I Can Make It
What my project is going to look like
Genre
VR/ Storytelling/ Music/ Motion Sensing/ 1st Person Perspective
Core Gameplay
Drumming+ walking simulator + human hand simulator
Use the VR controllers as drumsticks.
Core Loop
Background
Minority ethnical groups in western Hunan: The mountainous area in western Hunan is a place where ethnic minorities live in concentrated communities. The main ethnic groups are Miao, Dong, and Tujia. Of course, there is a lot of zombies and Gu art here.
In the past, due to inconvenient transportation, the village was on the top of the hill in front of me. The straight-line distance was 500 meters, but the mountain road was rugged, and the actual distance to travel might be 3 kilometers. People with loud voices can yell at the opposite hill and tell others what they have to say, but not everyone has such excellent vital capacity and loud speakers, so people use drums as one of the tools of communication. Drumming through different rhythms and methods to express different content. Drumming also has other functions. The whole village will play drums when celebrating festivals; the practice of exorcism will play drums; during wars, drums will also be used to boost morale.
Every Dong village has at least one drum tower for storing drums. Just like :
Decolonization
Although everyone knows that “56 ethnic groups are one family”, in my country’s entertainment market (such as movies, games, and music), works of pure ethnic minorities are always in a position of “non-profit”. One of the reasons is that most viewers are unfamiliar with these cultures, and it is difficult for the overly pure traditional content to resonate with most viewers. Therefore, to make works with ethnic minority cultural content, decolonization would be the keypoint.
To make the audience accept the niche culture, interesting works are essential. But the keywords I think of are “fusion“, “localization“, and “unknown“.
Fusion is the fusion of well-known/comprehensible subjects with minority ethnic cultures, creating a safe and comfortable cultural environment for users, expressing cultures unfamiliar to them in a gentler way, thereby increasing acceptance. Common ways of expression are characters with exotic backgrounds in the series of XianJian, Gujian, and XuanYuan Jian. Even in Jin Yong’s novels, which are based on Han culture, foreign characters add color to the story, but most of them are foils. It is undeniable that niche culture does benefit from the spread of popular culture.
Localization is to express the content in a way that most people can understand as much as possible. The three-character summary is to speak human words. The simulation of the real environment by the VR environment is redundant with the virtual environment displayed on the screen of a TV or mobile phone. An important topic of simulating reality is to minimize HUD and UI. The current human technology cannot allow everyone to see UI or system prompts in real life. Apart from the visual environment, language is an important tool for users to understand the virtual environment. The language is not limited to the language we can understand, it can also be the language that is used less and concisely, or not speak at all. Non-verbal communication accounts for 55% of human communication. Sometimes communication without vocabulary is a recipe for saving game production costs.
The unknown is a crooked door ramp that I personally think may be effective. Many period-themed films in the Chinese film market are not as profitable as modern-themed films, but period-themed themes are always popular in the field of content secondary creation. This is a game of “known” and “unknown”. Although the unknown is not as material as the known, the unknown is more imaginative because its possibilities are close to infinite. Incorporating the known culture into the unknown fictional framework, to a certain extent, can make the known culture attract more audiences. For example, Harry Potter’s fictional magical world has aroused many Chinese audiences’ interest in British culture 10,000 kilometers away.
The unknown is a crooked way that I personally think may be effective. Many period-themed films in the Chinese film market are not as profitable as modern-themed films, but period-themed themes are always popular in the field of content secondary creation. This is a game of “known” and “unknown”. Although the unknown is not as material as the known, the unknown is more imaginative because its possibilities are close to infinite. Incorporating the known culture into the unknown fictional framework, to a certain extent, can make the known culture attract more audiences. For example, Harry Potter’s fictional magical world has aroused many Chinese audiences’ interest in British culture 10,000 kilometers away.