Good Gamer, Good Citizen: Representing Video Games inChinese Television

This presentation discusses a developing project that looks at remediation of video games in Chinese television dramas, and will be of interest to Game Studies scholars interested in the social and cultural place of games and gaming, in China and more generally.This work uses textual analysis to explore how gaming is represented across a sample of these dramas, looking at how they construct discourses about games and being a player in a Chinese cultural context.For example, these dramas will feature PC gaming or are based on PC games, which is likely an artefact of the historical console ban and stronger presence of internet gaming cafes (Cao and Downing 2008).Others, such as You Are My Glory (Tencent 2021), which functions as extended product placement for Tencent's own Honor of Kings (2015), is a romance based on mutual proficiency in mobile gaming.These television dramas are interesting paratexts that drive interest towards games (Jiang et al. 2022), but more, they offer a view of how games and practice are framed in a mainstream media form.