Chinese Video Games: World, Object, and Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Chinese Video Games: World, Object, and Artificial Intelligence Abstract What is a Chinese video game? What makes a game “Chinese”? Does the term name a genre, like JRPG? Or does it simply designate a national category marked by linguistic, ethnic, or geographical differences? Important as these questions are, this dissertation is premised on none of them. In-stead, it reverses the question and asks: how is China produced in and through video games? How does the video game medium generate ideas of the “Chinese” anew? Rather than examining how China brackets video games, this dissertation tells a genesis story of China itself in and through video games. Since their first recorded appearance in China in the 1970s, video games have, in less than half a century, erupted into a massive cultural, economic, technological, and sociopolitical phenomenon. Yet while the video game medium might be new, youxi 遊戲 as a political form is not. This dissertation conceptualizes youxi as a political form that organizes individual conduct and collective movement, mediates political power and public feeling, shapes the formation of new subjects and objects, and delimits both the intelligibility of the past and the horizon of possible futures. I argue that Chinese video games are best understood as mediated articulations of youxi under new political, socioeconomic, affective, and technological conditions. To trace the genesis of Chinese video games, the dissertation addresses three interlinked problems organized around three keywords: world, object, and artificial intelligence. From a global historical perspective, I demonstrate how the very idea of a “Chinese” game emerged through the worldwide circulation and world-building practices of the video game medium. Attending to video games’ medium specificity, I examine where the Chinese difference is generated within games as digital objects. Finally, by analyzing game code, algorithms, and deep-learning models at the cutting edge of Chinese game development, I show how AI technologies reformulate the problem of the “Chinese” and fore-shadow new configurations of knowledge, subjectivity, technology, and ethics. Chapter 1 charts a longue durée history of video games worlding China as fantasy, commodity, and political possibility, tracing its arc from the medium’s early global circulation and world-building practices, through the articulation of a “Chinese national game,” to the contemporary state project of youxi chuhai 遊戲出海, or “games going overseas.” Chapter 2 rereads China’s regulatory history of games and shows how video games, as an affective medium, are both forged within and actively re-shape a threat environment from which games and players emerge as “Chinese.” Chapter 3 examines the storytelling capacity and digital genesis of the digital object “skin.” By delving into the source code and three deep-learning models developed to generate Chinese skin, faces, and facial expressions, the chapter recasts the “theoretical problem” of “Chineseness” first and foremost as a technological challenge, asking where the Chinese difference is made within games’ digital apparatuses. Chapter 4 explores Chinese developers’ latest efforts to create AI-powered intelligent characters and worlds. Examining emerging ethics at the cutting edge of game technology, it shows how video games, as a prophetic medium, rehearse new futures of love, sex, emotion, and relations between biological humans and digital human objects. Methodologically, the dissertation draws primarily on archival materials, including game texts, game-related publications and media, production manuals, technical papers, and development code repositories. The final chapter also incorporates interviews and field observations conducted with game streamers, play companions, and game developers between 2022 and 2024. Bringing together game studies, Chinese studies, comparative media studies, and STS, the dissertation also engages re-cent scholarship and methodological interventions in critical AI and computational hermeneutics. Among its methodological contributions is the proposal of “digital dermatology” as a way of reading video games as digital objects.