UC Santa Barbara

The global version of Valve’s Steam gaming platform is the largest and sole remaining channel in which substantial numbers of Chinese and non-Chinese internet users can come into contact with one another on a daily basis, representing an ideal setting to consider the rise of China in the twenty-first century. Moreover, in the multilingual and genuinely multinational space of the Steam Community, these gamers are not only playing games, but actively producing digital and discursive content, transnationally co-imagining hybrid conceptions of Chinese history, nationalism, and identity via the new metahistorical mode of historical video games. In this project, I will thus examine the relationship between historical video games, transnational gaming spaces, and conceptions of Chinese nationalism and identity, or how Chinese gamers are (re)imagining China on Steam. To these ends, I will not only conduct close analysis of historical games set in, about, and/or from China, but also explore the heteroglossia of hyper- and paratextual user-generated content surrounding these games in the space of the Community, including everything from players’ forum discussions, social media posts, and comments, to their game reviews, guides and walkthroughs, and modifications, as well as developer interviews, articles from the gaming press, historical primary and secondary sources, and more. Furthermore, working from the dual themes of history and space, I will also introduce two key conceptual frameworks: 1) Metahistorical gaming, i.e. a new metahistorical mode centered on counterfactual play in which gamers “play out” the past via historical games to produce new, alternative, and unofficial histories, and 2) gamescapes, or diegetic and non-diegetic gaming spaces that are contested by a series of different actors and institutions across an increasingly globalized gaming culture. Taken together, this project will reflect on how historical structures and nationalist narratives are being reimagined in the space of the Steam platform via this new metahistorical mode of the twenty-first century. How is Chinese history played, and who are its players? What significance do historical games and transnational gaming spaces have for Chinese nationalism? In what ways does metahistorical gaming in China play out across gamescapes like Steam?