Play, watch, share: the dissemination of the cultural presence of games on video-based social media

Abstract

A digital game, as a type of virtual entertainment with the widest audience rang, is an important media form that should be integrated into the cultural presence. Black Myth: Wukong is the first Chinese digital game to shift from a hit game to a cultural phenomenon. Previous studies have shown that cultural presence is crucial for cultural dissemination. This study examines the dissemination mode of the cultural presence of digital games through interactive ritual (IR) theory, which is helpful for understanding the components of the cultural phenomena formed by it. In total, 462 videos and Danmaku are collected from a social media video site (Bilibili). A real-time object detection algorithm from the computer vision (CV) field is used for video emotion detection, and the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) approach from the natural language processing (NLP) field is used for text analysis and topic extraction purposes. Finally, text proctyessing is performed via manual coding, screening, classification and summarization. We obtain the IR dissemination model of digital cultural presence. 1. Human‒computer game interactions from the perspective of players: sensory identification, group identification, and emotional identification. 2. Game information diffusion from the perspective of games: game operation experience, game narrative experience, and game culture experience. 3. Multisource dissemination of games from the video perspective: player community sharing, cross-platform sharing, and cross-domain sharing. The cultural presence diffusion model developed in this study reveals the prospect of gamification becoming the core strategy of cultural dissemination.