I used to spend most of my time playing games but as a person who will easily get addicted and for the sake’s of focusing more on studying,  before I came to Canada, I deleted all the game on my mobile phones and didn’t bring my game console. When I started to look for games to do this experiment, there is nothing accessible to me. That’s the beginning story of my subversive play.

After installing most of my familiar games and tried to come back to each different game world. Here I come, the weirdest feeling… Friend lists are in grey, nobody is online. Some even are purely blank as I am connecting to a new server which is not the area I was playing before. It’s the like feeling of going back to an abandoned world.

After adjusting my emotions, I chose the game called Arena of Valor (aka Kings of Glory 王者荣耀）for my subversive play experiment. It’s a PVP online mobile game features many similarities to League of Legends published by Tencent company. This game required players either having QQ or Wechat accounts (main social media in China). So I am still having most of my friends there. FYI, Wechat is more than just a social media to Chinese people, it becomes an essential in people’s daily life including daily consumption, education and working communication. As a consequence, Kings of Glory becomes the most popular game in China, it shows players’ ranking on Wechat account and becomes a kind of conversation starter among Chinese people.

How this game works:

• Each player chooses one character who has a set of unique skills and assigned to one of the teams for every match. There are 6 types of characters–warrior, tank, assassin, mage, archer and support, which will play different roles in the team.
  
• When the match begins, each character starts with an equal low level and then gain Exp. by either killing the enemy, minors or monsters over the course of the match to achieve a maximum level of 15. Each character starts with an equal gold too, gold is used to buy equipment and can be gained in a various way.  
  
• There are two teams, which team destroy the enemy team’s crystal/home will win the match. 
  
• There are three paths with defending towers leading to enemy’s home. 
  

How to subversive play:

• Walk around the whole map but not killing the enemy 
  
• Get into the enemy home without getting shot by defending tower
  
• After choosing one character, typing he/her history background story to everyone.
  

First attempt:

As a player for both League of Legends and Kings of Glory, I am not very professional but I did have a goal of improving my physical gaming skills every time when playing, in other words, kill the enemy as fast as I can. So when I try to achieve my subversive play goal, I feel really uncomfortable because I already have muscle memory in my fingers and I can’t help to press the button when I saw enemy running towards me. As I only need to run across the whole map, I didn’t buy any weapons but only 5 sets of shoes to speed up my movement. I walked into the enemy’s home but eventually get caught by them and lost my life. Surprisingly, none of my team members cursed me by my unusual actions, the chatting channel is so quiet during the whole game. This is a game about teamwork if one of the players is not performing well, which will drag down the whole team and we eventually lost the match. However, I did get reported because of negative attitude.

Second attempt:

Kings of Glory used a lot of real people from the history. For my second attempt, I chose a respected woman from Han Dynasty– Wang Zhaojun. She is also known as one of four beauties in ancient China. She nominated herself to marry to the Huns in order to establish the friendly relationships. After her marriage, she still tried her best to dissuade from the war between two countries and maintain the peace for a very long period of time. For this round of match, I want to keep playing the game but also typing out my character’s historic story. One of my team members replied ” So, are you my bro or sister?” I didn’t reply back but keep typing the story. The final result is that we win the match.

Conclusion:

This experiment of subversive play is very interesting, it raised up some topics around the boundaries between the game battle and real life. From the player’s point of view, it’s really difficult to play in a subversive way which is already rooted in my mind. After some research, some popular games like Kings of Glory have a quite big effect on players’ life, especially most players are young people which will mislead their understanding of history.

Reference List:

“Authorities to reinforce inspection over games “distorting history” · TechNode.” TechNode, 24 Jan. 2018, technode.com/2018/01/24/authorities-reinforce-inspection-games-distorting-history/.

“Arena of Valor — true MOBA on mobile phones.” Gamasutra Article, www.gamasutra.com/blogs/VadimBulatov/20171226/312233/Arena_of_Valor__true_MOBA_on_mobile_phones.php.

Liu, Yong, and Hongxiu Li. “Exploring the impact of use context on mobile hedonic services adoption: An empirical study on mobile gaming in China.” Computers in Human Behavior 27.2 (2011): 890-898.