Abstract
Parallax is a visual displacement of an object due to different observational spots or along two different lines of sight. In this article, the metaphorical object being observed and studied is the digital game. Imagine a parallel academic world to the one we comfortably dwell in, scholars are deriving their arguments from almost identical theoretical origins and arriving at similar conclusions, but corresponding to completely different audiences. Now the problem is that the two sides insist on their disparity in-between and never candidly intend to have a dialogue. The disparity is not necessarily a linguistic one but rather due to an intellectual indolence or even political reluctance. China seems to be always treated as an anthropological object to be studied especially in the bourgeoning field of game studies such as the once novel case of gold farmers (Nardi & Kow, 2010) while its own conclusions drawing from its empirical experiences, especially from its own academia are largely ignored or not adopted as a “serious” intellectual milieu. On the other hand, the Chinese academia, especially in the fields containing political controversies (e.g., videogames), often turn out to be, with elements of truth, policy-driven, ideologically apologist, and empirically unconvincing. However, instead of following the usual trajectory of this argument between the two sides, which often leads to a resentful complaint about Western academia’s ignorance of “Chinese characteristics” 1 or Chinese academia’s intellectual incompetence, I intend to neither defend nor promote a national or culturally specific epistemology or methodology. This unconventional book review, instead of introducing and recommending the book to the readers who then decide whether to read it or not, aims at comparing the frontiers of game studies in simplified Chinese 2 to the existing library of game studies in English. In other words, a comparison of the two “game studies” would exhibit the “parallelness” of two circles of academia rather than a rift as people assume.
Mi and Chen’s book Gaming East and West is a hidden gem I found accidentally while aimlessly drifting into the Chinese academic literature on games in preparation for my thesis. Zhang’s (2013) categorization of Chinese discourses on games as “productive vs. pathological” are largely confirmed by my own reading of a mass of Chinese books and journal articles on digital games. It is often the case that digital games are only understood in terms of this dichotomy, that is, games are either studied as prospective instrument for education (or gamification in the context of management) or as potentially deleterious objects inducing addiction. In this context, Mi and Chen’s book is rather unusual: It might even emerge too prematurely as it was largely disregarded in China until recently. For the same reason, I dub the book as the “Year One” 3 of computer game studies in China. In other words this is the first and only Chinese academic book 4 I have ever read on videogames that really treats games as cultural and social objects; also, authors have evidently played and understood games as players themselves. This single book is definitely not representative of the majority of Chinese academic discourse on games but at least it provides a parallax view deviating from the imprisonment of the binary of “productive vs. pathological.”
The relative absence of academic interests (outside the fields such as clinical psychology, pathology, and applied sociology) in games is not a disconnection from a “theoretical tradition.” In fact, Chinese academia has long discovered and been obsessed with continental philosophy and contemporary media theories to a degree that there is a fairly complete library of translations. However, readings of new trends of theories are often stranded in the periphery of Chinese academia without challenging the orthodox that dismisses digital games as “spiritual opium” (Szablewicz, 2010). In other words, there are almost no incentives to extend the “mania” over novel philosophical concepts and media theories to further the understanding of the actual experiences of digital games in the Chinese context, except for the efforts I have seen in Mi and Chen’s book.
Gaming East and West, published in 2006, ambitiously covers a large array of topics that appeared in the growing inventory of game studies in the last decade in the Euro-American game studies. The book is by no means an importation of English literature on digital games from the past decade, nor do the authors quote any books explicitly on games apart from prominent media scholars such as Mark Poster and Marshall McLuhan. It is a rather independent, although not from various “Western” theories, but definitely from more recently manufactured scholarship specifically dedicated to games such as this journal, as it is constructed through the authors’ own original reading of indigenous game cultures in China. The authors certainly demonstrate that they are well informed not only of continental philosophy but also intimate tales of Chinese gaming cultures that are inaccessible to outsiders.
However, despite Mi and Chen’s persistent (although not necessarily coherent) and playful engagements with classical philosophy from Hegel to Kant, French theories from Lyotard to Baudrillard, Critical Theory from Marcuse to Adorno and Birmingham cultural studies, valuable insights are often isolated in sentences with fragmented theoretical moves desperately attempting to link philosophical concepts and empirical cases but only elaborated insufficiently. This theoretical ambition of covering many major themes of game studies in a single book is likely due to a different academic expectation and writing practice. For instance, the book is entirely in essay form with poor links between chapters and curiously a central argument is missing throughout the book. This book is likely a result of a collage of many articles with incomplete reference footnotes and no bibliography at all. In addition, there are no biographical introductions of the authors, whose names are possibly pseudonyms. 5 Nonetheless, even reading from these fragments and proto-theories, there are many moments of illumination.
