delete the game.” Katie said, “This is contrary to our philosophy of playing chess games.”
These problems have accumulated a lot, and the development team of the game is also starting to think about: Is it possible to make any changes in the game to reduce this kind of situation?
The health system looks like a compromise.
3.
At the end of May 2018, a small red dot was lit up on the game setting button of the initial interface of “Happy Landlord”. There is an option called “health game”, which can set the single game duration and daily game. duration. Katie believes that this is like a “convention” between the user and the game. After confirmation, the player can play the game normally, and the game will remind the user to go offline after the scheduled time is reached.
The game reminds the user as gently as possible – this gentleness is also reflected in the interface design
The mandatory anti-addiction mechanism has been widely used among underage users, but what about adults? Adults have the ability to be responsible for their actions and health. Even if they are addicted, they are also their own choices. Is it necessary for the game to intervene in adult game time?
These concerns also plague the health system planners. From the beginning of R&D, it was destined to be a system full of contradictions. “The design of its own is in conflict with the concept of game planning.” Katie told me, “The purpose of game planning is to let users stay in this game more, but this system is to let users be able to restrain themselves. The time of the game.”
“In fact, when this thing was first started, not everyone can understand it, including myself.” Shire said, “Especially ourselves as heavy players and game designers are young in their 20s. People, it is hard to realize what role health plays in the game. This is the first contradiction.”
At first, this is not a product that is valued. “When we just went online more than a year ago, we just made a very simple demo. I didn’t expect many players to use it. The idea of the team is to try not to take up too much manpower for development. After all, We also need to develop more new content related to the gameplay.”
Unconsciously, this system has been online for more than a year and has become a long-term project in the team.. The team has made a lot of improvements in art and logic. From the previous iterations, they are also full of entanglement and temptation in the process of development. At the beginning, it was just a small red dot. Later, the team tried to give a heavy user default setting convention without setting a contract but showing signs of addiction. This agreement can be cancelled by the user. Unexpectedly, there were not many users who finally dismissed the initiative – which gave them a lot of confidence.
They will also try to make some radical improvements, such as the “curfew” function for older people over the age of 70, which can’t go online from 1 am to 5 am. This mechanism is essentially different from the health engagement system. It is a more thorough and strict anti-addiction, just like the protection mechanism for minors – they call it “Bottom strategy”.
“As a developer, we also worry about what happens when older people play games in the middle of the night,” Katie said. But for the age of 70, they are also inaccurate. “Accordingly, this should not be divided by age, but should be in accordance with the state of mind or health, but in fact it is difficult to obtain this information in the game, that is, what is the actual person behind the data. We are now The user image on hand is actually very rough, except that the user actively enters the age and does not know anything else.”
Where is the border drawn? This is a question they have repeatedly pondered. The so-called borders are not just the boundaries of age, but also the boundaries of time – how many game lengths are healthy? There is also the boundary of the experience – how to set a reminder will not incur the user’s resentment? And the boundaries of the mechanism – how to maintain their initial intention as a leader and protector, does not constitute a triumph of the user’s game rights?
These questions are not easy to answer.
4.
In addition to repeated trade-offs in practice, the more fundamental problem is cognitive: the team is accustomed to researching how to let users stay longer in the game, now it is necessary to find ways to keep users away from the game, but also need to change their own Way of thinking.
For Shire, her understanding of the health system is accompanied by a shift in her own perspective. As a player, game designer, and an adult who can manage time rationally, she didn’t initially agree with the system, but after setting up a game health agreement for her father, she suddenly had a perspective as a daughter.
“In addition to the identity of the player and the designer, I slowly learn to put myself in the position of some people who may not have self-control, or stand in the position of relatives and friends of players who have deep needs for health. On – from this perspective, I have more understanding of the system itself,” she said.
Siri observed that Dad’s game habits had improved after the appointment was made. “It’s been a few months later. Sometimes he chats with me on WeChat. He will tell me that he has been playing for an hour. The game reminds him that he can’t play. He is going to play basketball.” p>
“After a while, he returned from playing, and he said that he would continue to play for a while. After playing for an hour, he told me that the system reminded him that he could not play, he went to eat… like this Shirley said with a smile, “It took a few months, he will take the initiative to find me feedback, I feel that this system is really helping him. Many times when you hit it, you will forget the time, the system will remind you that you have been playing a game.” After hours, my dad will really put down his mobile phone to go to the event.”
Siri is in Shenzhen, her father is in Guangxi. “I can’t manage him at all, but with this system, I feel more at ease… It’s like it is trying to persuade my dad to pay attention to my body. It is still very comforting as a daughter.”
