While the urban sophisticated white-collar workers are still obsessed with Citywalk, young people have begun a renaissance and moved to hypermarkets .

In addition to going to MUJI to "guess how much" and going to boutiques to look at toys for primary school students, what else is interesting in today's hypermarkets?

Don't underestimate the talent of contemporary people in "playing" .

This year, many small games set in supermarkets and hypermarkets have appeared on social media. Most of these games are limited to only a few friends, and the rules are relatively simple. For example, the most widely circulated one is " Let's find fault ". Several friends work in groups and use their mobile phones to take pictures of a corner of the supermarket or partial pictures of products, and then exchange the pictures to find the source. The one who takes the shortest time wins.

If you were born in the 1990s, then the variety show "Shopping Street" may be one of the countless childhood wishes you have made.

In 2005, two supermarket-themed shopping programs, "Shopping Street" and "Supermarket Winner", were launched one after another. Among them, "Shopping Street" focuses on " looking at the products and guessing the price ", which tests HE Tuber the contestants' life experience and price sensitivity. Degree and reasoning ability, there are no threshold restrictions for contestants.

Therefore, housewives, university professors, and even children who have just started school can be the most potential seed contestants. The final winner of each episode will not only win flowers and applause from the audience, but also various kitchen appliances, Travel grand prize and return with a full load.

Although another program "Supermarket Sweep" has been discontinued, its original program "Supermarket Sweep" has been popular in the United States for decades, which is enough to show that although large shopping malls are no longer shining, they once represented a kind of The desire to live an abundant life.

For today's young people who "not only care about money, but also care about their hearts", stores have begun to assume the meaning of spiritual enrichment and have become a "theme park" that is more in line with the physique of Chinese babies .

Contemporary people tell you with practical actions that when going to a shopping mall, fun comes first, and consumption is just an added bonus.

According to  a white-collar worker who has participated in supermarket games many times, there are infinite possibilities behind seemingly boring games.

When he first participated in the game, Xiao Mo discovered that friends tended to focus on the food area when choosing products. “Maybe it’s because compared to daily necessities, food packaging is generally more fancy,” but this would easily expose the target. Xiao Mo's first game was "speed-passed" in this way - because she ran into another group of friends in the food section, and they found her carefully selected potato chips after looking around in front of the shelves where she was. .

Therefore, in the second game, Xiao Mo decisively turned her target to toys and daily necessities. This time she chose to shoot a corner of the stationery package, which was colorful and looked very misleading. Sure enough, the opponent was scratching his head when faced with Xiao Mo's photography and ran through various snack shelves but couldn't find it. In the end, he relied on prompts to pass the level.

The seemingly youthful "find fault game" is also indispensable for the battle of wits and courage behind the players. (Picture/Douyin@八Liangyinzi)

One of the benefits of the acquaintance game is to watch the players from all walks of life play tricks . After getting familiar with the game, everyone formed their own game strategies.

Xiao Mo once deliberately took the condiments to the snack area for filming, vaguely revealing the shadow of puffed food behind, in an attempt to mislead his opponents, but his friends who were familiar with his routine saw through. Xiao An, who was in another group at the time, couldn't find the target after searching the whole place, so he tried to import the picture sent by his opponent into a treasure map, but because the angle of the picture was too tricky, it failed in the end.

However, this seemingly simple game also requires talent. Some time ago, 25-year-old freelancertook the opportunity to visit Sam’s and tried a supermarket game with friends in pairs.

Although it was their first time playing, everyone was very determined to win. When La Laxun and his friends in the same group saw the photo, their friend recognized it at a glance, "It looks like it's from steak." In the end, it only took one minute for the two of them to find the corresponding product. Another group of friends asked for help from the staff and ran around the supermarket again, but it still took them more than six minutes to find them.

Facing partial pictures of products with unclear meanings requires a little imagination and life experience. (Picture/Xiaohongshu blogger @拉拉素)

At the beginning of the year, Lilith, who was studying, accidentally came across a video of a supermarket game on social media. She forwarded the video to her roommate group, and sure enough, there were hundreds of responses. After a brief discussion, Lilith and her friends rushed to a nearby store.

They also developed a different supermarket gameplay, where they would pick out the products placed in an inconspicuous corner of the supermarket, and then have another person find them back in their place. This is a variation of the hidden object gameplay, which minimizes the trouble for supermarket staff and allows them to enjoy " the simplest game and the most extreme happiness ."

(Photo/provided by interviewee)

Not only in shopping malls, in fact, in recent years, these offline games focusing on " simple happiness " are rapidly spreading among the adult population.

As a lover of offline games, Lilith was once addicted to script killing, and worked as a part-time DM (Dungeon Master, a host-like role in script killing, responsible for promoting the development of the storyline) for a period of time. In her opinion, these offline mini-games are like streamlined versions of the "mechanical version" of script killing, and they are also more convenient for game planning.

The reason why she chose to create her own rules was her own evaluation after practicing them. It was really "too difficult" to run around the supermarket for most of the day. As the person who organized the game, she mentally reviewed various situations that she might encounter in the game and found that it would be somewhat disappointing if no one could be found in the end. .

Therefore, in the second game, they chose a relatively simple " random number shopping " rule, similar to the gameplay of "Supermarket Winner" in the early years. The winner is the group that buys the group closest to the specified amount and in the fastest time.

In Lilith's "Random Number Shopping" game, you have to be smart about your budget to win. (Photo/provided by interviewee)

Lilith enjoys this kind of game where she and her friends jointly make rules and participate together. Recently, she also considered making a new game, "which can be played while queuing or waiting for the subway. I don't want to memorize words while waiting for the bus."

Throughout the past two years, there have been many offline games that focus on socializing with acquaintances. This kind of "high-end version of finding trouble" and "high-end version of playing house" are classic reproductions of childhood happiness, highlighting the idea of ​​" play wherever you go, and play with whatever you have ."

In February this year, a student from Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University,  recorded the entire process of hiding and hiding offline with his friends. The difference from the childhood gameplay is that during the hiding process, they need to turn on the real-time location sharing function of WeChat. This is jokingly called the "Hogwarts Marauder's Map". Whether it is the person being caught or the "ghost" who caught the person, You can feel a sense of urgency that is close at hand.