Bjarke Liboriussen, University of Nottingham Ningbo China

In a 2020 article on the world’s most popular MOBA, Tencent’s Honour of Kings (2015), Paul Martin and I found existing cultural studies models of hegemony lacking due to their reliance on a binary ‘power bloc vs. the people’ model. Tencent’s use of historical characters from the Chinese past, the State’s 2017 crackdown on such usage and the public’s social media-enabled reflection on the crackdown, called for a tripartite model of corporation, state and people. We observed a fissure in the power bloc as the tension between corporation and state became a source of popular entertainment.

Since then, that fissure in the power bloc has closed. Today, Tencent’s popular heritage strategy aligns more closely with the State’s calls for taking renewed pride in Chinese culture while accepting the Chinese Communist Party’s monopoly on the Chinese past. A more contemporary example of Chinese popular heritage comes with The Yinyang Master (Li 2021), a cinematic adaptation of the mobile game Onmyōji (NetEase, 2016). Both film and videogame draw on natural philosophy (the way of yin and yang) and quasi-historical accounts but whereas the game draws on bishōnen, an aesthetic style that highlights the attractiveness of androgynous young men and boys, the film thematically associates queerness with excess and selfishness. Inspired by Pamela Demory’s 2019 work on adapting as queering, I describe this reliance on narrative and patriarchal tropes that cannot be found in the underlying videogame as straightening.

The usefulness of a tripartite (corporation-state-people) analytical schema might already be obsolete and the concept of straightening more useful for understanding popular heritage in today’s Chinese gameworlds.

Bio

I am an Associate Professor in Digital and Creative Media at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China where I teach and research topics around the creative industries and videogames. Since moving to China in 2012, my creative industries research has been based on interviews and focused on the role of tools and technologies in creative labour. As part of my videogames research, I was part of the team that in 2014 launched a Chinese chapter of the Digital Games Research Association, which later inspired the concept of regional game studies (proposed in a 2016 Game Studies article co-authored with Paul Martin). Several of my own publications, for example, on Chinese amateur gold farming, would count as regional game studies. I am currently working on the monograph Cinematic Videogame Adaptation: An Ecoqueer Perspective (under contract with Edinburgh University Press).