A Critical Cultural History of Online Games in China, 1995–2015

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 195-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew M. Chew
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Business Model ◽  
Game Design ◽  
Online Games ◽  
Online Game ◽  
Industrial Growth ◽  
Chinese Business ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Media Discourses

This study critically assesses the Chinese online games industry through problematizing the creativity of Chinese games. I find that between 1995 and 2001, Chinese online games were mostly developed by amateurs, noncommercial, and considerably creative. Between 2002 and 2005, industrial growth allowed some room for local creativity despite commercialization and dominance of imported games. Current scholarly, business, and media discourses unfairly ignore creativity in these first two periods and yet praise the Chinese game industry’s commercial success since the late 2000s. I challenge these discourses by illustrating that between 2006 and early 2009, a new, ethically dubious, and uniquely Chinese business model emerged, became domestically dominant, and quietly and profoundly impacted on global online game design. From mid-2009 to 2015, there is ongoing corporatization based on the dubious Chinese business model on the one hand, and a reemphasis on creativity motivated by browser and mobile game formats on the other.

scholarly journals From Print Texts to Online Gaming: The Cross-Cultural History of Wuxia Fictions in Vietnam

SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 215824402110213
Author(s):  
Phan Anh Quang
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Online Games ◽  
Online Gaming ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Business Strategies ◽  
Mobile Gaming ◽  
Life Course Approach ◽  
Cultural Proximity ◽  
History Of ◽  
East West

The popularization of online gaming in Vietnam, including PC and mobile gaming, has witnessed the contribution of wuxia fictions as an essential aspect of digital content production. This article shows an attempt in tracing the cultural history of wuxia works in Vietnam. East-West differences have also been taken into consideration as a way to explain reading and playing preferences. By using life course approach along with the concepts of nostalgia and cultural proximity, this study tries to historically portray the wuxia readership in Vietnam and its vestige found in wuxia online games. The findings indicate that wuxia novels serve as a crucial factor representing the literary relationship between the Sinosphere and Vietnam. Its presence has enriched the content of Vietnamese literature, adding a new genre that has been widely accepted by many generations of Vietnamese readers. Because wuxia online games could be seen as the digital continuation of wuxia fictions, the author argues that prior experience drawn from interacting with wuxia novels affects the game selection-making process of players, and gaming companies in Vietnam also acknowledge that and deploy appropriate business strategies.

scholarly journals Parrot Interpreter: Representation, Extinction and the Electronic Information Environment

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-103
Author(s):  
Paul Carter
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Information Environment ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Electronic Information ◽  
Apparent Contrast ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
History Of ◽  
Imaginative Literature ◽  
The One ◽  
Scientific Collections

Humans, it seems, can’t get enough of parrots. Ethnography, folklore, psychology, and, of course, imaginative literature all offer copious evidence of our fantasy of living with, communicating with and even being parrots. The natural history of parrots and the cultural history of parrots present something of a conundrum: on the one hand, a massive destructiveness (illegal bird and feather trade, environment destruction, scientific collections); on the other, an often erotically inflected sympathetic identification leading to the production of new forms. It’s strange to realise that Europe is infested with a shadow population of captive and inbred budgerigars, whose numbers far exceed those remaining in the wild and who can never return to their origins. If, as our privileged other, our uncanny mimic and double, the parrot still fails to survive, what does this tell us about our economy of desire? It seems that to know is to consume and destroy; and that the apparent contrast between the operations of the rainforest loggers and bird-trappers and the sentimental representations and transformations parrot suffers in human society is overdrawn. How is this contradiction to be explained?

