Temporal Reconstruction and Defamiliarization: Narrative Design of Where Winds Meet’s Based on Bakhtin’s Chronotope

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-577-5_27How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Where Winds Meet’s; Narrative Design; Spacetime Theory

Abstract

Against the backdrop of the integration of digital culture and historical dissemination, games, as an important symbol of digital culture, have become an effective vehicle for disseminating historical culture. However, the industry has long faced a conflict between historical authenticity and game playability. Taking the open-world martial arts game “Where Winds Meet” set in the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period as a case study, this paper explores narrative design ideas for historical games from the perspective of innovative narrative design, guided by Bakhtin’s theory of spacetime and Genette’s theory of transgressive narrative. Research findings indicate that “Where Winds Meet” recreates the historical narrative space-time based on a triple spatio-temporal framework of “Jianghu—Street Life—Historical Rift,” and reshapes the unfamiliar expression of historical narrative through the intervention of the protagonist “Young Master” with multiple identities and the method of time-space retracing. This design resolves the inherent problems faced by historical games in creation and creates an immersive historical game experience that is different from traditional linear narrative methods. By analyzing data materials from three aspects—4.77 million words of non-linear narrative text in the game, foreign player evaluation data, and cross-time-space task completion rate—the study outlines the innovative path of narrative design in historical games and provides some guiding suggestions on how to further promote the digital development of historical culture and promote innovative narrative practices in historical games.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Xinyu Chen
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/05/15
TI  - Temporal Reconstruction and Defamiliarization: Narrative Design of Where Winds Meet’s Based on Bakhtin’s Chronotope
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 5th International Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities and Arts (SSHA 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 268
EP  - 275
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-577-5_27
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-577-5_27
ID  - Chen2026
ER  -