"Old Wine in a New Bottle"--Computer Games Subvert the Classics

On an icy cold computer monitor, one-thousand-year-old military commanders and Chinese "knights errant" or the sentimental Lin Daiyu, clad in her billowy clothing, appear. The newest wave in CD-ROM games is to employ the most ancient literary themes. How does this "old wine in a new bottle" taste?

Who would have thought so many characters from the distant past, characters such as the god-like strategist Zhuge Liang in his ridged cap, kungfu novelist Jin Yung's smiling Wei Xiaobao and the heroic Yang Guo, and martial-arts disciple Li Xiao Yao are the most popular figures in the new technology of CD-ROMs.

Chen Hung-wei, a journalism student at Chengchi University, began to play the Japanese version of "The Three Kingdoms," a game incorporating Chinese history and military strategy, two years ago. Not knowing Japanese didn't stop him from enjoying the game; he spent the entire summer vacation after his freshman year attacking cities, invading countries and opening up the borderlands, often playing all night long.

He enjoys playing different characters from the Three Kingdoms: the Machiavellian Cao Cao; the weak Kong Rong; and Liu Bei, who devoted himself to the restoration of the Han dynasty. From the recruiting of soldiers and the arraying of troops for battle, to the use of ancient weapons, the thrill is in the feeling of achievement that comes of having control of the whole empire at the end of the game. Chen is viewed as a Three Kingdoms fanatic by his classmates. Having played the game some tens of times, he decided to reread all of Luo Guanzhong's The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and also found a copy of the historical Records of the Three Kingdoms to study. From these, he moved onto general Chinese history in the mammoth historical tome, Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government. "I can't deny that CD-ROM games took me into the realm of Chinese history," he says.

In the game world, fans of the Three Kingdoms games are far from a minority. Style Game Magazine, a magazine which reviews game software, says of the ascendancy of the Three Kingdoms games, "Almost anywhere there is a computer, there are Three Kingdoms games." Their fame has spread far and wide and many Taiwanese emigrants who return during summer vacation to visit relatives make a special trip to the Kuang Hwa Computer Market just to buy one.

According to sales figures from Taiwan's two most famous computer game distributors, Third Wave and Soft-World, in the last five years, game software related to the Three Kingdoms has sold a total of nearly 300,000 units. Among these are games made by the Japanese company Koei which are distributed by Third Wave and Soft-World's own products.

Last summer saw a peak in the popularity of the Three Kingdoms brought about by television. TV stations on both sides of the Taiwan Strait independently produced serials based on the Three Kingdoms, which were broadcast simultaneously in Taiwan. In a flash, Taiwan was permeated by an atmosphere of military trickery and heroics. From video games and cartoons to TV, business and politics, "one couldn't hold a conversation without mentioning the Three Kingdoms."

The craze made game producers want to strike while they had the chance. The Japanese "Three Kingdoms" is not cheap, costing over NT$1000, but it is already in its fifth edition. Soft-World's "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms" is about to go into its third edition.

The strong sales of the Three Kingdoms games can't help but make people want to know: Is it the game that attracts people? Or is it The Romance of the Three Kingdoms itself that draws people into the fray and makes them want to lose themselves in the story?

Tu Tse-chen, president of Third Wave, thinks that among the traditional Chinese novels, Chinese people are most familiar with The Journey to the West. This story of Tang Sancang leading his disciples Sun Wukong and Zhu Bajie to the West to acquire Buddhist scriptures is also the most entertaining.

But the Three Kingdoms, in which the empire is divided into three portions, is a theme much more suited to a game of strategy.

History's bounty

The classic The Journey to the West has also been made into a game, but its popularity does not compare to that of the Three Kingdoms games. Chaotic periods in Chinese history such as the Spring and Autumn/Warring States period, the Sui-Tang and Five Dynasties periods, and the early Republican era have all been turned into games, but none have had resounding success. Is the popularity of the Three Kingdoms really that exceptional?

