A gender storm in Chinese gaming: investigating online polarization in the Black Myth: Wukong controversy

Amid the global gaming industry’s rapid expansion and growing socio-cultural influence, issues of gender discrimination and structural inequality in gaming demand urgent attention. As the world’s largest gaming market, China offers a compelling case study through the immense success of Black Myth: Wukong and the gender discrimination controversy sparked by its developer. This study examines the controversy that erupted on Weibo during the game’s August 2024 launch, analyzing how a visible gender controversy was structured, framed, and made visible in launch-month discussion. Combining social network analysis, BERTopic-assisted frame analysis, and close reading of high-centrality posts, we find that within this corpus the retweet network split into feminist and anti-feminist communities separated by a structural hole, with no prominent broker between them. The two camps mobilized in contrasting forms. The feminist surge took the form of a short-lived broadcast cascade, whereas the anti-feminist community maintained more distributed and sustained interaction over several weeks. The two camps framed the same event differently: one emphasized structural gender inequality, while the other foregrounded national pride and the defense of the game’s commercial success. The findings suggest that framing, affective mobilization, and nationalist language helped make the opposition organized and visible during the launch month. By focusing on a gender-themed, high-engagement slice of launch-month Weibo discourse, the study offers a bounded account of how a gaming controversy became organized as a networked gender backlash in a specific Chinese platform context.