Media Representations of Older Digital Game Players in China: A Text-Mining Analysis

China has become the world’s largest digital market and accounts for 38% of the roughly 1615 million players in the Asia Pacific Region. The growing importance of older digital game players is a result of the COVID-19 lockdown measures and stringent control of minors’ digital game access. This chapter examines the rise of senior digital game players in China in the context of the global aging trend and explores media discourses in China to analyze the representations of this emerging demographic segment. Specifically, the chapter examines recurrent keywords, key phrases, and topics in the mass media discourses in China and the relationships of extracted keywords about older digital game players. The study is based on media framing and representation perspectives and employs a text-mining technique to analyze mass media discourses. The extracted keywords are categorized into “digital game platforms and genres,” “the economic aspect,” “and gameplay benefits.” Additionally, the study’s topic modeling reveals four primary topics from the mass media corpus: “digital games as entertainment,” “medical benefits of gameplay,” “digital game platforms and economic impacts,” and “video game players.” The concurrence analysis demonstrates that the term “seniors” (i.e., older digital game players) in China is closely related to keywords such as “marketing,” “market,” and “spending” than to “social” and “active.”