I. The Past and Present Lives of the Tale of the Three Kingdoms
The first Strategy Game( Strategy Game) that is truly based on Chinese history and is relatively mature in genre production is the PC game "Three Kingdoms Qunying" (hereinafter referred to as "Qunying") launched by Aoting Technology Company in Taiwan in 1998. Since then, the mainland has had a strategy game with relatively stable technology, a relatively unified visual style, and a clear historical expression in the true sense.
"Heroes" combines turn-based internal affairs gameplay with real-time visual combat, which is immediately enthusiastically sought after by Chinese players, and to some extent, it also makes up for the long-standing shortcomings of this type of game. "Qunying" is not the first real-time strategy game based on the historical masterpiece "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" and the chronicle of the history book "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" as the story background, as early as 1985, Japan's Glory Co., Ltd. developed the first three-kingdoms theme game "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", and the two are often compared. The advent of "Heroes of the Crowd" not only opened the door to the genre creation of domestic strategic games, but also created an original game brand with the theme of the Three Kingdoms of the Mainland, and continued to innovate after the 21st century. From 1998 to 2021, the series has become a classic of domestic games, and although the later works have been criticized for their painting style, internal affairs system and strong fairy color, on the other hand, it also shows the unique Chinese cultural and emotional structure of the Three Kingdoms story under the interweaving of technology, game and history.
Around the turn of the millennium, when personal computers began to become popular and the win98-win2000 operating system dominated, the first three generations of "Qunying" once became the most popular single-player game series with their exquisite visual effects and unique Chinese strategic thinking. However, with the prevalence of piracy, the decline of production technology, the corporate transformation of the original development company Odin Technology, and the transformation of development ideas such as the mixed design of strategy games and role-playing games, the game has changed from historical facts to fairy style since the middle and late periods, and its aesthetic style, technical parameters, military and formation settings, and martial arts skills have also undergone cross-century evolution.
From the first work in 1998 to the official eighth part in 2021, the "Tales of the Three Kingdoms" series has gone through a 23-year journey. The evolution of its important parameters is shown in the following table:
Table 1. List of important parameters in the Three Kingdoms series from 1998 to 2021[1].
The first four works of "Qunying" were developed and produced by Odin Technology, which was committed to the development of PC games in the 1990s, and its game types were mostly warboard strategy and role-playing games, and produced classic domestic games such as "Fantasy of the Three Kingdoms", "New Absolute Double Glory" and "Fantasy World" series, which once became the pillar of domestic games, and "Qunying" was an important game IP of the company. In 2004, Odin Technology merged with Yujun and Yu'ao to form Yujun Odin Technology, and turned its main energy into the transformation from PC games to online games. Therefore, in 2007, the newly established Yujun Odin stopped the development of the stand-alone version of the series after the release of "Three Kingdoms Group English Biography VII", and shifted the focus of development to "Three Kingdoms Group English Legend Online". It was not until 2021 that Yujun Odin officially sold "Three Kingdoms Qunying III" on STEAM, the world's largest game software distribution platform, and the "Qunying" series of games ushered in innovation and change after ten years.
Second, text changes: cross-century domestic single-player game series
From the sales of the first generation of "Qunying" in 1998 to the advent of the eighth generation in 2021, the series of games has made certain changes in terms of technical parameters, internal affairs system and class settings, strategic map applications, military division skills and martial arts skills and other gameplay (as shown in Table 1 above), and has generally experienced three periods of start-up and rise, breakthrough is falling, transformation and replication, and the game is to some extent a cross-era masterpiece that cannot be ignored in the history of domestic PC game development.
1. Startup is Rise: Historical Logic Is Better Than Game Mechanics of Heroes I-II
In 1998, Odin Technology Company officially launched "Three Kingdoms Group I".
From the perspective of art form and style, its creative inspiration is obviously derived from the console strategy game "Dragon Power" launched by The Japanese Sega Company in 1996, which mainly contains the internal affairs interface of the player's order, the battle interface of the Hundred Man War, the strategic map interface of the army moving between the fortresses in real time, and the strategy game "Heroes of the Crowd I", which is also based on the three operation interfaces.
Although the game screen at 640×480 resolution consists of simple avatars, text and numerical values, the simple game rules and the strategy game 100-person screen battle still refreshed players in the PC era when the operating system was still win95, and they felt the unique aesthetic style and gameplay innovation of this type of game for the first time.
As shown in Table 1 above, this late 20th-century game innovatively features a 3D scroll-style map that can be adjusted near and far, which has certain original characteristics in character function design compared to the Japanese "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" of the same period. Players need to think about the symbiotic relationship between the class and the formation, and this highly strategic new setting has established a good reputation for "Heroes".
However, the disadvantage is that the game design team has not yet considered the entire game's assignment system, for example, the setting of heavy martial arts and light text makes civilian officials useless, the attack power of computer troops and strategic judgment are too weak, etc. As a strategy game genre, computer participation does not play a role in the game mechanics, but becomes a kind of obstacle, which has been improved in the sequel "Heroes of the Crowd II" launched in 1999.
"Heroes of the Crowd II" has greatly enriched the attributes of game characters such as military attaches and soldiers, enhanced the game nature of strategy games, and made obvious changes in terms of numbers, scenes, and visual settings. Among them, the number of people who can be on the same screen has doubled, and considering the balance of the role, the skills obtained by the warriors when upgrading are differentiated, and the new military division skills can also play a special role in the war interface, thus bringing players a broader space for exploration.
More importantly, the "Unification of the Central Plains" as the game's clearance task, greatly aroused the player's desire to achieve "grand hegemony" in the game "magic circle", and the player explored various creative gameplay through the rules of the game under a certain historical cognition of the Three Kingdoms, and then weaved a certain gamified historical logic.
As a result, "Heroes II" further improved the genre gameplay of strategy games, initially laid the game mechanism of the history of the Three Kingdoms, laid the foundation for China's own strategic game model, and quickly became the second only explosive product after "StarCraft" and "Counter-Strike" at that time. Heroes ii is also the closest to historical and most playable work in the series, offering multiple historical narrative possibilities. As a result, the game's historical significance far exceeds the game's own mechanics, which is a key factor in the survival of the game no matter how the quality of the heroes series declines.
