China in the Skin

Abstract How do video games tell “the good China story”? In reviewing Chinese official media's months-long criticism of the mobile MOBA game, Honor of Kings (Wangzhe rongyao 王者榮耀), and the game's rounds of responses in 2017 and 2018, this article investigates a unique digital object that affords storytelling in video games: skin (pifu 皮膚). Neither a playable character per se nor a player's avatar, skin constitutes a special digital milieu where China stories are told, debated, and their “goodness” performed. It traverses various composing strata of video games and distributes narrative into a game's mechanics, procedure, representation, playing experience, and more. Skin, the author argues, is a yet-theorized differentiator that anchors “Chineseness” in the world of video gaming. It is a new site in a digital age in which the theoretical problem of Chineseness manifests different kinds of difficulty. The article ends with a discussion of the significance of researching skin to our understanding of what a Chinese video game is. The author calls for a new conceptualization of a Chinese video game that accounts for video game's medium specificity. Speaking to scholars of both Chinese studies and digital game studies, this article anticipates more scholarly interest in the intersection of the two fields.