CMPO - Gam(bl)ing 🎁

The Gam(bl)ing Conference: Thinking Outsides of the Loot Box 🎁

28–29 September 2026

Registration: http://tinyurl.com/thegamblingregister

Call for papers (deadline passed): https://tinyurl.com/thegamblingcfp

Gam(bl)ing Conference Programme

Day 1 (below is work-in-progress and tbc)

Session 1 – Diving into Genshin Impact

Heather BLAKEY, The flâneur of Teyvat

In this paper I interpret Genshin Impact’s protagonist, the Traveler, as a flâneur. I suggest my interpretation makes visible the veering qualities of the Traveler; a figure able to hold the labyrinthine aspects of Genshin Impact in relation to one another. I explore the Traveler’s flânerie in relation to the quests, events, detritus, and literature of the Narzissenkreuz Ordo: a mostly defunct secret society established over 400 years prior to the Traveler’s time in Teyvat. I argue the Traveler’s subjectivity and narrative position as flâneur references the diasporic evolution of the complex contemporary global figuration of the flâneur as a ‘vehicle for the examination of the conditions of modernity’ (Stephen 2013) in the twenty-first century.

I examine the Traveler’s relation to the Narzissenkreuz Ordo via two influential conceptions of flânerie. First, Benjamin’s (2003) flâneur as ambivalent detective; at times an ‘observer of the marketplace’ (427) and at others a figure who resists alienation and is conducted into otherwise ‘vanished time’ (416). Second, Debord’s (see Debord, edited by Knabb 2006) Situationists, whose ‘wayward traversals’ (Luckhurst 2017 1049), guided by dérive or drift, resist the ‘apotheosis of speed’ (Solnit 2000 12) that increasingly characterises modernity in the twentieth—and now twenty-first—centuries. I consider the political stakes that each of these frames of flânerie imply, as well as the similarity in their capacity to lever open ‘other realities in the mundane world’ (Luckhurst 2017 1049): revealing hidden truths, falsehoods, and possibilities within the everyday.

Throughout Genshin Impact the Traveler is regularly acknowledged by other beings in the world as an individual capable of resisting ‘fate’: an obtuse shorthand for the pre-ordained future of Teyvat. I suggest the Traveler is endowed with the ability to resist Teyvat’s master narratives by nature of their meandering: a form of action oft considered anachronistic and at times openly disdained in modernity (see Solnit 2000), thus hailing to the original aims of flânerie: to ‘subvert concepts of time and order’ (Comfort and Papalas 2022 33). The Traveler plunges their ‘gaze into a thousand lives’ (Balzac 1826 63, cited in and translated by Comfort and Papalas 2022 23) and allows non-hedgemonic imaginaries to enter the world of Teyvat, thus exploring the ideological desires of flânerie that have enchanted artists and scholars since the nineteenth century.

Benjamin HORN, Have You Eaten Yet? Genshin Impact and Chinese Food

While traveling across Genshin Impact’s fantastical virtual landscapes, it is not uncommon for Paimon to inquire about the time and place of the next meal. In fact, so frequent are such interjections that one bemused online commentator (Reddit user kyuven87, 2024) was inspired to post to Genshin’s subreddit community: “Does EVERYTHING in this game center around meals?” The commentator could be forgiven for their hyperbole: besides the game narrative, which often pushes the player to join various banquets and feasts, there is a cooking mini-game to play, player-buffing recipes to craft, and foodstuffs to collect while exploring. Every gacha-able character in the game has their own favorite unique recipe and some characters (e.g. Varesa and Escoffier) have their entire designs and personalities themed around food. It is not disingenuous, therefore, to assert that food is a constant presence in Genshin. As such, this talk will put forth that understanding Genshin's treatment of food and drink is essential to its interpretation. Specifically, this talk will argue that the game promulgates a particular Chinese perspective on food that homogenizes its various in-game cultures even if the food presented is different, highlighting the challenges of regional food branding (Cwiertka and Miho, 2020) in a globalised world.

Paul A. THOMAS, Ghosts of False Pasts, Ghosts of Lost Futures: A Hauntological Analysis of Genshin Impact's Sumeru Storyarc (Remote)

This work synthesizes Jacques Derrida's notion of "hauntology" (1994) with Mark Fisher's account of "lost futures" (2012, 2014), and Nicolas Abraham & Maria Torok's psychoanalytic theory of the "phantom" (1994) to consider how Genshin Impact's Sumeru storyline dramatizes the persistence of absence and the afterlives of trauma. The work argues that the Sumeru storyline is fundamentally structured around "absent referents," which continue to shape the lived realities, ideologies, and emotional realities of the game's characters. Through close readings of two key figures, King Deshret of the desert and Greater Lord Rukkhadevata of the rainforest, the analysis explores how loss and misremembered history can co-generate hauntings that sustain social conflict and psychic repetition. These false "ghosts," though ontologically void, exert real influence within the game world, revealing how "that which does not exist" can still affect identity, myth, and mourning.

The first part of this work analyzes the "Specter of Al-Ahmar," exploring how the historical figure of King Deshret has become a "ghost from a past that never was." This false ghost is the result of competing mythologies that view Deshret as either a supreme God-King or a horrid tyrant—both of which represent opposing but equally fictive constructions of memory that perpetuate present-day conflict. Drawing on Svetlana Boym's (2001) distinction between "restorative nostalgia" and "reflective nostalgia," the essay shows how the desert-dwelling Eremites' desire to restore King Deshret's greatness exemplifies a restorative nostalgia that converts historical loss into mythic certainty, while the Akademiya's disdain for the desert peoples rests on a phantom fear of barbarism. Both factions are thus "haunted" by their own ideological projections, be they ghosts born of denial or distortion. These hauntings demonstrate how trauma, repression, and political desire conspire to create "pasts-that-never-were" which, though ontologically unreal, nevertheless structure present realities.

The second part of the work considers "Rukkhadevata's Impossible Legacy," examining the hauntological dynamics of "futures-that-were-never-meant-to-be." Here the absence of Greater Lord Rukkhadevata is seen as a void that gives rise to a compulsive repetition of loss itself. This can be seen in both the attempt by Sumeru's sages to resurrect their goddess through technological means and in the way Sumeru's new archon, Nahida, struggles with self-doubt. Both the sages and Nahida are mired

in melancholy, and their fixation on recreating or living up to an idealized deity is explored in light of Fisher's description of hauntology as an inability to imagine genuine futurity unshadowed by past nostalgia. Drawing on the thought of Freud (1961), the work further interprets this circulative fixation as a compulsive "death-drive loop" in which trauma is endlessly rehearsed rather than symbolically resolved. For this reason, the work argues that the sages' descent into techno-fanaticism and Nahida's paralyzing insecurity both exemplify how the specter of lost potential can imprison subjects in cycles of psychic and historical recurrence.

By exploring the hauntological role of these "specters," the paper considers how ghosts are "concealed rhetorically and linguistically within" the game and "how their concealed presence can be detected and exposed as the driving force behind the actions and discourse of certain fictive characters" (Rashkin 1992, 5). The work then argues that only through a confrontation with truth—framed as a "healthy exorcism" of ghosts—can the trauma of the past be overcome. This is easier said than done, as it requires parties to dispense with myth-making and denialism, but it is the only way humans can seek out a reality that is yet-to-be-written. The paper closes by examining the ways that powerful apparatuses (e.g., the Akademiya, the Eremite belief system) often use mythologized readings of the past to uphold a certain world order. By exposing these political manipulations, Sumeru’s narrative places the player into a position of hauntological deconstruction, requiring them to take an active part in the dismantling of "pasts-that-never-were" through game play. This is ultimately framed as a pedagogical move that provides players with the skills necessary to identify and interrogate the traumatic specters that linger within our own life-world.

Yifan WANG, Mapping the Atlantis in Inazuma: an Hellenistic Diffusion in Pop Gacha RPGs

Mythological video games foster the collection of mythographical retellings (Vandewalle 2023), while gacha game players often encounter a polyphonic and dialogic (Bakhtin 1981) hypertexts of mythologies during the nonlinear narrative and traversal gameplay. This paper investigates how recent popular mobile gacha roleplaying games cultivate a dynamic and experimental space for the multi-mythical otherworld, arguing that such games constitute a digital continuation of the transcultural diffusion that historically shaped the transmission of myths from the ancient Mediterranean to East Asia. This study focuses on Genshin Impact (miHoYo 2020)—particularly the Inazuma region and its lost civilisation Enkanomiya—to demonstrate how popular games render an interwoven mythography that mirrors realworld routes of cultural exchange. Through comparative attention to Monster Strike (MIXI 2013) and the other Shanghai-developed title Dislyte (Lilith Games 2022), this paper proposes that gacha games have emerged as a genre of mythological games characterised by rich multimythical embroidary, fragmented mythographical retelling, othered and or hybrided worldbuilding, and with engaging, devoted, derivative fan culture.

