Task 1 Reflection Robert

The scene of our project is based on the “Romance of Three Kingdoms (三國演義)”, this is very famous Chinese romance about the conflict between three kingdoms, the “Wei Kingdom(魏國)”, the “Su Kingdom(蜀國)” and the “Wu Kingdom (吳國)” together struggling to become the only emperor of China after the fall of Han Dynasty (漢朝). Although this is a Chinese classic, the plot is lengthy so considering the possibility of doing it we adopt only the most thrilling scenes and characters.

Figure 1 The Leader of Wei Kingdom Cao Cao

I was assigned to the “Wei Kingdom(魏國)” and I chose to become the Wei leader Cao Cao (曹操). The first challenge for me is how to portray this character. As many readers of the romance know, Cao Cao is described as a cunning and hypocritical villain. However, if we view him at a different point he is also considered as the most influential ruler. Cao Cao is one of the leaders during the Romance of three Kingdoms. Cao Cao was originally called the Cao minister (曹丞相) because he saved the young emperor of Han dynasty. Although Cao Cao did not claim himself to be the emperor he is actually the one who had the power over the last emperor of Han dynasty. In order to represent the role of Cao Cao, I had my avatar dressed in Cheongsam (長衫/旗袍) that had a golden dragon sewed on it to show the character’s status and influence. In ancient China dragon is considered as the symbol of power and only emperor can have dragon sewed on his garments. Most importantly, I chose to represent Cao Cao in a female figure because I attempt to re-define the character.

Figure 2 Cao Cao is thought to be the most influential leader

The second challenge of this project is to come up with the script. This is not an easy task because the words or sentences used by particular characters have to match with their personalities based on historical recordings. As a result, I adopted many famous quotations by Cao Cao such as “It is a pity to live in the time of turmoil, but if we can turn turmoil into peace, it is something worth our praise(生於亂世是為不幸，但如能變亂為治，豈非不幸中之大幸！)” Moreover, I marked many intonation alterations to match the personality of Cao Cao on my script.

Last but not least, I think the program Second Life needs some technical upgrades and improvements. Many of its functions require higher techniques to perform certain actions such as coding; it is extremely hard for beginners to get used to it. Moreover, many of the design like the way of changing clothes is also very complicated which may take a lot of time for beginners.

Furthermore, I think Second Life requires a lot of communication strategies as well as patience because we are all players in the virtual so how to interact with the others depend deeply on the way we instruct verbally. I think this is very hard especially when you are doing something that is not English because it requires many explanations to it. For example, the scene of our project is “The Romance of Three Kingdoms” so we have to adopt many Chinese culture and sayings. This is not only very hard for foreign students to understand the meaning behind each game we designed but also difficult for us to express something that is originally Chinese. However, I think it is during the explanations between us and the foreign students that we learned ways to communicate with others using communication skills. 

After all, I think our project on the “Romance of Three Kingdoms” is successful. Despite some technical problems we faced everything moves smoothly. The story is really interesting for we can learn from the reaction of the foreign students. I think our project is very entertaining and is a success. Yet, I could not help but to complain that this game really takes a lot of patience and time.   

Figure 3 Extraordinary person does extraordinary achievements