Abstract
This chapter analyzes the current situation of video games with Chinese cultural knowledge in China's game market by analyzing Weibo messages of five selected video games developed based on Chinese culture to explore their relationships with Chinese culture. The authors then summarize the results from comments, likes, word cloud, and clustering analysis to provide practical suggestions. As a new industry, video games and e-sports are gaining popularity worldwide. However, scant research has focused on video games developed based on Chinese culture in the current market, mainly because they started much later than their Western counterparts. Therefore, the findings of this research can help game developers better understand these markets and customer preferences while protecting and spreading Chinese culture through gaming and e-sports activities in this digital era.
TopIntroduction
With technological advancement and people’s increasing demand for spiritual, cultural, and entertainment, China’s video game industry has grown rapidly in recent years. Video games have become increasingly popular among young people in China. Since e-sports became the official program in the 2022 Hangzhou Asian Games, the video game industry ushers in unprecedented development opportunities. According to the data from Statista (Clement, 2021), China was the largest video game market with a revenue of US$40.85B in 2020, and the number of game users in China has reached 664.79 million in 2020 (Lin, 2021a). The revenue of e-sports in China in 2020 was 136.56B Yuan (1 USD = 6.5 Yuan approximately in 2021), while the Console and PC game revenue in China reached 640 million Yuan in 2019 (Lin, 2021b; 2021c).
As China’s video game industry enters its golden age, various types of video games have entered the market, including action games, science-fiction games, role-playing games (RPG), simulation games (SLG), etc. Foreign famous game companies like Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts, and Ubisoft have refocused their products on young people in China. At the same time, domestic game companies like Tencent and NetEase are rising and competing with foreign companies in the China market. Among various kinds of video games, different cultures come from different countries inside those games. In recent years, more and more developers have been incorporating elements of Chinese culture into their video games. To gain more insights into how culture affects game design, this research uses a Big Data analytics approach to explore the relationship between video games and Chinese culture so that people can find a better way to propagate and protect Chinese culture in this digital age. Thus, our three research questions (RQs) are as follows:
RQ1. What elements of Chinese culture are used in video games in the current major electronic game market?
RQ2. How popular are such games with Chinese cultural elements in the current electronic game market?
RQ3. How can these video games spread and preserve Chinese cultural elements?
Key Terms in this Chapter
Cluster Analysis: Used to classify objects or cases into groups called clusters, where no prior knowledge on cluster membership is required. Clustering procedures may be hierarchical or non-hierarchical, whereas the non-hierarchical methods in cluster analysis are often known as K-means clustering (employed in this research). Such procedures typically include problem formulation, distance measure selection, clustering procedure determination, choosing the number of clusters, cluster interpretation, and result validity assessment.
Chinese Word Segmentation: The task of splitting Chinese text (a sequence of Chinese characters) into words.
Stop Words: Are those filtered out before or after processing of natural language data or text as they are not carrying significant meaning, usually customized for different applications.
Word Cloud (Also Known as Wordle, Word Collage, or Tag Cloud): Visual representations of words that give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently.