Gendered algorithms within the politics of inclusion in Chinese gaming: a feminist critique of Identity V

This article examines how gender inclusion and inequality coexist in Identity V, a Chinese asymmetrical survival-horror game promoted as gender-inclusive. Combining critical play analysis, participant observation, and eighteen interviews with ten women working across China’s game industry, I trace gender across gameplay, player communities, and production. I argue that avatar design, ranking and matchmaking, monetization, and moderation reproduce masculine-coded forms of competition while positioning women unevenly as players, consumers, and creators. These patterns emerge within workplace hierarchies, market pressures, and state regulation shaped by the intertwined legacies of colonialism, state socialism, market reform, and nationalist gender politics. Yet women also negotiate these constraints through collective practices: players share strategies against harassment, build support networks, and reinterpret gender-conscious design, while practitioners exchange knowledge, refer one another to jobs, mentor newcomers, and make leadership more imaginable. Combining feminist game studies, critical information studies, and feminist ethics of care, the article treats algorithms as sociotechnical infrastructures rather than neutral code. It advances a situated feminist critique of Chinese gaming that moves beyond representation to ask who designs, maintains, and reshapes the systems that govern play.