The Promise of Play: A New Approach to Productive Play (original) (raw)
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Productive vs. Pathological: The Contested Space of Video Games in Post-Reform China (1980s–2012)
This article analyzes the discourses of video games in post-reform China, explicating gaming technology as a contested space coproduced by various social players struggling for power and cultural legitimacy in the context of post-socialist transition. As an imported foreign technology, video games are often identified by various social forces as either a solution to or a cause of the contradictions and crises generated by reform, which produces a recurring dialectical representation of the medium as both productive and pathological. The contrasting fates of arcade and console games in the 1980s and the interplay between promotion and regulation of PC games in the 1990s led to the contemporary battle over Internet addiction and new definitions of pathology and productivity. Those seemingly contradictory cultural discourses constitute and reflect power struggles among different stakeholders over the meaning, form, and use of new technologies as China transitions from a socialist to a post-socialist society. Before he become SKY, he was a juvenile delinquent, a shameful son, addicted to games and living on instant noodles in a netbar. After he became SKY, he transformed into a world champion and a pop idol. He is an excellent exemplar of the Chinese generation born in the 1980s! (Li, 2012) 1 About 14.1%, or nearly 2.5 million of urban young Internet users are addicts . . . online games rely on elements of attack, fight and competition, which can lead gamers to irrationality and immorality, sanctioning the behavior of achieving one's goal by harming others-some violent and pornographic games are often considered "Electronic Heroin." (Xu, 2012)
Situating Productive Play: Online Gaming Practices and Guanxi in China
2009
Economic activities in and around online gaming in China are often correlated in the West with practices of gold farming, or selling in-game currency to players for real money in online games. What can we learn about online gaming in China and about online gaming and online sociality more broadly when we look at economic and other “pragmatic” practices through which online gaming becomes meaningful to players? In this paper, we present findings from an ethnographic study of online gaming in China’s urban Internet cafes to discuss implications for game design, and HCI design more broadly. Considering the ties between socio-economic practices, development of trust and culturally situated imaginings of self-hood and otherness, brings to the fore how online gaming in and of itself constitutes the means for practical achievements in day-to-day management of guanxi (social connection).
2019
the number has dropped to less than two hundred. In their place, esports training centers and arenas are attracting both government and private investment. The nearly 50-years long history of local arcade gaming (Ng 2015), meanwhile, is changing as centers are primarily populated by older adults instead of youngsters. To document this changing landscape of semi-public play, this presentation draws on open interviews conducted in Hong Kong between 2017 and 2019. The interviews help to establish the local 'collective memory' (Halbwachs 1992) of arcade play, spaces and players. The presentation explores what kind of a cultural gamer identity the collective memory contributes towards and what are the meanings associated with game arcades in Hong Kong. Comparisons to cases outside of Hong Kong, such as Japan (Ashcraft and Snow 2008), will be made.
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We analyze online gaming as a site of collaboration in a digital-physical hybrid. We ground our analysis in findings from an ethnographic study of the online game World of Warcraft in China. We examine the interplay of collaborative practices across the physical environment of China's Internet cafes and the virtual game space of World of Warcraft. Our findings suggest that it may be fruitful to broaden existing notions of physical-digital hybridity by considering the nuanced interplay between the digital and physical as a multi-dimensional environment or "ecology". We illustrate how socio-economics, government regulations and cultural value systems shaped a hybrid cultural ecology of online gaming in China.
As a case study, this article examines the development of China's online game industry and how China responds to the forces of globalization. Based on in-depth interviews, ethnographic research, and the analysis of archive documents from the past few years, this study identifies China's evolving strategy of neo-techno-nationalism. In the Chinese context, this national strategy manipulates technology to create a version of popular nationalism that is both acceptable to and easily censored by the authorities. Therefore, cultural industries that adopt this strategy stand a good chance of prevailing in the Chinese market. This success explains why the regional competitors of Chinese online games—Korean games—are more successful in China than most of their Western counterparts. By providing a snapshot of the current ecology of China's online game industry, this article also discusses the influence of regional and global forces in a concrete context and argues that the development of China's online game industry depends more on political factors than economic factors.
Working as playing? Consumer labor, guild and the secondary industry of online gaming in China
China has become one of the biggest consumers and producers of online games in the world; however, little is known about a burgeoning secondary industry emerging out of the socioeconomic interaction between gamers and the online gaming industry. Through the lens of online gaming guilds-the intermediary institutions between the industry and gamers-this article discusses how the Chinese information economy's dependence on consumer labor and the gamers' entrepreneurial resourcefulness have produced a secondary industry. As the secondary industry has evolved, the gaming industry has come to depend on the productive play of consumers. This changing regime of value has given rise to bio-political control of consumer labor and, along with state control, is drawing gamers into the tug-of-war between entrepreneurial invention and labor exploitation. By depicting the complex negotiations between capital and labor, and community and commerce, on both subjective and institutional levels, this article re-examines and explicates the Western debate over consumer digital cultural production and its social, economic, and political implications.
An exploration of the relationship between video games and cyber-nationalism in contemporary China
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Video games were introduced to China in the 1980s and the Chinese market is now the largest in the world. Although that many participants in cyber-nationalism are gamers, this correlation has not previously been explained in Anglophone scholarship. This essay presents evidence that over the last 30 years video games have been fundamental to the development of cyber-nationalism in contemporary China.