Mapping Digital Game Culture in China

From Internet Addicts to Esports Athletes

Marcella Szablewicz

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030361105
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030361112
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book, Marcella Szablewicz traces what she calls the topography of digital game culture in urban China, drawing our attention to discourse and affect as they shape the popular imaginary surrounding digital games. Szablewicz argues that games are not mere sites of escape from Real Life, but rather locations around which dominant notions about failure, success, and socioeconomic mobility are actively processed and challenged. Covering a range of issues including nostalgia for Internet cafés as sites of youth sociality, the media-driven Internet addiction moral panic, the professionalization of e-sports, and the rise of the self-proclaimed loser (diaosi), Mapping Digital Game Culture in China uses games as a lens onto youth culture and the politics of everyday life in contemporary China. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2009 and 2015 and first-hand observations spanning over two decades, the book is also a social history of urban China's shifting technological landscape.

© The Author(s) 2020

M. SzablewiczMapping Digital Game Culture in ChinaEast Asian Popular Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36111-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Mapping China’s Digital Gaming Culture

Marcella Szablewicz¹

(1)

Pace University, New York, NY, USA

Marcella Szablewicz

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

ChinaDigital gamesTopographyAffectDiscoursePopular cultureYouthSituational analysis

End Abstract

One bright and unseasonably warm morning in March 2010, I boarded a public bus that took me on a 90-minute trek to the far outskirts of Shanghai. As the bus wound its way out of the crowded and glitzy city center, I was struck by the transition from Shanghai’s densely built downtown to the sparser surroundings of the suburbs. Unlike in the United States, where suburbs are replete with green manicured lawns and cookie-cutter houses, the Shanghai suburbs evoked a sense of development-in-waiting. A newly constructed highway extended endlessly into the horizon, but aside from that single stretch of freshly laid pavement little else disturbed the flat and dusty plain. Only occasionally did I spot a few car dealerships and manufacturing plants. People seemed scarcer still.

My destination was Tongji University’s Jiading campus.¹ Anyone expecting a bustling college town in Jiading would have been sorely disappointed. Eyeing nothing but empty highway stretching to either side of the gates, I turned my attention to the vast campus before me. Large, austere buildings spread across a wide flat expanse. The lawn was meticulously kept, but the young trees planted in neat rows looked like mere weeds cowering in the shadows of the gigantic concrete edifices they surrounded. Robin Visser refers to such constructions in urban China as evoking a sense of socialist monumentality.² Yet while the buildings did indeed evoke a sense of Spartan socialist grandeur, it was an empty grandeur, offset by the absence of students. The campus at first glance seemed nearly a ghost town. This too is a common sight in China, where the development of suburban college campuses and residential complexes often far outstrips actual demand.

The center of student life in Jiading, I found, was an on-campus pedestrian street lined with restaurants, cafés, and convenience stores. At one end of the strip a small grocery store provided students with daily staples. The busy little pedestrian street seemed like a stage set, as if the stores and restaurants were meant to create the illusion of a bustling town on an otherwise vacant stretch of land. Where kids in downtown Shanghai always seemed in need of space to escape to, the kids on this campus seemed suspended in a bizarre purgatory, between China’s urban and rural landscapes but part of neither. Far from being lost in the crowd, the students here were completely disconnected from it.

I was on campus to see Xiaomei, a female gamer whom my college-aged research assistant Luke had introduced me to a few weeks earlier. Xiaomei seemed a bit of a tomboy. She did not wear makeup or dresses, her main accessory was a pair of glasses, and she seemed to have more male than female friends. Xiaomei expressed a keen interest in getting to know me, probably because she planned to apply to business and finance graduate programs in the United States. She was drawn to the American stock market; I later learned that she had inherited that interest from her parents, who in their retirement enjoyed trading stocks on the Shanghai stock exchange.

Xiaomei had been playing games since before elementary school. Her father had introduced her to digital gaming when he brought home a television game console when she was five years old. She first encountered Internet games in fifth grade, at about age ten, when a friend took her to an Internet café. She did not begin gaming in earnest until her first year of middle school. Throughout middle school and her early high-school years, she and her mostly male friends went to Internet cafés an average of three times a week. By the time she reached her second year of high school, however, the cafés had begun to enforce stricter regulations prohibiting minors and she could not go as often. Still, she and her friends had tactics to get around the restrictions: primarily, creating fake IDs, and lying to their parents about their whereabouts.

The evening of our first meeting Xiaomei introduced me to her friends Yuanqi and Wanghui. Yuanqi was a fast talker, never at a loss for words. He was the joker of the group and would often do or say funny things to amuse his friends. Wanghui was an earnest and studious young man. He surprised me by coming to our meeting prepared with his own set of questions to ask me.

