The Curious Story of China's Indie Gaming Scene

Holy shit the Chinese Parents game having a New Years minigame balancing refusal and acceptance of the red pouches is so fucking hilarious and accurate

As a gamer who speaks both English and Chinese, I have to say that some of the best Chinese indie games are unbelievably difficult to translate into proper English. For example, The Scroll of Taiwu, which you mentioned at the beginning of Part 4, is basically considered by Chinese gamers to be the pinnacle of "ancient Chinese style writing". And that means a load of insurmountable cultural barriers for almost all non-Chinese speakers. For example, one of the skills in the game is called "巨阙千钧剑". Where "巨" means huge; "阙" can refer to both an ancient Chinese building and "broken"; "千" refers to a thousand; "钧" is a rather large unit of weight used in ancient China; "剑" is a sword. And even if you fully understand the meaning of each character in this name individually, you are still far from getting its real meaning, so it's time to go to the second level: the first two characters "巨阙" together are a new word, the name of an "acupuncture point". - This is a mysterious concept in ancient Chinese medicine, and to explain it would probably require a monograph. To keep things simple, it is only necessary to understand that the "巨阙" point is located approximately in the concave area between the human chest and abdomen. At the same time, "巨阙" is also the name of a famous ancient sword in China, and there are many legends surrounding the casting and use of it. In short, "巨阙" as the name of the sword roughly means a "large and broken" sword. "千钧" together is also a special ancient word, but fortunately it is not that complicated. It is generally used to refer to an unstoppable and enormous force, and can also refer to a very critical and dangerous moment. Thus, the five simple Chinese characters "巨阙千钧剑" together have a very rich multi-layered meaning in the eyes of a player who grew up with a standard Chinese education experience (which contains a great deal of basic knowledge of those pieces of knowledge) - a legendary broken heavy sword without a blade, one of the most vulnerable points of the human body, a huge and unstoppable force, a critical moment of life and death...... and such "highly compressed" textual information is literally present in every corner of this game. It's simply unimaginable to translate such kinds of texts into another language without losing their complex connotations.

Unironically, your 'bad design'/'spaghetti' speech was kind of inspiring at a personal level, as someone who compulsively restarts games when they realise they didn't build their character/base/city/etc optimally

As a Chinese game dev, I found your video very interesting. Chinese gaming industry is at a very interesting point in time...The Chinese Debate World Cup featured a topic on "Is Genshin the daybreak moment for Chinese gaming industry", but at the same time Xinhua News Agency(one of the Chinese gov official media) recently published an article called video games "electronic Opium"(sounds familiar huh)...Chinese game quality is rising and most importantly, they are not trying to mimic the western games and the Japanese games anymore, they are developing games that tells the stories about China. Think about it, when is the last time you heard some thing positive about China from the western media? Games with Chinese elements and kicks become our way to tell the world about Chinese culture and Chinese philosophy. Although the back and forth attitude of the government towards video games kinda sucks for the industry, I still believe more high quality Chinese games will appear in the future. Glad to see you played and introduced so many Chinese indie games, keep up the great work.

I have to say that your reporting is not only really accurate but also endearing to see that someone cares enough to report about both the struggles of gamers and accomplishments/failures of developers in the region. I was really surprised you even attempted to learn Mandarin (I struggle with tones also), the history of gaming there, and the culture that has developed around it as a result of government intervention and wealth inequality. Thanks for taking so much time to do your research because regardless of the government there are lots of passionate and dedicated developers who deserve some recognition. Hope you have a great day man.

I had no interest in this topic seeing the title and within 5 mins of starting the video I was hooked. Excellent work man. This is incredibly informative and interesting.

I know “gamers are oppressed” is a joke about gamer entitlement, but man Chinese gamers are the real oppressed gamers. Hearing how Chinese game developers suffer while chasing after their dreams made me really sad…

45:10 for your information, localization isn't usually done or even tested at all through actually playing through the game. Localization is basically you send a team a .resx file (basically an xml) and they translate every element in that file, which the game exe will then pull through at runtime. Easy for a typo to slip through.

Somewhere between the hoover rant and the philosphic diatrade on spaghetti I realized making this video might have had a bit of an effect on your mental wellbeing.

