Saturday, March 24, 2007

Chinese personality and online gaming

While poking around the Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting website to see who's doing what & what's shaking in the world of, well, Asian studies, I came across an interesting panel entitled "Digitalized China: Internet Politics through Multidisciplinary Perspectives", which is way far afield from what I study, but interesting nonetheless. I was particularly interested in the abstract of someone at the Communication University of China:

The high prosperity of online gaming industries in Mainland China parallels its “reported” social problems occurring in the youth groups by the media. The potent organizations advocate the danger of online games and at the same time establish the cause-and-effect relations between teenagers addicted to the Internet and “electronic heroin”. Thus, the mainstream opinions on online games come to a negative extreme. However, from a dialectic view, when we emphasize too much on the negative sides of Chinese online gaming case, the unique Chinese personalities represented in this case is always neglected.

This project is based on my field observation in Beijing Youth Internet Addiction Treatment Center, which is dedicated to rectify those youngsters who are frenetic about online games by medicine, psychological and physical treatments. This paper aims to explore the unique Chinese personalities represented in online gaming activities and explain the cognitive conflicts between the digital natives (youngsters generally) and the non-natives (adults generally) by the methods of field observation, in-depth interviews and document analysis.


Lots of academic jargon, but after the recent spate of Chinese gamers in the news, I'd love to get my hands on this paper & see what an 'academic' study has yielding. I'm all for studying games & gaming in the Ivory Tower, and it's especially cool to see it from a perspective that I have a better grasp on than, say, the complicated psychology behind game design.

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