There is a widely circulated "Three Laws of Technology" on the Chinese internet, originating from Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. The most popular version of this law is:
1. Any technology that was already present when I was born is mundane and part of the natural order of the world.
2. Any technology born between my ages of 15 and 35 is a revolutionary product that changes the world.
3. Any technology born after I turn 35 is against the laws of nature and deserves damnation.
Douglas summarized these three laws in an essay published in The Sunday Times in August 1999, titled "How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet."
Anyone with eyes can see that these laws are not really discussing technological inventions; they are actually talking about the universal mindset people have when accepting new things. Everyone is familiar with this topic—my despair when discussing my job with my parents stems from this.
As a writer who makes a living off the internet, I essentially need to transcend these three laws to some extent. The internet is evolving, AI is developing, new content forms are sprouting, and a new era is approaching. How can I fall behind in such a place...
But when I heard that fat guy in the ad recommended to me on Bilibili shouting "#Funtime! Launch!" again, I surrendered.
Whoever invented this thing really deserves to go to hell.
"This thing" is a vague reference; depending on your level of sanity, it can expand to include the internet, capitalism, and consumer worship, or shrink to AI short dramas, video ad promotions, and even mini-program games—of course, their levels of annoyance are actually comparable.
If you are a normal internet surfer, upon seeing "#Funtime! Launch!", your DNA should automatically undergo a chemical reaction, starting to flash some meaningless images.
These images include, but are not limited to, a standard AI beauty with an outstanding figure and pleasant face, leaning against the ear of a fat guy in a dirty tank top, whispering provocatively: "If you give me the urine filter, I'll marry you." Not even Love Is All Around: I'm Surrounded by Beauties, Beauty, Please Don't Affect My Immortality, Reborn and Still Asked to Date, or Please Be My Coser Master combined are as sci-fi as this scene.
Or in an illegal building, in rooms familiar to Shanghai workers that are so small they can only fit a bed, our familiar comrade Fei Qiang is being bullied by his neighbors. People around him throw trash, shake dust, and drain water into his room, or even install air conditioner outdoor units inside his room.
Depending on whether Fei Qiang holds the plot item "seawater filter," he will have two attitudes: unbearable or anything goes. But regardless of his attitude, he ultimately breaks through the room wall, rides a bizarre vehicle, and says, "#Funtime! Launch!"
You don't have time to complain about absurd details like why the walls of this room can move, why the AC outdoor unit is installed indoors, or why this person is riding a water tractor, before the next AI short drama is slapped directly onto your face.
This time, Fei Qiang walks confidently into the sales office in a土豪 gold suit, bringing out a seawater filter ready for a new century land grab, only to get slapped in the face by those around him, who say the seawater filter is outdated equipment and that the coolest things now are electric eel generators or pufferfish oxygenators.
Then another punch breaks the wall, followed by the loop of shouting the slogan "Three minutes per round, super cool and stress-relieving."
The large batch of AI short drama ads launched by #Funtime covers almost every short drama trope you can imagine, from "looking down on people" and "slapping the protagonist," to "crowd suddenly laughing" and "don't bully the poor youth." Popular internet memes, from sitting at the kids' table to Xiang Zuo, from Nailong to Niu Lai, all jump back and forth repeatedly in #Funtime, making it a comprehensive collection of internet filth, even more complete than our own account.
Meme fusion, brainstorming, creating satisfaction points, plus the magically repetitive "#Funtime! Launch!", these overwhelming ads have successfully created a weird situation: when something looks like an AI short drama, sounds like an AI short drama, and even its stupid aspects resemble an AI short drama, then it is an AI short drama.
So most people don't actually treat #Funtime as a game; they watch these things as AI series. There is a "brain storage area" in the comment sections of all AI short dramas, fully indicating that the viewing threshold for such works is to throw away your brain. Similarly, if you discard your brain and treat #Funtime's ads as a kind of mental massage, you can indeed successfully harvest a lot of industrial dopamine in tens of seconds to a minute, ranking from NPC to upper class alongside hoof trimming and carpet washing.
Fortunately, most people cannot be successfully converted into the audience of #Funtime, otherwise they would experience a thoroughly satisfying session of eating shit.
As readers of our account, you have basically seen and played games, so you don't think much of mini-program games that circle around numerical inflation in their gameplay. But I must emphasize that even in this "sea of shit" where gameplay, production, and spending experience are all terrible, #Funtime is the fattest "maggot."