Zheng Junli, Complicity and the Cultural History of Socialist China, 1949–1976

2006 ◽  
Vol 188 ◽  
pp. 1048-1069 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul G. Pickowicz
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
State Building ◽  
The Other ◽  
Great Leap Forward ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Party State ◽  
Mao Era

This article explores cultural producation during the Mao era (1949–76) by focusing on the evolving relationship between artists and the party-state. The emphasis is on state direction of art in the all-important film industry. From 1949, well-known bourgeois Republican-era artists willingly began the complicated, painful and sometimes deadly process of adjusting to Communist Party state building, nation building and political domination. The career of influential film director Zheng Junli is examined as a case study of creative and strategic accommodation to new circumstances on the one hand, and of complicity on the other. Zheng is seen in his dual and contradictory roles as both trusted, ever loyal insider and unreliable, even degenerate, outsider. His Mao-era films, especially the spectacular Great Leap Forward production of Lin Zexu, are analysed in terms of their political thrust and reception in the difficult-to-predict world of the People's Republic.

scholarly journals ‘A Place full of Trade’: Placing an Early Modern Chinese Town in Global Cultural History

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-194
Author(s):  
Anne Gerritsen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Small Town ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Administrative Records ◽  
Global Connections ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Town

This article focuses on the history of Wuchengzhen 吳 城 鎮, a small town in the inland province of Jiangxi. It explores the history of the town between 1500 and 1850 in terms of both its local significance as an entrepot for trade in grain and tea and its global connections to early modern Europe, by way of the trade in porcelain. The question this paper explores concerns the juxtaposition between, on the one hand, the idea gained from global historians, that during the early modern period, globally traded commodities like tea and porcelain situate a small town like this in a globalized, perhaps even unified or homogenous, world, and on the other hand, the insight gained from cultural historians, that no two people would ever see, or assign meaning to, this small town in the same way. Drawing on this insight, the history of Wuchengzhen is explored on the basis of different textual (administrative records, local gazetteers, merchant manuals) and visual sources (maps and visual depictions of the town), exploring the ways in which the different meanings of the town are constructed in each. The combination of global and cultural history places Wuchengzhen on our map of the early modern world.

The “estate topos” of Russian symbolism in the ego-documentary prose by Andrei Bely

2020 ◽  
pp. 48-66
Author(s):  
Elena V. Glukhova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Russian Symbolism ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Ideal

The article discusses the modification of the “estate topos” of Russian sym- bolism in Andrei Bely’s memoir prose. The estates Shakhmatovo, Dedovo, Serebrianyj Kolodez played a key role in the cultural history of Russian symbolism. The peculiarity of Bely’s “estate text”, on the one hand, is that he found an original neo-mythological mode in the image of these estates, on the other hand, gave them heterotopic properties. The article shows how the tonality of his memoirs about Alexander Blok changes from the first edition in journal “Notes of Dreamers” (1922) to the last part of his memorial trilogy “The Beginning of the Century” (1932). If in the first version “Shakhmatovo” appears in neo-mythological meaning and a number of significant symbolic universals are realized, then in the latter version this way of representing the estate is practically erased. The image of Alexander Blok as a spiritual and symbolic center of estate cul- ture is changing: if originally he had the folklore features of Ivan Tsarevich, the ideal symbolist poet on a background of nature, and his wife was Tsarevna, the embodiment of Sophia the Wisdom of God, then later Blok appears as a Lord, carried away only by the issues of managing the estate, and his wife gets the features of an ordinary woman. The estate Serebrianyj Kolodez appears as a heterotopic space, and the features of the estate Dedovo are recognizable in the novel “The Silver Dove”.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Alex Dowdall
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
World War ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Twentieth Century Europe ◽  
First World

The introduction sets out the main lines of argument of the book, and introduces the four case studies—Nancy, Reims, Arras, and the coal-mining region of the Pas-de-Calais. It provides relevant historical context and situates the work within the existing historiography. It pays particular attention to the new cultural history of the First World War, and the literature surrounding the relationships between local communities and nation states in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. It introduces the main civilian experiences of war discussed in the book—artillery bombardment, military occupation, and forced displacement. It concludes by outlining the main aims of the book, which are to explore how, on the one hand, war placed these civilian populations at the forefront of a broad process of militarization and how, on the other, it shaped their attitudes towards their bombarded home towns and the wider national community.

scholarly journals IDENTITAS BUDAYA NASIONAL PADA GAME NUSANTARA ONLINE

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Harli Brata Wardhana ◽  
Didik Hariyanto
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Online Games ◽  
Local Culture ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Online Game ◽  
Game Play ◽  
Religious Rituals ◽  
History Of

