Zhu Ze has been repeating the life of day and night for a long time, which is the norm for many indie gamers.

Lacking both manpower and funds, if they want to improve their game as much as possible, they can only use a natural resource that everyone has - liver!

The liver is dizzy, the liver is delirious, and the liver has to open the mailbox from time to time to see if there are any self-recommenders who are willing to take the bait.

He posted his production concept and contact information on all the platforms that he could publish, because he didn't believe that there was really no one who understood him, and he didn't believe that he was the only one who thought about it.

- Although there are still such unwilling thoughts, Zhu Ze is faintly aware that his thoughts may be ...... in the current era An outlier indeed.

Is this wrong?

"The Secret of Psalm 46?" he saw the name of the email at the top at a glance, "Anyone else voted for me?"

After all, Zhu Ze still clicked on it, who let this be the only new email he received?

Surprisingly, the content of the email was not what he thought, but a speech, and the author seemed to be a foreigner he didn't know at all.

"How many of you have witnessed a total solar eclipse? To be able to stand in the shadow of the moon one day is one of the many insignificant goals of my life. ”

The speaker reminisced about his experience as a salesperson in an ordinary commercial area, starting from the distant past.

His store has a campaign where customers can pick up a free battery every month.

The batteries are so inferior that they barely sell, but there is still a steady stream of customers walking through the store just to get a free battery.

Customers don't really take advantage of it, but the power of "what to get extra" drives them to come here again and again.

Later, that power had a more specific name: "Easter eggs".

At the same time, there was also a children's book called "The Masquerade", which described a simple story in 15 color pages.

But the story is not the point at all, the back cover of the book is a jewel made in the shape of a rabbit, with the "rules of the game" written on it: the place where the jewel is buried is hidden in the pictures and text of the book, find clues and solve puzzles, and the treasure will go to the first person to find it.

Soon, the wave of "treasure hunting" swept the world, and this fascinating adventure cost countless "players" a lot of energy and money, even far exceeding the value of the jewelry itself.

They still enjoy it.

That's the power of Easter eggs – the unknown, the tension, the possibility of being the only one.

Of course, easter eggs are not only in the game, they are all over the history of human culture and art.

Countless artists have left easter-egg-like secrets in their work, some just hints of what they like or hate, and some are meant to show their beliefs.

It is also because of their existence that those who try to decipher the "truth of the world" from those great works have come forward one after another.

That may be the will of the human soul to "pursue easter eggs".

The two most "declassified" sources of culture in the entire Western world are the King James Version of the Bible and the Complete Works of Shakespeare, published in 1611.

The former, completed by 46 editors over a period of ten years, is an immortal monument of English prose, influencing the perfection and formation of generations after generations.

The latter has provided the world with at least 15,000 new words, and the shadow of his works has flourished throughout the field of literature and art, and the modern English as we know it can be said to have been born from these works.

They have transcended the level of literary and artistic works themselves and reached another level -

It is not the times that make the work great, but the work itself that creates all the eras that follow.

"An extraordinary feeling that arises as you gaze at these dazzling treasures of wisdom and rhetoric. ”

Its name is "Awe".

- Unforgettable reverence and paralyzing fear.

Awe is the holy grail of artistic achievement.

However, there are too few works that can truly be called awesome.

Most of the works are really just setting up "easter eggs", especially modern games, and they are going further and further down the road of creating "Skinner boxes that tame humans and make them form the habit of repeating certain actions to obtain rewards".

In order to cater to the market and players, game creators continue to lower the threshold and set rewards, and use all means to keep players, in order to let players form a conditioned reflex of "getting an inferior battery once a month that has no use".

In this process, the game is a tool, not an end.

This may be a good way to go, after all, entertainment is always needed.

But it shouldn't be the only way.

"Is it true that our imaginations are so barren that we have to resort to small tricks to get players interested in our games?"

Awesome things don't need to be hidden.

Awesome things are both rich and generous.

The treasure is there.

The game should not be just a means to the treasure, the game itself is the treasure.

Every new thing is born with a myriad of new concepts and words, for example, since the birth of the computer, how many words are closely related to it?

Video games are only a little over forty years old, and there are very few references to them in our basic language.

The whole dictionary is waiting for us to fill it out.

The timing is good.

It won't be long before there is a game design that shines like lightning on our culture.

It's easy to identify.

It will be generous, dazzling with its exuberant creativity.

Scholars will spend decades, if not centuries, analyzing it, as they do all the great arts that have influenced the times.

It will be awe-inspiring.

Millions of people visit the Holy Trinity Church on the banks of the River Avon every year, which is rumored to be the burial place of Shakespeare.

Pilgrims come to this thinker's tombstone with sincere awe, perhaps just to experience some emotion.

To the right of the altar is a simple oak chest with an open book.

It was the King James version of the Bible, the first edition, published in 1611.

Shakespeare was 46 years old.

The book is opened in chapter 46 of the Old Testament: Psalms.

From the beginning of this chapter, the 46th word of the positive number is "shake".

From the end of this chapter, the 46th word from the bottom is "spear".

Together, "shakespear", translated into Chinese, Shakespeare.

This should just be a coincidence.

Or...... Not a coincidence?

The world always works like this, inadvertently giving chilling "surprises".

More "easter eggs" are artificially created.

Like the author who started a treasure hunt with children's books, he buried a ceramic container with the treasure in the designed place, and the following words were engraved on the container:

"I am the guardian of the masquerade jewels, waiting for you, or waiting for eternity. ”