2. Breakthrough is Falling: "Heroes of the Crowd III" where innovation and "plagiarism" coexist
After the success of the first two "Start-ups are Rises", Odin Technology launched a sequel "Heroes III" in December 2001. Compared with the previous two games, the biggest innovation of this game is the subversive change in visual style. Whether it is in the layout of the large map, the strategic window of the white blade battle, or the art style of the character head, there are fundamental breakthroughs, making it the most special one in the "Heroes" series.
Figure 1: The internal affairs interface and the wargame interface in Heroes III.
First of all, in terms of game rules, the biggest adjustment of Heroes III is to weaken the RTS (real-time strategy game) characteristics of this strategy genre on the one hand, and strengthen its TBS (turn based strategic game) features on the other hand. This is mainly reflected in the turn-based rules in the operation interface of the internal affairs system. In the beginning, the monarch only had three tokens per month, as shown in Figure 1 above, that is, only three internal tasks could be performed, and later as the number of cities increased, the number of rounds that the player could perform, that is, the number of tokens, would also increase proportionally, which to a certain extent limited the player's freedom and was criticized.
Secondly, in terms of battle mode, another important innovation of Heroes III is the addition of a wargame system to the large map setting (as shown in Figure 1 above). However, due to the weakness of the computer-controlled AI troops, "Heroes III" can not obtain the strategic significance of the carefully designed wargame layout like the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms 11" in the same period, which makes the former often hinder the player from entering the battle mode due to the settings of the city and the number of days out of the city, and even the phenomenon that the enemy cannot meet the enemy due to the chess grid setting, and the lack of sufficient information causes the player to fall into a long-term stagnation in the battle mode.
However, the work's innovations in other aspects are still remarkable, such as the addition of martial arts must kill skills, formation class mixing, military general single challenge, self-built martial generals, competitions, special events and other settings, especially the martial arts, military division skills and must kill skills also added weather, hour, geographical environment and other natural factors of the actual combat conditions, players need to comprehensively consider the strategic significance of the geographical environment before military operations, which enhances the freshness and playability of the game to a certain extent.
The biggest change in "Heroes of the Crowd III" lies in the subversive change of the art style at the visual level. The work changes the non-realistic art style of the first two works and uses realistic techniques to draw the heads of military generals. This is a major innovation, but its martial arts avatar was found by players to be very similar to the actors in the classic mainland TV series "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", as shown in Figure 2, even the expressions, clothing decorations and even scenes are constantly "bumping in the face", and its degree of similarity has reached an incomparable point, which cannot be said to be a major regret of the work, and it is not a glorious page in the history of domestic game visual design.
Figure 2: The characters of "Heroes OF heroes III" and "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" "collide in the face". [2]
In fact, not only is the art style similar to that of tv dramas, but in terms of strategy type game design, although the turn-based and battle mode innovation of "Heroes III" has a subversive transformation significance, its TBS wargame design thinking is highly similar to the "Heroic Biography" series of games such as "Three Kingdoms Chronicles Cao Cao" and "Three Kingdoms Chronicles Kong Ming Biography" of Japan Glory Company, so the originality of this change is still questioned by the majority of PC strategy gamers. As Software magazine's Game Yearbook Review commented on this phenomenon: "The Three Kingdoms series should be more about sticking to its own characteristics and style rather than imitating it." [3] It has to be said that the most disgraceful aspect of the "Heroes of the Crowd" series is that there are obvious imitations and even plagiarisms of other cultural works of art, which is not only a problem of the game generation of "Heroes III", but also exists in the entire game series.
3. Transformation and Replication: Embarking on the "Path of the Immortals" in "Heroes IV-VII"
Starting from "Qunying IV", the "Qunying" series has ushered in major changes in anti-piracy technology, gameplay, art style, historical expression, etc., and even opened the precedent of the series's transformation from history to fairy magic style. Since then, the series has stripped itself from its historical dimension and positioned itself as a "legend of demons", and has continued to strengthen this fantasy feature in the 5th-7th generation.
First, in terms of anti-piracy technology, the most important technological innovation of Heroes IV lies in the complex anti-piracy design, which makes it difficult for even genuine players to enter the game. This change was triggered by the establishment of Beijing Universal Star Software Co., Ltd. in the mainland by five companies, including Daewoo Information and Yujun Aoting, which was responsible for the distribution of its products in the mainland region. In response to the rampant phenomenon of piracy, Universal Star, as an agent publisher in mainland China, has made great changes in the anti-piracy technology of "Heroes IV".
To prevent piracy, Heroes IV uses a disc encryption technology called Starforce, which requires players to go through the steps of "inserting the first disc to install the game and putting in the second game disc scratching open the user manual to view the serial number input and restarting" to enter the game. However, this anti-copy mechanism is due to a series of technical problems such as case settings, CD/DVD optical drive restrictions, other software occupancy can not be recognized, system compatibility, etc., resulting in players who have purchased genuine software will also suffer from many problems such as "unable to load", "frequent crashes" and even "optical drive damage" during the game. What's more fatal is that this complex anti-piracy certification technology actually only needs to develop a cracked software to solve, and even the game experience of genuine games is not as good as that of pirated games, resulting in dismal sales.
Second, despite the system compatibility issues, the gameplay was fundamentally innovative compared to the wargame style of the previous game, and the open map and fairy magic turn laid the foundation for the series' gameplay style, and continued to replicate itself in subsequent generations.
Starting from "Heroes IV", the series of games is no longer limited to one-on-one warrior battle settings in terms of battle scenes, but has changed to a team of up to five warriors can be combined into a team with the increase of rank and official position, plus the combination of martial arts and military division skills to achieve the combined skill effect of martial arts, which enhances the visual effect and intensity of the game.
Figure 3: Closed roadmap and open large map of Heroes III and Heroes IV.