In the first few chapters, the authors discuss a number of popular issues ranging from sexism and eroticism, spectacles of the female body to simulated violence, and the appropriation of Chinese ideal of wuxia, the Chinese “equivalent” of knight-errant stories,
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in videogames. The authors first quote an online Counterstrike strategy guide and discuss its resemblances to a manual of war. They raise the argument that violence is normalized, quotidianized, and even de-romanticized. Mi and Chen writes, Videogame violence is only an account, an allegory of the real violence … the real issues of violence are not in videogames, but somewhere else- in our society, prisons, exiles, genocides, corruptions and exploitations which are recurring phenomenon and yet the predominant response is indifference.
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(pp. 21–22)
Resolutely against Huizinga’s theorization of games as ideals of violence because of the fair competition that the real war lacks, the authors argue that the fact that cheating, hacking, and “botting” widely exist in digital gaming practices means that games are not “protected” by the magic circle but permeated by the human sociality and motives. In a parallel academic world, the gamer theorist McKenzie Wark writes, “war is a game—for the military entertainment complex” (2007, p. 10). For him, the real issue is the dehumanizing effect of technocrat managed algorithm oriented society. “The real violence of gamespace is its dicing of everything analog into the digital, cutting continuums into bits” (2007, p. 23). Moving on from the argument of convergence of technologized warfare and war-simulating videogames, Mi and Chen then shift to wuxia, which is broken down into two characters, namely, wu, meaning physical strength or power; xia, an ambiguous term that signifies spirits, morality, chivalry, a symbol of moral integrity and self-sacrifice in the name of greater good. In the countless wuxia-themed Chinese games, the elements of xia are diluted while wu is greatly amplified since overpowering strength is the primary drive or determinant of these games (p. 18). Wu is then cultivated not through “meaningful events” as it is often in wuxia novels but reduced to algorithmic accumulations, namely, grinding for levels and gears. Though these online games are often advertised as recreation of the fantasied worlds of wuxia, in the end, they actually reproduce an independent social system where violence and power reigns rather than morality, good will, and self-discipline. “Games, when they become decadent, trap play and repeat it as endless variations of the same” (Wark, 2012, p. 95). On a similar note, Mi and Chen warn against the repetitive features of gameplay and questing in Chinese MMOs (Massively Multiplayer Online) and call for a diversity of games outside the category of massively multiplayer online role-playing games that are nothing but cash cows for greedy developers in China.
Gaming body is another recurring topic throughout the book. This body is not just in a literal sense, but an assemblage of needs and desires of the gamer. Following Bahktin’s notion of the “grotesque body,” the authors claim that the body remains the central ground for pleasure of gaming derived from transgressions of social norms. The absurdity of the gaming body is a resistance against the perfect, socially accommodating normal body. It actually liberates human from the tyranny of the unattainable perfect body … A grotesque realism of the carnival … ‘the vernacular of the oppressed.’ (p. 30)
It was 2 years later in Apperley’s (2010) book Gaming Rhythms, a reorientation to the gaming body was made: The task is to study this “bundle of gaming body” situated in a network of “elements required to produce play with the literal body of the gamer as its central node” (p. 38). In their discussion of role-playing games, Mi and Chen state that the progression of the avatar, the digital body, as well as the physical body of the gamer, is a process of practice. “Only that computer games amplified the process of such ‘practice’: familiarity with keyboard and mouse elevated into prodigious magic, strength and intellect” (pp. 28–29). For the “keyboard warriors,” 8 familiarity with the touch of the keyboard and the particular layouts of keys for different games determines the fundamental experiences of gameplay. This resonates with Apperley’s appropriation of Lefebvre’s theory of dressage, which is the training of the body—“of gesture, gait, stature and composure-based on repetition” (p. 42). The literal body of the gamer, as the operator, is thus present and the corporeality becomes central in the analysis. In Apperley and Jayemane’s (2012) seminal statement of game studies’ materialist turn, the body was also placed under the spotlight as the direction of future research. Gaming East and West’s recurring emphasis on the body is certainly original and in a sense prophetic in their theoretical direction.
