Hit Chinese video game builds pride, subdues prejudice

Yang Han, a 42-year-old player, said it took him 15 years to learn that Super Mario Bros was a story "told by a Japanese company about an Italian pipe worker's adventures in the underground tunnels of New York."

Yang got a computer in 2000 and joined the wave of fans playing the Red Alert 2 game released the same year. Like most of the games, it was in English and involved a fictional Soviet invasion of the United States and a battle for territorial control. Yang played the game without knowing the history of the Cold War, the Soviet Union, and the Cuban missile crisis. This historical ignorance was echoed by hundreds of players of a similar age to Yang in commentary threads on social media platform Sina Weibo.

On Zhihu.com, China's equivalent to Quora, a hot question has asked why all the legendary characters in internationally popular games, from aliens coming from outerspace to ancient dragons hiding in deep underground holes, all had one thing in common — speaking English.

"The whole gaming world was invented by English-speaking teams based on English-language literature to serve English-speaking customers," was the answer that netizens agreed with the most.

While many of the games are played in English and have cultural roots in Western culture, a vast number of them are produced in Japan, which is considered the creator and innovator of video games.

Patriot games

Gu Kai, a senior games producer who founded Armored Horse Studio, made the popular game Glorious Mission with the support of the People's Liberation Army. "Prejudices easily get hidden in video games as a cultural product," Gu said, citing Red Alert 2 as an example.

In the game, developed by US company Westwood Studios, Soviet troops that occupy New York City can fire at unarmed civilians, while US troops that invade the Ural Mountains in Russia broadcast from trucks, appealing to residents to follow them.

"Those behind the game development team try to leave each and every player with the impression that the US military promotes humanitarianism and bravely defends peace all over the world," Gu said. "That's apparently not the truth, even when viewed by US media outlets, but they can repeat such misinformation a hundred million times to players around the world and always get some believers."

This is a key reason why there have always been voices calling for Chinese teams to develop games based on Chinese literature and promote them around the world.

At the annual session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference National Committee in 2023, member Guo Yuanyuan, who is also vice dean of the School of Culture and Communication at the Capital University of Economics and Business, called for the domestic video game industry to promote its products overseas to gain global influence. This was despite popular domestically developed games then seldom having an impact overseas.

It was not until Honor of Kings, a smartphone game that allows users to fight as heroes in teams, was successful in 2023 that Chinese games with Chinese heroes finally gained international standing.

By July, the game had over 50 million registered users worldwide from more than 160 countries and regions.