At the same time, the strategy map changed from closed to open, and did not set a moving route, which really played the genre function of strategy games. At the same time, the game map has also changed from the previous closed route schematic to an open map based on China's geographical landform. As shown in Figure 3, the player's controlled warrior troops gallop through magnificent mountains and rivers, and can change their destination at will along the way. In previous titles, player-controlled troops could only move along certain routes.
Due to the setting of the open strategic map, the AI troops opposed to the player are not limited to the warlord forces in the historical background of the Three Kingdoms, but add elements such as bandits and bandits, demons and ghosts, cave tombs, immortals and beasts, etc. Players can explore and upgrade equipment at will on the strategic map, which increases the playability of the game. The focus of the research and development of game works after "Heroes IV" has also shifted from a historical-oriented gameplay to the development of "immortals" elements, embarking on a "fairy road" that is completely different from the historically positioned "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" series.
Third, in addition to the fairy magic turn, the aesthetic style of the "Heroes" series has also undergone great changes from the fourth generation, thus laying the visual system of the series. For example, the aesthetic style of the warrior head completes the transition from the "3D digital style hand-drawn realistic style comic exaggerated style".
Figure 4: Comparison of Liu Bei's head portraits in "Qunying I, II, III, VII".
As shown in Figure 4, take Liu Bei's character image design change as an example: although the design of the warrior's head of "Qunying I" adopted the more advanced 3D pre-rendering technology at that time, it was quite old-fashioned in visual aesthetics, and even fell into the effect of "Uncanny Valley" to a certain extent; "Qunying II" added a Japanese hand-drawn style on the basis of 3D rendering, although there was a significant change, but the abrupt digital light source, single curved imaging, etc. caused the character expression to be stiff and lacked temperature, and the "Uncanny Valley" effect still had a certain residue; "Qunying III" adopts a new realistic painting style, although it is similar to the actors in "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", but has an independent aesthetic visual system of painting compared with the first two works; in "Qunying IV", not only the fineness of the painting work has been improved, and the image design is divorced from historical reality and largely integrated into the two-dimensional animation modeling style, so Liu Bei's head is no longer the "Han Zhao Lie Emperor Liu Bei" with the image of an ancient civilian official with long hair and long beard, but wears a short-sleeved battle suit with a standing collar, a forehead band and no long beard. The "two-dimensional teenager Liu Bei" with short-haired bangs hairstyle also indicates to some extent that the series has embarked on a "fairy road" completely different from the historical narrative.
In 2021, Yujun Odin released "Heroes VIII" on the Steam platform, which not only marked the return of the series of games to single-player games, but also boldly canceled all fairy elements and returned to the historical narrative to a certain extent. However, or based on Yujun Odin's research and development experience in online games and mobile games for more than ten years, "Qunying VIII" is more like a "semi-finished product" after mixing online games and single-player games. For example, the gameplay of the internal affairs system mainly relies on time consumption, canceling the specific battle interface of the Thousand Man Battle, and changing it to a real-time interface of the encounter. The original function of these common online game designs is to attract players to Krypton gold, but the game not only abandons its own style characteristics (even if it is the cursed fairy color) but also lacks the necessity of online game operation, not only in the strategic type of game gameplay there is almost no essential innovation, and even many details are seriously contrary to historical facts, affecting the player's understanding of the historical plot. Compared with the stand-alone games with the theme of the Three Kingdoms in the same period, such as "Total War: Three Kingdoms", which set a record for the highest number of simultaneous online games on Steam in 2019, and "Romance of the Three Kingdoms 14", which has exceeded 400,000 worldwide sales as of February 11, 2021, it is a more embarrassing and regrettable existence in terms of technical quality, artistic aesthetics, and market sales.
In any case, as a popular domestic Three Kingdoms theme strategy type game, the "Qunying" series of games pushes it to the classic status of domestic PC games not the technical operation and gameplay of this game, but the emotional structure of the majority of Chinese players in the history of the Three Kingdoms. In other words, the unique game culture value of the "Qunying" series lies in the setting of it detaching from the game mechanism and entering the level of historical cognition, such as how to play the best combination of the lineup of the five tiger generals of the Shu Han Dynasty, the four governors of Sun Wu Jiangdong, and the five sons of Cao Wei through gameplay, or how to change the fate of historical figures in the historical facts of the Three Kingdoms through strategic layout, and then realize the "dream" of players or Kuang Fu Han Room or unified Central Plains to rewrite Chinese history. This is largely divorced from the consideration of the technical and artistic dimensions, and involves the unique historical and emotional value of the cultural dimension.
Third, the fading line of history: from the fictional rhetoric of history to the narrative turn of the magic to change the imagination of the imagination
As a strategy type game, the "Heroes of the Crowd" series gives full play to the fictional characteristics of the "historical text" of the Three Kingdoms, so it cannot be simply discussed from the technical level of game design, game type research, etc., but should focus on its historical rhetoric and its cultural function, and examine the role of emotional factors such as the player's historical complex, emotional transmission and cultural imagination in the development process of the series of games.
1. The plot construction process of the game script
As a gradually independent art category, game art has become a unique way of writing human cultural emotions and history in the 21st century in a historical rhetorical way. As the historical philosopher and intellectual historian Hayden White rejected the assumptions of "historical text" and "historical truth," in White's view, "history acquires only partial explanatory effects by making up pure chronicles; stories in turn are made up from chronicles through ... the operation of 'plot construction'." [4] "History" in the human concept does not exist, it is first and foremost a linguistic structure, and language is fictional, so history, like art forms such as mythology and literature, is a kind of rhetoric for what has happened, and what really plays a role is the discursive force behind this rhetorical structure. Just as the consensus formed by the discourse logic of the Chinese historical circles for historical and novel texts such as "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" and "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" adopted by the "Yang Liu Suppress cao" writing method is that the identity position of the creator determines the ideological tendency of taking the Liu Han regime as the orthodox, and the "Three Kingdoms" historical theme game also uses the unique rhetorical technique of game art to carry out "plot construction" in the sense of White, and the player can use the game to improve the martial arts, military master skills, Content design such as domestic affairs and military is to re-create (fictional) historical texts, and practice their own historical emotions and cultural imagination in the process of playing.
