April 6th, Wednesday.
After two days of struggle, Pei Qian finally wrote out the general plot outline for “Struggle.”
The game’s storyline could be roughly divided into several major stages: birth, schooling, exams, work, love, marriage, home purchase, childbirth, midlife crisis, and so on.
This was the overall main flow. Although the stages were the same for the poor and the rich, the experiences they went through were completely different.
For example, from birth to schooling, a rich child would have a nanny taking meticulous care of them, could happily play in a mansion when a bit older, would have very expensive toys, and could hire high-end private tutors to get an excellent pre-school education.
A poor child, on the other hand, would have none of these conveniences, could only watch TV or draw at home, and had to entertain themselves alone after their parents went to work.
The other major stages were similar. In short, one could imagine what the general plot would be like.
The poor would face difficulties in everything, while the rich would sail through smoothly.
To make players more clearly feel the gap between the two, Pei Qian also considered adding some quantifiable data in the game, such as the player’s current knowledge (professional knowledge, financial awareness, etc.), emotional intelligence (dealing with people, making friends, etc.), psychological health, specific material wealth, and so on.
These data would seemingly affect the player’s options in the game. For instance, a rich person’s financial awareness could accelerate their accumulation of material wealth, emotional intelligence could give them more opportunities to meet beneficial connections, and psychological health could make it easier for them to adjust their mood at work and avoid problems due to excessive pressure…
But this was just on the surface.
In reality, these would only affect some insignificant branches and would not affect the outcome at all.
The reason Pei Qian did this was simple: if gameplay could influence the outcome, how could he antagonize players?
If the poor could achieve a reversal of fortune, and the rich could escape the fate of being killed, wouldn’t that become a feel-good game?
Absolutely not!
Moreover, the setting of “seemingly having choices but having none” was already considered a failed design in the gaming industry, and most games that did this would be criticized.
The progression of the game would only go up to middle age, around 50 years old.
The Analects of Confucius states: “At thirty, I stood firm; at forty, I had no doubts; at fifty, I knew the decrees of Heaven.”
For Pei Qian, if he were to choose a point in time for the rich player to be killed, fifty would be most appropriate.
Too early, and the game content wouldn’t be enough; too late, and it wouldn’t irritate people.
A fifty-year-old rich person would be at the peak of their career, having already obtained a very comfortable living environment, likely possessing a good marriage and children with unlimited prospects. Dying at this time should be the most unacceptable moment for players.
As for the poor… by the age of fifty, their life would be set, and similar traits to their parents would have manifested in their children, with the cycle of poverty already showing signs of continuation.
In short, ending the game at this age would be just right.
Of course, apart from these fixed life progressions, some unexpected events would also be added during the game.
For example: car accidents, illness, children being bullied at school, being scammed when buying a house, natural disasters, and so on.
These unexpected events would slightly alter the game’s flow and demonstrate the difference in risk resilience between the poor and the rich when facing these sudden events.
Having learned from the lesson of “Game Producer,” Pei Qian didn’t plan to include any narration this time.
All content in the game would not contain any emotional coloring. All dialogues and actions would be as objective as possible, absolutely not guiding players or causing them to develop a contrary mentality.
Additionally, to prevent people with “ulterior motives” from forcibly adding deeper thoughts, Pei Qian set the rich and poor as two completely separate individuals with no intersection.
The person who eventually killed the rich person was a homeless person, with no connection to the poor protagonist.
Even this homeless person wasn’t the pure-hearted and kind poor person that most people would imagine. He was able-bodied but idle and lazy, killing the rich person out of greed, not for some noble reason of resisting oppression.
The rich people that the poor could interact with, such as their supervisors or bosses, had no relation to the protagonist in the rich version and never developed any thoughts of resistance.
He wanted to avoid, as much as possible, making people develop easily misunderstood ideas like “the rich oppress the poor” or “the poor resist the rich.”
Besides this, there was one more crucial issue: how to prevent his nemesis Qiao Laoshi from over-interpreting this game.
On this point, after deep contemplation, Pei Qian finally thought of a solution.
Official kills fan interpretation!
If I interpret it in advance, no one will listen to you, right?
If no one listens to you, how can you backstab me?
Pei Qian could roughly guess from which angles Qiao Laoshi might interpret the game: the wealth gap, the Matthew effect, unreasonable social wealth distribution, and class solidification. If his thought process was more peculiar, he might even analyze that the poor lack financial awareness and are short-sighted, or that the rich are oblivious to the struggles of the lower class, unable to understand the vicious cycle of life after falling to the bottom…
In short, the topic of wealth disparity had been discussed to death worldwide. With some divergent thinking, there were still many topics that could be brought up.
Pei Qian decided that as soon as the game was released, he would proactively expose these issues.
Take Qiao Laoshi’s path, leaving Qiao Laoshi no path to take!
Of course, Pei Qian wasn’t foolish enough to backstab himself. Although he wanted to officially expose these issues, he certainly wouldn’t do it like Qiao Laoshi.
Following the same principle, the key was in how to express it.
Qiao Laoshi’s approach of extensive referencing and citing classics, forcibly adding value and depth, would appear very impressive and easily resonate with people.
Pei Qian planned to use plain language and straightforward, simple methods to state all these points, keeping it as dry as possible.
He could even guide players in the game to develop some incorrect views, such as using the two fixed endings to lead them to misunderstand that “the creator has an erroneous ‘classes can never be transcended’ or ‘determinism’ ideology.”
This principle was like telling a joke.
When Qiao Laoshi told a joke, he would gesticulate wildly and vividly, first creating enough suspense, and then when the punchline was delivered, the whole place would erupt, creating an excellent effect.
