Internationalization and Post-Orientalism: The Evolution of the Guochao of Contemporary Chinese Video Games

The development of Chinese video games since the 1980s has been a turbulent and continuous guochao, or “national chic.” Chinese players’ demands for localization are a priori, so the Chinese game industry has been torn between the self-gaze of Orientalism and the self-cognition of anti-Orientalism, resulting in tension between localization and internationalization. From the cultural appropriation of the FC/NES era, to the trend of wuxia in the era of JRPG, to the turning of xianxia and xuanhuan, to the dawn of internationalization and domestic AAA production, Chinese video games have been subtly shaping the construction of the guochao. Despite being overlooked by the mainstream for many years, Chinese games have fundamentally affected the organism of contemporary Chinese mass culture.