Enkanomiya constitutes one of the most sophisticated and engaging cases of mythological reception in the game world. Modelled as a quasi-Atlantis situated beneath Inazuma’s ocean, the Japan-inspired nation in Teyvat, it reimagines ancient sun myths of Greece through a Japanese mythical lens. Its principal game quests—Hyperion’s Dirge and Phaethon’s Syrtos—evoke unmistakably Greek resonances, while the narrative of a submerged civilisation rescued from darkness by an artificial sun, the Dainichi Mikoshi, recalls Helios and his chariot. Yet these motifs are deliberately entwined with the Japanese myths. The integration of Greek tales into Japanese mythology is first documented in the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters, 712 AD), representing one divergent adaptation of Hellenistic diffusions. The mythical tale of Uzume dancing to lure Amaterasu (Sungoddess) from her cavern is interpreted by Atsuhiko Yoshida (1974, 1977) as a (trans)cultural mediation similar to Baubo’s enticing Demeter. Such parallels illuminate a long history of Hellenistic diffusion—such as the Heracles in the East manifested as guardian warriors in Gandhara Buddhism, as argued by Hsing (2005)—through Scythian and Korean intermediaries, which reached early Japan and produced striking convergences, including the parallels between Orpheus–Eurydice and Izanagi–Izanami. Enkanomiya’s narrative thus does not arbitrarily juxtapose Greek and Japanese elements; rather, it imaginatively re-enacts a plausible transcultural memory of mythic exchange within a digital otherworld, as an integrated “eternal return” (Eliade 1959) and archetypical recurrence (Campbell 1991).

Classical images persist beyond fidelity to material resources and come to the adaptability to convergent media (Jenkins 2006) and speculative hypertexts. This pattern becomes more apparent when situated within the lineage of popular gacha games, when analysing the digital legacy of classical imagery. Monster Strike has possibly estalibshed a reservoir for Dislyte comparing from the visual design of diverse deities, the mechanics of gacha play, the blending worldview of futuristicism and post-apocalypticism. These inter-game legacies reveal a shared genre tendency: gacha games increasingly function as playful laboratories for remediating, reorganising, and speculating upon global mythologies.

By examining Genshin Impact within this transcultural constellation, the paper argues that gacha games offer a hypertextual landscape where players engage with myths as simultaneously inherited and reinvented. In navigating these mixed mythical terrains, players participate in a contemporary re-enactment and re-enchantment of cultural diffusion, encountering antiquity anew through digital, multi-mythical retellings that extend and complicate the reception of the classical past.

Session 2 – Community

Yeonwoo LEE, From Hashtags to Airships: Tracing the Dynamics of Gamer-Consumer Activism

This presentation examines how gamer activism in South Korea has developed into an anti-feminist form of consumer mobilization. Focusing on the airship protest organized by Genshin Impact players, I trace the trajectory of gamer-led protests and the distinctive logics revealed through this case. While such activism initially emerged in the name of consumer rights, it has increasingly overlapped with anti-feminist discourse and practices that marginalize women and workers within the industry. By analyzing this convergence of digital fandom, neoliberal consumerism, and gender politics, the presentation reveals how gamer activism in South Korea has transformed into a site of both resistance and exclusion.

Charisse SO, World Join Request (10): A Case- based autoethnographic understanding of co-operative play

tbc

Hyerin SHIN, Dataminers, Beta Testers, and Fan Translators: Leaks as Cultural Capital in Gacha Game Communities

In November 2023, COGNOSPHERE, the global publishing arm of the Chinese developer miHoYo, issued a Digital Millennium Copyright Act subpoena to unmask the personal information of accounts dedicated to Genshin Impact (miHoYo 2020) “leaks”—unauthorized disclosure and dissemination of the game’s upcoming content (Chalk 2024). This was but one of many attempts in the company’s ongoing efforts to combat leaks—including but not limited to non-disclosure agreements for beta testers, bans, and legal actions against domestic and international leakers. However, despite the looming legal threats, leaks remain a core part of community discussion not only among Genshin Impact fans but also for players of gacha games as a whole. When navigating online fandom spaces for gacha games, it is not uncommon to encounter information on new characters, features, and even story cutscenes months before they are officially announced.

This paper is an aca-fan, netnographic investigation of fan communities surrounding leak communities in gacha gaming spaces involving two case studies. The first is an autoethnography of my own role as an administrator and fan translator for GRAY RAVENS, a fan website for the gacha game Punishing: Gray Raven (Kuro Games 2019). Here, I analyze and reflect upon the process by which the website’s volunteers translate and publish the information from the game’s beta tests and content exclusively available in the Chinese version of the game for the international fandom. I then examine the community response to the translated information, demonstrating the usefulness of access to the game’s future content in players’ in-game progression and spending habits. The second case study is a survey of Genshin Impact’s leak communities, drawing on interviews conducted with anonymous beta testers and dataminers who have agreed to participate in this study, as well as my investigations of relevant online communities, including both closed spaces (such as leakers’ Telegram chats and private Discord channels) and open communities (such as public social media accounts and forums), in English and Chinese.

Based on the observations from the two case studies, I first suggest understanding leaks as a popular, accepted form of “cheating” in gacha games, using the definition of the term proposed by Mia Consalvo (2007, 2) as an alternative way to play a game and an activity that can “challenge game companies in understandings of who controls the game space”. However, the role of leaks in the context of the relationship between gacha game players and the gacha monetization model can align with utopian, anti-capitalist perspectives in fan studies, such as the perspective presented in Henry Jenkins’ seminal work Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture (1992), that interpret participatory culture as a force of resistance against the proprietors of commercial cultural production. Here, I posit that leaks can be understood as a form of paratext that provides “another way to shape and form player understandings of what a game is or could be” (Consalvo 2017) in regards to how gacha games want players to interact with its monetization system—my investigations suggest that leaks are widely disseminated within gacha gaming communities as an acceptable means to combat the predatory nature of the games’ monetization system as they help undermine the fear of missing out. On the other hand, leaks themselves function as a form of cultural capital that establishes and reinforces hierarchies within fandom. By leveraging fans’ demand for leaks, leaks take on the role of “fan leaders” (Chin 2018), and in some cases, demonstrate the capitalistic order that leaks supposedly help combat when access to leaked information is monetized.

By bringing to light an underexplored (and legally precarious) fan practice in gacha gaming spaces, this paper provides a rare inside look at the social and cultural dynamics of leaker networks and invites readers to further consider how fan labor interacts with exploitative monetization systems inherent in gacha games.

Fanxi FENG, Gacha Game Collaborations and the Production of Affective Legitimacy

Cross-media collaborations (variously described as tie-ins, collabs, or crossovers) have become increasingly routine in recent years in China’s mobile gacha game sector. No longer limited to occasional promotional events, collaborations are now a regularized and expected component of many live-service game operation. Yet beyond their apparent role as marketing strategies, fan service, or supplementary content, the broader cultural and affective work performed by these collaborations remains insufficiently examined. This paper proposes a different perspective: it conceptualizes collaborations as an efficient form of affective infrastructure that enables affect to circulate across domains, be converted into different forms of value, and be reinvested over time.

Drawing on the concept of affective economies (Ahmed 2004), affect is understood here not as a private or purely subjective feeling, but as a relational and circulatory force that attaches to characters, objects, spaces, and practices. Through circulation, affect generates value beyond emotion itself, including economic, cultural, and symbolic forms. Importantly, affect is not exhausted through use, and it can be redirected, accumulated, and reproduced. This framework allows the paper to focus on what affect does as it moves across different collaborative forms.

Mobile gacha games provide an especially effective platform for affective conversion due to several structural features. First, their character-centered monetization models foster strong parasocial attachments, as high-rarity characters function simultaneously as emotional focal points and economic drivers. Second, as continuously operating live-service games, gacha titles cultivate long-term, habitual engagement rather than one-off play experiences, stabilizing affective attachment over time. Third, players are already embedded in these games as part of their everyday routines, which lowers the threshold for mobilization: collaboration events are easily noticed, readily accessed, and framed as extensions of existing play practices. Together, these features make gacha games particularly well suited to hosting collaborations that redirect and intensify affect.

The paper examines three common modes of collaboration through case studies, focusing on the distinct yet interconnected pathways through which affect is oriented toward different endpoints within a shared circulatory system.

The first mode, brand- or retail-oriented co-promotions, channels affect toward consumption. In collaborations with consumer brands such as food, apparel, or retail chains, spending is reframed as affective expression rather than rational economic choice. Characters operate as emotional mediators between players and commodities, while limited editions, commemorative value, and in-game rewards reinforce emotional motivation. Physical spaces such as themed stores and pop-up events further materialize affect, transforming consumption into participatory experience. In this process, affect becomes a resource that facilitates monetization while appearing voluntary, pleasurable, and even meaningful.

The second mode, culture- or state-oriented collaborations, redirects affect toward legitimacy and cultural governance. Through partnerships with museums, heritage initiatives, or public institutions, games mobilize feelings such as admiration, pride, and aesthetic pleasure toward culturally sanctioned symbols. Rather than requiring political persuasion or historical understanding, these collaborations operate through affective alignment as players are invited to like, feel moved by, or feel proud of cultural representations embedded in play. As a result, games gain legitimacy as acceptable and even celebrated cultural media within a social context where digital games have long been viewed as frivolous, harmful, or culturally suspect. At the same time, this form of collaboration operates as a soft mode of cultural governance that relies less on persuasion than on incorporation. With minimal risk of arousing resistance, players’ emotional engagement is tacitly folded into dominant cultural frameworks.

The third mode, inter-game and IP crossovers, orients affect toward the reproduction and intensification of affect itself. By collaborating with high-prestige IPs—often well-established Japanese or Western manga, anime, or games—mobile gacha games borrow symbolic qualities such as coolness, prestige, and cultural status. These associations intensify players’ emotional attachment to the hosting game, making it feel more desirable, meaningful, and worthy of sustained engagement. The affect generated through such collaborations can then be reinvested and further converted into long-term play habits, consumption, or additional forms of legitimacy. However, cases of controversies surrounding adaptations, such as player resistance to character reinterpretation, demonstrate that these processes are not fully controllable. Players retain a degree of agency in negotiating how affect is translated and whether symbolic associations are accepted or rejected.