Many in the game world think so. For most games, sales of 10,000 units are considered to be booming, yet the Three Kingdoms games have sold many times that amount.

One scholar points out that in the mainland, in Japan, and in Taiwan, the history of the Three Kingdoms has always been a common area of study. Even businessmen study the Three Kingdoms to compete better. Its popularity is the result of many factors.

Chiang Ching-ming, deputy editor-in-chief of PC Gamer, feels that among the periods of Chinese history in which many talented people have appeared, the Three Kingdoms is the most familiar. "As long as they are not too poorly made, games based on the Three Kingdoms are easy to sell," he says.

Profit is what motivates businesses, and the game world's hot pursuit of the Three Kingdoms trend has even led to the use of the faces of the characters from the story in Monopoly-style games.

Although high-energy computer games based on war stories and the classics don't always appeal to audiences, game designers still feel they can use them to establish a profit base. All of them follow the same formula, taking inspiration from history, famous novels such as All Men Are Brothers and The Dream of the Red Chamber), characters in kungfu novels including Chu Liuxiang and Zhang Wuji, and traditional puppet theater. All hope to recreate the phenomenal sales figures of the Three Kingdoms games.

Seeking inspiration from history and literature is not only convenient when choosing characters and plots, but local gamers also have an affinity for local themes.

Two years ago, Third Wave acted as agent for a game based on the American Civil War. The game wasn't bad, but "because it was unfamiliar, it met its Waterloo," says Wu Ming-chuan who works in the company's marketing division. And the Three Kingdoms theme which sells so well in the East loses all of its appeal in the United States.

You can "make history"

Games select from history, the classics and kungfu novels hoping to use the impressions that these works have already burned into people's minds. But the process is different from that of turning some famous work into a film. After the written word is turned into a multi-media format with animation, music, and images, the gamers themselves also become an important "player" in creating the game's interest.

In the Three Kingdoms games, the maps on the screen, the years in which characters appear, the events which occur, the length of the characters lives, and even their basic personality type are all historically accurate. The map scenes all appear as ink paintings. Colors on the maps change with the seasons. Characters' expressions are lifelike. The games seem real, which is one of the reasons that gamers are so enthusiastic about them.

Forty-seven fortresses and over three hundred military commanders. . . From the moment you choose the leader you will play, you begin to enter the China of 1500 years ago. Choose Liu Bei or Cao Cao and you clearly begin with a different level of military strength. But for the later development of your armies, most of the variables are under the your own control. Winning or losing depends on how you control your fortresses, whether you win the hearts of your people, recruiting troops, the use of diplomacy, and strategies such as creating dissent within the enemy camp and using beautiful women to distract enemy leaders. You attack and conquer until you control the heartland.

And if, by some chance, you are defeated before you have achieved your goal, you can start the game anew from that point.

What is unique about historical games is that the gamer is somewhere between fact and fiction, parts of the game being real history and other parts being fictitious. They are designed in this way to make them more entertaining. But there are gamers who think that a lot of the design of the Three Kingdoms system is ridiculously far removed from history.

Chiang, also a game player, cites an example. He says that Zhang Fei and Guan Yu were Liu Bei's sworn brothers but gamers can use gifts of famous horses and gold to win their loyalty for the opposing side. He says that the most ridiculous thing is that some games are designed such that a player must plant fields and cut wood to improve his country's military preparedness. He says that spending so much time on planting fields "drives you nuts!"

While some gamers are dying for a more historically accurate game, others feel that too much realism is not fun.

Chang Yi-min, director of research and development at Soft-World, says that if you take the Three Kingdoms' famous "David and Goliath" battle at Chibi as an example, if a player chooses to attack Liu Bei's forces, the brilliant strategist Zhuge Liang will devise the "linking plan" and the "arrow gathering plan" (plans by which Liu Bei's forces defeated Cao Cao's superior military force). Some people want to test themselves, to see if they can find some way to array their troops to defeat Zhuge Liang.

