Abstract
Chinese popular culture is a field with a complicated history, a wide range of topics, and interconnected affections. It is difficult to reveal all of its features. In the book Mapping Digital Game Culture in China: From Internet Addicts to Esports Athletes, Marcella Szablewicz created an effective strategy for comprehending the culture of digital games in China. Szablewicz, an Assistant Professor at Pace University’s Dyson College of Arts and Sciences, is interested in the constructed division between productive and unproductive online pursuits.
Starting from a survey of activities in Internet cafés (wangba) in Harbin, Szablewicz portrays the historical trajectory and topographical map of digital game culture in China. On the one hand, Szablewicz explores the ways in which members of an entire generation of urban Chinese youth experienced digital gaming and Internet. Those born mostly in the 1980s and early 1990s are to some extent responsible for the development history of digital game culture in China. On the other hand, tracing the culture, rules, and social interactions of different kinds of game, Szablewicz investigates the diversity of discourses, practices, and meanings associated with them. She uses above empirical materials as the foundation for mapping China’s digital game culture. This topographical map includes at least two aspects: “network of culture” and “artifact of culture.”
About the network of digital game culture in China, Szablewicz discusses the conjunction between discourse and affect, in which there is constantly a struggle between structural constraints at the macro level and individual agency at the micro level. For the former, Szablewicz pays particular attention to the historical, cultural, and political settings that affect how people interact with and comprehend digital media. In her view, the Chinese government and the media are trying to position digital games in the popular imagination by using discourse resources. They characterize digital games as harmful spiritual opium that are frequently depressing, unhealthy, and addictive, and associate them with illicit places and practices of China’s past. However, with esports (dianzi jingji) became an official sport and a source of national pride and goodwill, the Chinese government has viewed esports as a form of soft power and made reserved efforts to legitimize it. So, the media discourse about the digital games has also changed from “E-heroin” to “Created in China” (Wei & Shule, 2018). As a result, digital games are increasingly considered as beneficial, healthy, and capable of advancing society. In other words, digital game culture in China is constantly subject to “a double discursive construction whereby they are framed as something with simultaneously both positive benefits and negative consequences.” (Chap.1, p.7) For the latter, Szablewicz focuses especially on the micro level texture of individual agency. She contends that young people’s microscopic individual agency can shape the contours of structural constraints at a macro level by the affective attachments and collective response to digital games. And their “dividing practices” (Michel Foucault, 1982) indicate the complexity of subjectivity. For example, many gamers hold nostalgic and affective attachments to Internet cafes, but some of them exploit the location of play, from Internet cafés to dormitories to professional arenas, to distinguish their practices apart from those of others. Through the meaning production of space that relates with their class and social identity, those dividing practices might affect how others regard them.
Parallelly, with regard to the artifact of culture of digital game in China, Szablewicz focuses on the topography of the places that exist within Internet games themselves. She identifies the digital game culture as a place, a cultural artifact, and a “nonhuman actants” in the research situation where “the material things that are molded, shaped, and then remolded by the various government policies, media discourses, game designers, corporate interests, and practices of those who engage with and seek to define them.” (Chap.1, p.18) Szablewicz uses this defense of their right to inhabit their spiritual homeland to show how Internet gamers respond to attempts by the government to regulate the gaming industry. They specifically want to create a dominant interpretation that is distinct from the government discourse by harnessing the power of their affection ties to the games. Szablewicz employs the term “sideways mobility” and “virtual mobility” to explain how the influence of digital game culture is no longer confined to games themselves but spills over into other aspects of new media and real life. For example, young gamers use the humorous Internet memes and slang terms (e.g., diaosi (loser) and jiyou (gay friend)) to express how government-led narratives’ heteronormative models of perfect citizenship and patriotic leisure are playfully contested by the affective intensities of open symbols. Humor has always had political implications, especially in the digital age. These humorous Internet expressions imply the political potential embedded within digital leisure culture in urban China. Szablewicz, thus, regards digital games as a medium for young gamers to deal with the challenges of contemporary life, and they can freely move and express themselves in games and its spillover space.
There are two threads running throughout this book: the dominant one is to map the topography of digital game culture in China and the hidden one is to address the underlying question of what constitutes a “real” gamer. The way of interspersed narrative can portray both the macro topography of digital game culture and the micro texture of individual agency. Additionally, Szablewicz extracts rich data about the culture of digital games in China using sound anthropological fieldwork applied to specific situational analysis and uses empirical materials to establish the groundwork for theoretical arguments, which makes this book very readable. However, it would have be more endogenous if the author take “family” (a key variable) into account, especially about the discussion of Internet addiction in the China’s context. That would add depth to the debate of this book.
In sum, the book Mapping Digital Game Culture in China: From Internet Addicts to Esports Athletes portrays a vivid and meaningful topography of digital game culture in China. Szablewicz shows the struggle between structural constraints from the authorities and the subjectivity of young gamers, the convergence of politics and culture, and the interaction of discourse and affection. Furthermore, the author explores issues in China to reflect on global concerns about digital game addiction. She optimistically points out that digital media provide platforms for youth to become more aware of their own subjectivity and the shortcomings of the society where they live. The book makes us realize that digital game culture has the potential to be a reality-changing force when finding the real life was no match for the utopian world of digital games. Additionally, as productive groups with subjectivity and agency, young people can also be productive.