By bringing these three modes together, the paper shows how collaborations form a cyclical system of affective circulation and reinvestment that facilitates incorporation and alignment without overt discipline or explicit persuasion. Understanding collaborations as affective infrastructure helps explain why such events have become so prevalent in China’s gacha game market, and why affect itself has emerged as an increasingly central, convertible resource in contemporary digital game economies.

Student / Early Career Session

Jiayi YUAN, Negotiating Visibility: Erciyuan Culture in Contemporary China

This paper examines how erciyuan culture (二次元, literally “two-dimensional”) has negotiated its visibility in Chinese public discourse through the case of Genshin Impact (HoYoverse, 2020). The term erciyuan refers to practices centered on manga, anime, and games in China, which are borrowed from Japanese otaku culture yet carry specific subcultural connotations. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s theory of articulation, this paper explores how subcultural communities, commercial entities, and the state are contingently articulated around erciyuan culture. This articulation has made erciyuan culture highly visible in current China, while simultaneously transforming its cultural practices.

Articulation theory offers a useful way to understand this phenomenon. As Hall explains in an interview with Lawrence Grossberg, articulation is how elements “come, under certain conditions, to cohere together within a discourse, and a way of asking how they do or do not become articulated, at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects” (Grossberg 1986). Genshin Impact exemplifies such articulations. The game brings together three competing articulations whose tensions define debates over Chinese erciyuan culture.

First, Genshin Impact is built upon erciyuan culture: HoYoverse, the developer of the game, is itself rooted in erciyuan culture, with its slogan “tech otakus save the world” signaling this position. The game’s intricate and fragmented narrative inspires players’ fanworks, which lie at the core of erciyuan cultural practices (Greting et al. 2022). The game also performs what Suan (2017) terms anime-esque conventions, using visual and narrative styles typical of Japanese anime. These features make the game appear to have “all the characteristics of a Japanese invention” despite being Chinese, as observed by the New York Times (Dooley and Mozur 2022).

Second, the game employs explicit features of Chinese culture. The Liyue region features architecture inspired by classical Chinese aesthetics, and the character Yun Jin performs in Peking opera styles. These elements have become central to how Chinese state media strategically reframe the game. State media emphasizes the game’s representation of tradition while strategically ignores the anime-esque conventions, regarding Genshin Impact as a vehicle for cultural export, thereby advancing China’s soft power strategy. As Tang and Li (2025) observe, this strategy exemplifies a pragmatic approach to tradition, which treats tradition as a flexible resource for soft power and modern governance.

Third, Genshin Impact achieved unprecedented commercial success. Powered by its gacha mechanic, the game has generated billions in global revenue. Against the background of China’s post-pandemic economic slowdown, such commercial triumph proved particularly significant, rebranding erciyuan culture from “problematic Japanese influence” to “profitable erciyuan economy.” This made erciyuan culture highly visible in current China.

This convergence was unprecedented. In the 2000s, state policies restricted foreign animation on television while erciyuan culture shifted to the internet (Li 2024, 63). Though marginalized in public discourse, erciyuan culture thrived online over two decades, developing distinctive practices and values. Meanwhile, two parallel dynamics emerged: some erciyuan members sought to legitimize this subculture within nationalism discourse, while the state, recognizing erciyuan’s appeal among youth, attempted to incorporate it into official narratives (Lin 2018). These efforts long failed to achieve significant breakthrough. Genshin Impact’s commercial success made this tension impossible to ignore. The game thus became a locus where subcultural members, commercial entities, and the state actively negotiate the meaning and value of erciyuan culture.

To examine these articulations, this paper analyzes three types of materials: (1) game texts from Genshin Impact, including visual design, narrative elements, and cultural representations in regions like Liyue; (2) state narratives from news organizations like People’s Daily, examining how they frame the game as cultural export; and (3) player discussions from online communities such as Bilibili and Zhihu, focusing on the fan debates over the game’s relationship with mainstream discourse.

Rather than offering a narrative of incorporation or resistance, this paper reveals an ongoing negotiation marked by the state’s selective recognition of economic value, commercial capital’s dual imperative to satisfy both erciyuan members and state discourse, and erciyuan members’ internal conflicts over the costs and benefits of mainstreaming. Understanding these dynamics illuminates how transnational popular culture circulates and changes within specific political economies, and how subcultures navigate the tension between seeking mainstream recognition and preserving their distinctive cultures.

Emilienne PARCHLINIAK, From Dragon-Slayer to Dragon-Tamer: How Genshin Impact Reshapes Western Conceptions of Dragons

Genshin Impact, a Role-Playing Game (RPG) released by MiHoYo in 2020, invites players to embark on a heroic journey filled with magic and supernatural beings and creatures such as dragons. The figure of the dragon is found in many cultures all over the world. Its mythological origins make it a consistent motif in fantasy fiction, where dragons serve narrative purposes, acting as obstacles to the progression of heroes and as powerful foes to slay for rewards (Young 2010, Tolkien 2014, Young 2016, Fitzpatrick 2019, Houghton 2024).

Medieval literary traditions feature a similar pattern, as both epic poetry and chivalric romance narrate heroic quests of dragon slaying. The antagonism between heroes and dragons is often highlighted by the latter’s evil characterization. Most prominent examples of such dragons are Fafnir, from the Poetic Edda, and the dragon in Beowulf.1 Indeed, the former is portrayed as particularly evil and wicked, while the latter is described as a dangerous and fearsome creature decimating populations (Tolkien 2007, Honegger 2019). These images were reinterpreted across time—most specifically for cultural, racial, and political purposes during the Renaissance and the Romantic era onwards—thus explaining dragons’ omnipresence in post-medieval fantasy fiction (Torres-Horgueta 2025).

Genshin Impact weaves these Western conceptions into its narrative, specifically in Mondstadt, influenced by German culture and mythology. Yet, the narrative moves on from these conceptions to offer a glimpse at Chinese ones during Liyue’s questline, directly following Mondstadt’s in the first release of the game.

In Chinese mythology, dragons are supernatural beings capable of controlling weather and water. Also named Loong (Zeng 2008, Gao 2025), they are objects of worship, shielding humans from floods and droughts, which is historically consistent with the agricultural environment of Ancient China. As such, they are helpers of heroes as well as symbols of prosperity and vitality, omnipresent in Chinese classical literature (i.e. as metaphors of Chinese poets’ ambitions and ideologies), material culture (e.g. in ceramics and paintings) and cultural practices (e.g. dances and dragon-boat races in rituals and festivities). This phenomenon notably reaches its height with representations of Chinese emperors as dragons (Yang et al. 2005, Chen and Honegger 2009, Xu and Deng 2024).

The aim of this paper will thus be to uncover the diverse uses of dragons in Genshin Impact, while taking into account their multicultural symbolism. To do so, I will proceed with a comparative analysis of the narrative, gameplay and aesthetical elements related to dragons in Mondstadt and Liyue. The narrative trajectory of dragons derived from this analysis will help identify the forms of hybridization and globalization at play, thus questioning the wider cultural and social implications behind these processes.

Yuting ZHENG, Constructing Parasocial Intimacy in Otome Games: A Data-Driven and Autoethnographic Study Based on Love and Deepspace

Building on existing Game Studies research on parasocial relationships and interactive narrative games (e.g. Vella, D., 2015; Chen et al., 2024) and the author's Master's thesis (Zheng, 2025), this study uses Love and Deepspace (Papergames 2024) as a case study to examine how parasocial intimacy between players and virtual characters is constructed and sustained in otome games, foregrounding its gendered configuration through specific game mechanics. This study combines forum-based text analysis and autoethnographic reflection to examine how narrative design, interaction mechanisms, and community participation jointly shape immersive emotional experiences. Drawing on parasocial relationship theory, game character design, and game narrative, this paper proposes an analytical model centered on the "player-avatar-character" ternary relationship, elucidating how parasocial intimacy is generated and maintained in the game world and how emotional connections are formed across the virtual-real boundary.

The findings suggest that parasocial intimacy between players and characters is not a singular act of emotional projection, but a dynamic process that is continuously reinforced through the interplay of game mechanics and community participation. This process demonstrates that narrative and interactive mechanisms not only foster players' emotional attachment to characters, but also enable players to reflect on and renegotiate their emotional identities through communal expression. Ultimately, the paper argues that parasocial intimacy should be understood not merely as a form of narrative consumption, but as an emotionally and culturally meaningful mode of game participation, thereby extending the applicability of parasocial relationship theory within the context of interactive narrative games.

Quantitative analysis of Reddit data reveals several recurring patterns. First, players' emotional investment is strongly character-centered. References to individual characters occur far more frequently than discussions of world-building or settings. While plot developments and key narrative events directly intensify discussion activity, they also function as contextual triggers that amplify parasocial relationship construction beyond character developments alone.

Second, the emotional connection between players and characters presents a gradually deepening dynamic process, which is manifested from the initial expression of emotional stance, the intermediate stage of personality matching and self-identification, to the advanced stage of exclusive fantasy and future situation imagination. In this process, the Reddit community plays the role of affective circulation.