Pei Qian, on the other hand, would provide no build-up at all, directly dropping the punchline on the ground.
This way, the audience would already know what the punchline was, and no matter how much atmosphere Qiao Laoshi created, no matter how much suspense he built, no matter how eloquently he spoke, the punchline would never land!
Pei Qian felt that his behavior was like marking “this person is the murderer” on the first page of a mystery comic, absolutely ensuring that Qiao Laoshi’s “Masterpiece” series of videos could never produce a new episode!
The more Pei Qian thought about it, the more satisfied he felt, believing himself to be a genius!
After completing everything, Pei Qian sent the game’s plot outline to Hu Xianbin, asking him to expand on it.
At the same time, different characters in the game would require different motion capture actors, all of whom needed to be foreigners, so they had to be scouted in advance.
Pei Qian couldn’t be bothered to manage these details and left it all to Hu Xianbin. If things went wrong later, that would be even better.
If things went smoothly… that was fine too, as long as the game’s plot was kept firmly on track!
…
…
April 7th, Thursday.
Pei Qian arrived at the office punctually after lunch.
Yesterday afternoon, he had already sent the plot outline for “Struggle” to Hu Xianbin and assigned the matter of ioi’s China server to Lin Wan, asking her to coordinate with He Desheng.
Regarding exactly how to handle ioi’s China server, Pei Qian didn’t have many good ideas.
The possibility of modifying the game was almost non-existent, and it would be difficult to lower the prices of heroes and skins, since Yuanmeng Investment only held a 20% stake in Finger Games and didn’t have that much say.
Purely from the perspective of the game’s charging model, ioi was indeed less friendly compared to GOG after all, GOG offered all heroes for free, and the skin prices were several times lower than ioi’s.
However, Pei Qian felt this shouldn’t be a major issue, as there were already quite a few people playing ioi in China, forming a certain player base.
For them, the biggest problem wasn’t the price, but network issues.
Using accelerators to connect to ioi’s international server was too laggy, and they couldn’t communicate with foreign teammates in-game.
As soon as the China server was released, these people would switch to it immediately. So there was no need to worry about the initial phase of the ioi China server version. With the capabilities of the Shangyang Games team, it would take off with just a bit of operation.
Having temporarily settled matters with the two game departments, Pei Qian felt the pressure on him greatly reduced.
However, even so, he couldn’t be complacent, as there were still many matters waiting for him to handle.
“Knock, knock, knock.”
There was a knocking sound from outside the office. It was Assistant Xin.
“Mr. Pei, here’s the survey report on Jingzhou’s fitness industry that you requested. If you don’t want to look at the data, you can directly turn to the last page for the conclusion.”
Pei Qian nodded and took the survey report from Assistant Xin.
After casually flipping through a couple of pages, he found that the front indeed consisted of a large amount of data and professional terminology that he couldn’t understand.
Pei Qian very calmly turned to the last page, reading the survey conclusions while asking, “So, currently in Jingzhou, are fitness centers generally profitable or not?”
Assistant Xin considered for a moment: “They are both profitable and not profitable. It depends on how they are operated.”
Pei Qian: “Oh? Explain in detail.”
Assistant Xin clearly had prior understanding of the current state of the fitness industry, and having received Mr. Pei’s task in the past few days, had conducted an in-depth investigation of Jingzhou’s fitness industry. These contents were thoroughly familiar to him.
“Simply put, limited by the current level of economic development in our country, most people don’t have the habit of regularly going to fitness centers. Even those with fitness habits often can’t afford the expenses of those high-end gyms.”
“In tier-one cities with many white-collar workers, the situation is better. In Jingzhou, as a second-tier city, this problem is particularly evident.”
“Considering the expenses of opening a fitness center—venue rent, equipment, labor, utilities, heating and cooling, fire safety, and various other aspects—the low-priced membership strategies that many fitness centers adopt to attract more customers can hardly support daily operations, let alone create sufficient profits.”
“From this perspective, fitness centers don’t make money. Many closed fitness centers failed because their income couldn’t cover their expenses. The larger the investment, the greater the marketing pressure.”
“However, truly profitable fitness centers also earn a lot, mainly by finding high-asset customers to sell personal training sessions to. The more they sell, the more they earn.”
“In most fitness centers, the primary task of personal trainers is not to teach students well, but to sell more classes. The internal groups of personal trainers are similar to marketing groups—whoever sells more classes is more revered.”
“In short, the current profitable fitness center model is to sell more memberships, especially to trick newcomers into buying annual memberships. Newcomers generally don’t have fitness habits and find it hard to persist. They buy memberships but don’t come, and the fitness center makes pure profit.”
“At the same time, low-priced fitness memberships aim to attract as many customers as possible. Then the personal trainers begin to display their various skills, targeting high-asset customers to persuade them to buy personal training sessions, earning the bulk of profits from this side.”
“There are also other tricks, such as offering a free health check on the first visit. Modern people more or less have some health issues, and personal trainers will deliberately exaggerate these health problems to sell classes.”
“In short, while not denying the existence of more conscientious fitness centers in this industry, generally speaking, there are many disorderly practices and the industry is not very standardized.”
“Many consumers who go to fitness centers are also extremely averse to these chaotic practices, but the reasons for this situation are complex and cannot be changed in a short time.”
“If you want to enter this industry, Mr. Pei, it’s certainly a good thing for the industry itself. However, these objectively existing problems must be considered.”
“Even for you, starting from scratch to create a high-end and conscientious fitness brand is not an easy task.”