However, this denial of historical objectivity and authenticity and the obsession with the rhetorical character of the structure of language may lead to a nihilistic tendency that dissolves history itself. The works in the middle and late stages of the "Heroes of the Crowd" series, due to the excessive focus on the development of the operation effect of the fairy and magic elements, made the game plot depart from the historical trend and moved towards the fantasy rhetorical style of the fairy and demon theme, and finally made the game theme from fiction to complete nothingness, and also lost the story core of the historical strategy game type to a certain extent.
So, what is the historical rhetoric of the Three Kingdoms games of the Heroes of the Crowd? Or how did historical rhetoric fade into obscurity in the series? The answer, of course, is the "magic reform" plot design thinking. The series of games begins in the fourth generation, from the "fictional rhetoric of history" to the "illusory imagination of magic", which is the road of no return. The eight generations of game scripts in the series are divided as follows:
Table 2: List of game plot extensions for Heroes I-VIII.
According to the plot construction and development process of Table 2, from the original "Qunying" in 1998 to the "Qunying VII" in 2007, the historical script based on the original novel "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" and the historical facts of the Three Kingdoms, after continuous "magic reform" style plot arrangement, the exit of history has become a certain inevitability, and in the open strategic map of the geocultural imagination structure of "Huayi Distinction", with the continuous addition of the immortal demon elements, it has turned to fantasy theme strategy games.
2. Take the fictional rhetoric of history as the core driving force
First of all, "Heroes I-III" is based on the historical facts of the Three Kingdoms, and the script design provided by it allows players to "continue" the history of the Three Kingdoms at the narrative level, which is the emergence of the most successful and important historical core of the series at the beginning of the release, and the value of "historical fictional rhetoric" has also played a positive role in the first three generations of works.
As shown in Table 2 above, since the third generation began to add the script of "The World Returns to Wei", the historical narrative of the Three Kingdoms at the historical level has ended, followed by the subsequent historical process of Sima Shi's establishment of the Western Jin Dynasty, the Wuhu Chaohua Period after the Eight Kings Rebellion, and the fragmentation of the Central Plains to the Southern and Northern Dynasties period. In the script design of the high-difficulty game reward and hidden plot after the completion of the third generation of the plot "The World Returns to Wei", the player must choose to enter the game for the new monarch, and then compete with the powerful Cao Wei forces, and the wuhu chaohua during the Rebellion of the Eight Kings, the historical celebrities of the Southern and Northern Dynasties period such as Jia Nanfeng and Jian Jian will appear one after another, which means that the game opens the "post-Three Kingdoms Era" according to the original game strategy mode. To some extent, it also reflects the game's automated writing function of Chinese history, and to a certain extent satisfies the player's historical complex for the Three Kingdoms to the Wei and Jin Dynasties and the Southern and Northern Dynasties.
As mentioned above, the first generation of the "Heroes" series has been compared with the game design of "Dragon Power" and the historical theme of "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" at the beginning of its release, and there are also obvious traces of imitation compared with other works, in other words, the series is not highly innovative in the form of games. However, the reason why the series quickly opened up the Chinese PC game market, in addition to the local brand identity of domestic games, is more important to use the historical core of this "book/continuation of the history of the Three Kingdoms" as a driving force to attract players to open up the possibility of historical writing.
3. "Real-time Strategy Fairy Magic" mixed style and its nihilistic imagination
The "magic reform" of the "Heroes" series began with the fourth generation of game scripts, which to some extent marked the basic establishment of the "magic reform" strategy and the later style of the series of games.
In the fourth generation of works, the most emblematic is the addition of "chaos in the world", the script is not only completely divorced from historical facts, but also the monarch and the military general are randomly assigned, the life span of the characters is not limited by the number of birth and death, the relationship between the characters is not considered between the favorability of the forces, and the initial military settings are not directly related to geographical environmental factors. From the fifth generation onwards, this magic reform style is even worse, and even added the plot of "Battle for the Hegemony", that is, the monarch is all set up as a female warrior, which satisfies the player's desire for the role of female warriors, and the time and space clues also shift from linear parallel to to tortuous interlacing... A series of game rules constructed in the previous game, such as the difficulty of recruitment and the loyalty of military generals, the real-time strategy of marching and single-handedness, the relationship between the martial generals' division skills and the arms of the army, etc., these historical and cultural cores such as the military and political relations based on the historical facts of the Three Kingdoms, the geopolitical pattern, and even the philosophical relationship between the five elements in traditional Chinese culture, have gradually dissolved with the overexploitation of the magic reform plot. In the end, whether it is the demon army led by the ghost king Dong Zhuo in the sixth generation of "Haojie Qixin", or as shown in Figure 5, the human warriors fighting with the demon beast troops, or the demon army led by Xiang Yu, the king of Lixi Chu, in "The Return of the Overlord" in "Qunying VII", and the heavenly soldiers and heavenly generals under Liu Bang of Han Gaozu, have fundamentally abandoned the historical texts of the Three Kingdoms and become a kind of nihilistic "famous generals in a great brawl".
Figure 5: The battle scene between a human warrior and a golden-armored demon dragon in "Heroes of the Crowd VII".
Under the script design of "Magic Reform", the "Heroes of the Crowd" series eventually not only deviated from the facts, but also evolved in the direction of fairy magic, and introduced non-human characters such as divine beasts, immortals, zombie corps and superhuman abilities, making it completely reduced to a "real-time strategy fairy" hybrid style game to some extent.