Finally, the distribution and intensity of character-related discussions provide empirical support for the role of character design and narrative structure in constructing parasocial intimacy. Players' emotional orientations toward specific characters vary across event contexts, suggesting that festive and narrative-driven mechanisms are used to strengthen emotional bonds. Character-related discussions exhibit high concentration, expressive richness, and multi-layered emotions, indicating the continued deepening of parasocial intimacy within external communities and the strong resonance generated by narrative design and character charm.

Furthermore, qualitative analysis indicates that players' emotional investment in game characters emerges not only from narrative guidance, but also from players' own emotional projection. Player-driven narrative moments effectively respond to players' emotional expectations, functioning as a key mechanism that strengthen emotional bonds and promote continuous participation.

From a symbolic interactionist perspective (Silverstone, 1999; Goffman, 2023), otome games construct an immersive virtual space through symbolic systems such as narrative text, visual art, and sound design. Players have absolute initiative in their perception and interpretation of situations. They not only gain aesthetic experience from visual and auditory symbols, but also gain real emotional support through interaction with characters in the game world. This support is reflected in an immersive sense of companionship, satisfaction in exploring intimacy, and reflection and construction of real emotional identities.

Based on the parasocial relationship theory (Horton et al., 1956), this paper expands the applicability of parasocial intimacy in the context of interactive narrative games. It proposes a multi-level analytical framework in which emotional projection, situational construction, and affective circulation serve as central components of relationship maintenance, demonstrating how parasocial intimacy is co-constructed across game worlds and the real world. This extension makes the parasocial intimacy theory not only applicable to traditional television, idols, or social media contexts, but also to highly participatory and immersive game media, indicating that the generation and maintenance of parasocial intimacy is the result of a complex collaboration between game players and game characters, game mechanisms, as well as social platforms.

From a methodological perspective, while mixed-method approaches are well established in Game Studies, this study adopts a combined approach that is particularly suited to examining the relationship between players' subjective emotional experiences and collective forms of expression, offering an operational and explanatory framework for analyzing emotional participation in digital games.

This study also points out that parasocial intimacy in otome games is essentially still a human-machine interaction and cannot completely replace intimacy in real life, but the emotions experienced by players are real and profound. This also raises an important issue about how to strike a balance between technical efficiency and emotional depth.

Thiago SANTOS & Daniel LEITE COSTA, The Neuroscience of Desire: Dopamine, Intermittent Reinforcement, and Player Retention in Genshin Impact (Remote)

The phenomenal success of gacha games like Genshin Impact (HoYoverse 2020) presents a core puzzle for developers and researchers. How do these games maintain such a massive, engaged player base, driving retention that outpaces many traditional titles? (JCOMA 2025). The conventional answer, and often simplistic, one is that the game is simply "fun." However, this explanation fails to address the persistent, near-compulsive behavior that gacha systems can induce (Skeptic.org.uk 2024). The public discourse frequently compares these mechanics to gambling (Wu & Singh 2023) , but this comparison, while accurate, often lacks a neuroscientific explanation of why the loop is so effective. We assume retention is driven by the "joy of winning," but this assumption confuses the experience of pleasure with the mechanism of motivation.

This paper argues that the retention model of Genshin Impact is not primarily built on the pleasure of possessing a reward, but on the deliberate engineering of the desire to seek that reward. This is not a semantic distinction; it is a fundamental neurobiological dissociation. Drawing from the Incentive-Sensitization Theory (Berridge, Robinson, & Aldridge 2009; Berridge & Robinson 2016) , we posit that gacha systems are optimized to exploit the dopaminergic "Wanting" system, rather than the "Liking" system. "Liking" is the hedonic pleasure, which is neurologically fragile (Berridge 2009). "Wanting" is the incentive salience, the motivational drive, which is powered by dopamine and is neurologically robust (Berridge & Robinson 2016; Robinson & Berridge 1998; Berridge 2007). The thesis of this paper is that Genshin Impact functions as a motivational architecture designed to neurologically "sensitize" the player's "Wanting" system (Linnet 2014; Robinson & Berridge 2025), creating a persistent seeking-behavior loop that becomes dissociated from the actual pleasure obtained.

To prove this thesis, we synthesize two foundational lines of research:

Neuroscience of Reward: We analyze the seminal neuroscientific literature of Berridge and Robinson (2016) to establish the neurochemical dissociation between "Wanting" (Dopamine) and "Liking" (Opioids). We demonstrate that dopamine is not a "pleasure molecule" but a neurotransmitter of anticipation, motivation, and incentive salience (Berridge 2007; Linnet 2014; bioRxiv 2025).

To ground this distinction, it is crucial to observe the anatomical disparity between these two systems in the brain.

The "Wanting" System: This system is vast and resilient. It is mediated by the mesocorticolimbic dopamine system, projecting from the midbrain to broad structures such as the nucleus accumbens, the amygdala, and the prefrontal cortex. It is a robust system, evolutionarily designed to ensure goal pursuit.

The "Liking" System: In contrast, this system is anatomically restricted and fragile. Berridge’s research identifies specific zones called "hedonic hotspots." Unlike the desire system, the generation of pleasure requires the unanimous and simultaneous activation of these small points via opioid or endocannabinoid neurotransmitters. This means the human brain possesses a vast and easily activatable capacity for desire, but a limited and delicate capacity for pure pleasure—an asymmetry that gacha games aggressively exploit.

Behavioral Psychology: We revisit the foundational work of B.F. Skinner (Ferster & Skinner 1957) on operant conditioning to identify the precise psychological mechanism used to train this "Wanting" system. We focus specifically on the distinction between continuous and intermittent reinforcement (Lim 2024; Lerman & Iwata 1996).

By overlaying the neurobiology (the why) onto the behavioral psychology (the how), we can dissect the design of Genshin Impact's "Wish" system as an engine for motivational engineering.

Our analysis reveals a synergy of two systems. First, the neurobiological evidence shows that the mesolimbic dopamine system is the motor of "Wanting" (Berridge & Robinson 2016). Dopamine is crucial for the anticipation of reward and for assigning salience to the "cues" that predict it (Linnet 2014; Berridge 2009).

The exact mechanics of how this functions in Genshin Impact can be explained through the experiment by Wyvell and Berridge (2001). In this study, rats received microinjections of amphetamine in the nucleus accumbens to increase dopamine. The result was not a constant increase in food-seeking, but rather a dramatic amplification of desire "spikes" triggered specifically by an auditory cue (a tone) that predicted sugar. Without the tone, behavior was normal; with the tone, desire exploded into intense transient peaks. Berridge describes this as "mountains of desire resting on a plateau."

In Genshin Impact, the "Event Banners" (JCOMA 2025; Komad 2024) function precisely as these cues, activating dopaminergic "Wanting". The character art, the red notification, and the countdown timer are triggers that, in a game-sensitized brain, fire these irrational spikes of motivation. With repeated exposure, this system can become "sensitized" (Linnet 2014; Robinson & Berridge 2025) , leading to a "pathological 'wanting'" where the desire to seek surpasses the expected pleasure of the reward—the neurological basis of compulsion (Berridge 2009).

Second, the behavioral evidence identifies the mechanism of reward delivery. We revisit B.F. Skinner’s foundational work on operant conditioning to identify the exact psychological mechanism used to train this 'Wanting' system. We focus specifically on the distinction between continuous and intermittent reinforcement. The gacha system is a textbook implementation of B.F. Skinner's "Variable-Ratio (VR) Schedule" (Komad 2024; JCOMA 2025; Wu & Singh 2023; FTC 2024). A VR schedule, which provides reinforcement after an unpredictable number of responses, is the most potent psychological mechanism known.

Skinner's research (Ferster & Skinner 1957) discovered that VR produces (a) the highest, most stable rate of response and (b) the greatest resistance to extinction (Lim 2024; McLeod 2023). It is, by definition, the schedule most resistant to extinction (Lim 2024). The "pity system" of Genshin Impact (Anunpattana, Khalid, & Iida 2025) acts as a superimposed "Fixed-Ratio (FR) Schedule," which prevents total extinction and exploits the sunk cost fallacy (Yuan 2024) , further locking the player into the loop.

In this context, players perform wishes using Primogems or Fates, primarily to obtain five-star items. However, each wish has a very low base probability of generating a five-star result. Yet, repeated failure does not stop the behavior, as the absence of reward does not signal failure, but merely delay. As discussed, intermittent reinforcement produces greater resistance to extinction and a higher number of responses (Skinner, 1938). In Skinner’s framework, extinction refers to the gradual reduction and eventual disappearance of a learned behavior when reinforcement is no longer provided; it is marked by a decline in response frequency, rather than forgetting or unlearning (Skinner, 1953). Therefore, the response rate can be spiked once more with the introduction of a new reinforcer (such as a new five-star item).

The contribution of this analysis for GachaCon is to reframe the debate on retention and monetization. The industry discussion, often focused on "fun" (the 'Liking'), is looking at the wrong metric. The core gacha design loop is not optimized for pleasure; it is optimized for motivation.

The "Variable-Ratio Schedule" (the gacha) is the behavioral mechanism (Part II) that activates and "sensitizes" the neurological "Wanting" system (Part I). The result is the manufacture of a "pathological 'wanting'" (Linnet 2014), a compulsive desire to make the next 'pull' that is neurologically independent of the 'liking' for the item eventually won (Berridge & Robinson 2016; Berridge 2009). For developers, regulators, and researchers, this is critical: The success of Genshin Impact demonstrates a retention model based not on player pleasure, but on the engineering of a self-perpetuating neurological desire, rooted in the vast anatomy of dopamine and triggered by carefully designed visual cues.