For those of this school, the fun in historical games is in making and changing history. Players of the Three Kingdoms games can even enter their own names, making themselves into one of the warlords contending for the heartland.

All for the market

Some people want realism, while others want fun. Chiang thinks that all you can say is that everyone has their own taste.

He says the two kinds of gamers differ in age. Older gamers want games that are realistic in their setting, that have beautiful plots, that move people. Middle- and high-school students just entering the gaming world want sound and visual effects. They feel that the games are entertainment and are not very concerned about plot development.

To cater to the tastes of the market, when Soft-World was promoting the third edition of its "Romance of the Three Kingdoms," the company considered producing two versions, one high on entertainment and fictional content, the other, a version as historically accurate as possible.

Whether games should be completely true to their source material or at least preserve the spirit of that source on some level is a problem also faced by games based on fictitious materials such as the classics and kungfu novels.

Chu Hsueh-heng, an electrical-engineering student at Central University, has been playing computer games for 10 years. He is critical of "Jin Yung's Heroes" which incorporates many of the characters of famous kungfu novelist Jin Yung's works into a game that involves kungfu fighting and finding one's way through a maze. "But it just uses Jin Yung as a shell, making all of his characters fight bad guys. It perverts his novels," says Chu.

Eliciting an even stronger response from gamers is "Moonlight Affair," a game based on Golden Lotus. The game takes Ximen Qing and turns him into a man of exceptional charm and emphasizes his having eight wives. By the end of the game, the female characters are wearing less and less clothing. "It's just another variant of a pornographic game," says one gamer.

Chang, head of R and D at Soft-World, which has the rights to Jin Yung's works, says that using the name of a famous source certainly attracts more gamers. They made Golden Lotus into a game in which men pursue women and vice versa, aiming it at the over-18 adult market. He says that the packaging clearly indicates that it is a game for adults.

"Most people's impression of Golden Lotus is that it is about male-female relationships, that it tells the story of Ximen Qing and Pan Jinlian's weakness for one another," says Chang. He says the game does not overstep the standards used by the movie industry.

The market has even seen Lin Daiyu and Jia Baoyu, the main characters in The Dream of the Red Chamber, turned into cartoon-like figures which compete at a version of Tetris. If the gamer wins, a picture of a naked woman appears. The game has nothing at all to do with The Dream of the Red Chamber.

Entertainment first, then education

Most people who buy a computer do not do so only to write letters and keep their books. A major attraction is often games. With improvements in digital compression, computer images are becoming more life-like and all kinds of CD-ROM-format entertainment and educational products are coming onto the market.

The Institute for the Information Industry estimates that last year the CD-ROM market in Taiwan saw total sales of NT$1.78 billion. Of this amount, games accounted for NT$1.44 billion, far outpacing the sales of educational CD-ROMs.

There are many enticements for gamers to play computer games, but at the beginning of this year, when Jin Yung came to Taiwan to be interviewed, he expressed another opinion. Speaking of the games that had been made from his novels, he said that it was hard for him to accept the way the younger generation had been introduced to his martial arts world through these computer games.

Jin Yung, who has loved books since childhood and is fiercely loyal to the written word, says that when you take the majestic feeling of the "Hua Shan Sword Match" and put it on a thin little CD-ROM and see the swords on the screen, it just cannot compare to the mystery and feeling of the written word; the two can't even be mentioned in the same breath. He hopes that young people will read the novels before playing the games.

However, some people feel that a game is just a game and you can't demand that it carry so much cultural and educational baggage. Moreover, games and books have different audiences and don't really affect one another.

The structuralist viewpoint is that once a text leaves the hands of its creator, any reader is an interpreter. The Dream of the Red Chamber has been made into movies and television serials, which have taken it far from what its writer, Cao Xueqin had in mind. "Once a text comes out, its author is dead." If other media can alter a work, why should games be any different? Or, perhaps, we should encourage games to be different?

