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Real Emotions in Virtual Play: The Impact of Honor of Kings on Players’ Attitudes Toward and Cognition of Historical Figures

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The Chinese Video Game Industry

Part of the book series: Palgrave Games in Context ((PAGCON))

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Abstract

Honor of Kings (Tencent Games) is one of the most popular mobile games in the world. This chapter explores how the game influences the historical views of players. A survey was conducted with 907 valid samples of adults with higher educational backgrounds. Data including emotional attitudes towards real historical figures, willingness to learn, and related historical knowledge of the respondents were collected. The respondents’ gaming behavior and demographic information were also measured. The results of the study demonstrate that playing Honor of Kings has an emotional influence on player attitudes towards historical figures, especially for players already familiar with the game’s heroes. The chapter introduces the effect of “real emotions in virtual play”—which is based on the concept of player-avatar identification—as an explanation for this influence.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The number of Chinese gamers exceeded 640 million in the first quarter of 2019, ranking first in the world; the total revenue of the Chinese game market in 2018 was 214.4 billion yuan [30.7 billion USD], second only to the United States (CGIGC 2019).

  2. 2.

    HoK is a mobile multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game developed by Timi Studio and Tencent and launched in 2015. By early 2017, the game had more than 200 million registered players and 50 million daily users (Zhou 2017). A custom skin for one of the game’s most popular characters saw its sales volume reach 150 million yuan [21.53 million USD] in its first day (Zhang 2017a). In October 2018, the monthly average number of daily active users was nearly 60 million, much higher than the figure for all other mobile games in China. HoK was also the only mobile game in China with monthly active users exceeding 100 million every month during 2018 (Jiguang 2019). In terms of revenue, HoK rocketed to the top of the mobile games sales charts based on worldwide revenue in May 2017 and has held the position as of this writing (GameLook 2017). Despite the emergence of new competitive games, HoK still ranks first in Chinese mobile game revenue in the first quarter of 2019 (Gamma Data 2019). It became the world’s highest grossing mobile game in the first half of 2019, with more than 728 million US dollars in revenue (Nelson 2019).

  3. 3.

    Proficiency is an indicator in HoK. The more matches a player plays using a specific hero, the higher the hero’s proficiency. Players can easily display all the heroes they have in order of proficiency.

  4. 4.

    The data, provided by Tencent Timi Studios, which runs HoK, reflect the rate at which each hero is selected to play in millions of battles every day.

  5. 5.

    Luban’s real name is still disputed, and many of his inventions and deeds are folklore. There are also no names of “Diaochan” or “Sun Shangxiang” in official history. Only “Zhuo Bi” and “Lady Sun” are mentioned in The Three Kingdoms. However, after the rendering and romance of folklore, the names and images of these characters have gradually become familiar to the public, so they are also regarded as real historical figures. This poses a question for reflection. How many of the historical figures that people think they know well are reconstructions out of different stories?

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

    Wei He & Yue Li

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  1. Wei He
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  2. Yue Li
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Correspondence to Wei He .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Shenzhen Technology University, Shenzhen, China

    Feng Chen

  2. Department of Public and Applied Humanities, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Ken S. McAllister

  3. Department of Public and Applied Humanities, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Judd Ethan Ruggill

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He, W., Li, Y. (2024). Real Emotions in Virtual Play: The Impact of Honor of Kings on Players’ Attitudes Toward and Cognition of Historical Figures. In: Chen, F., McAllister, K.S., Ruggill, J.E. (eds) The Chinese Video Game Industry. Palgrave Games in Context. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41504-3_9

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