Mapping Digital Game Culture in China: From Internet Addicts to Esports Athletes

By Marcella Szablewicz

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Feb 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9783030361112

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© The Author(s) 2020

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

1. Introduction: Mapping China’s Digital Gaming Culture

Marcella Szablewicz¹  

(1)

Pace University, New York, NY, USA

Marcella Szablewicz

Email: [e-mail]

Keywords

ChinaDigital gamesTopographyAffectDiscoursePopular cultureYouthSituational analysis

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 if they had been raised on tainted milk powder. Dark humor aside, Deming expressed concern about the direction of Chinese society and the difficulty for individuals to find firm moral grounding and a sense of life’s purpose within a sea of rapid changes. We talked in particular about a recent bout of elementary school stabbings and the reports of numerous suicides at the Foxconn electronics factories in Shenzhen.⁶ Our conversation shifted to those moments when people’s despair and the uncertainties of contemporary life broke through the surface. There had been suicides at the school, Deming reported; in his dorm building a student had recently jumped to his death from the roof. In his opinion, incidents such as the elementary school stabbings occurred because of people’s despair at their inability to effect change within their own lives. They felt that their own destiny had been taken out of their hands; only through violence or suicide could they break free from this monotonous cycle. The same kind of feeling overcame both factory workers and students. They felt lost, trapped, like cogs in a machine.

It was a lot to ponder as we returned to the students’ isolated college campus on the outskirts of Shanghai, and our conversation stood in sharp contrast to the innocent and euphoric singing at the top of the mountain. Even on our frugal budget, the trip we had just taken was one that many young Chinese could not afford. Having enough disposable income to travel is one of the markers of financial success in China, especially in a place in which mobility is tightly controlled by a residence permit (hukou) system and migrants frequently do not even earn enough to return home for the all-important Chinese New Year holiday.⁷

Not long after our Huangshan trip, I returned to Jiading to visit the group again. But on that visit we were running out of activities to occupy the time. After the momentous beauty of Huangshan, everyone glanced around feeling, no doubt, that some of the magic was gone. We had returned to everyday reality, and there simply wasn’t much to do there. We lingered over lunch for as long as possible, chatting until the food grew cold. We moved on to another café, where we conversed over all-you-can-drink/eat dessert and sodas, even though everyone was already full. Growing restless after sitting for hours, the group began to discuss what else they could do to occupy the time. Well, I prompted them, what would you be doing if I weren’t here? Xiaomei and Yuanqi ran back to their dorm rooms to retrieve their laptops and, upon their return, everyone crowded around them as they engaged in virtual battles in Warcraft III.

The Problematic

The scenes I have sketched here may seem like unremarkably ordinary scenes from college life in China. Yet this story helps to illustrate the complicated way in which digital gaming figures in the life-world of many young Chinese. According to a February 2019 report by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), approximately 484 million Chinese, or slightly over 58% of Chinese Internet users, play online games.⁸ With respect to younger generations, CNNIC reports that approximately two-thirds of youth play.⁹ Simply put, China is home to a nation of gamers. However, understanding these young gamers and their online pursuits is not a simple matter. How do government and media frame digital gaming and gamers? What do parents and schoolteachers think of them? What do those who play think of their own leisure choices? As will be discussed throughout this book, the answers to these questions depend largely upon the circumstances under which play takes place. Are these gamers huddled in a college dorm room or a glitzy private apartment? Are they playing in a dimly lit and smoky Internet café, or are they sitting center stage in a crowded sports arena? Should these distinctions even matter?

When I first embarked upon my fieldwork, I was not fully aware of the extent to which such questions were significant. I often summarized my research by stating that I was studying Internet games (wangluo youxi) in China. This, it turned out, was a gross oversimplification. The description was accurate, in that my research did not focus on any one Internet game but rather on a variety of them. Despite this, many people, especially those who were avid gamers themselves, were disconcerted by my choice, noting that each game has its own cultural practices, rules, and social norms. This is certainly true, but my decision to study such a broad category and to cut across a number of different games was deliberate, born of my desire to study what I will call the topography of digital gaming in China. I wished to probe the diversity of discourses, practices, and meanings that shape general attitudes about games and the places where play takes place. Many different types of games were being played in the Internet cafés, dormitories, and apartments that served as my field sites, making it impossible to study one game and not another. This should serve as fair warning to anyone who expects this study to be a traditional ethnography of digital games. Although digital games occupy a central position in my work, this book is not so much about life within these games as it is about the social relations, imaginaries, and discourses that flow through and around them.

What I did not bargain for was that a number of the young gamers I would encounter in the cafés, dormitories, and apartments I visited would deny that they played Internet (wangluo) games at all.¹⁰ This declaration clashed with my own perceptions about the games these young people were playing. I observed people sitting at computers, logging on to games through Internet servers, and engaging in multiplayer game scenarios with gamers in another room, another dormitory, or even another province. How was it possible that these games they played were not Internet (wangluo) games? The complex answer to this question will be discussed at length in Chap. 4, but the boundary work inherent in the claim that some games played via the Internet are not Internet games epitomizes the kinds of discursive processes that are the central concern of this book. As T.L. Taylor notes, these gaps in meaning are the places in which different definitions become problematized or previously hidden practices are accounted for.¹¹

As this book will demonstrate, digital game culture fosters affective experiences that are sometimes at odds with and sometimes aligned with dominant cultural representations. What is more, digital media are subject to a double discursive construction whereby they are framed as something with simultaneously both positive benefits and negative consequences. Often, the difference between a healthy leisure pursuit and an unhealthy addiction has to do with factors related to class and power. By closely investigating the nature of these ambiguities and the ways in which youth navigate them in order to cope with and challenge dominant perceptions about failure (and success), the book provides a critical lens onto youth culture and the politics of everyday life in contemporary China.