The three friends told me that when not studying for exams, they devoted their time to “studying” and playing Warcraft III , a real-time strategy (RTS) game. Though they seemed like friends who had known each other all their lives, the trio had actually met only one semester before, through the campus bulletin board system (BBS) on a discussion thread devoted to finance majors. Having discovered their shared interest in War3, as it is nicknamed, they quickly bonded over late-night gaming sessions. In China, most college dormitories are segregated by sex. Therefore, although they lived on the same campus, Xiaomei’s gaming sessions with Yuanqi and Wanghui had to be coordinated online, through the instant messaging service QQ. After a game concluded the three would continue to chat online: sharing funny videos, discussing class assignments, and analyzing game strategy. Wanghui approached games like an algorithm to be decoded. Xiaomei and Yuanqi teased him about his once staying up all night to chart out the best possible times to harvest vegetables in the game Farmville, an online social networking game where gamers cultivated a farm and could steal vegetables from other farms.

Xiaomei, Yuanqi, and Wanghui talked with me enthusiastically for hours that first night, and we fast became friends. Xiaomei and I continued to chat over QQ, and it was not long before she inducted me into a private group chat. Through chat I met another two of her friends: Deming and Ting. Xiaomei’s group shared a desire to travel and experience new things. Two of the five, Xiaomei and Wanghui, planned to apply to graduate school in the United States. Wanghui and Ting had spent semesters abroad, Wanghui in Ireland and Ting in Canada; Deming had interned in California. Xiaomei and Yuanqi were the only ones who had not yet been abroad, though Xiaomei was in the process of applying to study-abroad programs and would leave for a semester in Ireland shortly after I departed China.

It was an exciting, if dizzying, experience to be chatting online with this vibrant group of young people. The good-natured banter of my new friends was, in and of itself, a lesson in Internet slang. It was not long before Xiaomei informed me that they were planning a trip to Huangshan.³ This was to be their first domestic trip without their parents and their first time to travel with friends. Whether it was because I was a foreigner and the group was eager to show me a good time or because they simply wanted to try something new, Xiaomei asked if I would like to join them.

I spent four days traveling with Xiaomei and three of her friends: Yuanqi, Deming, and Ting. Wanghui, who was involved in the planning process, ultimately decided he was unable to join because of an impending exam. Though he was disappointed to miss the trip, his decision to stay behind and study served to illustrate the extent of his academic motivation.

By most American middle-class standards, it was not a luxurious vacation. As students, Xiaomei, Yuanqi, Deming, and Ting were on a tight budget. We purchased hard seats on the slow train, three of us to a row, and we slept leaning on each other’s shoulders during the overnight journey.⁴ Once we arrived at the foot of Huangshan, we haggled with restaurant managers over meal prices. On the mountaintop, the six of us crammed into a single dorm-style room with bunk beds.

During this time, no computer was touched, no e-mail checked, no games played. The sole exception to the digital blackout were cell phones, one of which, much to my amusement, burst out in a digitized snippet of a popular song just as we were enjoying a particularly quiet moment at the peak of the mountain. It turned out to be Yuanqi’s parents calling to check in: How was everything going? Was he having fun, staying safe?

Parents’ phone calls aside, our group spent the days at Huangshan immersed in nature, albeit a very crowded and touristy version of it. As we ascended the mountain’s narrow stone steps, we stopped occasionally for a rest or to fuel up on the chocolate and nuts we had brought along. After eight hours of uphill hiking we stopped for the night at the hotel. We woke before dawn and stumbled our way along the dark mountain paths together with hundreds of other Chinese tourists to watch the sun rise above the misty peaks of the mountain. At one point Yuanqi and Xiaomei broke into song and, inspired by the scenery, everyone stopped for a spontaneous xiu (Chinese slang for “show”). It was like some idyllic and slightly surreal scene from a musical, and the heartfelt, unmitigated joy of my young friends was a jolt to me, accustomed as I was to American college students’ cynicism.

On the bus back to Shanghai, Yuanqi, Deming and I sat in the back of the bus, while Xiaomei and Ting took seats toward the front. Tired from the combination of physical exertion and the excitement of travel, Yuanqi dozed off beside me. As Yuanqi slept, Deming and I continued to chat. Our conversation at first focused on American popular culture. He spoke of his fondness for American television series such as Lost and Heroes, and his excitement about the new Twilight series. But one topic of conversation sticks out clearly in my mind. Somehow our conversation drifted to the pressures of everyday life in modern China.

By that spring of 2010, a series of recent incidents had laid bare the sense of anxiety that bubbled beneath the surface of society. Some of the incidents, such as the 2008 tainted milk scandal, had become fodder for jokes.⁵ I learned, for example, that it was common for students to insult each other’s intelligence by asking...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Mapping China’s Digital Gaming Culture
• 2. Internet Cafés: Nostalgia, Sociality, and Stigma
• 3. Spiritual Opium: The Internet Addiction Panic and the Spiritually Ailing Nation
• 4. Patriotic Leisure: Internet Games, Esports, and the Discourse of Productivity
• 5. Carving Out a Spiritual Homeland
• 6. “Losers” “Acting Gay”: Internet Slang, Memes, and Affective Intensities
• 7. Conclusion: Mainstreaming and Marginalizing Digital Games
• Back Matter