How "Travel frog" influences social media

Recently, "Travel Frog" becomes a big trending in China and Japan internet, you can find it in every social media platform, it is extremely popular in young people, especially those young people who are between 20 to 30 years old.

“Travel Frog” is a phone game app, which is developed by HIT-POINT, a Japanese game company. In this game, you can raise a frog as your child, you name him, and take care of him. The frog is living in a huge house by himself, and he will do something he like to kill leisure time, like reading, eating, sleeping and so on. This game is totally different with other games, you can do few things to control your frog, and the scene you can see is only the house he lives. The only thing you can do is to pack up things in a backpack for him, then maybe one day he will take the backpack that you prepared for him, to have a travel to a random place. When he is in a travel, you cannot see him for a long time, but he might will send you some postcards to tell you where he has been, what he has seen, who he has met. All of those events are all up to the frog, not player.

This game brought a huge impact on social media, many young people are discussing on it. Many young people said they could feel the hard of raising a child in this game, and it reminded them of their parents. The frog in this game cannot be controlled by player, he can do everything he want, and players have to deal with every problem he made, then players fix up everything for him and witness he goes for a long travel. It is just like many young people, like us, we used to be a willful kid, did not listen to the advises from our parents, and then we left parents to live our own life, to go for a long travel, but even the frog would send postcard to you, some of us could not always keep in touch with their parents. In this game, young people could have the feeling of being a father or mother, they could understand how hard to be parents, then they could know how great their parents are. It is like a role-exchanging. Because of this game, more and more young people care about their parents, and they deeply it is necessary to express appreciation to their parents. It is a great phenomenon for young people, making young people understand parents through a game app, which has better influence than other official public advertising or public relation advertising. 

In fact, "Travel frog" is a evaluation tool of Japan governments. Due to the low birth rate of whole Japan society, governments cooperate with game company to introduce this game. If you continue playing "Travel frog" more than one week, the system would consider you as a person who has strong will to have a baby, then you will receive a 3500+ words mail to encourage you to actually have a baby. I think it is a very smart way to deal with a social problem, sometime the official public relation advertising may not work for people, like the low birth rate problem in Japan, Japan governments have been working on this for many years, they have tried many ways to encourage people to have babies, like putting advertising video in every social media platform, making public speech and so on, but all of those approaches did not work. But now "Travel frog" provided a new way, by using a phone game app to attract young people's attention, and let them realize the point that you want them to know by playing this game, and they also are willing to discuss it on social media, which create a trending to attract more attention. From my perspective, I think "Travel frog" could be a representative of a new way to do social marketing and public relations advertising in young people group, it could works better than other traditional approaches.