For example, in terms of special martial arts skills acquisition, the later works of the series even set up five major divine beasts in the ancient immortal system - the Suzaku of the Five Elements of Fire, the Xuanwu of the Five Elements of Water, the White Tiger of the Five Elements of Gold, the Green Dragon of the Five Elements of Wood, and the Yellow Qilin of the Five Elements of The Earth, which correspond to the Flame Mountain near jiaotong City in the south, the Daxue Mountain near the Plain City in the north, the Tiger's Den near Jiangzhou City in the west, the Poisonous Dragon Pond near Jianye City in the East, and the Beast God Cave in the middle Xiangyang area. When the player conquers the divine beast, he can obtain the ability to summon the divine beast to help the battle, if the four divine beasts are gathered, the four martial artists can also release the "four spirit evil array" combination martial arts skills together, plus the Kirin divine beast can also release the "super big move" of the "beast king breaking the evil array", which makes the game almost completely transform from a war strategy game to a role-playing game with a treasure upgrade, thus attracting many bad reviews.
In this sense, with the formation of the "real-time strategy fairy magic" mixed style in the later stages of the series of games, the historical fictional rhetorical function established by the first three generations of games was almost lost, replaced by a kind of imaginary imagination full of nihilism, and a self-contradictory centrifugal force was formed between the historical theme of the story background and its cultural structure, resulting in the instability and even imbalance of the game style and positioning.
4. Player mod version with the return of the official latest generation of historical rhetoric
Whether in terms of form or content, "Heroes" cannot be said to be a very successful game, but it is indeed a classic that cannot be ignored in domestic real-time strategy PC games. Half of its classic lies in the rhetorical strategy laid down by Heroes I-III about the history of the Three Kingdoms, although such a strategy was greatly undermined in the middle and late part of the series, and the other half in the sense of Jenkins's "text poaching", in which fan players develop various game mods (modifications, also known as game mods) by modifying computer programs.
In the later stages of the series, players took the initiative to make many game mods, and even programmed special corps such as Lü Bu's Flying Horse and Gongsun Zhan's White Horse Yicong that the original game text did not have, which to a large extent made up for the lack of historical rhetoric in the series in the way of "poaching texts", thus enhancing the playability of the game.
It is worth playing that the MOD version of the "fan external elements" also appeared in the official new "Three Kingdoms HEROES" in 2021, although its gameplay and image design are very different, there is no literature to show the connection between the MOD version and the official official version, but it can be seen that the official research and development team is consciously making up for the lack of historical rhetoric and trying to reverse the magic route in the later stage of the series. Just the way to work hard, it returns to the old problem of the series since its inception: self-imitation of game design and form, and even returning to the routine of "plagiarism".
As mentioned above, "Heroes OF THE CROWD" has fundamentally destroyed the form and style of the real-time strategy genre + PC game due to its efforts to please online game players, and with the rise of other real-time strategy games of the same theme in recent years, as the latest work in the "Heroes of the Crowd" series, the artistic quality and gameplay design of "Heroes OF the Heroes VIII" are not outstanding. Judging from the sales and evaluation of STEAM after its launch, it can only rely on the veteran players who are active in the turn of the 21st century and the historical rhetoric of the Three Kingdoms and the remaining original game feelings that they are nostalgic for.
Art and Cultural Logic: Geocultural Structure and Cultural Emotion Syndrome within game texts
From the perspective of the internal text of the game, whether it is a historical text as a starting point or a magic change, "Heroes of the Crowd" as a strategic type game, its game interface is more distinctly based on the "Huayi Debate" as a certain stable geographical feature, to a certain extent, showing a very iconic Chinese cultural structure. This also reflects the cultural expression of the series of games with a certain originality. Unfortunately, the cultural structure of the game interface only provides a certain artistic form of creativity, fails to provide a clearer expression of cultural values at the level of cultural emotional logic and its ethical value, and fundamentally contains the cultural core of the game, making the "Heroes of the Crowd" series eventually deviate from Chinese history and cultural feelings.
1. Chinese geopolitical space in map interface design
As an audiovisual interactive text, time-based interactive medium, game art depends on the player's gameplay and decisions within the limits of a computer program. Espen Aarseth borrowed the term "ergodic" from the term physics to describe some kind of "reading" behavior that a player performs through interactive choices in a game or cyberspace, meaning "working" or "road". In the "Qunying" series, the player's "traversal" has a very important emotional basis, which is first determined by a certain historical identity in "Qunying I-III", and then transformed into a traditional Chinese Xianxia imagination in "Qunying IV-VII", both of which are guided by the game interface based on the terrain of the Three Kingdoms and the distribution map of the city, with a distinct Chinese cultural emotional structure and its geo-cultural imagination of "Huayi Distinction".
As mentioned above, the strategic map of "Qunying I-III" adopts a closed layout, which refers to the actual distribution of cities and pools in the late Eastern Han Dynasty, and the player can only move in a point-to-point manner during the game, so the closed strategic map has the significance of offensive routes. Starting from "Heroes IV", the most important change is that the game has an open layout, and a lot of geographical elements have been added to the aesthetic vision, and the locations and characters that can trigger unexpected events such as bandits, fairies, and cave tombs have been set up on the way, and players can enter the unexpected events out of the historical text, thus enhancing the playability of the map interface.
During this game, the game's map interface plays an important role. Whether it is the location of other forces in the script or the unexpected events that are not historical facts, they are presented through the bright color blocks on the radar map, attracting players to "traverse" it, becoming a series of important elements to promote the progress of the game, such as fighting monsters and upgrading, replenishing equipment, and adjusting offensive routes.
Take, for example, the trigger point of the open event on the large map of Heroes VII. Over the course of the game, all the human characters in the accident appear in the form of army groups and appear as large red blocks in the radar map in the upper left corner. Among them, the barbarian chieftain legion will only appear in the southern region, the mountain thief king army will most likely appear in the mountainous area, and the desert thieves will only appear in the desert area of the Western Liang region, etc., and their appearance sites are based on the real Chinese geopolitical structure.