Game Nusantara Online is the only online game that lifted the Indonesian culture hey day empires that ever existed and is the only original online games domestically-made. So it is not surprising that this game displays various types of display depicting national cultural identity in the game. The method used in analyzing was John Fiske the semiotics (semiology) through three tiers level, reality, representation, and ideology in the opening game in the form of nondialogue short film, but it was also analyzed in the game play in game logo, the cast of characters, and missions “Timun Mas”. Further analysis was based on the study of literature and other supporting data to determinenational cultural identity. After doing research on the game Nusantara Online, it was found thatnational cultural identity displayed on the level of reality by visualizing typical clothing and accessories of Indonesia empire at that time, the use of the name on the cast of characters that has its own story and has become the local culture, including Hayam Wuruk, Elephant Mada, and others. Visualization of social life, such as religious rituals Bendrong Dimples and Bali, and incorporate folklore or legends in the game missions. While the level of representation, the camera technique is used so that the details of the national cultural identity clearly visible on the clothing motif and shape of the building. The ideology that displayed the Nusantara Online games are games that have cultural values and history of Nusantara (Indonesia).

scholarly journals Visual Media and the Healthy Self in the 20th Century: An Introduction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Bonah ◽  
Anja Laukötter
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
The Body ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
History Of The Body ◽  
The Social ◽  
Film And Media Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

To introduce Body, Capital, and Screens as a series of in-depth case studies at the intersection of film and media studies and the social and cultural history of the body, we have chosen, as with all of the contributions, a film emblematic for the chapter’s specific thematic focus: Victoire de la vie/Victory of life (FR, 1937) by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Through these images, we intend to detail our approach illustrating how the material and social aspects of moving images have served as a hyphen between body politics, on the one hand, and the market as the 20th century’s primary form of social and economic organization, on the other. We lay out the framework for connecting bodies and capital with the significance of a century’s worth of utility media culture.

Euro-American Modernism as Local Refraction

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-306
Author(s):  
Svend Erik Larsen
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Complex Picture ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

Modernism and everything modern have always been identified with the avant-garde. If something had not at a certain juncture in cultural history been avant-garde,eo ipsoit had also not been modern. But the history of literary Modernism shows a more complex picture. The various arrière-garde movements celebrating the regional, the traditional, the anti-urban aspects of life stood, on the one hand, in manifest contrast to the metropolitan and globally oriented Modernism, but were on the other hand also fostered by the same modernist wave from ca. 1850 onwards. I here discuss the dichotomies between the local and the global, and between the avant- and arrière-garde as constitutive of Modernism as a whole from its very beginnings.

Sayyid Ni'mat Allāh al-Jazā'irī and his Anthologies: Anti-Sufism, Shi'ism and Jokes in the Safavid World

2010 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 224-242
Author(s):  
Sajjad Rizvi
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Classical Period ◽  
Critical Importance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Anthologies ◽  
The One ◽  
Southern Iraq

AbstractThe paper examines an important Arabic anthology of literary material of mixed content, the al-Anwār al-nu'māniyya of Sayyid Ni'matullāh al-Jazā'irī (d. 1701) to ascertain its value as a source for intellectual and cultural history of the Safavid period. Al-Jazā'irī was a prominent transnational Shi'i intellectual who was born in the marshlands of Southern Iraq, a leading light of the Akhbārī movement of his time, and major scholar associated with the hadīth-based Shi'i revival of Mullā Muhammad Bāqir Majlisī (d. 1699). Literary anthologies are of critical importance for understanding, on the one hand, the anthropology of what it meant to be human as well as the wider contours of the cultural, literary and intellectual history of the Safavid period. They represent both a serious engagement and demonstration of literary excellence in the pre-modern and post-classical period, contrary to rather dated notions of the stagnation of the period. Three themes from the text are analysed: the nature of philosophy, attitudes towards Sufism and mysticism, and the formation of a Safavid Shi'i cultural identity that was reactive and anti-Sunni and articulated through jokes and light-hearted anecdotes.

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