Do Not Pass Go: China’s Complex Relationship with Gaming
Growing up in a Chinese household I always encountered resistance from my parents as regards my video-gaming diet, for a number of reasons: “Gamers have no future”, “You cant earn money from playing videos games”, “It damages your eyes and you will wear glasses” etc, etc.
To this day I still ponder the reason why I wear spectacles. Is it because of too much gaming, or did I just study too hard? While either way it is hard to discern, I’m willing to bet on the former.
Indeed, while half the world away, I played video games when I was young like any British kid. Since everyone else I know played, I suppose I had the desire to play in order to fit in during school, spending lunch and break deep in discussion on the latest releases and games. Since the introduction of online video games in China it has caused a surge in ‘internet cafes’ and, with it, undoubtedly a generational divide. One side that grew up during the Cultural Revolution now pits itself against another captivated by digitalisation and technological change. However, is this picture starting to change with the new generation of Chinese millennial parents?
History of Gaming in China
Gaming in China goes much further back than the industrial developments in video gaming of the last 10–15 years. Throughout the different Chinese dynasties saw the introduction of a wide range of card, dice, domino and board games, most famously “象棋” (Xiangqi) aka ”Chinese chess” in English and “围棋”(Weiqi) or aka “Go”. These games are ingrained deep within Chinese culture, and interconnected with the development of Chinese society. For instance, during the 2008 Beijing Olympics the usage of traditional games in the performance of national identity and projection of soft power has been widely discussed by Gong (2012) and Miles (2014).
The early establishment of digital game development in Japan during the 1980s, as Sara Liao’s (2016) article shows it led to the introduction and circulation of games around East Asia, including Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and mainland China. Liao’s article contributed greatly to understanding these networks or circuits of digital gaming culture development in the Far East. Drawing parallels with my family experiences, my grandfather went to Japan for a business trip back in the 1990s and brought back a Super Nintendo Entertainment System. It was, in his words, nothing like he had ever seen before: in his day, the ability to play traditional games that required physical products, and now, you can play whatever games you want from a TV screen. Bringing back the console made my grandfather a very popular man, and since not many people had heard of the SNES, or had seen anything like it, he often invited his friends and neighbours to game with him!
Scholarly Perspectives
China according to Trent Bax’s articles “Internet Gaming Disorder in China: Biomedical Sickness or Sociological Badness?”, is a totalitarian society with an incredibly competitive educational system, the pressures of the system is amplified by family expectations creating stressful conditions for children who turn to online gaming as a means of escape. Bax can be seen to create a dark and bleak picture, nonetheless a society where lively debate occurs over how to best assist children addicted to excessive internet gaming. For instance, Military-style camps are set up to “cure” internet addicts.
Where Bax remains focused on contemporary reality, Marcella Szablewicz’s approach (“A Realm of Mere Representation? ‘Live’ eSports Spectacles and the Crafting of China’s Digital Gaming Image”) is a collective of her experiences taking part in eSports events as an academic observer. She juxtaposed the China she has been observing since 2010 with the Maoist China of the past: model consumers vs. model workers. Putting China in regional competition with Japan and South Korea for the soft power associated with popular culture, she critiques the “official China” manifested through grand sporting events, including eSports. It is tricky for government officials to distinctively separate eSports from generic online gaming. The picture of anti-social shut-in addicted to online games is not easily washed away by the image of a tech-savvy, healthy consumer. In this sense, Bax’s view reflects as a reminder of the deep consternation around gaming and the internet in China.
Rise of eSports in China
E-sports refers to competitive tournaments of video games among mainly professional gamers. China is a gaming mammoth, according to iResearch, China’s eSports industry is the world’s largest by number of gamers around 600 million people, play games on phones, consoles or computers. By 2023, the number is forecast to reach 878 million.
Beijing took a supportive stance toward eSports, taking the opportunity to take this opportunity to accelerate the development of its IT industry and a new route to boost its economy. In 2003, the Sports Ministry listed e-sports as one of 99 officially recognized sports. In March 2013, a national e-sports team was established by the Sports Ministry. By 2016, with total annual revenue of US$22.23 billion, China had overtaken the USA as the world’s largest e-sports market. There are now over 100 million e-sports fans in China.
Chinese Tech giants race for a piece of the big cake
Companies like Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings are racing to engage in the eSports industry. Alibaba has invested in its own top-tier e-sports tournament around China, World Electronic Sports Games, where teams of players compete against each other in shared online battlefields.
Alisports, the sports arm of Alibaba, and the Olympic Council of Asia have announced a partnership to introduce eSports to the 2022 Asian Games in Hangzhou.