2. The geocultural structure of "Huayi Discernment"
On the interface of the open strategic map, treasures, immortals, mounts, mythical beasts and demons frequently appear in the game, so the series of games was later ridiculed by players as "Three Kingdoms Demon Legend". Take the location of the demon character in "Heroes VII" as an example, as shown in Figure 6: the two-tailed demon beast appears in the "desert camping" in the western desert of the mainland, the blue-scaled water demon lives in the "Cangni Reef" far southeast of the mainland (there is a random water demon in the upper right of Figure 6), the giant snow bear lives in the northern "floating Iceland", and the black jade demon python is entrenched in the "black water" of the southern Tadazawa belt. It can be seen that the west, south, north and east correspond to the geographical environment of deserts, swamps, islands and snow, which are not only far from the Central Plains inhabited by the Chinese, but also the entrenched places of demons and ghosts "beyond the four seas" in the fantasy genre stories of the mainland immortals.
Figure 6 The appearance site of the two-tailed demon beast, the green scaled water demon, the giant snow bear, and the black jade demon python in the opening event of "Qunying VII".
This way of imagining reflects the cultural and psychological topographic map of the game developers about the "Huayi Distinction" in ancient China. The so-called "Huayi Distinction" is a cultural perception of the geospatial pattern of the Chinese since the pre-Qin Dynasty. According to the division of the pre-Qin geography work "YuGong", Chinese geography is divided into three sets of cultural circles, centered on the royal city (Qi), where the Central Dynasty is located, divided into internal and external services; secondly, outside the royal city is limited to five hundred miles, divided into five different levels, called "five services"; finally, places outside the "five services" are collectively called "four seas". That is, "the system of the first kings, the state of inner Dian, the state of the outer marquis, hou, Wei Bin, Yi, barbarian to serve, Rong, Di desert service." [8] It aims to interpret the geopolitical legitimacy of the Zhou Dynasty as a central dynasty rule from the rationality of the "five-service system". This "five-service system" is essentially a tributary system in ancient China, and culturally formed the structure of "Huayi Distinction" in the cultural circle of the Chinese nation. In the open strategic map interface in the middle and late stages of the game "Heroes of the Crowd" series, the open events and their trigger conditions increased generation by generation as the creative elements of the game content, whether it is the bandit army incident of human characters or the geographical space of the survival of gods and monsters, in fact, they are based on the imagination of barbarians within the four seas and demons and ghosts outside the four seas, reflecting the cultural imagination of ancient Chinese geopolitical structure, and sharing the same cultural psychology as Chinese fantasy genres and fairy tale online film and television dramas.
Compared with the geo-cultural structure of the "Huayi Debate", the Japanese "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" series focuses on the excavation of the ethical elements of the bloodline in historical materials. For example, in the later works of the series, especially "Romance of the Three Kingdoms 14", it also set up a special interpersonal network of martial artists' intimacy, reflecting the unique understanding of interpersonal ethical relations in Japanese culture, and to some extent, it also shows a unique emotional cognition of Asian game culture. If the PC strategy game "Rise of the Dragon", which is also based on ancient Chinese warfare and developed by the American Snow Mountain Game Company, is included in the comparative vision, it will be obvious that the Westerners' perception of China is fundamentally different from that of Countries in the Asian cultural circle such as China and Japan.
Figure 7: Introduction to the "Monkey King" immortal character in the game "Rise of the Dragon".
The American game "Rise of the Dragon" pays more attention to or is curious about the traditional Chinese society's logic of offering sacrifices to the gods, the defense strategy of the cities of the Central Plains Dynasty in the face of attacks from "cities" such as border Mongolia and Xiongnu, so there will be many "cultural discounts" in the game: for example, Sun Wukong as a god has the function of shortening travel and satisfying the entertainment of the citizens (as shown in Figure 7, obviously influenced by the travel elements in the text of "Journey to the West" and the folk Peking Opera monkey play), or by Western European classical civilization The history of "barbarian invasion" to understand the central plains dynastic crisis in ancient China embodies the way in which other cultures are imagined for Chinese history and culture, which is full of some kind of "oriental aesthetic" style of exotic colors.
Returning to the "Qunying" series, the locality of Chinese culture and even the subjective characteristics of Chinese culture are obvious, neither like the Japanese real-time strategy game "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" series, which excessively amplifies the characteristics of a certain branch of Chinese history and culture, nor like the American game "Rise of the Dragon", which shows the "oriental imagination" of the cultural other, but recreates based on China's geo-cultural structure and mythological elements. Although the continuous increase of the immortal element in the later period inevitably disgusts many gamers who are history lovers, from the perspective of cultural understanding, the "Huayi Debate" and its geo-cultural imagination still show a large extent the cultural subjectivity of the gameplay form.
Unfortunately, whether it is historical orientation or immortal tendency, Yujun Aoting was unable to dig deeper and innovate in the strategic map interface and gameplay and its mechanism, and finally slid to the interface exploration game based on the open events on the map interface and based on the dominant strategic gameplay, thus only showing the Chinese cultural characteristics in form, but losing the most important historical rhetoric and cultural value connotation of the Three Kingdoms theme game in terms of content.
3. Artistic shortcomings under a dominant strategy
From the perspective of gameplay, the biggest idea at the beginning of "Heroes" is to create an independent point distribution system according to the different force values, military generals, and class skills of the Three Kingdoms period, and to deepen the development of the most basic rules of real-time strategy games - stone, scissors, cloth (RPS) model, players need to try to predict the unit configuration used by the opponent, adjust and optimize their own unit combinations, and fight according to different types, formations, military division skills and martial arts optimization formations.
However, relying solely on the point distribution system is not enough to support the entire rules of the strategy game, but it needs to integrate the supplementary conditions for the health of the game units, the redistribution of points for logistical supply, the technology tree for the advanced development of the units, and relying on more complex conditional factors such as the relationship between the characters in the game script to form a complete strategy game. This is the focus of the continuous in-depth research and development of the later works of the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" series in terms of the internal affairs system and the interpersonal relations of military generals, but it is ignored by the research and development team of the "Heroes of the Crowd" series.
