Book Review: Mapping digital game culture in China: From internet addicts to esports athletes

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