China

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[edit] Game Cultures

[edit] On Role Playing

MIT professor Henry Jenkins has written about the role of play in Chinese society, in the context of online games and "game addiction" concerns:

"The addiction rhetoric, though, carries force within China where it is connected to a number of concerns which the Chinese have about their children's culture. First, at a time when aspects of capitalism are reshaping Chinese society (especially in Shanghai), addiction rhetoric gives the Chinese a way to talk about the impact of leisure culture and consumer capitalism on their lives. Playing games is problematic precisely because it is unproductive (or seen as such). This focus on unproductive play rather than productive labor takes on particular significance when you recognize that time spent playing games was time "stolen" from exam preparation in a culture where one's future (and that of your family) often rested on how well you perform on standardized testing. It is the high pressure nature of Chinese education which helps to account for the attractiveness of games as a cultural outlet."
"Of course, this focus on play is not unique to Chinese youth, even if the forms that play takes breaks along generational lines. On most residential streets, you can see people squatting around a card game, Chess, or Mah Jong, the game providing a context for face to face interactions within the adults of the community. Many of the public parks we visited on this trip included plastic playground equiptment, not aimed at small children but rather targeted at senior citizens, who used them to exercise. Seniors are being encouraged to play but that play is organized around keeping young and improving their physical health (that is, play is redefined as enabling self improvement). Chinese youth, by contrast, are more likely to be interacting online (or within the closed space of the cybercafes) and often to be playing games with people they do not meet face to face."

Source: Henry Jenkins, Confessions of Aca/Fan, January 17, 2008, online: http://henryjenkins.org/2008/01/games_and_social_responsibilit.html

Jenkins has also summarized comparative findings from an IAC/JWT marketing research survey:

  • Almost five times as many Chinese as American respondents said they have a parallel life online (61 percent vs. 13 percent).
  • More than twice as many Chinese respondents agreed that "I have experimented with how I present myself online" (69 percent vs. 28 percent of Americans).
  • More than half the Chinese sample (51 percent) said they have adopted a completely different persona in some of their online interactions, compared with only 17 percent of Americans.
  • Fewer than a third of Americans (30 percent) said the Internet helps their social life, but more than three-quarters of Chinese respondents (77 percent) agreed that "The Internet helps me make friends."
  • Chinese respondents were also more likely than Americans to say they have expressed personal opinions or written about themselves online (72 percent vs. 56 percent). And they have expressed themselves more strongly online than they generally do in person (52 percent vs. 43 percent of Americans).
  • Chinese respondents were almost twice as likely as Americans to agree that it's good to be able to express honest opinions anonymously online (79 percent vs. 42 percent) and to agree that online they are free to do and say things they would not do or say offline (73 percent vs. 32 percent).

Sources: http://www.iac.com/index/news/press/IAC/press_release_detail.htm?id=8833 via http://henryjenkins.org/2008/01/field_notes_from_shanghai_chin.html

[edit] Virtual World

  • Virtual Worlds in Asia: Business Models and Legal Issues [1]
This paper uses two Asian case studies to illustrate the issues that developers of virtual worlds should address as they mature. The Korean case emphasizes the phenomenon of item trading. This involves emergent markets linking real world currency to items existing on company servers. The practice has resulted in controversial and unresolved legal issues. Companies such as ItemBay have grown to take advantage of these opportunities. The Chinese case emphasizes the transformation of business models over time as well as community control. The paper discusses feedback effects between broadband adoption and online games as well as issues such as Waigua, private servers, virtual property trade, and developer control. The experience of these countries shows that initial technical challenges for business models were overcome but new ones are beginning to emerge as the industry evolves. The new environment requires a change in the assumptions under which the game industry has operated.
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