SEMINAR: Negotiating Online Games in China

In the past decade, online computer games have steadily proliferated throughout the Asian region, yet there are few scholarly publications that adequately contextualise the production, consumption and circulation of these games. Asian online games and gaming cultures are also often subject to mystifications and putative misinformation. They range from sensationalised press accounts of Asian youths dropping dead after continuously playing games for days without a break, through to the reported litany of cultural obstacles faced by Western game developers in attempting to launch an online game in Asian markets. What, indeed, distinguishes online computer games in Asia? As a partial response to the foregoing concerns, this paper offers an analysis of topical developments in the production and circulation of computer games in China. My discussion focuses on massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs). What are some of the main conditions that have enabled the rise and rapid uptake of online games in China? What are the common characteristics of the most popular MMOGs? What and, indeed, whose representations of "Chineseness" and Chinese identity are currently being circulated and consumed in the Chinese gaming context? Last but not least, what is the meaning and significance of the term "Chinese farming" in the context of online games?

Biography

Dean Chan is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Communications and Multimedia, and the School of Contemporary Art, Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia. He has published widely on cultural theory and visual culture in publications such as Alter/Asians, Diaspora: Negotiating Asian-Australia, Disrupting Preconceptions: Postcolonialism and Education, Journal of Australian Studies, Journal of Australian Art Education, Art Monthly Australia and Meanjin. His fellowship project is on the cultural politics of East Asian videogames, incorporating an analysis of the production and circulation of these games within Asian contexts, and their reception by diasporic Asian gamers. Some of his forthcoming publications include book chapters and journal articles on intra-Asian games networks, Asian MMORPGs, queer online games cultures, the ethics of racialised representations in videogames, and the inter-cultural politics of game-localisation.