Gameplay content like doomsday survival, shelter building, tech climbing, and population raising has negligible presence in the game. When you enter story mode to fight pirates, a first-top-up gift pack of six yuan giving you "One Dragon"—a high-quality imitation of Elon Musk—will directly send this game into a level-grinding mode with constantly inflating combat power.
Soon you will discover that the real gameplay of this game is raising heroes, equipment, skills, and summons, and surrounding this gameplay are the endlessly familiar spending packs. In this game, there isn't a single interface that doesn't pop up purchase information, nor a minute where you don't see recharge content, ranging from 6 yuan to 648 yuan. VIPs and upgrade packs are everywhere. Building gameplay and farming gameplay simply don't exist; team composition and strategy are irrelevant. From the moment you log in, this game wants to use turbo acceleration to send you into the colosseum of combat power comparison—it's impressive that they didn't even make battle sound effects and still want to make money off this.
And when you truly want to play without spending money, treating this game as a doomsday farming simulator, you'll discover something even more outrageous: the auto-harvest function, one of the underlying logics of this type of game, costs 12 yuan here, with creativity rivaling "charging for breathing."
The ads for #Funtime are a massive plagiarism of internet memes, and its gameplay is a hodgepodge of elements from famous mini-program games like Endless Winter, Salted Fish King, and Fire at Doomsday. Meanwhile, its inheritance of the main scourge, "forced spending," is a masterpiece in its own right. Describing it as "ugly monetization" is scratching the surface; describing the game company's attitude as "treating players like idiots" is more accurate.
But even though I've clicked "dislike this content" countless times, this thing still appears in my homepage recommendations like psoriasis, spreading my disgust for Big Data's random recommendations. Those absurd mini-game ads like "Don't laugh, you won't pass level two," "A little guy shooting left and right on two paths," and "Muscle man diving," led by "#Funtime! Launch!", have all turned into dead memories that constantly nauseate me.
I don't know which smart guy finally discovered that with the development of AI technology, the popularity of short video platforms like Douyin, and the emergence of short dramas, the cost and threshold of content production have dropped to an outrageous level. The boundary between product promotion ads and cultural content consumed by audiences has long been shattered by the need to "make a living," and the two have often become exactly the same thing.
Thus, internet surfing in the new generation has completely turned into fishing for information you can still stomach in an ocean of ads. Everyone is sprinting into the cyberpunk era.
Think of something quickly
The emergence of #Funtime is actually not surprising at all. Its product promotion logic has been a zombie worm since the days of Zhengtu and Legend; viral marketing and catchy slogans have never stepped down from their throne in the Chinese gaming industry.
Back then it was "Come play, equipment drops freely, true legend," now it's "#Funtime! Launch!"
It's just that, as content forms evolve with the times, it needs to put on a few new coats, pretend to act out some plot, and hype up whatever randomly chosen game theme, making you think this is the "true legend" you want.
Even this new coat it wears was not pioneered by #Funtime.
If your internet memory hasn't been eaten by a goldfish, you can probably recall Salted Fish King, where a bunch of people always shout "I'm quitting XXX," only to be persuaded back into spending money by someone with just two sentences.
The user acquisition model always evolves with the form of the internet, closely following the development of content formats. It tries every possible way to reduce content production costs, desperately drills into the lower-tier markets, and then shifts the cost of ads rather than the work itself onto every "lucky viewer."
In the era when portal websites were still popular, they were individual splash ads, webpage backgrounds, and horizontal banners.
In the era when video websites were prevalent, they were slogans shouted by big-name stars wearing unknown third-rate cosplay props.
In the era of short videos—a time when content began to sink wildly—many things underwent qualitative changes. Short video filming no longer requires agonizing over scripts, leveraging star power, or preparing professional teams. Picking up a mobile phone allows entry into the content creation field, and both the spiritual life of the people and the ad production of manufacturers have sprinted into a golden age.
Thus, we saw Salted Fish King, or any other strange works you can recall that bombard your social platforms with live-action short dramas.
As for #Funtime, anyone can guess with their toes that it's because of AI.
No matter how low the cost of Hengdian extras is, it won't be lower than what AI generates. Even if abstract scripts are truly written by screenwriters using their feet, they won't be cheaper than AI writing. As for video editing, filming teams, and venue preparation, no matter how cheap, they won't be cheaper than having no filming, no editing, and no venue.
