Representing Virtual Worlds in Chinese Television Dramas
I attended Video Game Cultures 2025, 10-12 September, Charles University (Prague). The conference theme was Environmental Storytelling, with panels covering dystopia and apocalypse, questions of space and place, specific sci-fi locations in games, the capacities of AR/VR and AI, as well as panels with a specific focus on narrative, environmental themes, game design, and emotion/therapy. The conference was held in the Faculty of Humanities building at Charles University, which was a lovely contemporary take on brutalist institutional architecture that still felt light and modern.
I shared work from an ongoing project on representation of games in Chinese popular television dramas, working through the relationship between actors’ performances as players of esports games, as live-action avatars (or as voicing animated avatars) that exist within a (diegetically) virtual environment, and as interacting with imagined bleed-through of game elements into a mundane physical reality.
My initial plan for the chapter was to look mainly at narratives around esports and MMO play in these television titles, but as I continue to share thoughts about the project to different academic audiences I am becoming more interested in the formal elements of how games themselves, as well as the experience of games, are represented in these dramas. There are dozens (if not scores) of dramas about PC gaming that have been produced in China over the last decade, and each wrestle with the problem of how to make playing a game look and feel exciting. Often we see the actors doubling their roles as player and as avatar, appearing both inside the game and out of it, which is potentially doing something with affect, performance, and identification. Additionally, the formal aspects of production: shot choice, camera movement, editing, sound, etc., all are deployed to turn a relatively static hobby into something visually (and narratively) dynamic. By creating an in-game diegesis for the players’ avatars, these dramas show how an MMO looks as it is played, and also how it feels to be engaged in play.
Abstract:
This paper considers the visual strategies used to represent virtual worlds in three Chinese popular television series about gaming, all produced by Tencent Video (a subsidiary of the world’s largest game company). You Are My Glory (2021) and Cross Fire (2020) both adapt existing video game IP, whereas King’s Avatar (2019) is a live-action adaptation of a popular web novel about a fictional esports league and its star players. Rather than taking a unified approach, they offer a range of aesthetic strategies to adapt a feel (or experience) of gameplay.
The three dramas engage in a diegetic negotiation with how video games are represented on the television screen, and specifically in the nature of the gaming landscape as a distinct and yet not fully separate space to the ‘real world’ inhabited by the players. In King’s Avatar the camera moves through a computer screen into an animated fantasy diegesis where players interact as their avatars, whereas in Cross Fire the in-game diegesis is a live-action adaptation of a first-person shooter map intercut with players at their PCs. Finally, in You Are My Glory visual elements from a mobile battle arena game appear as graphical overlays in the players’ diegesis. These diverse approaches do not offer consensus about how to adapt games; rather, they explore the boundaries of remediating games into television.
These offer an interesting contrast to television programmes such as Fallout and The Last of Us where narrative and characters are adapted into a linear narrative, with the game’s storyworld translated into a televisual diegesis arguably without players. With this paper, I explore how these Chinese television programmes fold representations of a virtual world into narratives where the pleasures and social value of gaming are foregrounded in a cultural policy environment that is often hostile to games and gaming.