Making history enjoyable: rules and resonance in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms video game series

This article examines how the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (RTK) video game series transforms history into a source of gameplay enjoyment. Moving beyond debates over historical accuracy and authenticity, it asks how history functions for video games rather than how video games serve history. The article analyzes RTK through two interconnected dimensions: the rule-based reconfiguration of historical materials and resonance between the game and players, understood as a twofold mechanism for generating enjoyment. The article argues that RTK reorganizes historiographical records, literary narratives, and modern media representations into a calculable game system structured through quantified character attributes, turn-based temporality, restricted historical agency, and conquest-oriented goals. Through these rule structures, historical complexity is translated into a framework that enables prediction, planning, and strategic decision-making. The gameplay experience is further recontextualized through resonance, as players relate emergent in-game narratives to their prior knowledge of the Three Kingdoms. By foregrounding the interplay between systemic abstraction, which constructs a generalized rule-based framework, and resonance, which reconfigures gameplay through individualized meaning-making, this article argues that historical video games do not simply represent the past but generate historically grounded enjoyment through the interaction among rules, players, and culturally circulating historical narratives.