Gaming and Guanxi

I recently read and enjoyed a paper that has been posted to ssrn on gaming and guanxi in China, and I wanted to post about it here because this is the kind of new scholarship on online gaming that we need. Guanxi is the management of relationships of reciprocity in China, primarily through gift-giving, and it is a topic with a long history in the anthropology of China. Here, Silvia Lindtner, Scott Mainwaring, and Yang Wang accomplish what has been a relative rarity in game studies -- they give an account of how the rise of online gaming there shapes and is shaped by this longstanding cultural practice. What is really impressive about this kind of new work is that it resists two common temptations. They do not reduce online gaming there to existing cultural forms (which would be the old wine in new bottles argument), nor do they argue the exceptionalist position -- that online gaming changes everything and sweeps away the past. While I would like to see this kind of work weave in more participant observation data (the emphasis here is on interview material), this is a step forward. Highly recommended.

Comments

[Adam Hyland]

1.

Really quite good, especially "ASSESSING GUANXI AND INTERPRETING FACE".

It is interesting that they can observe something which appears so stylized and unique (guanxi) while avoiding a discussion of how the culture is intrinsically Chinese. They assiduously avoid the question (a good move in my opinion) but their informants note it either when speaking about themselves or about "american" servers in WoW.

Now I'm going to go read that Lutters and Ackerman 2007 cite--looks fascinating.