Different from traditional social software, games are being seen by more and more young people as a new way of socializing. Rather than simply experiencing the game itself, they will choose to play, chat, and share their lives and emotions with different people in the game, thereby establishing social relationships and emotional links belonging to the next generation.
Young people of different ages are exposed to different native cultures in the growth process, which will produce different perceptions of the whole world, society, market, and needs.
In the face of new things, in order to defend their identity as a young person and retain the independence and differentiation characteristics of their own generation, the next generation of users will often choose to keep a certain distance from mature products with a wide range of users.
Young people may not be the smartest, most mature, and most knowledgeable group, but young people are not only the group with the most sensitive sense of smell, but also the group that represents the future.
I. The Essence, Evolution and Cyberspace of Social
On the last day of 2020, Zhihu CEO Zhou Yuan answered a question: what is social networking, what is its essence, and what are its elements? The answer he gave is very simple, there are only two points about the nature of socialization:
- Who am I?
- Who are the others and what are they thinking? What is it to me?
This is of course not the only correct answer, or there is no so-called correct answer. Because the discussion about the nature of social interaction is extremely difficult, it is difficult to have a universally defined topic. The various interpretations of social interaction we have seen are based on the products of different disciplines or different eras.
But this is indeed a very important topic. We need to know what social networking we usually talk about is, how it has evolved, and how we step by step towards the cyberspace filled with huge digital networks.
All this must start from “who am I”.
In ancient human society, due to low productivity, people’s behavior focused on solving the simplest survival problems, that is, competing for water, obtaining food, and finding a place to rest. In this process, cooperation and coordination is the simplest and most effective way of behavior. This is actually the origin of social interaction. At that time, there was no language system for communication between people, but it was with this kind of interaction and interaction that humans helped themselves to survive better through social interaction. At this time, humans’ social needs were only to meet the most basic material and survival needs.
In that era, mothers who were alone had to drag their children, it was difficult to get enough food for themselves and their children. Therefore, if you want to raise a child, you need continuous assistance from other family members and neighbors. To feed a child requires the joint efforts of all. Therefore, evolution also prefers races that can form strong social relationships.
And since human beings “gained” intelligence and understood how to make and use tools, human society began to become a little different. The increase in productivity has made the material life of mankind become prosperous, and self-awareness has begun to gradually awaken. As described in the brief history of mankind, mankind began to move toward that imaginative world.
All the cooperative networks constructed by humans at that time, whether it was the cities of ancient Mesopotamia, or the empires of the Qin Dynasty and ancient Rome, were just “orders constructed by imagination.” The social norms that support them are neither natural human instincts nor interpersonal communication relationships, but they all believe in common fictional myths.
As people build more and more stories, there are more different specific scenarios, and everyone is given more specific social relationships. At this time, social needs have gradually shifted from the material to the spiritual level. The spiritual level here refers to whether to recognize each other’s stories, whether to believe in each other’s stories, and whether to enter each other’s stories.
In the Internet age, with the reduction of communication costs, people have more abundant ways to connect and interact. People are more and more willing to share their own stories on the Internet, to find new stories of their own, and to pursue their inner identity and satisfaction to a higher degree.
So we can know that the evolution of social interaction begins with human interaction, and relying on the social relationship between each other, it has produced material-based and spiritual needs. Until now, as the mobile age continues to deepen, people have a third need for social interaction: the need for information.
This demand is also a product of this era. The mobile era is constantly cutting people’s time, and at the same time, it uses a variety of products to make up for the time that has been continuously fragmented. This is a game chasing fragmented time, and none of us want to be left behind by information. At the same time, the information transmission function of mobile social networks also makes us have a demand for social information.
Behavior based on fragmented time also often brings fragmentation of thinking and information expression, which gradually challenges people’s thinking patterns and expressions. We will find that it becomes more and more difficult to write large paragraphs, and even watching a long video becomes less patient.
This is of course a frustrating trend, but in any case, as McLuhan said, the medium is the message, and the use of the medium can cause changes in people’s thinking and behavior.
From the historical dimension of the development of Internet socialization and entertainment
- The Internet before 2002 was dominated by anonymous information acquisition functions
- After 2002, the Web 2.0 revolution broke out. The Internet has increasingly emphasized interaction. Social media such as forums, blogs, and content sharing have grown stronger and closer to real life. The status of multimedia forms such as video and audio has also become important
- At the stage of Web 3.0, people began to take a completely virtual life as the main body of entertainment, aiming to satisfy the spiritual world, while real life was only an auxiliary form of entertainment. The popularity of smart devices and wireless broadband makes it easy to immerse yourself in virtual life anytime, anywhere. People are both content consumers and content producers, and everyone is a media
Since entering the Web2.0 era, people have appeared more in various online social spaces with “real” identities. What social platforms are connected to are more of real social relationships. Therefore, we refer to the Internet more as a network society than a “virtual society”.
In the Web3.0 era, for users, new media is not only a channel for them to obtain information, but also a new space for their social relations. While copying and expanding the social structure and social relations in reality, the attributes of new media itself as a new type of society have become increasingly clear, and the boundaries between online and offline societies have become increasingly blurred, gradually forming a certain Virtual society in this sense.
The relationship between virtual and reality is like a balanced chemical equation. We can move from virtual to reality, or from reality to virtual. Looking at it now, we are heading to that cyberspace.
The term “cyberspace” originated from Canadian novelist William Gibson. In 1984, he used the term “cyberspace” for the first time in the science fiction novel Necromancer. Some researchers summarize the characteristics of cyberspace into four aspects:
- People’s intuition can get rid of the shackles of the physical body and exist and act independently in cyberspace
- Cyberspace can break through the limitations of the physical world and travel through time and space
- Cyberspace consists of information, and people with the ability to manipulate information have huge powers in cyberspace
- Human-machine coupled cyborg gains immortality in cyberspace
The first three characteristics have been fully reflected in today’s Internet, but the human-computer coupled, immortal cyborgs seem to exist more in science fiction movies and novels. However, with the continuous accumulation and breakthrough of technologies such as artificial intelligence and brain-computer interfaces, human beings are gradually moving to the fully physical cyberspace, and our social behavior will change again.
II. Involution and Dislocation: Emotional Sustenance at the Inflection Point of the Era
In the background of globalization, competition between countries has penetrated into the internal markets of various countries through the connections between different industries, and has brought more and more intense external pressures to the enterprises within them, thus limiting the limited resources and market size. Internally, the living space and growth momentum of the enterprise are further compressed.
For enterprises, the increase comes from the development of new markets, and when technological breakthroughs have not been well applied to the market, growth stagnation and rising costs will occur. When it is impossible to increase new business in various ways and improve the utilization of existing resources and output efficiency, the source of corporate profits will turn to the cost side and transfer them in various ways.
When China first entered the WTO, along with the population migration from inland cities to coastal cities, trading companies transferred costs to these employees in order to maintain their price advantage, and the costs of the companies were also transferred to the land to a certain extent, resulting in the rise in real estate prices. History tells us that compared with upstream and downstream partners, companies will give priority to transfer to employees. But when employees cannot transfer costs out again, they have to digest and suffer health damage.
This structured disease originates from the staged involution of society. Limited values have brought about a single mode of production and consumption, vicious competition among participants, and a vicious circle based on this. Vividly speaking, it means “digesting one’s own body to linger.” In fact, when technological development encounters bottlenecks and existing technologies have not been applied to the market to create new demands and improve efficiency, most countries in the world have experienced a certain degree of involution.
According to the latest data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the number one Mexican works 2,137 hours a year, while the Japanese, who are under high-intensity work pressure, work only 1,644 hours a year. However, according to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, in July 2020, the average weekly working hours of corporate employees nationwide was 46.8 hours. If calculated at 52 weeks and deducted from legal holidays, the annual working hours of corporate employees exceeded 2,200 hours. The hard work and struggle of the Chinese have created China’s miracle of development, and the hardships and sadness of it are hard to explain…
Structured social pressure has dislocated people’s emotional needs and sources of comfort. In the real world, people use work time in exchange for corresponding wealth, and freely allocate the remaining leisure time to pursue happiness in the overall sense. As work time and pressure become greater and greater, the remaining leisure time becomes increasingly fragmented. People gradually lose the basis for obtaining experience in the real world, and these experiences are an important source of emotional dependence for people. With the increase of fragmentation time, the cost and difficulty of obtaining real experiences continue to rise. Therefore, people turn to virtual experiences to obtain emotional satisfaction and dependence in a more convenient way.
The development of the Internet makes people’s daily life needs almost all realized through the Internet. Cool and humane software such as e-commerce, food delivery, media, games, social networking, etc., allows users to enjoy their time without direct pressure from the outside world.
