Media industries in Asia have been experiencing significant changes in recent years, with the emergence of new creators, platforms, and media forms that have transformed the way media is produced, distributed, and consumed. In the current Asian and even global media market, digital games are sweeping the user market. This type of media also attracts scholars and analysts worldwide to figure out how this media model has the power to attract a tremendous number of users and how to operate a fruitful digital game in Asia. In this article, I will integrate related terms from production and reception to explain how these processes affect the operation of Asian games. If we need to run a successful video game in Asia, what are the terminologies in media studies fields that are required to focus on and apply?
Figure1. Google Play Game Section
Specifically, one meaningful example of successful Asian game media that I want to use to demonstrate the application of the circuit of culture is Genshin Impact, an action role-playing game developed and published by Mihoyo. The game also has received widespread acclaim for its open-world gameplay, immersive storylines, and stunning visuals. In the first month of the game's release alone, GI generated $250 million in revenue, and to date, has approximately 9 million active users every day (Active Player, n, d.). As mentioned above, Genshin Impact’s success also can be attributed to its creativity and precision in production and reception. In this paper, I will explore the techniques and terminological practices of running Asian game media from the success of GI. Thus, assisting our media companies in the development and creation.
Production is the process that all media companies must spend a lot of time and effort polishing. Content, art design, voiceover, and soundtrack are all essential elements in the production process. Compared to Chinese giant game companies Tencent and NetEase, Mihoyo is not exactly a huge company. Nevertheless, Mihoyo’s production for Genshin Impact is a prime example of changing nature of media production in Asia.
Firstly, content is always the most important part of media work. One factor that makes Genshin Impact better than other similar games is the real-world cultural context embedded in GI. For example, in the GI, Liyue's cultural background is the Tang Dynasty in China, while Inadzuma adopts the Japanese culture. GI also adopts western culture, such as Mondstadt representing a “pan-European” culture mode, including German, Swiss, and French. Furthermore, GI has introduced some real-world national festivals so that players can experience the characteristics of different national festivals in the game, such as Liyue's Lantern Rite, which adopts the Chinese Lunar New Year, and Mondstadt's Weinlesefest is an adaptation of the German Oktoberfest.
However, when a media company needs to use real-world culture in media works, it is necessary to consider whether they create cultural misinterpretation or deepen misunderstanding between players from different cultural backgrounds. As Said (1978) describes, the Orientalist view places the East in a subordinate and exotic position. As a result, in many European and American games and film productions, Asian-related characters have certain stereotypes, such as flirtatious Asian dancers and Chinese women in cheongsam with pill hair. These strange modes of relying on Eastern otherness for artistic expression are the manifestations of Orientalism (Joo, 2012). However, in some Chinese media works, "foreignized" Chinese faces are deliberately used to gain acceptance from foreign mainstream commentators.
Figure2: Chinese film - “I Am What I Am.”
For example, in the Chinese animated movie "I Am What I Am," all the characters have slender and upward eyes, which makes many Chinese viewers feel weird because not all Chinese people have eyes like this. Therefore, ethical and moral considerations are necessary when media works adopt real-world cultures for artistic creation. Depicting a culture with bias and stereotypes can be detrimental to the people of that culture in the real world. In GI, Mihoyo does not focus on using one culture to highlight another, but somewhat undercuts the class differences between countries and the depiction of "exoticism." The tone of cross-cultural communication throughout the game is harmony and unity, as characters from different cultures can play together, and players are free to use characters from different countries in combination to enhance their combat power. Every character in GI is culturally specific but not alienating, and no marginal characters or specific useless country exists.
What is more, Genshin Impact was initially considered to have too many similarities to The Legend of Zelda - Breath of the Wild by Nintendo, such as similar open-world exploration and some similarities in gameplay details. Therefore, at the beginning of the release of GI, many players believe that this is a Shanzhai or a copycat of the Nintendo game. Some Chinese gamers even vandalized their Nintendo Switch in front of the Genshin Impact booths at the China Joy Show to reveal their protest against Mihoyo and GI (Trinske, 2019). According to She (2022), Shanzhai is an immoral and undignified product of low quality that some Chinese companies use their huge productivity to imitate expensive foreign brands. However, the author still illustrates that this fear of becoming a Shanzhai is due not only to the level of game production, but also to the ambiguity of the definition of "Chinese games." As GI was promoted and updated, more players experienced GI and discovered the differences and engaging stories. GI even won the Game Award for Best Mobile Game 2021, beating out many globally known games such as League of Legends and Pokémon Unite. Gradually, GI jumped out of the name of low-quality counterfeit products or Shanzhai and reaped global attention.