Chinese Popular Culture and the State in the Era of Participatory Media

The complex relationship between Chinese popular culture and the state attracted the attention of contemporary China scholars in the years surrounding and following the Tiananmen Square tragedy.¹² Responding, in part, to this literature, Jing Wang worries that a common binary of official versus unofficial culture dominates the Western fantasy about China.¹³ She argues that the official/unofficial binary reifies boundaries between the state and the people and creates a simplistic model of total domination and complete resistance; state-sanctioned cultural productions are always assumed to propagate official messages while grassroots cultural productions are unofficial by default. Wang urges the reader to resist such binary models, noting, Chinese people have more choices of agency than being victims or martyrs.¹⁴ Within the complex reality of contemporary China, official and unofficial often mix and meet in unexpected ways. Not all Chinese people are resistant to the state, and even state-sanctioned cultural products may send mixed messages.

In recent years, many have noted that the Internet has given rise to a kind of participatory culture that enables new modes of civic engagement and political protest. For China, this has led to a large body of scholarship focused on the tensions between state efforts to censor the medium and average citizens’ ability to outsmart the Great Firewall through the use of inventive Internet slang, memes, and software.¹⁵ A common question seems to underlie this scholarship: will the Internet democratize China? While digital media have certainly altered the relationship between popular culture and the state, this question is but the newest iteration of the official/unofficial binary that preoccupied scholars in the post-Tiananmen era.

In this book I seek to turn the focus away from broad speculation about the emancipatory potential of the Internet (and the Western cultural bias embedded therein) in order to examine the very particular ways in which young people’s digital leisure practices are both shaped by and operate in contention with the governing mentalities of the contemporary Chinese state. Internet cafés and digital games are intertwined with the state’s efforts to expand its technological expertise and soft power, at the same time that they are the target of government raids and media reports deploring their moral corruption of China’s youth.¹⁶ Neither can the young people who play digital games and share Internet memes be easily categorized as marginalized subcultures resisting the authoritarian state. While some are critical of government censorship and argue for expanded gamer rights, others speak the very discourse of Internet addiction that is used to lambaste their choice of leisure activity. This book will demonstrate the complex and often contradictory nature of youth subjectivity in light of these portrayals.

This is not to say that the book avoids issues of politics. Indeed, as I will discuss at length in Chap. 6, play and humor are, by their very nature, political. But rather than focusing on digital media’s democratizing potential, this study argues that digital culture’s overlooked political contribution has been to filter, solidify, and amplify popular affect. Here, I invoke Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth’s definition of affect as "those forces—visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion—that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension."¹⁷ Not passive but not fully active, the emotions and states of being fostered by digital leisure culture have today become the fertile ground out of which political awareness blossoms. It should come as no surprise that for today’s youth, affect often crystallizes on the Internet, a platform that allows group expression to gain visibility and volume.

A Topography of Digital Game Culture

It may strike some as odd that, in attempting to move beyond the simplistic official/unofficial binary, I have chosen discourse and affect as the two modes of analysis through which to frame my study. For many, discourse belongs to the realm of the official, while affect is precisely its opposite—an unofficial process that is perceived as being "beyond, below, and past discourse."¹⁸ Rather than keeping the two separate, I intend to demonstrate how discourse and affect intertwine. As Margaret Wetherell notes, this requires paying attention to what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls the middle ranges of agency that exist between the extremes of compulsion and voluntarity.¹⁹ In rejecting the notion that individuals are either complete subjects of discourse or entirely free agents, Sedgwick focuses on the complexity of texture , noting that its affiliated sense of touch:

makes nonsense out of any dualistic understanding of agency and passivity; to touch is always already to reach out, to fondle, to heft, to tap, or to enfold, and always also to understand other people or natural forces as having effectually done so before oneself, if only in the making of the textured object.²⁰

If texture serves as a useful analogy for overcoming simplistic binaries and thinking about the interplay of discourse and agency on an individual level, then on a systemic level it makes sense to employ the parallel concept of topography. A topographical map reveals the textures of a landscape, the numerous hills and valleys that have formed over time and as a result of various seismic shifts and pressures. While paying attention to the texture of individual agency at the micro level, this book also engages with the topography of digital gaming culture at a macro level, tracing the contours of dominant discourse and the ways in which young people collectively react to and shape these contours through the power of their affective attachments to digital games.

The concept of topography is also a natural extension of the spatial metaphors that govern our understanding of the Internet. Digital media, and digital games in particular, are often conceived of as places that we travel to and through, and, as I will argue, the affective experiences central to digital gaming culture are intimately tied to this sense of space and simulated mobility. In urban China, there are numerous ways in which young people’s physical and socioeconomic mobility is constrained. In particular, the stringently controlled hukou system and intense competition for housing, jobs, and life partners make movement a daunting challenge. In the face of such trammels, digital media are often conceived of as carving out alternative spaces and modes of advancement.

Scholars and intellectuals have long argued that spatial mappings are implicated in particular relations of power. Writing in the 1920s, Virginia Woolf famously notes that having a room of one’s own is of paramount importance for women.²¹ For her, the affordance of a private physical place is closely linked with social place and status. Yet it is not enough simply to show how spaces are implicated in relations of power. It is also important to focus on the particular practices by which individuals live within, absorb, and contest such spatial ordering. To this end, Michel de Certeau examines the agency of individuals who, having no space of their own, poach upon institutional spaces to carve out a niche in an otherwise alienating system.²² He stresses the micro-techniques or tactics by which individuals subvert the dominant order. In his famous discussion of walking in the city, de Certeau explains the