In this process, people’s emotional needs have gradually become content in the virtual world: users with various personalities and backgrounds, a dazzling array of products, graphics and short videos produced by different people, and streaming media’s content and games produced by professional organizations.
It is also in this environment that people’s interaction objects have gradually changed from people and objects in different offline scenes to online digital content, and a very unique emotional connection is established in the process of interaction.
III. Reality and Fantasy: Mutual Dependence in the Digital World
People who have been living in a state of involution for a long time are easily depressed, so a power to counterbalance this has developed, namely through various cultures that relieve everyone’s stress, and this range of cultures is gathered and spread through the internet.
Despite the impact of the epidemic, online entertainment and online social networks are becoming more and more popular, and the relationship between people and various digital contents is being strengthened along with the data of various online products showing continuous growth.
One might think that relying on digital content and social relationships in the internet is a form of escapism, but the truth is that we all need to have an object with which we can have a unique relationship, and it can be a friend in the real world, another person in the internet or a character in a game, music, etc.
If digital content in the form of film, video, etc. is not widely considered to be an object on which a relationship of dependence has been established with the user, then the objects on which people engage in social interaction in the traditional sense of the word in the web are literally emotional attachments. Of course, the social object can be a mapping of a real person on the web, or a pure, native digital image.
Indeed, virtual images have been presented through comics and film before technology was able to provide game-like interaction. Until the 1990s, the audience for Japanese animation was solidly perceived as children and partly young people, and the core of creation was always storytelling, building a worldview by presenting a theme-related storyline. The more interesting and impressive the story and characters are, the larger number the audience would be.
The bursting of Japan’s economic bubble in the early 1990s, the major economic setback and the implosion of society, followed five years later by the Great Hanshin Earthquake and the Subway Sarin Incident, which had a huge impact on Japan and left the Japanese in a very different state of consciousness as a result.
In the early 90s Japan’s economic bubble burst, the economy suffered a dramatic setback and society imploded. Five years later the Great Hanshin Earthquake and the Sarin underground incident had brought about a huge impact on Japan and a very different state of consciousness as a result.
The animation Neon Genesis Evangelion, which emerged during this period, not only told an appealing story but also contained a very positive fantasy, which became a salve for adults, helping them to find the warmth in their hearts and start facing life positively again instead of waiting passively; it also encouraged them to pursue their personal happiness instead of running away from their problems.
This indelible history has led the Japanese public to rely more on virtual symbols, images and culture for their spiritual needs, and on this basis the Japanese ‘fantasy industry’ has shifted from the consumption of stories to the consumption of concrete material, and this has been accompanied by the dismantling of the images and personalities of different characters. The fragmentation and reorganisation of characters has thus become more relevant and intertwined with the lives of the general public, with people placing the missing emotional needs of their lives in these various fragmented features.
Audiences no longer have the time to patiently watch a story, to understand the characters, to get a feel for their appearance and personality traits, but rather prefer to search for data, to identify the traits they need at the outset, and to simply and brutally filter the characters and worldviews that are assembled from the corresponding elements.
As the importance of narrative in ‘fantasy’ is gradually dismantled, characters and other elements become mainstream objects of consumption, and social culture moves from elitism to populism.
In such a context, the traditional values of virtual images and characters, such as “kawaii”, “ACG” and “justice”, are rapidly reduced to a thin combination of physical appearance and characteristics. By sifting through the different combinations of elements, people can quickly access emotions that are unattainable in the real world from different virtual contents and develop a continuous dependence on them.
In fact, the demand for digital content, in addition to information and objective facts, is for “fantasy” ones. Virtual images, cartoons, films, games and other fantasies satisfy the emotions that we are missing in the real world and bring about a new culture of public consumption.
Whereas in the past, “fantasy”, based on the form of digital content was either a character in a film or animation or an object to be manipulated and interacted with in a game, we can now map parts of ourselves or the whole of ourselves in the digital world, such as images in social networks, facial effects, sound effects, etc., thus providing other users with new objects to interact with and emotional links.
We can already interact with users in a predetermined way, or project the movements of real people behind them onto avatars through real-time motion capture, for example by having real anchors become different secondary avatars to interact with the audience. What is even more amazing is that in 2018, Vicon, Cubic Motion, 3Lateral and Tencent collaborated to launch Siren, a digital avatar that takes real-time live action capture and digital avatar interactions.