Callum DEERY & Francesca FOFFANO, Disability tax in gacha games: the social cost of hidden expenses

Whenever a disabled gamer purchases a game, they are faced with the risk that the game will not be accessible to them. USD$60 wasted (Luis Levy 2011). Free-to-play games have the potential to reduce this risk. However new models of monetisation recreate an old accessibility challenge: the disability tax (Olsen et al. 2022). This paper will use Genshin Impact (MiHoYo 2020) as a case study to discuss current accessibility challenges disabled players face in gacha and other free-to-play games. We will analyze three design elements: pay-to-progress, daily login, and character power creep. Illustrating how the use of these designs in Geshin Impact weaponises stuckness and creates disability taxes.

A disability tax refers to the additional labor, both economical and emotional, and expenditure incurred and paid by a disabled person through their life (Olsen et al. 2022). This concept is used to describe the increased labor faced by marginalised groups. Most famously the “pink” tax, where products “for women” are placed in a pink box and at a higher price than those “for men” (Olsen et al. 2022). Accessibility taxes are a form of disability tax where people with disabilities have to pay to remove an access barrier (Olsen et al. 2022). For example: a person who uses a wheelchair may have to purchase a modified car to travel to work. Disability taxes also exist within gaming, returning to our initial example of purchasing a game: To attempt to determine if a game is accessible to them a disabled player must seek accessibility focused reviews (Can Play That 2025), find online discussions from players with similar access needs, and playthrough videos to attempt to make that judgement. This represents a large amount of time and emotional labor involved in the purchase of a game. And if the player gets it wrong, and the game does contain an access barrier, then there goes USD$60. Accessibility taxes also exist in gaming, in the form of accessible remasters (Laura Dale 2025) and the high cost of accessible controllers ~USD$100 (Xbox.Com, n.d.).

The removal of upfront costs enabled by free-to-play models has the potential to reduce game’s disability tax and make gaming more accessible. However, current monetisation model designs create new accessibility taxes through the pressure of progression blocking systems. For example, some studies found that designing an unbalanced experience can create states in which the player is stuck as a consequence of their inability to progress the game (Foffano 2023). A designer could create intentionally unbalanced boss fights to push players to buy more expensive items in order to succeed. This creates an even higher mismatch between the player abilities required and a disabled player (Beeston et al. 2018) with the consequence of forcing them to have to pay their way to continue the experience. Indeed some studies highlight the social cost dark patterns can have on vulnerable populations (Zhang et al. 2025; Gray et al. 2018) such as in our case of disabled players who have to pay for access. This contrasts with the specific barrier moments which existing accessibility research seeks to address (Cairns et al. 2019; Hassan 2024).

We argue this emerges from three designs utilised in Genshin Impact and other free-to-play games:

Pay-to-progress: This refers to a set of systems which restrict a player’s progress unless they pay, for example requiring a player to wait hours for a task to complete. These waits increase with progression, eventually players become stuck waiting for meaningful progression. In Genshin Impact this takes the form of the ‘resin’ system which is spent to acquire items, where players have to either pay or wait for it to recharge.

Daily login: In this system players are required to engage with a game for a specific amount of time on a daily basis, and are punished with reduced rewards before for engaging for longer or for not engaging. A player who does not keep up regular engagement with this system will fall behind and eventually run out of resources, becoming stuck. In Genshin Impact this is the ‘commission’ system, daily quests which reward players with virtual currency.

Character power creep: Common in gacha games, this is a design where new characters are created to be more powerful than previous ones. This is to incentivise players to acquire or purchase new characters. A player who does not will face increasing challenges until they become stuck. In Genshin Impact this is core to the gacha system.

However, these designs are playtested and balanced around an assumption of an able-bodied player, ignoring the specific need and impact for disabled players. This results in a situation where an access barrier in any one of these gameplay systems can create a feedback loop of reduced resources, building to a player being forced to pay or have the game become inaccessible to them. In this paper we demonstrated how design practices aimed to increase engagement and monetization can widen the gap of inaccessibility for disabled players, forcing payment of a disability tax to continue engaging with a game. We invite more careful consideration and further studies in mapping this issue.

Session 3 – Gender & Culture

Joleen BLOM, The gacha monetization trends of women’s leisure

Gacha games have become the centre piece for many cross- and transmedia franchises. The change from gacha games to being peripheral to centre has led to game characters being used as fuel to monetize games. In the first part of the presentation, I will briefly reflect on my previous work on Genshin Impact’s gacha monetization model, and the model’s impact on the game’s romance- and friendship system. Games always already tend to frame romantic relationships as transactional, but free-to-play game monetization increases player labour and amplifies the transactional nature of parasocial relationships.

Following from this reflection, I will discuss in the second part of the presentation how Genshin Impact’s global success opened pathways to new venues of gamblified women’s leisure by focusing on my work in progress about current gacha monetization trends in women’s digital leisure. East Asian popular culture has gained a strong foothold across European and North American societies, contributing to the increasing acceptance of women’s leisure and gaming in the mainstream. This influence is visible in the surge of popularity of otome games that use gacha mechanics, and of cute character toys sold in blind boxes. However, I will argue that contemporary otome games exemplify issues of player optimization, gamblification, potential exploitation of labour, and privacy infringements embedded in their monetization and design structures, as a result of free-to-play games’ reliance on a platform logic. These issues, then, demand a rethinking on the consequences and ethical responsibility of the current logic of leisure and consumption.

Siyu SONG, Ritualizing the Parasocial: Dream-Girl Practices and Transmedia Intimacy in Genshin Impact

“Dream-girl” (yume-joshi) practices have typically been described as modes of self-insert romantic identification, in which players explicitly imagine themselves as being in intimate relationships with fictional characters (Giard 2022; Andlauer 2019). In this paper, I examine dream-girl practices such as tarot-based “dream divination” and Y/N (Your/Name) second-person fanfiction within Genshin Impact’s Chinese female player communities, focusing on how participants ritualize these practices to negotiate the tension between gacha’s transactional mechanics and their desire for affective reciprocity through transmedia practices.

Parasocial relationships have long been theorized in relation to celebrity and idol fandoms (Yano 2004; Song & Fox 2016), but their reconfiguration within game worlds has only recently begun to receive attention. Otome game studies demonstrate how players cultivate attachment through branching romance mechanics, character-driven choice structures, and intensive interpretive community labor (Kim 2009; Ganzon 2019; Tosca & Klastrup 2019). By contrast, non-otome dream-girl practices in gacha games such as Genshin pose a different set of questions: how do players navigate emotional surplus in the absence of romance routes, and how do they extend attachments into adjacent ritual and textual spaces? Recent studies of free-to-play games highlight how monetization design, affective reward cycles, and the uncertainty of randomized systems jointly structure player experience (Alha 2020; Nielsen & Grabarczyk 2019; Woods 2021). Blom’s (2023, 2025) observes that Genshin’s dynamic characters circulate across multiple media yet remain narratively closed, producing affective cues while limiting relational articulation. Building on this, I treat dream-girl practices as one response to this managed incompleteness, revealing how players creatively negotiate, inhabit, and ritualize the structural limits of non-romance gacha games.

This study draws on three months of digital ethnography (2025) in Genshin’s Chinese dream-girl communities. Guided by close reading, I analyzed 7 tarot-divination posts, 7 self-insert Y/N second-person romances, and over 100 Xiaohongshu comment threads to examine how players transform popular male characters (Zhongli, Diluc, Kamisato Ayato) into intimate presences through ritualized interpretation that stretch beyond the game’s formal interface.

My analysis proceeds in two parts. First, I examine tarot-based “dream divination” as an interpretive technology through which players navigate gacha uncertainty and render its probabilistic logics emotionally and metaphysically legible. I read these draws as compact expressions of how players recast opaque computational processes as messages and relational cues. This dynamic can be situated within existing work on user engagements with algorithmic opacity. Bucher’s (2018) notion of algorithmic imaginaries describes how people construct culturally meaningful explanations for computational processes, while Seaver’s (2019) frames algorithms as rhythms that invite participation rather than as detached manipulative forces. Dream-girl tarot resonates with both views, transforming algorithmic outputs into messages imagined as addressed to the player.

Second-person (Y/N) writing extends this interpretive work into narrative form and into the cadence of everyday life. Rather than producing long, communal fanfiction, many players write brief, intimate scenarios as daily micro-practices of small gestures of care that they offer to and receive from characters, subtly aligning their moods and routines with the imagined rhythms of these virtual others. In these texts, the pronoun “you” functions as a device of invocation, animating characters outside the game’s narrative loops and staging a conversational proximity that the game itself never grants. In the absence of romance routes, writing becomes an affective interface through which players sustain proximity to emotionally expressive yet unreachable characters. These textual rituals echo findings in otome studies that repetition and small-scale narrative crafting can operate as practices of emotional maintenance and self-regulation (Andlauer 2018; Kim 2009), but in a context where explicit romance remains unavailable.

Taken together, tarot and Y/N writing approximate what Burton (2020) terms “remixed religion”: personalized, syncretic ritual systems emerging within ostensibly secular digital cultures. These ritualized attempts work to summon presence and responsiveness from a system and from characters that, by design, cannot truly reciprocate. Rather than irrational excess, they constitute structured strategies for stabilizing attachment and producing emotional coherence under conditions of algorithmic indifference and can be read as a vernacular form of digital spirituality organized around one-to-one devotion to an algorithmically mediated other.

