The Three Kingdoms Across Media: Characters in History, Fiction, and Video Games

Undergraduate catalogue

Video games have in the last 40 years morphed from lab experiments at MIT into a billion-dollar worldwide entertainment. How can we engage with this fast growing media platform in a critically engaged and humanities-based manner? This class does so by placing video-game culture in a much longer, two-thousand year old East Asian history of media transformations. Starting with a single historical event, The Three Kingdoms, we trace how this event was renarrativized and remediated through many incarnations from official dynastic history to contemporary video game and from Chinese novel and Japanese game to American gaming communities.