Tencent, successfully drew its layout in the industry chain, across game development, game matches, matches and events operation, game live-streaming and from strategic acquisitions. For example, in 2011 Tencent made a $400 million investment to take 93% stake in Riot Games, the developer of League of Legends.
Greater Bay Area collaboration
Digital Entertainment Leadership Forum 2019 was held in Hong Kong Cyberport. Business leaders from Hong Kong and Macao eSports industry have expressed their willingness to embrace opportunities generated by the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.
Mario Ho, the president of Macao eSports Federation, said Macao shares similarities with Hong Kong in the industry. He pointed out that booming video game companies in the mainland are what both Hong Kong and Macao lack. “Now we’re working with Tencent and some live video streaming platforms to help our games and our players into the mainland market.”
“The first place you should go if you care about gamers is Asia, and specifically Greater China, as fast as possible,” said Ann Hand, the CEO and chairman of Nasdaq-listed Super League, at a sub-event.
Impacts
In 2010, a study conducted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences reported the increasing number of problems associated with internet gaming. The report showed that around 50% of young Chinese people use the Internet just to play games. Internet gaming addiction attracted the attention of the general public when a series of death occur in internet cafes. For instance, in 2012 a 23-year-old man was found dead after a 23-hour marathon gaming binge and in 2015 a 24-year-old gamer collapsed and died in an internet cafe in Shanghai.
3 years after announcing eSport as one of the recognized 99 sports, psychologists had launched initiatives to classify internet gaming addiction as a mental disorder which leads to a number of psychological problems including anxiety and depression. Despite internet gaming addition not yet officially recognised by the Ministry of Health as a medical disease, regulations were passed by the Chinese government to limit time teens can spend playing online games and prohibiting u-18s from internet cafes.
Already the many Chinese parents discourage video gaming, research by Thomala (2019) on “Parents’ attitude towards game console usage effect on young children in China as of June 2017” around 21.8% of the surveyed parents of preschoolers in China thought that game console usage was harmful to their children.
China’s state media machine has also urged parents to limit children’s exposure to the internet and online gaming, citing psychological and physical health impacts from depression to addiction, and potential relations to unhealthy diets as well.
Party mouthpiece The People’s Daily referred to Honour of Kings as a “poison” and a “drug,” a term that carries considerable significance in China. Drawing parallels with the popular Chinese historical narrative, the epidemic of opium addiction bears much of the blame for the fall of the Qing Empire, and the “century of humiliation” so prominent in the Party’s nationalist rhetoric.
In an even more robust tone, during the 2018 two sessions, Hu Wanning, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and the head of Tangshan People’s Hospital said that online games are “spirit drugs” and should be “banned and eliminated.”
For Chinese gaming, there are reasonable and moral reasons behind increasing strict regulations that Beijing chose to put in place. Yet, the consistency, opaque and heavy-handed nature of their implementation means that potentially even China’s most innovative and promising industries like eSports and online gaming must always beware of drastic changes in the environment with little warning.
Future
In February 2019, China released a video game that puts players in control of the most frightening of characters: Mom & Dad, allowing you to become a “Tiger Mum” or “Driven Dad”. The goal? Raise a son or daughter from cot to college.
The player goes through the journey starting as a newborn and ending at the age of 18, with the ultimate goal being able to pass China’s ultra-competitive National College Entrance Examination aka as the “GaoKao”.
From the reviews, many initially thought the platform would be used to exact revenge for their own upbringings. However, it has the opposite effect, some players have written that, by letting them experience childhood from their parents’ perspective, it had moved them to tears.
“I used to not understand many things my mom made me do when I was little,” said Kang Shenghao, 19, a professional blogger in the northeastern city of Qinhuangdao. “But when I play the game and try to boost up figures for my son so he can unlock more achievements and marry the prettiest girl in school, I start to understand my parents more.”
According to Global Times, Chinese parents in their mid-20s and 30s increasingly play computer and video games with their children. Perhaps this shows the new generation of Chinese parents are starting to resonate with their children and developing common interests. As, Li Qi, a 33-year-old IT worker living in Beijing, has a 7-year-old son, Fengfeng. They have a good bond, and he thinks they are “much closer” than other fathers and sons because they have a common interest, which is playing games.
Does this signal shift away from traditional Chinese parent’s attitudes on gaming?
References:
Gong, J. (2012). Re-imagining an ancient, emergent superpower: 2008 Beijing Olympic games, publics memory, and national identity. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 9, 191–214.
Liao, S. X. (2016). Japanese Console Games Popularization in China. Games and Culture, 11(3), 275–297. doi:10.1177/1555412015583574
Morris, A. D. (2004). Marrow of the nation: A history of sport and culture in Republican China. Berkeley: University of California Press.