Finally, the paper situates these findings within broader debates on games of chance, play, and contingency. As critiques have noted, Genshin encourages deep emotional investment while withholding relational fulfillment, channeling attachment toward spending (Nielsen & Grabarczyk 2019; Woods 2021). Dream-girl rituals can thus be read more than compensatory practices but also as situated critiques of a system that renders affection itself profitable. By tracing these practices, this study reframes dream-girl engagement as creative negotiation with the emotional architecture of gacha games. Genshin Impact’s combination of affective abundance and relational closure generates a fertile environment for alternative intimacies, and dream-girl rituals reveal how players extend the game sideways through divination, writing, and interpretive networks to craft recognition and emotional coherence beyond the interface.

Luyao LIU, From "Gacha Commodities" to "Desiring Subjects": A Transnational Feminist Analysis of Female Fanfiction Practices in Genshin Impact

This study examines how female/female (F/F) fanfiction writers on AO3 and LOFTER reinterpret the hyper-feminized characters of Genshin Impact (miHoYo 2020) within the affective economies of digital capitalism. The game’s gacha system structures anticipation, scarcity, and emotional attachment as forms of productive value (Woods 2022), positioning female characters such as Ganyu and Raiden Shogun as affective commodities. Against this backdrop, women’s fanfiction becomes a space where gendered meaning is reorganized. Rather than reinforcing the game’s logic of docility, eroticization, or emotional service, fan writers construct alternative configurations of intimacy, care, and desire that complicate how feminine subjectivity is imagined within platform capitalism. These rewritings form the basis for interpreting fanfiction as feminist affective labor: creative work that negotiates the absorption of women’s emotional investments into digital economies while simultaneously generating relational value and agency.

Building on scholarship on Chinese fandom, digital labor, and the circulation of desire (Hou 2014; Li and Yang 2015; Yang 2023; Yuan 2024), the study addresses a gap in existing research. While prior work examines Chinese fan culture and the gendered logics of digital gaming, little attention has been given to how F/F fanfiction reconfigures female characters across different platform ecologies or how these rewritings enact feminist agency through affective transformation. This study contributes to that gap by analyzing how AO3 and LOFTER—two platforms shaped by divergent sociotechnical environments—produce distinct feminist possibilities through which women reinterpret the affective labor embedded in Genshin Impact.

Methodologically, the project conducts close readings of sixteen F/F fanfictions across two dominant pairings: Ganyu/Keqing and Ei/Yae Miko, selected based on their visibility, narrative completeness, and circulation within each platform’s F/F fandom ecology. The comparison focuses on how writers redistribute emotional labor, reframe bodily vulnerability, reorganize intimacy, and construct queer desire in relation to each platform’s expressive norms and governance structures. AO3’s anti-censorship ethos and liberal queer infrastructure support explicit articulations of erotic autonomy, temporal refusal, and embodied vulnerability. LOFTER’s censored and relationally oriented environment encourages coded intimacy, soft authority, and emotional apprenticeship, producing a quieter but equally meaningful feminist grammar. Together, these sites illustrate how feminist creativity adapts to platform constraints, shaping the emotional and political possibilities available to female fans.

The analysis finds that AO3 narratives consistently reconstruct Ganyu and Ei through forms of agency centered on desire, mutuality, and the rejection of disciplinary temporalities. Through scenes that emphasize bodily sensitivity, erotic confession, and relational reciprocity, AO3 authors position feminine subjectivity as grounded in embodied need and shared affect. These portrayals reinterpret exhaustion, desire, and vulnerability as resources for rethinking what feminine autonomy can look like within digital capitalism.

LOFTER narratives, shaped by censorship, moral expectations such as suzhi, and community risk-management norms, articulate a different constellation of feminine agency. Here, intimacy is expressed through tenderness, jealousy softened into insecurity, metaphor, and emotional calibration. Rather than direct refusals of discipline, LOFTER texts foreground mutual reliance, coded desire, and the cultivation of emotional safety. Feminist meaning emerges through relational negotiation and incremental trust, not through explicit transgression. These differences reflect the unequal expressive conditions that structure Chinese digital publics and highlight how F/F fanfiction becomes a site where women practice coded labor to sustain queer attachment.

Placing the two platforms in dialogue demonstrates how transnational feminist analysis can explain the movement of gendered meaning across global infrastructures. Following Grewal and Kaplan (2001) and Tsing (2011), the study conceptualizes AO3 and LOFTER not as cultural opposites but as distinct epistemic regimes that structure how feminist knowledge becomes thinkable. Feminine agency is thus produced through friction: erotic autonomy on AO3, relational caretaking on LOFTER. Both modes unsettle Genshin Impact’s canonical construction of feminine docility, yet each does so through platform-specific affective grammars shaped by geopolitical, technological, and linguistic asymmetries.

Taken together, these findings suggest that F/F fanfiction offers a lens for understanding how gendered meaning is negotiated within the uneven conditions of global digital capitalism. Rather than positioning fan creativity as inherently resistant or transformative, the analysis highlights how affective labor circulates across platforms in ways that are shaped by their infrastructures of visibility, regulation, and relational practice. The contrast between AO3 and LOFTER points to how different sociotechnical environments invite distinct articulations of intimacy, agency, and desire, allowing fan authors to reorganize affective attachments in ways that matter within their specific contexts. While the study focuses on two characters and two platforms, it outlines a platform-centered approach for examining how feminist meaning-making emerges through the interplay of narrative, emotion, and digital governance in transnational environments. This perspective emphasizes the situated nature of fan authorship and offers a grounded way to understand how feminist possibilities are shaped, limited, and reconfigured within contemporary digital cultures.

Hanjun SHI, Evaluating the Reception of Classical Greek Mythology in Genshin Impact: A Case Study of Enkanomiya Region (Remote)

In current classical game studies, the Graeco-Roman classical culture in digital games has become a significant aspect (Rollinger, 2020). Academic research usually focuses on the usage of classics in games produced and played in North America and Europe (Clare, 2021). For example, Ross Clare (2021) proposed a valid framework for understanding the vibrant mixture of European-themed classical games influenced by modern and ancient historical materials and their receptions, along with surrounding mythology and folklore. Furthermore, Dom Ford (2025) suggested the concept of ‘mytholudics’ as an analytical structure to understand classical-related games as a type of mythology, along with their surrounding folklore. Recently, the Mythological Game Studies Conference (2025) featured more than thirty papers that explored transcultural narratives, including the Graeco-Roman-inspired game Hades (Supergiant Games, 2020) and the tabletop role-playing game Lex Arcana (Colovini et al., 1993), set in the background of the Western Roman Empire.

Recently, Graeco-Roman inspirations have become increasingly prominent in East Asian games. A notable example of this is the immensely popular role-playing game Genshin Impact, developed by the Chinese studio HoYoVerse in 2020. In the game, the player assumes the role of a traveller looking for their lost sibling. The fantasy world of ‘Teyvat’, in which the game is set, heavily incorporates Ancient Greek cultural references within its storylines, which are set in the Enkanomiya region, allowing players to engage with on-screen events and explore classical-inspired narratives. The Ancient Greek inspirations within the game have been analysed by Wang’s (2024) paper on how Genshin Impact retold the folklore of Atlantis through the lens of Japanese mythology in Enkanomiya’s storyline, and Thomas’s (2025) work on the transcultural combination and Graeco-Roman receptions within Genshin Impact. Apart from its classical elements, the game has also been well researched in its portrayal of the ‘Chineseness’ (Li and Li, 2023), or the emergence of Chinese soft power demonstrated by the delicate multicultural representation within the game (Tang and Li, 2025).

Thus, this article will examine the use of classical Greek elements in Genshin Impact’s storytelling, following Rachael Hutchinson’s (2019) research framework to analyse the textual and visual representations in the game. Through a dynamic reimagining of Plato’s philosophy, the video game created an alternative underground civilisation similar to Atlantis within the Enkanomiya region. This civilisation is depicted with stunning remnants of classical Greek columns, rich narration and dialogues involving Greek mythology and folklore figures (e.g., Helios, Phaethon, Ouroboros), and breathtaking cutscenes showing the beauty of the marvellous palace beneath an abyss. Players could explore the integration of Japanese mythology and Greek folklore in this region, including interactions with the classical Greek figures and performing rituals inspired by Greek and Japanese mythology.

The integration reflects a cultural pattern that moved away from the anachronism and multiculturalism typical of Japanese animation and games, which was influenced by the Japanese role-playing games’ multiculturalism traditions, and has heavily received popularity in mainland China since the 1990s (Liao, 2016). The Ancient Greek cultural integration can also be referred to another HoYoVerse game, Honkai: Star Rail (2023). Previously, scholars also discussed the multiculturalism traditions in the Japanese game industry. While Iwabuchi (2002) considered Japanese games using the ‘cultural odourless’ effects to achieve global success, Miyake (2015) argued that the Japanese creative cultural industry was also heavily based on Self-Orientalism and cultural stereotypes, employing parodies to soften strict themes and attract attention in the worldwide entertainment market. In Genshin Impact, compared to the previous passive Japanese cultural industry strategy, the depiction of diverse cultures originated from a more proactive multicultural approach nourished by the Chinese government’s official cultural policies (Tang and Li, 2025). Overall, this essay aims to contribute to the research on classical reception and the influence of multiculturalism in East Asian games, bridging the current studies of Genshin Impact on its Chinese influence with the classical reception studies.

