From non-player characters to othered participants: Chinese women's gaming experience in the ‘free’ digital market

ABSTRACT

Globally, mainstream digital gaming has long been marked by compulsory (hetero)sexuality and hypermasculine gender norms, making it an ideal arena for exploring gendered power relations. This article critically examines how the participation of Chinese women digital gamers has taken on a distinctive shape in the context of newly emerging local online games that serve as an extension of the market mechanism. We examine the players’ experience of two games: namely, a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game, King of Glory (wangzhe rongyao), and an otome love simulation game, Evol LoveR (lian yu zhizuoren). Results of 31 in-depth qualitative interviews with Chinese women gamers show that Chinese women's gaming experience has been profoundly shaped by both changes and continuities in the norms governing Chinese women's participation in play, romance and sex. We conclude that Chinese MOBA and otome games are not isolated new media products, but actually part and parcel of a broader digital media economy which provides audiences and players with information and cues that reinforce the dominant view that women and men have fundamentally different characteristics.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• China
• digital games
• masculinity
• femininity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Game-related glossary in this article:

• BGM: background music.

• MOBA games: Multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games. MOBA is a subgenre of strategy video games that originated as a subgenre of real-time strategy in which each player controls a single character as part of a team competing against another team of players.

• NPC: non-playable characters; any character in a game which is not controlled by a player.

• otome games: 乙女ゲーム, literally ‘maiden game’, referring to a story-based video game that is targeted towards (normatively constructed) women.

• Tencent (Tengxun): Tencent Holdings Limited, a dominant Chinese Information Technology company.

• WeChat: the dominant all-in-one popular social media application in China.

2. List of Competitors in the 2019 King Pro League (Professional King of Glory e-sports league reality show run by Tencent Games in China): https://pvp.qq.com/webplat/info/news_version3/15592/24418/24987/24988/m18519/201901/787724.shtml

3. For details, see the homepage of Papergames: https://www.papegames.com/about/#info.

4. For details, see the homepage of Papergames: https://www.papegames.com/about/#info.

5. For details, see https://www.yicai.com/news/5390791.html

6. Baidu BBS (Baidu Tieba) is one of the largest Chinese online forums provided by the Chinese search engine company, Baidu.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tingting Liu

Tingting Liu is an associate professor at School of Journalism and Communication, Jinan University, Guangzhou, China. She used to work as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Australia. She received her PhD in Anthropology at the University of Queensland in 2018. Her research interests include media anthropology, digital culture, and popular entertainment with regional expertise in China and Australia.

Zishan Lai

Zishan Lai received her master’s degree in Media Practice at The University of Sydney. Her research interests focus on new media, popular culture and their intersections.