No production model can compare to AI in the field of mass-producing garbage.
The prevalence of AI is no longer a fresh topic; it's so common that we have to avoid it when scratching our heads for article ideas. Whether you are 35 or not, you must admit that AI is already part of the current world order. Just as an AI movie called Sanxingdui: Future Past was announced this month, scheduled for theatrical release—humans who are still lamenting the box office success of Niu Lai will likely all be swept into the trash heap of internet history next.
However, those who cheered to welcome the AI era, imagining many times how AI could greatly liberate productivity, probably didn't expect that the first area to have its productivity liberated would be the ad production for mini-program games.
So damn sacred
When many people jokingly refer to the AI ads for #Funtime as the "peak of Chinese animation," everyone has to grit their teeth and admit that AI is indeed a revolutionary, epoch-making invention.
And from a certain perspective, it does demonstrate a degree of revolution—even if an old fogey like me is unwilling to admit it.
AI doesn't just provide a cost-reduction solution, allowing advertisers to stride into an era of ad freedom; it also somewhat improves the quality of these ads, giving their content more diverse forms of presentation. No one expected that psoriasis ads, once considered internet garbage, could truly possess content attributes, outlining "Little Fei Qiang's Doomsday Survival" in countless videos you've seen or haven't seen.
The video posted by the official Bilibili account of #Funtime, finally salvaging the "seawater filter," has over 240,000 views, far exceeding its peers. From any angle of analysis, this shows that the topic "Little Fei Qiang's youth is over" indeed holds appeal for a portion of the audience.
Since #Funtime started wholesale distribution of AI ad videos, these ads have completely invaded the "summer" of many internet users. For many people, the fat guy who is constantly humiliated and relentlessly chasing the "seawater filter" has become the internet symbol of this period—
Look, even the "People's Bunny Girl" has joined the "seawater filter" army.
#Funtime, which truly understands how to use AI to boost productivity, although like many of its "predecessors" is a game that disregards game design, has indeed come up with brand new ideas in the area of "making money from all directions" outside the game itself.
Giving its ads serial drama attributes significantly strengthens the audience's recognition of ad characters and game elements. This approach might even bring about the brand effect that such games have long desired but never achieved.
In fact, after successfully shaping public perception, #Funtime did show a trend towards becoming a "brand." They collaborated with numerous stars, coordinated with in-game events, launched the "Summer Wave Festival" in August, and based on their fabricated worldview, served up a 50-episode AI series on top of their original AI ads.
Combined with the mainstream perception of #Funtime among the public as more of an AI video theme than a game, #Funtime increasingly resembles a rudimentary brand framework developing across multiple platforms and content formats—
This is the true revolution brought by AI.
Anyone and anything can give you a combination punch.
And precisely because anyone and anything can do it, #Funtime will definitely not be the last. Just as it is the successor to Salted Fish King, #Funtime will also have its own successors.
The "Three Laws of Technology" mentioned at the beginning of the article, the most widely circulated version on the Chinese internet, actually differs significantly from the original. It not only changed the age from 30 to 35 in the original text, but in Douglas's original words, the third law's "damnation" actually had a small follow-up—
Anything invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
As conveyed by the title of the last book in his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, most inventions that seem damned in our current view are "mostly harmless" on the scale of historical development.
One of the main themes of the elder's series is also to tell everyone "Don't Panic"
This is the attitude of a wise elder accepting new things, which I appreciate.
But I must also honestly say, fuck it.
From another perspective, this shows that as individuals, we basically cannot refuse the birth of new things. Our personal subjective disgust cannot stop the repeated appearance of those "nothing new under the sun" events. Like that long-standing internet catchphrase: If you can't resist, we can only try to enjoy it, which makes it more comfortable.
I really hate #Funtime.
But for the internet, its arrival is neither good nor bad; it is simply something that must happen in the AI era.
Everyone has to learn to accept its appearance, just like you reluctantly accept the cockroaches in your rental apartment.
In the days to come, we will continue to see things like #Funtime, using AI to gobble up cake in the attention economy.
Elsewhere, we have already seen AI short dramas formally replace live-action short dramas, becoming a black hole that absorbs user time.
In the comments section of our official account, we are bound to see an endless stream of remarks poking writers in the back, saying "AI writing is terrible."
You eat, we eat, whether we like it or not, everyone has to eat.
Friends, the era of eating large portions has arrived—
Damn, I don't want it to come at all.