Chen Pai-lin, a professor in the Department of Journalism at Chengchi University, thinks that in the novel Lu Ding Ji Jin Yung used the character of Wei Xiaobao to discuss the Tiaoyutai issue. If readers think that Jin Yung was using that to rewrite history, that's just too much. "Isn't history an element of creativity?" he asks.

Reflex versus reflection

Although computer games don't have to be educational, nonetheless, many have indirectly inspired players to learn.

For this reason, PC Gamer's Chiang disagrees with the placing of computer games and arcade video games into the same category.

"Video arcade games are just hands responding to actions. Computer games provide the player with a lot of data. Especially when playing games from overseas, to understand the plot the gamer must look up words in the dictionary while playing. If, by some chance, this word is a clue, the player can't ignore it," explains Chiang.

Chu Hsueh-heng began playing games from overseas when he was in the second grade. At that time, he didn't know the Latin alphabet, but when the same words appeared again and again, he began to remember them. "It was a terrible struggle." But from middle school to university, his English grades were always at or near the top of his class. Another positive influence of the games was "whether forced or of my own will, I had to quickly learn something about computers." Now he writes articles for computer game magazines. Of course, all the money he earns is "respectfully" put back into the CD-ROM market.

And, because the Three Kingdoms requires a knowledge of military tactics, it pushes players to study history more deeply outside the game. Tu's son, a fifth grader, has carefully read a colloquial Chinese translation of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (the original is written in the difficult classical Chinese) in order to better play the game, allowing his father to see the game's charm firsthand.

However, just as some fans of martial arts novels are so addicted to them that they actually go into the mountains to search for a master to teach them, gamers who get too involved sometimes find it difficult to distinguish their games from reality.

Last year's number one domestically produced game, "Immortal Swordsman," tells the story of a dashing and refined young man who is accompanying a lady on her travels. On the way, they improve their kungfu, solve puzzles, and avoid enemies. The plot has the female character die at the end. But many gamers, having lost themselves in the story, have been unable to accept this "cruel reality." Not only do they chat on the Internet about how to save her, they have also written letters to the company which produced the game asking the company to put out a new version of the game in which she is resurrected.

A life of all work and no play has no meaning, while a life of all play and no work is equally boring.

Donald A. Norman, an American scholar, in his book Things That Make Us Smart mentions that one aspect of human intelligence is the invention of tools which help in self-understanding and self-education. But looking at people glued to the front of a TV screen, being turned into idiots, he wonders at the entertainment value of some tools.

He gives the example of a teacher. A teacher knows what students should learn, but doesn't know how to make them pay attention. On the other hand, people in the entertainment industry know how to stir people's hearts but don't know what to teach. The obvious solution is to bring together the strong points of both.

The Red Chamber goes digital

The combination of education and entertainment has led to the coining of a new term in the US, "edutainment." But this idea of learning while you play is easier to talk about than to put into practice. Chen Pai-lin, who researches communications technology at Chengchi University, has designed a game to encourage students to learn about computers. However, students always respond by asking, "Why aren't there more fun parts and fewer educational parts?" CD-ROM games have almost the same problem; they are either "too" educational, or too fun.

Can the success of the Three Kingdoms games and the excitement they have stirred up continue? Although using themes from history and the classics is convenient, what kind of games can these themes be made into to attract people to them?

"The Dream of the Red Chamber is too literary. All of the characters recite and write poetry," says Lai Ying-ying, marketing director at Third Wave. She asks what kind of game you can make it into and if it would have playability. In her view, these are all problems. She says, "If you design the game just right, Jia Baoyu gets to fall in love every day. But if you design it wrong, it becomes pornographic."

But a researcher on The Dream of the Red Chamber sees another possibility.