Moreover, the production of Genshin Impact has more worthy analysis and milestones. In a relatively close country, high-level ideological control and strict censorship limit Chinese players’ access to worldwide games (Fung& Yin, 2019). Many famous international game platforms, such as Nintendo and Steam, are banned in mainland China. With this situation, Genshin Impact allows Chinese gamers to experience an international game-making style, with an American open-world exploration gaming model, Japanese manga art style, and Chinese culture. This mixture product is “the frontier, the border, the contact zone” (Chubb, 2014). GI acts as a kind of education of world game knowledge for ordinary Chinese players. In addition, the Chinese cultural elements in GI give Chinese players a sense of intimacy, and Chinese players can notice many familiar cultural elements in the game. As a game made entirely by a Chinese company, GI gives an identification of “Chinese game” and makes players feel proud of their identity when they receive positive comments from the world.
Reception and Production are both essential media-operation processes. In the past, the reception process is mainly the encoding and decoding process between the media companies and the audiences (Hall, 1980). Nowadays, many audiences decode media works and then make recreational works to show their fondness. Many market evaluators will measure the market value of media production by the number of comments and re-creations. They are the consumer of the media works and also producers, like the prosumer defined by Ahluwalia and Miller (2015). On the other hand, those fan production can influence and attract more audiences as a kind of credible word-of-mouth. As Jenkins (2006) said, participatory audiences like posting collective creations based on the media content on online fan communities or social media, which can build tight connections and like-minded fan collectives in the loosely connected internet era.
Meanwhile, content structure is king for games (Sjöblom, Törhönen, Hamari& Macey, 2017). It is an indisputable fact that a rich game design and content can inspire players' enthusiasm for playing and sharing a game. Therefore, media companies should consciously create meaningful content to inspire players to recreate and participate, thus strengthening the connection between the media product and the audience. In the game's production process, Mihoyo gives all the playable characters in GI a rich character and story background, with logical and interlocking chapters, so the game is a fully developed world. In Greting, Mao& Eladari's (2022) survey, many GI's fanfiction and fanart authors say that rich and vivid game characters can make players develop a fondness for game characters, some fans even treat game characters like their real friends. Therefore, they will have the power and desire to continue their stories for game characters or use their creativity to write more stories for them. These re-creations of game characters are circulated and discussed among game players, which can let more players experience the character and make relative characters more popular, allowing more people to find the attractiveness of game characters in GI.
In addition to character appeal, as an open-world exploration game, there are many materials to collect and puzzles to solve in GI. Those puzzles are innovative and hard to find in every corner of the game, some of them even contain specialized knowledge, such as Sudoku and Rubik's Cube. These creative productions and challenging puzzles have spawned professional demystification video makers. Those video makers are ordinary players, but they are always the first to complete the explorative tasks and create tutorial videos to teach othrt players how to solve those puzzles or collect required materials. This way of inspiring recreation requires the producer to initially have creative thinking and difficulty control.
Figure 3: Genshin Impact Tutorial videos on YouTube
Furthermore, online fan communities are also a great way to inspire fans to recreate and strengthen connections between fans. Tseng, Huang, and Teng (2015) conducted a study on how online fan communities affect retaining players. Through a survey of online gamers, the authors demonstrate the importance of social interactions in online gamer communities for gamers. They can build social networks in the game world by meeting strange gamers online and creating friendships with them, thus enhancing the continued appeal of the game to players. Similarly, Mihoyo has put much effort into creating a social platform matrix that belongs to GI, giving these players and fans an exclusive space to create collectively. For example, Mihoyo has online gamer community applications where players can get updated information and find game fellows. In this app, Mihoyo also conducts many interactive activities, such as rating and ranking players' doujinshi works of game characters and awarding prizes to the most popular ones. Moreover, there is feedback about bugs or suggestions in GI's online community, and Mihoyo will take note of this information and make updates and fixes to the game. With the response and feedback systems, online game communities can contribute to game production, while the game company can know what players need to improve. Thus, players can feel that their suggestions are adopted and feel their contribution to the game.
Figure 4: Game Community apps for Mihoyo games