Rivermen is a collection of 10,000 3D model NFTs released by the Penglai team on August 15, 2021. In contrast to other NFTs, the characters of Rivermen are all born out of the art masterpiece " Riverside scene at Qingming festival ".

As an artistic treasure of Chinese culture, almost every era seems to re-interpret " Riverside scene at Qingming festival " in the contest of its time. The Rivermen series can be regarded as the Web3 interpretation by its creative team, Penglai.

Compared with the common algorithm-synthesized NFTs on the market, Penglai, as a professional design team, is quite sincere, using hand-made figures for all of Rivermen's 10,000 NFTs, which are based on more than 800 characters and 202 professions from the Qingming Shanghe Tu.

The Rivermen project, which is full of Chinese cultural characteristics, has been created after a number of complicated processes and a lot of labour costs.

Nevertheless, Penglai is not limited themselves to only one NFT project. What it wants to create is a Bianriverse that is different from the Western ideology and has the soul of Chinese national culture. They proposed the idea of synthesis which is the key to the Bianriverse. So what exactly is synthesis?

Synthesis is one of the core gameplay of Rivermen, where users can collect NFTs of different professions to synthesize higher level NFT assets. The synthesized NFT assets can also be used in the next round of synthesis. According to the information provided by the official website, the synthesis route is as follows: villain pawn—>pawn synthesizes crowd Scene—>adjacent Scene synthesizes Place—>adjacent Place synthesizes Part—>Part finally synthesizes long scroll Whole.

According to its official disclosure, at the end of the synthesis game, 10 alienated versions of the long scrolls will appear, and when the synthesis game ends, the Bianriverse will be officially opened.

In the Bianriverse, the river people and the river residence act as the core elements of productivity and means of production respectively. For example, if the Bianriverse is a business-generating game, the river people are the characters that players need to enter the game, while the river mansions take on the role of production and business, such as producing grain in the fields and selling wine in the wine shops.

And only under the joint effect of the two that the Bianriverse can run smoothly.

The perfect harmony of culture and metaverse

The concept of the metaverse seems to be naturally compatible with terms such as virtual reality, cyberpunk, and The Matrix. As a result, whenever the term metaverse is mentioned, it seems that even the discourse will carry some avant-garde technological colors. However, the author believes that if the metaverse is only interpreted from the perspective of technology, it will inevitably appear lame.

At present, the most high-profile metaverse projects are almost always open worlds outlined in the context of Western culture, such as Decentraland and The Sandbox. Such projects often have a P2E theme, where making money seems to have become politically correct, and they seem to inevitably fall into the death spiral of land speculation and gold mining in the end.

In contrast, Rivermen believes that excessive P2E is actually dwarfing the game itself. In terms of the current GameFi market, the biggest problem facing GameFi today is not actually the design of the profit model or economic model, but the general lack of playability. Phil Spencer, the CEO of Microsoft, has publicly stated that today's metaverse is nothing more than "a poorly made video game." While this is a harsh statement, it is admittedly true.

Thus, in the vision of Rivermen's team, Penglai, the Bianriverse should be an open world rooted in culture. Here, people can produce and work; create and operate. Of course, if you are profit-oriented, there will be no shortage of room for profit in the Bianriverse. Even, as long as you want to, it is not uncommon to live in seclusion here, picking chrysanthemums and living under the fence.

Therefore, what Bianriverse wants to provide are not actually a fixed state of life. Conversely, it is an alternative, controlled and inclusive way of living.

In fact, for the metaverse, we can completely regard it as a new type of decentralized society. When analyzing a society, two perspectives should be considered: technology and culture.

Due to the strong futuristic color of the metaverse itself, we will inevitably be too limited to the technical level and ignore cultural factors.

In fact, culture, as the bloodline of spiritual civilization, contains the power to influence people. Take, for example, BAYC and Azuki, which are both blue chips, the former enjoys great popularity in Europe and the United States, while the latter is riding high in popularity in Asia. This difference in aesthetics is actually a reflection of the difference in intrinsic cultural attributes.

On the other the construction of the current metaverse seems to be seriously lacking a cultural and humanistic root, and most of them are just modeled construction and destruction, which seem to have no other purpose than making money. It turns out that people are wandering and wandering in the empty space, like souls without an owner.

In my opinion, Rivermen may have some sense of mission. It seeks to borrow the soul of the Chinese Qingming Shanghe culture to draw a picture of the era that belongs to Web3. The combination of its humanistic color and exquisite mechanism design also makes the project a delicate balance, which will also become an important guarantee for maintaining its healthy development.