New CCTV documentary shows Chinese gaming in a positive light, for once

Although gaming is hugely popular in China, most gamers are members of what China calls the post-80s and post 90s generations; teens and twenty-somethings who grew up with internet cafes and video games. China’s older generations still tend to look down on gaming, and the Chinese media is often rather unfriendly to it. Especially in the more conservative state-run outlets, it’s not uncommon to find scare pieces about the perils of gaming addiction (though this is a serious problem), and gaming is generally written off as a niche hobby.

Gaming is also not well understood by China’s older generations. To an extent this is true in most countries, but in China the divide is particularly pronounced because the childhood that the parents of post-80s and post-90s kids had was drastically different from Chinese childhood today. China’s elder generations remember firsthand the starvation during the Great Leap Forward and the chaos of the cultural revolution, and many have difficulty understanding why China’s modern youth want to “waste” their time with online gaming when they could be taking advantage of the stable political situation and the growing economy to earn money.

How pleased and surprised I was, then, to discover that CCTV — China’s state-run television network conglomerate — has produced a new documentary series called Gaming Life (游戏·人生) that portrays hardcore gaming in a very positive light. The series is part of a CCTV documentary show called Human Geography, and it has aired five half hour long game-centric episodes, the first of which premiered last Thursday. Each episode focuses on a different aspect of gaming life: the first is about the power of games, the second focuses on competition, the third is about innovation in the Chinese games industry, etc.

I have seen enough CCTV programming that I went into Gaming Life rather pessimistic. Like most state-media programming on Chinese gaming, I expected it to be either a scare piece or something very surface-level about how people use games to “escape” into a virtual world. Instead, it turned out to be a pretty good overview of China’s gaming scene that’s clearly aimed at making gaming, even hardcore gaming, seem normal and acceptable.

This goal is evident from the series’s title sequence, which is a slickly-animated sequence that shows us the evolution of gaming, from a spinning wooden top on the sidewalk to a modern 3D brawler game. The implied message seems to be that modern videogaming is simply a continuation of the outdoor games kids played before video games existed. In the first episode, this sequence is followed by the inter-cut stories of three different gamers: a older man who runs a large team in an online naval battle game, a young woman who met her soon-to-be husband in an online RPG, and professional Warcraft 3 player Sky, who won two consecutive WCG titles in 2005 and 2006. Their stories are told broadly, and the target audience is clearly people who haven’t played a ton of games before, but the message that emerges from these stories is a very positive one: games help build teamwork and establish friendships. Games can help people find love. Games can even be a real career.

Throughout it, I was struck by how the series seems designed to “sell” gaming as an acceptable and even beneficial pastime to the older generations. Everything from competitive gaming to cosplay competitions is addressed, explained simply so that anyone can understand, and illustrated through onscreen examples of young people in the culture who are truly getting something positive out of it. The fifth episode even takes the conventional understanding of games in China as an “escape from reality” and turns it on its head, arguing that games can actually be a powerful tool for helping us understand and process the things that are happening in the real world.

This might all seem obvious to a gamer, and it is, because we understand this culture and we’ve been steeped in it for years. We’ve seen firsthand the positive things that it can do. But China’s state media broadcasting a show aimed at teaching the non-gaming public why gaming is good? That’s really a revelation, and a long overdue one. Gaming Life could be a valuable tool in helping bridge China’s mammoth generation gap and taking hardcore gaming down the path towards more mainstream acceptance even among older generations.

The series is only available in Mandarin, but the five episodes can be streamed for free only via CNTV, CCTV’s online video affiliate. They don’t play in some browsers, so if these links don’t work for you we recommend trying Firefox or Internet Explorer:

Episode 1: “The Power of Gaming”
Episode 2: “Chasing Dreams in Competition”
Episode 3: “The Joy of Creating”
Episode 4: “I’m an Expert”
Episode 5: “Life-Changing”