The secret to the success of "Battle of Two Cities" is not in the game itself

The secret to the success of "Battle of Two Cities" is not in the game itself

"Arcane: League of Legends" is a title destined to be successful, otherwise it's like those games that rely on a bit of attraction to maintain their popularity and throw them in the trash after a binge. The key is who defines its success, the players, or the average viewers who open Tencent Video or Netflix. The people around it seem to be not only indulging in the charm of games and the content of film and television, but also topics other than the "Twin Cities". I Audience - Comment on the contradictory community of "Arcane: League of Legends", because of the diversity of characters, so that the audience can get multiple ways of evaluation. For the three-dimensional characters in the story, such as Jinx, Wei, Jace, Victor, Hilco, Vander, etc., viewers have different evaluations and understandings, which brings a game adapted from the game. The most enjoyable sight in the coming animated series is the heated discussion among players (audience). What brought this buzz? One explanation is the huge popularity of the game "League of Legends", but the key lies in the characteristics of the work itself. Perhaps the biggest "problem" of "Battle of the Two Cities" is that it provides a space for imagination and gives the audience an omniscient and omnipotent vision. From the perspective of the omniscient God, the audience's immersive interpretation of the story on the one hand proves the value of the work, but also shows the flaws in the narcissistic personality to a certain extent. Narcissistic viewers find great satisfaction when they judge the characters in the story, which is both moral dogma and the output of values. It's hard to be rational, and we can't get rid of this subjective emotion as an audience, it makes us empathize with the plot and characters in the work, it makes us look at others with compassion, and it may also be full of malicious accusation. We look down on the sentient beings in the story and treat the hero like a summoner in the game. The scary thing is that we completely abandon our physical experience and judge people according to our own understanding and simplified rules of the world, this complex social thing. Jinx is a lunatic, Wei is a reckless man, and the conclusion that such a coffin is born in the heart is because of the narrative point of view displayed in all directions, each character has his own memory moment, and the audience has no time to enter a person's heart. Get to know the next character. Because of this, "Battle of Two Cities" has created three-dimensional personalities and complete arcs for its characters, but it has turned the audience into a god of scrutiny. Do we become rational after knowing each character? No, we have become emotionally-dominated gods, choosing the image of our choosing according to our will. The old concept of binary opposition re-emerged in the audience's evaluation, which is really inappropriate for an excellent drama whose theme involves politics and class metaphors. The most direct way to improve the audience's aesthetics is to become rational, but when dealing with people in reality, we will lose it, and what about the characters in the story? II Game-Animation-Movie When the game "League of Legends" was launched for more than ten years, both Tencent and Riot Games couldn't wait to explore the derivative value behind it. The integration of a huge game background. Obviously, Riot Games has not made much effective progress in dealing with the latter, and the feedback from gamers is the best proof. Even so, the gaming company has followed the path of many of its predecessors. Just like Blizzard, which was just acquired by Microsoft for $67.8 billion, Riot Games has also received a lot of praise for using animation to promote its games, and has even been dubbed the "music company" for its high level of music production. Of course, there are not many novel and ingenious strategies, and the use of animation as a medium to display these computer-generated two-dimensional images is the best choice, so animation and video games have been tied together for decades. The Calling (2022) Most people think that the highly illusory nature of animation makes the game reusable, but for game companies, animation is a convenient promotional tool. From the hands of game companies, the value of animation is being continuously devalued, because those promo videos or demo videos that are as short as a few minutes and as long as tens of minutes are open and free on Internet sites. In the eyes of gamers, who are the largest audience, these non-paid and fully game-oriented animations have completely lost the seriousness of their content. It is worth mentioning that the exploration of game companies in the form of animation is obviously the pursuit of a hidden value. The expansion of the game content is extended by animation, so that more main and side stories that cannot be fully displayed in the game form can be presented. Smart images make everything lively and interesting, and players (audience) can touch the game world and characters more. the truth. This kind of hidden value is the internal driving force for game retention. After all, no one would be willing to spend such a long time to make some ordinary video products, and its cost performance is far inferior to selling skins or expansion packs. Riot Games' transition from games to live-action movies is another difficult road. Counting the movies adapted from games in recent years, except for the first few films of the "Resident Evil" series, almost all of them are predictable to lose both word of mouth and box office. Looking back at the time when "Warcraft" was released, I still watched the screening with the enthusiasts in the early morning, but the frenzy in front of the screen did not change the reality that the circle could not be broken outside the theater. Even such a huge game IP has encountered stumbling blocks on the road to adapting movies. "Warcraft" (2016) Compared with animation, the movie needs to go to the market. Even if the game company still maintains the same attitude towards animation as mentioned above, it inevitably needs to consider the extensiveness of public ticket sales. Finding a balance between gamers and general audiences is difficult, not only involving creative adaptations of game content, but also affecting how studios value the game. So we see more of those bad movies caused by the imbalance, which are all eaten up by the game. The era of streaming media has given more compromise methods, choosing episodes instead of feature films, online instead of offline, animation instead of live action, which all make the controllability of game adaptation within greater limits. Leaving aside the plot and content of "Battle of the Two Cities" for a while, this streaming animation series from Netflix and Riot Games has won widespread acclaim because of its balance of film and game integration, which comes from Due to an unexpected prior condition - the chaotic League of Legends story background. Riot’s previous content strategy was a mess, let alone the management of the banner, which led to more or less discrepancies in the story background of the game, promotional animations and event pages. Even if many people reflect this situation, to most players of the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA), what kind of story "League of Legends" tells is not important. So facing the characters in "Battle of the Two Cities", such as Jinx, Wei, Jace, Victor, etc., players need to re-understand these strangers under the familiar shell. When gamers stop raising their arrogant heads, we are all ordinary spectators in front of the screen. In the twin cities full of class metaphors, we see the most authentic things of family and friendship, love and growth, as well as imaginative Arcane and technology. We are all immersed in it as audiences, experiencing the real absurdity in the fictional world, and then wake up and escape back to reality. "Battle of Two Cities" has completely escaped the shackles of the game, and original characters and plays have brought its most valuable value, but whether this test of the fist company can continue into the film, everything is Unknown.

(Responsible editor：Share Photography)