Session 4 – China

Yixiang QUE, Teresa DE LA HERA, & Jeroen JANSZ, Playing to Belong: The Role of Cultural Experience in Shaping Cultural Identity among Chinese Mobile Game Players

This research aims to investigate how Chinese mobile game players experience the representation of Chinese intangible cultural heritage, and how such experience plays a role in the formation and enhancement of their cultural identity. We conducted 18 semi-structured interviews in China to gain insights with China mobile game players.

Hong ZENG & Xiaoxuan HUANG, Spectacularizing China: Cultural Heritage and Visual World-Building in Genshin Impact

Genshin Impact (miHoYo, 2020) was released in September 2020, against the prevailing trend of guofeng games in China. The term guofeng (literally “national style”) refers to games that portray lifestyles, aesthetics, and artistic expressions rooted in traditional Chinese culture. Industry reports (GPC & CNG, 2021) indicate that most original gaming intellectual properties (IPs) in China are encapsulated within this guofeng category.

As a Chinese-developed open-world role-playing game designed for a global market, Genshin Impact presents multiple regions inspired by diverse cultural backgrounds, with the region of Liyue representing China. Described by The New York Times as “a smash hit from China” (Dooley & Mozur, 2022), the game has also sparked heated debates, particularly regarding the question of its “Chineseness” (Li & Li, 2023). Scholars have noted how Genshin Impact promotes traditional Chinese culture through its representation of elements such as Cantonese cuisine (Horn, 2025) and Peking opera (Que et al., 2025). Moreover, in July 2021, Genshin Impact was officially selected by China’s Ministry of Commerce as one of the national “Chinese Cultural Export” projects (Ministry of Commerce, 2021), further situating it within the state’s game-going-global strategy.

Our study compares Genshin Impact’s appropriation of Chinese cultural heritage in its representational design with that of Canal Towns, a game produced by Coconut Island Games, one of China’s pioneering independent studios (Coconut Island, 2020). Unlike Genshin Impact, Canal Towns was developed primarily for domestic players, with its release version exclusively in Chinese. Through an analysis of the game’s representation of Chinese culture and archival research into the design teams’ stated concepts and approaches, we argue that although both Genshin Impact and Canal Towns draw inspiration from Ming- and early Qing-dynasty heritage elements in their representational choices (Wardaya et al., 2024), the resulting aesthetic effects are markedly different.

Canal Towns, inspired by the renowned Ming-dynasty scroll painting Along the River During the Qingming Festival and informed by extensive research on historical vernacular dwellings, immerses players in the rhythms of everyday life in Yangtze river towns. It foregrounds ordinary residential, commercial, and industrial architectures set amid gentle hills and winding rivers in the countryside. Gameplay experiences are structured around daily practices and spatial routines, emphasizing quotidian social relations instead of spectacle. By contrast, Liyue constructs a spectacular China through extraordinary visual symbols. The design of its main town draws primarily from Fenghuang Ancient Town in Hunan, whose urban fabric follows the contours of the Tuojiang River, featuring stilted wooden houses (diaojiaolou) perched along the riverbanks—an architecturally distinctive form within China.

Meanwhile, players traversing Genshin Impact’s landscapes encounter artistic references to some of China’s most iconic natural sites—Zhangjiajie National Forest Park, the Huanglong Scenic Area, and the Guilin karst landscape—all celebrated for their dramatic landforms and prominence as major tourist attractions. These sites are featured as destinations to be awed and consumed, rather than as ordinary spaces shaped by everyday labor, habitation, or recreation. This suggests that, much like the cinematic spectacularisation seen in early 2000s Chinese blockbuster films targeting global audiences (Chan and Stuckey, 2021), the imperatives embedded in China’s game-going-global strategy may have encouraged the design team to spectacularize China’s natural and cultural beauty. Such a mode of representation risks simplifying complex social realities while producing a visually legible and exportable image of China for global consumption.

Tianyi ZHANGSHAO, Ben EGLISTON, & Marcus CARTER, Game Monetisation in China: A Gameworker’s Perspective (Awarded best paper prize!)

With the rise of the games-as-a-service model, monetisation design has undergone a significant transformation, particularly through the widespread adoption of microtransactions (Tomić 2017). New monetisation designs based on microtransactions, such as loot boxes, have generated considerable controversy due to their proximity to gambling-like practices (Zendle et al. 2019), prompting increasing regulatory scrutiny worldwide (Xiao 2024). Scholars have sought to understand how game producers perceive monetisation design primarily from an ethical standpoint. For example, Karlsen (2022) argues that developers’ ethical positions vary according to their scale and business model, noting that freemium-oriented studios often downplay their ethical responsibilities by prioritising profit maximisation. Similarly, Denoo and Patrovskaya (2025) investigate practitioners’ principles for implementing monetisation systems and identify a general absence of safeguards to mitigate excessive player spending. Although prior research has explored how developers understand monetisation, this work has largely focused on Western contexts. China, by contrast, offers a distinct setting due to the unique developmental trajectory of its game industry (Lu and Liu 2025), and its current landscape of being mobile-centric production alongside a growing indie development culture (Bao 2022; Davies 2024).

This study aims to understand how Chinese gameworkers navigate and negotiate monetisation within the intersecting commercial, creative, and institutional logics of contemporary media production. We adopt the term gameworkers (Keogh 2023) to emphasise that monetisation is shaped not only by design decisions but by the broader dynamics of game work. We recruited 24 Chinese gameworkers across a range of occupations directly involved in monetisation decisions, including publishers, designers, developers, investors, and studio owners. While the study was not specifically focused on freemium games, 21 participants had experience working on freemium projects. Participants were interviewed about their working practices and their reflections on monetisation. All interview data were transcribed and coded, and the researchers employed grounded theory methods (Charmaz 2006) to identify patterns, generate conceptual categories, and develop an inductive account of how monetisation is understood and enacted within Chinese game production.

Our analysis revealed that monetisation was navigated across three interrelated levels: the business of games, the design of games, and the dilemmas inherent in monetising games. Monetisation practices in China were strongly influenced by industry norms, market pressures, and the regulatory environment. Chinese gameworkers approached monetisation primarily through the lens of game category, an industrial classification based on market, platform, and business considerations, rather than game genre, which is more closely tied to gameplay and content. Within these highly competitive markets, gambling-like designs such as loot boxes were often legitimised, as gameworkers perceived them to enhance their chances of commercial survival. This anxiety over survival was further amplified by the regulatory environment, particularly the numerous licensing systems, which inadvertently incentivised companies to recover rising development and marketing costs through monetisation mechanisms like loot boxes. Based on the findings, we argue that Chinese gameworkers were compelled to adopt a “commercialised production ethos” that priorities profits in response to the structural conditions of industrial norms, market pressure and regulatory environments, regardless of personal preference. However, fully embracing this ethos can be problematic, as it shapes how Chinese gameworkers conceptualise creativity and ethical design. We recommend increasing transparency in regulations that affect game production and fostering closer collaboration among industry, academia, and government, to enable developers to better balance commercial viability with ethical and creative considerations.

Lukas N. EGGERT, The Dialectical Governance of Digital Gaming in China: Fusing Digital Developmentalism with Ideological Discipline

Day 2

Session 5 – Travelling Beyond Genshin

Anh-Thu Cathy NGUYEN, Touring Teyvat: Genshin Impact’s Themed Open World as Ludic Tourism

Central to the gameplay experience of Genshin Impact is its vast open world, featuring plenty of different regions, cities, and other points of interest to fill its space. Enticing players with rewards and compelling scenery, the spatial logic foregrounds player-induced exploration in a coherent world with different lands akin to theme park areas. This talk examines Teyvat’s lands closely, arguing that their arrangement and exploration are consciously inspired by specific cultures, from European medieval fantasy, Japanese Shintoism, to ancient China. Through the commodification of these cultures into lands, the regions carry a touristic appeal through which they are gazed at; at the same time, through the logics of theming, they simplify and streamline cultures to convey a predominantly visual appeal for a tourist gaze in a ludic context rather than a thorough representation of a culture. It is precisely this ambivalence in which Genshin Impact excels, creating a visually attractive world with characters embodying such themes. At the same time, more recent expansions such as the region of Natlan, presumably inspired by Indigenous regions of America, Africa, and Oceania, provoke a more critical assessment of turning cultures into thematic lands for consumption.

Courtney LAZORE, Leaving Teyvat: Gendered Expectations and Exit Discourses

What drives players to quit a game they’ve invested significant time, money, and effort into? Even as one of the most successful and well-known gacha games, Genshin Impact (miHoYo 2020) has not been immune to player criticisms. Especially after the release of the Natlan expansion, players have expressed dissatisfaction with the game’s direction, the lack of diverse character representation, and the potential for cultural appropriation. Many players have publicly commented about their intent to quit the game. Interestingly, numerous players specifically named Love and Deepspace (Papergames 2024), another gacha game, as a replacement or supplement.

While much has been written about gacha monetization structures, player engagement, and creative communities around games, less attention has been paid to player exit narratives as a meaningful form of player practice. Game studies scholarship recognizes that what players do outside of the game world is central to the study of play. T.L. Taylor (2006) discusses how “extra-game” spaces, such as online discussion boards and fan-organized contexts, are an integral part of the player experience. Similarly, social media sites and Reddit have been established as rich sources for qualitative research on online communities through methods such as netnography (Kozinets 2015) and digital ethnography (Hine 2000). While this study does not rely on ethnographic methodology, it draws on these frameworks to treat Reddit as a meaningful space for player practice, interaction, and critique.

