University of Wollongong Research Online Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive) Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences & Humanities 2006 Playing with indexical Chineseness: the transnational cultural politics of Wuxia in digital games Dean Chan University of Wollongong,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons, and the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Chan, Dean, Playing with indexical Chineseness: the transnational cultural politics of Wuxia in digital games 2006. https://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers/1856 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library:
[email protected] EnterText 6.1 DEAN CHAN Playing with Indexical Chineseness: The Transnational Cultural Politics of Wuxia in Digital Games Wuxia narratives delineate an imagined cultural China. Although officially banned in Mainland China for most of the twentieth century, contemporary Chinese reclamations of these pseudo-historical and fantastical tales of martial chivalry now circulate locally, regionally, and internationally. New treatments of wuxia—especially in film and literature— have drawn increasing international scholarly interest.1 Nevertheless, the proliferation of wuxia digital games has, to date, received scant academic attention. Over the past decade, the use of wuxia fictions has steadily gained momentum in East Asian games networks, particularly within Chinese language territories. This essay traces a cultural history of the evolution of wuxia digital games from PC role-playing games (RPGs) to massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), and offers a contextual analysis of their attendant significations.