"Heroes IV" established a fantasy style and its game structure, although it added many monarchs and scripts, but only focused on the point distribution system, not only did not focus on the control of the core mechanism of this strategy game - the number of values and resource flow, but also greatly simplified the supply system between cities in the later version, and even eliminated the resource control of the consumption of food and grass for the troops, which made the series develop to the later stages of the gradual absurdity. The loss of the genre function of strategy games and their appeal to players is largely lost, which is also an important reason why later generations of games are considered to be highly homogenized.
With no other rules restricting the player, this point-sharing system can easily trap the game in the typical bug of strategy games - "dominant strategy", that is, simplistic point allocation is easy to create near-perfect moves that are completely superior to other combinations. For example, in "Qunying VII.", the three-level advanced class of the cavalry class, the foxy iron horse, even in the face of the heavy soldiers with different attributes, can also fight the enemy army, or a military unit with a strength and intelligence value of less than 60, as long as special props, precious weapons, and divine beast mounts are attached, they can also defeat historical generals such as Guan Yu and Dianwei in one move, which destroys the balance of the game.
Under the domination of the game rules of this dominant strategy, the functional relationship between the game units as the dependent variable and the natural geographical environment, interpersonal factors, historical background changes and other independent variable factors in the game rules is becoming less and less, and the logical correlation between the historical significance and cultural emotions given by the player in actual operation is also weakened. The historical and cultural symbols assumed by the series of games have lost their meaning.
In theory, the control variables in the game design should be based on the historical political and cultural elements in the historical theme of the game as the logical premise, but in the actual game process, it is simplified into a point distribution system, so there is no essential difference between the famous generals such as Zhao Yun and Zhang Guo, and the unit signifiers of Zhuge Liang, Lu Su and other military divisions, and it is difficult to carry the meaning of the game's historical reference, which fundamentally empties the historical core of the game, disintegrates the historical theme of the Three Kingdoms, and becomes the most fundamental artistic defect of the series of games.
4. The cultural language of the mechanism of controlling variables is unknown
The serious consequence of artistic defects is the failure of the value of the cultural dimension.
First of all, this strategy game that flaunts the theme of the Three Kingdoms, not only has the nihilistic tendency of the history of the Three Kingdoms mentioned above, but more importantly, in order to satisfy the psychology of the player's role-playing monarch, the game often has a certain degree of confusion at the level of cultural and ethical values.
For example, in the late magic script of the series, "Reign in turmoil", the system randomly generates a number of historical celebrities as monarchs, including the famous Shu Han Xiang Zhuge Liang. However, whether it is in the original novel or in the historical text, Zhuge Liang has always been a subject of "bowing down and dying", but in the game he appears as a monarch, which to a certain extent has caused confusion in the game's historical view, and in the history of the Three Kingdoms, the initiator of the great chaos in the world, Shi Changshi, actually appeared in the game as a copycat thief, and these unreasonable points also negated the personal aspirations and political concepts of the famous generals, military masters and warlords of the Three Kingdoms.
In the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" series produced by Japan's glory at the same time, there was an essential temperament and an evil relationship between the military generals. For example, Yang Ren, who died under Xiahou Yuan's sword, could never surrender to Cao Wei; Zhang Ren, the first fierce general of Yizhou under Liu Zhang, had designed to kill Liu Bei's army master Pang Tong at Luofengpo, but was eventually killed because he swore not to surrender Liu Bei, so there would be no plot to defect to hostile forces. This kind of variable control based on historical facts is, to a large extent, conducive to conveying loyalty, filial piety, benevolence, righteousness, etiquette, wisdom, and faith, which are the cultural cores that the "Qunying" series of games lack.
Secondly, the simplified design of the control variables of random events and their reward and punishment mechanisms in the game has also led to the vagueness of cultural expressions in the game text.
For example, in the course of the game, there will occasionally be reset changes in the allocation of internal political points in the month of good luck and the month of great evil, such as special events such as "treasures for the people", "soldiers defecting", "displaced people", "strong men voluntarily enlisting", etc., but the trigger of these events is not due to the player's play style caused by the system rewards and punishments, but random events based on the current resource allocation solidification.
In addition, no matter what kind of monarch the player chooses, there are fixed cottage thieves near the city to harass, especially when there is a confrontation with the enemy in the vicinity, there will be an additional force to help the enemy, no matter how the player adopts the internal affairs system, it will not be able to fundamentally solve these evil forces. Even the game's reward and punishment system tends to allow players to increase their military power by bribing forces such as copycat thieves, and this political view is worth scrutinizing. It can be seen that the reward and punishment mechanism of the game has not been given the profound connotation of the political concept of benevolence and tyranny, and many random events and their reward and punishment mechanisms have also dissolved the ruling logic of the history of the Three Kingdoms at the narrative level, and their narrative significance has fallen short with the simplification of the rules of the game.
In fact, random events and reward and punishment mechanisms can not only enhance the playability of the game, but also combine with the narrative content of the game text to present the creator's game culture concept. This is also a cultural strategy often adopted by indie games. For example, with the emergence of refugees in Europe in recent years, many serious games with refugee themes have emerged, among which the Polish independent game company 11 bit studios launched a sandbox game "This Is My War" in 2014, which is a typical example of the player's only task in the ruins of a city with scarce materials and poor living conditions. The restrictions on completing the level are very difficult, so in order to win, you must fall into ethical and moral torture. The creative team tried to use the control variable settings of the game rules to introduce players into the discussion of serious propositions such as war, human nature, violence, and morality.
Returning to the literary and artistic creation of the theme of the history of the Three Kingdoms on the mainland, almost any work of art created on this subject—whether it is the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" and "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" in ancient China, or the Chinese TV series "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" and the "New Three Kingdoms" in the 21st century—or borrowing from the history of the broken era, or creating novels in chapters, or using film and television language techniques, or adopting computer special effects technology and other artistic techniques, tries to express different historical, ethical and moral views. In this sense, the creative team of the "Heroes" series of games obviously lacks the necessary creative ambitions, so the random events in the game process have nothing to do with the player's or benevolent or tyrannical gameplay and its reward and punishment mechanism, and its cultural expression is even more vague.