Advances in technology have allowed us to create increasingly realistic avatars that we can invest more and more emotion in and become deeply attached to. In addition to such extremely realistic avatars, the characters we use in games to fight against and play with as well as the characters we use in social networks to chat and make friends, are in fact images based on real people driven in real time.
Of course, we know that a real person is operating and controlling them, and while using and communicating with these digital images in the network, we are also very aware that we are actually interacting with the person behind them and not with the digital image itself. This emotional link is still essentially “from real person to real person”.
If avatars that need to be controlled by real people in real time are a tricky way of interacting with different real people to meet different needs, then when cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence are widely used in the market, we can make these images more vivid and realistic, freeing up human control at a deeper level; creating digital characters that can interact on their own without relying on human control in different limited scenarios, thus fulfilling everyone’s fantasies and allowing people to establish a closer and unique emotional connection with these fantasies.
To satisfy fantasies, imaginary images, scenarios and stories are constantly being recreated and realised, and along with advances in technology, these fantasies are becoming more and more real and the ways of interaction are becoming increasingly rich and dynamic. The difference between games and other forms of internet products is that games offer a deeper and freer level of interaction to the player or user.
In the early stages, people could only interact with images in animation in a static way, seeing and feeling these images in a very singular way in relation to the corresponding world view and story, and based on this understanding they created very many fantasies for themselves, thus allowing themselves to interact with these characters in any way they wanted in their fantasies.
With the advent of technology and the advent of game engines, these characters can be code-driven and can interact with the player in more ways than ever before, allowing the player to have conversations with these NPCs and perform actions that are allowed in the game. At this stage, in order to allow a degree of freedom of interaction in the behaviour of virtual characters, developers need to use long and complex behaviour trees to define all the actions and conversational language. To achieve as many conversations and actions as possible would require an exponential investment of manpower and time.
However, this approach gives players and users a limited amount of fantasy, as their needs for a particular fantasy can be too arbitrary and rich to be realised using traditional behaviour trees and development methods. In order to bring people’s fantasies to life, we need new ways of creating them in a more efficient way.
Whether it is reinforcement learning for decision making, natural language models for verbal expression, TTS for emotional tone of voice, neural networks for action learning and prediction, etc., these technologies all point to one outcome: a digital image that can be realised without a real person behind the scenes, with emotion and personality and with a high degree of freedom to interact with the user in terms of language and action.
People have always had fantasies, and most of these fantasies seek psychological comfort by fulfilling needs that they cannot fulfil in the real world. The use of technologies such as communication, the internet, artificial intelligence and big data have brought us closer to fantasy and have allowed us to gradually find the different parts of ourselves that are missing in a fragmented way.
IV. Game and Social: Building Relationships in the New Context
In the early stages of Internet development, text, image and video-based digital content has been used by people as a basic information interaction medium, embedded in various areas of Internet applications such as social, community, media and e-commerce.
Although at this stage people see games as a separate content area, as people continue to try to realise and satisfy their fantasies, they are increasingly not satisfied with a single form of content interaction, and the demand for digital content is showing a multidimensional rise, and people are beginning to experiment with adding game-like interaction to existing products, thus bringing new interactive experiences to users.
When virtual images, which exist only in pictures, animations and films, start to interact with users, they take on a game-like quality. In fact, the gamification of Internet content has already begun, with many apps and web pages embedding I/O game-like experiences; meanwhile, media, e-commerce, community and social sectors are also retaining users by combining games with specific business scenarios.
In terms of the logic of content development, games can be seen as the next medium that can be democratised after text, image and video. As games are used in various industries, their properties will be combined with different business scenarios and new scenarios will be formed. Gamers are no longer part of a broad user base, but most users already have gamer attributes when they use products that incorporate gaming elements. As a result, the gamification and socialisation of traditional business scenarios is effective in retaining users and increasing the length of use, thus becoming a new growth driver in many areas.
On 28 July 2019, Taobao launched a new feature called Taobao Life. In the user’s personal homepage, it is displayed next to the Membership Center which contains businesses such as Taobao and Tmall. In terms of properties, Taobao Life is actually a simulator game in which users can create their own avatar, choose clothes and props to dress it up, and socialise and share it through the various scenarios provided by the official website. In addition, users can also earn rewards related to dressing up avatars and buying real items in the mini-games.