Like Shiri, the team gradually felt the meaning of what they did while developing and operating the system. When entangled in some details, everyone will start to think: “If your parents are playing this game, how long can you not bear it?” “If it is a friend or relative around you, you want to give them What kind of reminder?”
The players of “Dod Landlords” have a wide range of ages, genders, backgrounds, and different cities, and the status of players is different
This perspective of empathy may be meaningful. Players are no longer a vague image of age, gender, game duration, etc., but a specific person around them; they are no longer for external playersTo be an attractive game, but to make a good game for the people around you.
After understanding the meaning of the health game, everyone began to think more actively: What else can you do for the player’s health in this game? How to do it?
5.
To make the game fun and healthy in the game, this starting point is not difficult to understand, but how to define the health of the game? How to pursue health in the game? What is a real health game? These big questions are not pure retreats. When implementing every trivial detail in the system, they often face these problems.
Siri knows that not all players can “listen” like her father. After the health system went online for a few months, the players with severe fatigue have been transformed a lot, but there are still quite a few players who can’t convert. If strictly in accordance with the requirements of “health”, they have a mandatory approach. “But if we only pursue this data and go down and adopt a tougher strategy, the experience for the player may be very bad.”
It is based on this concern that the team has designed the fatigue value to guide the player’s behavior based on more flexible values. “We have a lot of players who may be security guards or canteen bosses. Maybe they really need to play so much every day, we encourage him to play in stages.”
Kate also mentioned the group of older players. “Some old people are very lonely, they need to play for so long, do not want to be restrained, when the appointment time, the system will only remind, will not force the line down – I think this mechanism is still OK.” /p>
What is health for the player? Physiological health is naturally healthy, but participation, companionship, fulfillment, and respect are also important components of mental health. The more they go deeper, the more they discover that the health of the game is not a rigid concept, but a development, fluidity, and flexibility. There is no clear standard on how to define a healthy game product.
According to the agreement can get some extra rewards, but whether this is attractive enough for the player is still unknown
They don’t want to make this system more savage, limit the player’s game freedom, make decisions for the player. They want this initiative to be mastered by the players themselves, and they just provide a guided tool. “The system itself is a self-management tool that actually allows the player to adjust the time according to his or her own life without compelling.”
So far, they think that their grasp of the border is relatively reasonable – after all, in this big environment, they have been careful enough at every step. “For the game industry, in addition to some functional games, it may not be too good to be with ‘good’. There will be voices saying that our game first let the user indulge in it, now it is just a remedy.” Katie to me Say.
She thinks that their starting point is actually very small and small, and what they do is just the beginning. “If you want to implement the concept of ‘technology is good,’ in the game, you really need designers to come out of the conventional design ideas and think about some of the higher-level things.”
They are trying to do this.
6.
This sounds like a rotten Hollywood story, right? A KPI, monthly, and secondary-based game project team, because of some of the routines in the movie, such as the father, the elderly in cancer rehabilitation, the family of colleagues, and I slowly understood what I was doing.
But this is the case. Not every product is contaminated with the ambitions of big companies or the desires of small companies. Developers also have family members. They also hope that the game will carry more sense of responsibility and empathy. Not every product can be welcomed by everyone at the beginning of the project. The deeper and more essential considerations always take a long time to understand and polish. Designers will also have a better understanding of their mission and responsibilities in this process.
Of course, the story of Shirley and her father is just a wonderful coincidence. We can imagine that more users who are addicted to the game may not have such a planning daughter. They will not play when they put down their mobile phones.Basketball – the problem is still there: people are exposed to the fast-growing and mature entertainment environment, and the appeal of video games may have surpassed people’s self-control ability to some extent.
The game as a form of advanced entertainment, spread widely and at your fingertips, has a wide influence on the crowd. In this case, what should the game itself do? Which step should I do? Obviously, the Tencent Happy Game Studio is currently given, and it is not the final answer.
The game must of course pursue “fun”, but in addition to this, how much should the game involve?
For this system, Shirley has a feeling of hitting the top. “Simple from the designer’s point of view, it is difficult to judge what else to do next.” She told me that Tencent Research will do heavy user research next, trying to divide heavy users into several types, each A typical type of user finds out, makes offline contact, and understands their views on the system. She also wants to hear more stories like her father, approaching real, temperature-bearing individuals, bringing the care and care between people into the game design.
“We also want to know if this system has achieved our earliest intentions, whether it helps the players, whether it makes their lives better.” Katie said.
Finally, Hilly told me a funny story. Shortly after the health system went live, the studio received a comment from the player. He smashed all the systems in the game and said, “He has a liver and class again.” Finally, he said: “You have a conscience on the health system. .”
“The player is able to feel goodwill,” she said with a smile.
This article is from WeChat public account:Touch (ID: chuappgame) author: Chi Cheng