Luo Feng-shu, assistant professor in the general education department at Yuan-Ze University, has put The Dream of the Red Chamber into a multi-media format, in this way bringing students into the world of books. She thinks, however, that The Dream of the Red Chamber need not appear only as an electronic book. In her view, in making it into a game, the fun part should be "letting players change the story." Why does Jia Baoyu have to marry Xue Baochai? If he were to marry Lin Daiyu, how should the story go? The reason for asking such a question is "Cao Xueqin wrote only the first 80 chapters of the novel. The last 40 were written by a number of different people. This means that there's a lot of room to imagine how the later development might have gone," she says.

Including such things as how Lin Daiyu might have looked. Did she have epicanthic folds or not? Luo says all this can be imagined. Given the current level of computer graphics software, all the possibilities for Chinese eyes and eyebrows could be laid out, allowing the player to assemble Lin Daiyu and Jia Baoyu's features.

Technology and the humanities

The Dream of the Red Chamber's flexibility can be applied to other themes. The Journey to the West has also been made into an adventure game involving puzzle solving and fighting. But its puzzles were viewed as too childishly simple by gamers and it was only able to interest primary school children.

"The Journey to the West includes so many myths. . . it really is extremely well-suited to be an adventure game," says Luo. The problem is that game production shouldn't be led by technology people. The Journey to the West could be aimed at different age groups, with versions of differing levels of difficulty. She feels that people with a background in literature are clearest about which themes are suitable for which age of player.

There are innumerable themes in history and literature-the question is just how to best arrange them in the context of a game.

Chen Pai-lin once read a book describing the excavation of the Ming emperor Shen Zong's tomb by a mainland Chinese archaeological team and intuitively felt that it would make a great game. The process of excavation could be made into series of dangerous challenges with archaeological information inserted at appropriate times.

"Software development is a combination of thinking and creativity," says Chen. Producing CD-ROMs requires technology, a knowledge of the humanities, and a creative bent. Now that virtually every household has a computer, the stage is set. "But keeping computer users' [attention] still depends on the content [of the CD-ROMs]," says Chen.

Game industry wisdom is that whether or not a CD-ROM will be successful is determined within three months of its release. Whether or not it is fun to play is spread by word of mouth. Will the Three Kingdoms games' record of 300,000 units sold be broken? Who might break it? Both the game industry and academics are waiting to find out.

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Military officers bearing armor and spears, ancient beauties in billowing clothing-these figures from the past are the most popular characters on today's computer monitors. The picture shows the Japanese version of the Three Kingdoms game. (courtesy of Third Wave)

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"Winning battles from a thousand miles away, he makes his plans in the commander's tent." In games of strategy, the interest lies in rewriting history. Relying on Zhuge Liang's strategic skills and Guan Yu's fighting prowess, it might be Liu Bei who reunites China. (courtesy of Third Wave)

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Purchased by many students during their summer vacations, computer games are the hottest products at computer exhibitions. What really catches people's attention is the ratio of male to female customers. (photo by Diago Chiu)

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Is turning classic novels into CD-ROM games encouraging their study? Or is it perverting their meaning? Golden Lotus has been turned into an "adults only" computer game. (courtesy of Soft-World)

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Thinking games give players' brains a workout. Reflex games such as car racing, on the other hand, are the mainstream of computer games. (photo by Hsueh Chi-kuang)

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Traditional puppet theater, popular at one time, can also be seen on computer monitors, becoming the first aspect of Taiwanese culture to be computerized. (photo by Diago Chiu)

Purchased by many students during their summer vacations, computer games are the hottest products at computer exhibitions. What really catches people's attention is the ratio of male to female customers. （photo by Diago Chiu）

Is turning classic novels into CD-ROM games encouraging their study? Or is it perverting their meaning? Golden Lotus has been turned into an "adults only" computer game. （courtesy of Soft-World）

Thinking games give players' brains a workout. Reflex games such as car racing, on the other hand, are the mainstream of computer games. （photo by Hsueh Chi-kuang）

Traditional puppet theater, popular at one time, can also be seen on com puter monitors, becoming the first aspect of Taiwanese culture to be computerized. （photo by Diago Chiu）