The bottom logic of Taobao Life is also very clear: to gain users through games, which are more high-frequency than “shopping” and can occupy a lot of their time. The game is also social, and can be linked to the main business by linking the game’s scenarios and incentives to shopping.
Ali’s other core application, Alipay, also used this logic and gave birth to the product Ant Forest. By attracting a large number of users to a relatively low-frequency product in the form of a game, Alipay managed to capture more users’ time and increase their frequency of use. While many of Ali’s social products have never been successful, games such as Ant Forest and Ant Farm have helped a large number of users build social relationships within the Alipay system.
Alibaba hopes that “virtual life” games like Taobao Life can carry the relationship chain of acquaintances and allow users to interact and connect with more users on this basis, so as to get the entry ticket to the next era while maintaining the vitality of the main business. Meanwhile, from a business perspective, in 2015, Tencent’s WeChat launched a small plane shooting game, which not only brought massive sharing and participation from users, but also helped WeChat accomplish some important business goals at that time.
As a veteran player of social + games, Tencent has joined various social games in the QQ era, greatly acquiring users’ time, such as players’ own QQ show purchased to be able to interact in conversation chats, and to play games such as carjacking and QQ farm with friends in Qzone.
If adding games directly to the business is an explicit combination, then integrating game mechanics into the core logic and operational strategy of the product is an invisible combination, and PDD, which has gained rapid growth in recent years, belongs to the latter. PDD looks like an e-commerce company, but in essence it is a game company in an e-commerce shell.
People play games on PDD, the mode of grouping and bargain hunting is that the players in the game group together to go into instances, the reward is to be able to buy goods at a lower price and then send them to the players by package. The show-off goal of this social game of PDD is not to accomplish by fighting and upgrading equipment, but to get goods at a lower price by bargain hunting and other means.
When users enter PDD, it is just like entering a game, the app will give players various information and hints to complete tasks. The ultimate goal of this task is to let players buy goods at a lower price by playing games such as “grouping” and “bargain hunting”. At the same time, the similarity with the game is that in the game, players will have a service alert to inform other players when they get high value items in the top-up lottery, while PDD will push various information to users in real time, XX bought XX goods for only XX yuan. In addition, it will even push tasks for users constantly, the task would be ‘XX invited you to help bargain over the price, you can earn XX…
Therefore, the experience process of PDD and online games are almost identical. The user is immersed in a game called “shopping”, fighting monsters is equivalent to shopping, grouping and bargain hunting is initiating and accepting tasks, boss battles and going into instances is equivalent to finding N people to help you bargain, and the final reward is low-priced or even free items.
At the same time, similar to the drop mechanism of bosses and monsters in the game, the price discounts that users get in PDD by completing tasks such as grouping and price bargaining will also have a certain random nature, which also fully stimulates the speculative psychology of users.
In fact, through price comparison, getting the best deal isn’t that difficult, the difficult part is making the process interesting, cheap price is just the key to attract customers, being interesting is the key to make users stick around, and is also the core competitiveness of PDD, and on this basis, by improving the efficiency of the supply chain, the task rewards in the PDD shopping game can become very interesting.
On one hand, games can be seen as a medium for people to interact with digital content, and we will find that traditional business areas gain new opportunities and growth dynamics after incorporating elements of participation, communication, sharing, collaboration and confrontation that are unique to games. On the other hand, games can also be considered as a carrier of media, and the scenarios in the games themselves can be combined with different fields of business.
In the past, video games would have been considered a unique digital interactive experience. However, as the number of accumulated users in games increased, users began to explore experiences beyond game play based on the games themselves, giving rise to game-based socialization. Games also provide users with naturally existing communication and social scenarios, establishing emotional links between users through various gamification mechanisms, and firmly binding these emotional links to corresponding scenarios.
Epic Games’ game, Fortnite, has been a huge global success in recent years. From a game perspective, it makes a game like Battle Royale much easier to play, and also adds very much more elements of music, film, and other entertainment culture, while also providing players with a sandbox-like creative experience, forming these gameplay as a whole into an extremely strong game. From the medium perspective, “Fortnite” is not only a game, but also a portal to form a network effect, and still carries an emerging social mode.
As of April 2020, Fortnite has 350 million registered users who have played a total of over 3.2 billion hours, making it the game with the longest player time online in the world. In Fortnite, players are able to interact with other players through various mediums, not only using items and props to complete confrontations to win, but could also wear different clothes to dance together, voice chat, make various silly moves, attend concerts and other social behaviors.