5. Male-dominated gender aesthetic logic
What cannot be ignored is that, like most domestic games, the gender aesthetic of the "Heroes" series embodies the gender logic dominated by heterosexual men in a fundamental sense, which not only ignores female consciousness to a large extent, but also more obviously presents the expression of sexual aesthetics and objectification of female bodies.
Although the magic script of "Battle for Supremacy" is full of female characters, including Gan Ruonan, the daughter of Gan Ning, Huang Wudi, the daughter of Huang Zhong, Zhang Yingying, the daughter of Zhang Fei, and Zhang Yanyan, the game is not intended to reflect the female narrative dominance or show female power, on the contrary, it is to gender the appearance of female characters.
As shown in Figure 8, in "Heroes of the Crowd", sun ren and mink cicada heads modified the realistic style of the old version and instead adopted the revealing, sexy Japanese anime style to reflect the female body under their male aesthetic. At the same time, the female class as a special class also reflects the patriarchal aesthetic logic dominated by heterosexual men. For example, the dance girl's special skill in this female class lies in the charm ability to confuse the opposing soldiers to make them defect, which undoubtedly reinforces the player's stereotype of real women.
Figure 8: The heads of Sun Ren and the mink cicada in "Heroes of the Crowd VII".
In addition, the series of games lacks a female perspective and even reaches the point of being "ridiculous": in the game, there are also "beautiful women" who are also used as props to improve the loyalty of warriors such as jewelry, money, and jade bi. And "beauty" can also increase the loyalty value of female warriors. Obviously, the game development team has no intention of exploring diversified sexual orientations, but completely in accordance with the patriarchal aesthetic logic to show the sexualization and objectification of the female body, resulting in a bug in the sense of gender ethics. In fact, this is similar to the game mechanism of "double repair and recovery of physical strength", which exists in many contemporary domestic xiuxian theme games, which is a game mechanism that plays pornographic edge balls, reflecting the solidification of the male-dominated gender aesthetic concept in domestic games, as well as the long-term neglect of gender cultural logic in game content.
epilogue
In any case, after nearly a decade of development, the "Heroes" series of games fell into more than ten years of silence, and finally launched the eighth new work in March 2021, which can be called the domestic PC game classic with the longest history and the largest number of players in the history of the Three Kingdoms theme strategy game, which deserves the attention of gamers and game researchers.
As a strategy game, the most successful idea of the game may lie in the establishment of the point allocation system, which is the core mechanism of the strategy game, but it is very regrettable to stop at the development of the numerical amount of game units in isolation, and does not include the resource flow, another core mechanism of the strategy game, into the research and development vision of dynamic relationships. The blind eye of the latter reflects the lack of understanding of the historical depth and cultural breadth of the historical texts of the Three Kingdoms, such as the political logic, emotional structure, gender aesthetics, and cultural ethics of the three kingdoms, due to the simplification of the game strategy, the nihilization of the historical view, the confusion of political logic, and the masculine characteristics of gender aesthetics, which ultimately led to the cultural aphasia of this game.
Compared with the real-time strategy game "Age of Empires I-II" produced by Microsoft at the same time, the game reflects the distinct imperial colonial thinking and its world geopolitical concept with the rise of modern Western countries as the grand historical background through the differentiated distribution of points on the resource flow on different terrains and landforms and the numerical values of various civilizations. In addition, there is the seafaring adventure strategy game "Great Navigation Age I-IV" produced by Japan Glory Company, the story of the game takes place in the 14th and 16th centuries of the age of discovery, with the player playing the captain of the search for evidence of the hegemony of the world's seven seas, and the difference in cultural attributes and characteristics of the crew recruited by the world's famous ports gradually appear in the story, showing a world politics and trade economic pattern imagination that is completely different from the Western perspective. Even in the enhanced version of the work, the protagonists of the Americas, India and Southeast Asia and their mysterious origins have been added, which is more valuable to present the "third world" perspective of anti-imperialism and anti-colonial aggression.
It can be seen that the key to the strategic type of game lies in the game development team's historical cognition of the temporal view, the geopolitical spatial view, and the depth of cultural expression of the content narrative, which in turn tells the story of a "nation-state". In this sense, although it is difficult to say whether the Tale of the Three Kingdoms, which oscillates between history and the immortals, clearly tells a "historical story of the Three Kingdoms". It is hoped that the domestic games in the future can have a clear view of history and tell the "Chinese story" in its entirety through more exquisite art forms.
(Thanks to Xiao Jinfeng, a 2020 master's student in the Department of Digital Media at the School of Arts and Media of Beijing Normal University, for his efforts in game data collection and data collation.) ）
exegesis:
[1] Reference data source: Ranger Network Feature Post (Three Kingdoms I-VII): https://www.ali213.net/zt; STEAM website (Three Kingdoms Group ENGLISH III Zone): https://store.steampowered.com/app/875210/8/. This table is compiled by Xiao Jinfeng, a 2020 master's student in the Department of Digital Media, School of Art and Media, Beijing Normal University.
[2] The picture is reproduced from Tencent.com: "Three Kingdoms Heroes 3": The martial general bumps into the face of a real star, why didn't you notice it when you played it that year?. April 22, https://new.qq.com/omn/20200422/20200422A0CMX600.html?pc,2020.
[3] "2002 Chinese RPG Review", Software, March 2003, p. 75.
[4] Hayden White, Postmodern Historical Narratology, translated by Chen Yongguo and Zhang Wanjuan, Beijing: China Social Science Press, 2003.6:175
[5] This table is compiled by Xiao Jinfeng, a 2020 master's student in the Department of Digital Media, School of Arts and Media, Beijing Normal University.
[6] Apperley, Thomas H (1997): "Genre and Game Studies: Toward a Critical Approach to Video Game Genres". Simulation & Gaming, Vol. 37 No. 1, March 2006. 8-9.
[7] Aarseth, Espen (1997) Cybertext: Perspectiveson Ergodic Literature. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins. 1
[8] Wu Guoyi, et al., "Chinese Translation Notes", Shanghai: Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House, 1997:1.