Mapping Digital Game Culture in China
From Internet Addicts to Esports Athletes
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Beschreibung
‘Mapping Digital Game Culture in China brings refreshing cultural studies perspectives to China studies by analyzing competing narratives about digital gaming and the contested ideological forces that give rise to them. Szablewicz’s innovative approach generates unique insights into a new media and popular cultural phenomenon with latent political implications. Her rich ethnography invites us to more critically reflect on a historical period of dramatic economic, cultural, and technological changes within China and beyond.’
— Fan Yang, Associate Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA
In this book, Marcella Szablewicz traces what she calls the topography of digital game culture in urban China, drawing our attention to discourse and affect as they shape the popular imaginary surrounding digital games. Szablewicz argues that games are not mere sites of escape from Real Life but rather locations around which dominant notions about failure, success, and socioeconomic mobility are actively processed and challenged. Covering a range of issues including nostalgia for Internet cafés as sites of youth sociality, the media-driven Internet addiction moral panic, the professionalization of e-sports, and the rise of the self-proclaimed loser (diaosi), Mapping Digital Game Culture in China uses games as a lens onto youth culture and the politics of everyday life in contemporary China. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2009 and 2015 and first-hand observations spanning over two decades, the book is also a social history of urban China’s shifting technological landscape.
Marcella Szablewicz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Pace University in New York City and a former Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In this book, Marcella Szablewicz traces what she calls the topography of digital game culture in urban China, drawing our attention to discourse and affect as they shape the popular imaginary surrounding digital games. Szablewicz argues that games are not mere sites of escape from Real Life, but rather locations around which dominant notions about failure, success, and socioeconomic mobility are actively processed and challenged. Covering a range of issues including nostalgia for Internet cafés as sites of youth sociality, the media-driven Internet addiction moral panic, the professionalization of e-sports, and the rise of the self-proclaimed loser (diaosi), Mapping Digital Game Culture in China uses games as a lens onto youth culture and the politics of everyday life in contemporary China. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2009 and 2015 and first-hand observations spanning over two decades, the book is also a social history of urban China’s shifting technological landscape.
Demonstrates that digital leisure culture fosters affective experiences that are sometimes at odds with and sometimes aligned with dominant cultural representations Examines how digital media is subject to a double discursive construction whereby it is simultaneously framed as something with both positive benefits and negative consequences Provides a critical lens onto youth culture and the politics of everyday life in contemporary China
Autor*in
Marcella Szablewicz
Themen in »Mapping Digital Game Culture in China«
Digital gaming Chinese digital gaming Digital game culture Internet addiction in China Youth and digital gaming digital leisure culture e-sports culture Internet cafés ChinaJoy
Stimmen zu »Mapping Digital Game Culture in China«
“The book is a great contribution to the ever-expanding series of books on video games in general, and it is an important book for every researcher, since it helps broaden their horizons. After reading this book, you will see China differently.” (Mária Koscelníková, Acta Ludologica, Vol. 3 (1), 2020)
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‘Mapping Digital Game Culture in China brings refreshing cultural studies perspectives to China studies by analyzing competing narratives about digital gaming and the contested ideological forces that give rise to them. Szablewicz’s innovative approach generates unique insights into a new media and popular cultural phenomenon with latent political implications. Her rich ethnography invites us to more critically reflect on a historical period of dramatic economic, cultural, and technological changes within China and beyond.’
— Fan Yang, Associate Professor, Media and Communication Studies, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA
‘This is a must-read for anyone interested in youth, video games, and internet culture in contemporary China. Based on first-hand, ethnographic research, the book explores key issues in China today, from internet addiction, to e-sports, to video game cafes in the rapidly changing urban landscapes of a country at the center of global technological and cultural change. To know young people in China today, we need to understand their diverse relationships to the cultural powerhouse that the Internet and video games have become.'
--Ian Condry, Professor, Japanese Cultural Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, author of The Soul of Anime and Hip-Hop Japan
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