Many of Mi and Chen’s arguments are almost identical to Galloway’s Gaming, which was published in the same year. For Galloway (2006), the player is the operator, who “communicates with software and hardware of the machine, sending codified messages” (p. 2), codes are the “grammar of action” (p. 4) and “both the machine and the operator work together in a cybernetic relationship” (p. 5). Mi and Chen write in similar manner, The player provides the physical labor, the computer provides the mental labor. In congruence/collaboration, they create the world of the game … The ‘real’ terminal is actually human. On the side of the terminal, the requirement for frequent and complex calculation is very high. On the side of human, the task is in fact simplified to accommodate all ages and all skill levels. (p. 180)
The book recurrently refers to the discipline of narratology, mostly from the perspectives of literary studies. Although it does not mention ludology explicitly in name, the book points to a generic reorientation toward “actions” as the core of gameplay. It discusses nonlinear storytelling as a complex logical system, similar to Wark’s words, “it draws the gamers’ attention not to the storyline but to the combinations of elements from which any given storyline might be selected” (p. 71).
As Mi and Chen further elucidates, “in many cases, especially MMOs, in-game narrative are overwhelmed by the narrative generated by user sociality (e.g. few people read quest logs in World of Warcraft)” (p. 80). Mi and Chen’s “in-game narrative” is thus comparable to Galloway’s term “the diegetic” and “user generated narratives” are equivalent to the “the nondiegetic.” While quoting the same example of Civilization III, Galloway writes, “these actions of configuration are often the very essence of the operators’ experience of gameplay … gaming may eschew the diegetic completely” (p. 14). Interestingly, Mi and Chen also call for an informatics turn, that is, “through digital games, everyone participates in this self-construction into the standardized surveillance of the panopticon” (p. 197). A theory of informatics control is in the formation in both texts although Mi and Chen predominantly draw on Foucault’s “disciplinary society” (1995) while Galloway focuses on Deleuze’s (1992) “societies of control.”
Gaming East and West also reviews the “atrocities” (in their words) of mainstream Chinese academic literature on videogames in the early 2000 and summarizes it as follows: “computer games are [portrayed as] beauty snakes in our gardens, mesmerizing innocent and kind souls by its unveiled beauty” (p. 38). But unlike Szablewicz (2010, 2012) and Zhang (2013) who either criticizes the moralistic crusade against Internet addiction or the holistic approach of the “pathological addict” versus “productive athletes,” Mi and Chen write, Outside academic discussion of whether glorifying or demonizing games, for most gamers: ‘these quantitative studies are simply gossips they glimpse through after finishing a game- you can say whatever you want, I can still play what I want.’ (p. 43)
In the developed world, games are part of mass culture and legitimacy of this leisure activity seems to be a norm. Whereas in China, we have yet to witness a similar debate in which gamers, unless in the form of eSports and sportsmanship, are considered legitimate and recognized identities. However, most Chinese gamers, as depicted in Mi and Chen’s book and confirmed by my own findings in my recent fieldwork, do not care much about these negative images nor intend to defend themselves against “negative portrayals.” They are cynical enough to scorn at the lunacy of Internet or online game crusaders and yet satisfied to have their enclaves such as Internet cafés. They are fully aware gaming in itself is never really a threat to the “harmonious society” but an ordinary preference for cultural products. Bearing a negative image does not mean you cannot continue what you are already doing but doing it without publicly proclaiming its legitimacy. The negative images of gamers as irresponsible man-child or children strayed from their proper life course are omnipresent and almost ingrained in people’s mentalities, even for people who spend majority of their life playing games. The absence of discursive resistance and gamers’ compliance to the official ideology of separating the high and low cultures is not coincidental but in fact a discursive vacuum in which subversion occurs constantly without openly confronting the dominating power. The power remains intact not only through violent repression but implicitly assuring people that you can be subversive privately within a limit of control but not openly and without control.
As Gaming East and West implies, academic defense of gamers and gaming cultures in China is futile and unproductive in advancing any in-depth understanding of gamers in their everyday life settings. Often, these defenders of video games against the addiction crusaders make the same mistake of their opponents, that is, they fall back into the dichotomy of apocalyptic versus redemptive debate. “We need to avoid a dogmatic position,” Mi and Chen argue, “a moralistic critique detached from the concrete text is powerless, it is unable to understand the text/culture’s complexity of meanings- not matter this complexity is positive or negative” (p. 54). The authors stress the need to focus on games themselves and gamers’ experiences: their language, logic, emotions, desires, consciousness, and morals. Then we discover the distance between the researcher and the researched and the possibility of having a dialogue between the two.
Finally, we return to Mi and Chen’s critique of Huizinga. The authors write, “he [Huizinga] impedes the connection between games and everyday life while constraining games in a magic circle” (p. 73). Apperley (2010, p. 102) state similarly, “videogame play may be a form of evasion from everyday life, but the desire to evade or depart from everyday life is itself a symptom of its existence.” The authors eventually come to acknowledge videogames as mundane objects and gaming as a highly routinized leisure activity in contemporary society—its “functionality” eventually will find a comfortable place, in terms of both cultural acceptance and incorporation into the routines of everyday life.