Fortnite, as a game, is on a social path, and more and more players are joining Fortnite with the purpose of gradually changing from playing games to socializing. Many teenagers are meeting friends from all over the world on Fortnite, talking with them about a variety of interesting topics and interacting with their friends through the features offered in the game. They see Fortnite as more of a social app, or even a virtual world parallel to the real world. In this virtual world, people live and do all kinds of activities just like in the real world.
In 2018, Fortnite hosted a live EDM concert with millions of players worldwide attending at the same time and premiered an album by the band Weezer in the game. In February 2019, Marshmello hosted a live concert in Fortnite with over 10 million players enjoying it. In April 2019, Fortnite brought the The Avengers: Endgame Battle into the game, with players able to play as one of the Avengers or Thanos in the fight. in December 2019, Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker held an audience meeting for the movie at Fortnite, with director JJ Abrams being interviewed live. in April 2020, Travis Scott parachuted into Fortnite Night, bringing dazzling bands of light, deep universes and psychedelic visuals to over 12 million players…
In China, there are actually many games with social attributes, but the one that really makes the purpose of players change from playing games to socializing is none other than “Glory of Kings”. As a beautifully designed game with low difficulty to start and very easy to get started, Glory of Kings has not only attracted a lot of beginners, but also has more than 100 million female players. At the same time, the game itself with its group play and sharing mechanism is constantly encouraging players to invite their friends. Coupled with the huge traffic of WeChat and QQ, “King of Glory” has successfully become a national-level handheld game.
Although King of Glory does not host a variety of activities directly within the game like Fortnite does, the convenience of cell phones has greatly broadened the social scope of young people. The fragmented game mechanics also further reduce the user’s participation threshold, allowing players to join the game’s environment at any time on almost any occasion. The simple operation, beautiful design and cool dynamic effects also attract a large number of female players to participate, thus creating a very important basis for socializing.
When a large number of players enter the same game, any content in the game will become a medium between people. This content helps users to complete the interaction while also carrying the emotional link between them.
From offline Dungeons & Dragons, to online CS, Warcraft, Happy Farm, Glory of Kings, and Fortnite, young people of every generation vote for games that are suitable as social scenarios, and realize the need for socialization in the process of experiencing game content simultaneously.
Although at present we do not know what the next game that can satisfy large-scale users for socializing will be like? When will it appear? But what we can be sure of is that the games that can be used as social scenes now will definitely be replaced by the next phenomenal games in the future.
Last but not least
Young people of different generations are exposed to different cultures of origin during their growth, which will result in different perceptions of the whole world, society, market, demand, etc. Young people may not be the smartest, the most mature, or the most knowledgeable group, but young people will always be the ones with the sharpest sense of smell.
They will be extremely honest about their needs in the current environment, and very clear about what they like and what they don’t like. For the things that everyone around them or on the Internet is participating in, the software they use, the games they experience, the reason young people participate is perhaps more to not lose their identity as young people and to retain the independence and differentiated characteristics that belong to their own generation.
Our society will continue to move forward, and the rolling of the economic cycle will bring different social problems and pressures to each generation of young people, and the so-called involution is just a microcosm of the current era. Not everyone can experience a full economic cycle, but everyone who had their youth when they were young knows why they chose some websites, software and games at that time. Although some of these applications and products have disappeared from the Internet, they do represent the memories of a generation of young people.
Young people and adults actually cannot fully understand each other, and therefore both keep searching for themselves in their own lives. Because there is only one self, people will feel miserable and lonely. Even so, generations of youth will still be full of fantasies and expectations for a better life and future, and will achieve them through their own efforts and choices.
Games or social networks, they are all ways that every generation uses and relies on in the process of finding themselves. The social culture of different generations also makes young people make different choices.
The development of technology also allows us to see the fantasy belonging to the future. We believe that people can reap more happiness and find more friends through richer contents and mediums in the future games. Whether in the virtual world or the real world, if we stop running away from difficulties and are more positive about life, we will definitely find another unique version of ourselves in the end.
Reference
Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A brief history of humankind. Random House, 2014.
New media user research: the nodal, mediated, cybernetic man
The economics of persona and companionship: how to deal with the ubiquitous loneliness and anxiety of the post-95s?
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