To add to the point about Steam, one of the other aspects I've found strange (as a user in China who buys and plays games from the Chinese store) is that a lot of the games that are allowed are also not modified in any way from the original. For example, many games are modified for sale in certain countries by toning down or totally removing certain aspects (Fallout 3 springs to mind because, assuming I'm recalling correctly, the German version of FO3 had most of the gore removed for it to be legally available there). However, on Chinese Steam - assuming the game wasn't straight up banned from sale in the first place, such as those featuring pornographic content - these games aren't censored at all. Full gore, nudity, the lot. Cyberpunk 2077 is a great example, none of it has been edited from the standard version for sale on Steam in China. My assumption is that they're able to get away with it because the game isn't openly advertised as including this kind of content (well, violence certainly is but that seems to be an inconsistency in Chinese media, because fairly graphic violence IS a feature of some mainstream Chinese films, shows, etc., but nudity isn't front-page marketing material for it). Thus the only people who will likely be made aware of this kind of content in games like Cyberpunk would be the consumers, who aren't going to say anything because they wouldn't see it as an issue in the first place, nor is it particularly unusual/taboo content for some of them anyway (particularly when I think of Chinese friends, colleagues, etc. who I know played the game). Still, even on a platform like Steam that is quite the mystery in how it is allowed to exist here, I do find it odd how little censoring is done with respect to the games that are allowed, particularly as there clearly IS some level of censorship in terms of which games are allowed to be sold at all on the Chinese store. Anyway, excellent video on a topic that really isn't well understood, both inside and outside of China. Props to you for putting so much effort into educating people on it! :) also glad someone else has been converted to the religion of 叉烧包!

"My entire life is "bad design" and I will NEVER start over" ~NeverKnowsBest, 2021 54:25 They hit me hard, man. That hit me hard.

It always shocks me just how little people in the West think of China, describing it as backwards in terms of gaming, when i lived there, as recently as 2016, they had degrees for running Gaming events.... its just how big gaming already was there long before MiHoYo's Genshin Impact. I played Xuan Yuan sword and Chinese Paladin: Sword and Fairy and they were dealing with philosophical issues and concepts nearly 2-3 years before the big games like Planescape Torment shook up the western RPG market about how games could explore dense and topical issues and explore what it means to be human and not just be dungeon crawlers. Also I have to say the Chinese industry is HEAVILY mobile based. Due to the high cost of consoles and gaming rigs (and despite its economic boom Chinese people still struggle with disparity of income). Also relative obscurity of consoles due to their being banned for a long time. It is common to see people playing mobile games... well.. nearly everywhere, from street corners, to Metro. PUBG was massively celebrated in China as their first international success... not Genshin Impact. China's rise in gaming will be commensurate with mobile gaming.

Sir, your dry humor is just gold. Rare, but precious, I'm always get caught off guard.

I wish my students would dive so deeply into a culture and language as you did for this video :). My favorite quote from you this video is (roughly), “Gosh darn it, China, where is the easy mode for this language.”

Chinese audience here, really amazing one! appreciate it. Starting to follow this channel after Genshin Impact video. Videos which related to China are usually attractive to me. Only after watching this video, did I realize the situation that Chinese game developers in and the challenges they face. About censorship, I used to have a vague feeling and little knowledge about censorship in China. I did not think too much and just accept it and literally like mentioned in video, I feel like I cannot do anything since I have no idea to how to address this kind of problem and ignore it as always. When it comes to stuffs being banned in China, I think YouTube and some other social media being banned in China makes sense in some way according to things I know. However it sucks that people lost access to the other side of the coin (the great contents) on these platforms. Seldom people know VPN and can actually use it. I started to watch YouTube a lot since I came to Taiwan for university. I also seldom use VPN in China due to reasons including it costs money for a good quality one. Looking forward to more videos like this. Still struggling with my English. Hope this comment makes sense.

neverknowsbest: "I knew i'd need to explain cultivation." me: "jokes on you, i've been reading chinese martial arts novels for the past 5 years!"

"My entire life is bad design and i would never start over" is, unironically, a beautiful line

It's so relaxing just sitting back and letting you take me on a 2,5 hour ride through a topic I didn't know I had any interest about! Really well done!

I really appreciate that someone took so much time and effort to learn and understand about our situation.

if you werent chainsmoking in a dimly lit room with no ventilation in 90 degree heat eating barbecue duck neck snacks, you werent fully immersed in chinese gaming