Prior research on players leaving games has often focused on contexts that are not player-initiated, such as game shutdowns (Pearce 2011) and network quality (Chen, Huang, & Lei 2009). Negative player experiences have also been examined, including disengaging from games due to addiction (Lee, Yu, & Lin 2007). Less work has focused on player-initiated quitting or disengagement. A study by Hou et al. (2011) applied migration theory and the push-pull-mooring model to players switching between MMORPG games, finding that switching games was more strongly influenced by the appeal of new games and existing investments in the current game than by dissatisfaction with the current game alone. Additionally, one longitudinal study on game design and player retention (Strååt and Verhagen 2018) investigated how player interest in a specific game declines over time, as players report frustrations related to opaque reward systems, diminishing appeal, repetitive gameplay, and narrative coherence. Building on this work, the present study centers the lived experiences of players who intentionally quit or disengage from a game as a meaningful form of critique.

This paper presents a thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006) of about 400 comments left in a Reddit thread about player migration from Genshin Impact to Love and Deepspace. The preliminary analysis suggests that quitting or disengaging from Genshin Impact functions as critical commentary and rejection of game design and direction, not necessarily a rejection of gacha genre and mechanics.

A major theme in the dataset involves players' frustrations with character design, specifically a lack of male five-star characters and more attention placed on catering to the male audience with sexualized female characters. Similar frustration occurred over Natlan’s storylines and perceived bad writing, in contrast to earlier parts of the game. Another common theme was a sense of emotional disconnection; players noted feeling less attached to the game in its current state, driving down engagement. Additionally, overwhelm and burnout are also prominent themes, as some players felt discontent with Genshin’s exploration and quest design.

Conversely, players characterize Love and Deepspace as emotionally rewarding and focused on the female player experience. Players comment that they feel more seen and appreciate the game’s focus on emotional intimacy. Love and Deepspace also offers more digestible tasks that take less investment, as a mobile-only game that combines visual novel elements with combat.

These exit narratives demonstrate how a subset of players are driven by their dissatisfaction with narrative design, representation, and character choices to not only modify their play or quit Genshin Impact entirely, but migrate to a game that offers what they desire. Quitting functions as a quiet but important player critique of a game that no longer meets expectations, suggesting a shift in those expectations as they relate to storytelling and emotional investment.

Sumeng ZHAO, Character Design in the Natlan and Sumeru Regions of Genshin Impact: A Visual Semiotic Analysis from a Critical Transculturalism Perspective (Remote)

In the context of globalization, culture never exists in isolation. As Kraidy (2008, p.148) notes, “Every cultural form is radically, quintessentially hybrid.” As a composite of multiple media such as visuals, language, and mythology, video games construct a cultural hybrid “third space” mediated through electronic technology. However, Kraidy (2008) points out that this process is not egalitarian, but rather nested within the logic of global capital expansion. Cultural hybridization in games functions both as a strategy to gain recognition in international markets, evoking resonance through familiar elements and generating novelty through unfamiliar ones (Finkelstein & Rios, 2022; Zhang et al., 2025), and as a culturally asymmetrical process of reconstruction. When cultural symbols are overly simplified or alienated in recontextualization, the originating cultural communities often accuse such practices of cultural appropriation or racism, thereby highlighting the question of who has the authority to define culture.

Genshin Impact (GI) (miHoyo, 2020) exemplifies this very tension. Following the 2024 release of the Sumeru and Natlan regions, the game sparked controversies over whitewashing of skin tones and the use of colonial symbols (Bevan, 2024; Lima, 2024; Yonezawa, 2024), with related petitions on Change.org garnering over 130,000 signatures (Change.org, 2024). This study will employ Barthes’ three-level semiotic approach to deconstruct the visual design of characters from Sumeru and Natlan, and, drawing on critical intercultural theory, explore how GI negotiates differences and reconstructs meaning amid cultural hybridization and global circulation.

At the operational level, this study adopts Roland Barthes’ visual semiotics to deconstruct and analyze the design of 24 playable characters from the Sumeru and Natlan regions. By collecting character illustrations, 3D models, and cutscenes, a database of four categories of visual signs was established: bodily signs, clothing signs, accessory signs, and action signs. The analysis is based on Barthes’ three-tiered model, encompassing the denotative, connotative, and mythic levels, ultimately revealing the appropriation of cultural symbols and their ideological functions in visual reconstruction.

At the denotative level, this study distinguishes three types of signs: original signs (directly drawn from cultural sources), hybrid signs (fusing multiple cultures), and fictional signs (with no clear cultural origin). At the connotative level, it analyzes semantic transformations and the meaning shifts that occur when signs are detached from their social context. At the mythic level, a critical transcultural perspective is applied. Through this analytical process, the study aims to reveal the underlying logic and semiotic reconstruction employed in GI’s character designs for the “Nation of War” (Natlan) and the “Nation of Wisdom” (Sumeru), as well as to explore how broader social contexts, power discourses, and ideologies profoundly shape the game’s representation of foreign cultures.

Based on the semiotic analysis, this study presents three key findings. 1. The Collage Logic and Aesthetic Inertia of ACG Style: GI is heavily influenced by ACG aesthetics, exhibiting a distinctly Japanese anime-style visual design. Its use of cultural elements from Natlan and Sumeru reflects a logicless collage characteristic of ACG aesthetics (Napier, 2005). Approximately 17% of the collected signs do not originate from the prototype cultures but are drawn from German military uniforms, Nordic elf attire, and knight costumes, demonstrating the long-standing de-territorialized aesthetic inertia of ACG culture. However, the integration of marginal cultures simultaneously introduces new cultural resources into the ACG system. 2. The Trap of Technological Utopianism and Intentional Hybridity: Within GI’s cultural system, the development paths of other nations often have real-world prototypes. For instance, Fontaine’s use of steam machinery reflects legal-rational principles corresponding to historical France. In contrast, Natlan’s design replaces the unique techniques of its prototype culture with motorcycles, pixel art, and electronic dance, exemplifying the “intentional hybridity” described by Kraidy (2008). Although this technological reinterpretation aims to challenge the bias that “original” equals “backward,” it falls into a logic of technological utopianism, treating modern industrialization as the sole path to progress while overlooking the value of local knowledge, such as shamanic rituals and herbal medicine. It presupposes that the prosperity and strength of Natlan’s prototype nation must be expressed through modern industrial civilization, reflecting a limited imagination regarding social flourishing and civilizational evolution. 3. The Spatial Compression of Civilizations: In GI’s world, nations such as Liyue, Inazuma, and Fontaine correspond to China, Japan, and France, respectively, and possess clear cultural anchors. In contrast, Sumeru and Natlan fuse elements from the Middle East, South Asia, Latin America, and Africa, forming a collage-like cultural complex. While this multicultural integration enhances visual diversity, it diminishes cultural depth and historical context (de Wildt & Aupers, 2021). From a critical intercultural perspective, this design reflects an imbalance in cultural representation: dominant cultures are depicted in detail, while marginalized cultures are treated as symbolic, and colonial and religious conflicts are erased, leaving a depoliticized surface-level diversity.

Chelsea RUSSELL, Genealogical Gacha: Pedigree, Heritage, and Monetised Lineage in Uma Musume: Pretty Derby (Remote)

This paper examines Uma Musume: Pretty Derby (Cygames 2021–present) to argue that some gacha systems monetise not only characters, but lineage: ancestry, inheritance, and historical prestige become purchasable inputs to optimisation. I term this configuration genealogical gacha. The term is not meant to suggest that Uma Musume is the only game to mobilise “inheritance” logics, but to name a specific pattern that is especially legible here because it is anchored in real-world thoroughbred pedigrees and a widely circulated national sporting heritage. I operationalise genealogical gacha through three design moves: (1) referential encoding, where a real-world genealogy and biography are translated into character data and collectible assets; (2) procedural inheritance, where progression depends on probabilistic “trait passing” across generations; and (3) monetised access, where gacha pulls price-discriminate access to better “ancestors” and training supports, turning heritage into upgrade currency.

Methodologically, the paper combines an interface walkthrough of the live-service client, analysis of official paratexts (e.g., posts and update communications), multi-sited netnography across Japanese- and English-language player spaces (including fan wikis, Discord servers, X/Twitter, YouTube), and a small set of semi-structured player interviews. Across these materials, I ask: how does Uma Musume translate racing heritage into a free-to-play optimisation economy, and how do players narrate spending in ways that blur calculation with care?

The game’s core loop couples two summon streams—character pulls and support-card pulls—to training scenarios in which “inheritance” probabilistically transfers aptitudes and traits. Players are encouraged to rerun training arcs to produce improved descendants, a recursive process that pairs chance with disciplined time investment and community-authored optimisation knowledge (guides, spreadsheets, simulators, and banner calendars). In political-economic terms, this lineage loop shifts horse-racing’s speculative logics away from state-regulated wagering and into platform microtransactions: uncertainty and variance remain central, but they are re-sited in the purchase of repeated attempts, account-building, and long-horizon saving strategies rather than bets placed on races.

At the same time, Uma Musume frames optimisation through affect. The “trainer” role script encourages routines of care (rest cycles, injury avoidance, route planning) that make successful outcomes feel like responsible stewardship, not only efficient play. Players also draw on idol-fandom language to describe attachment: oshi (推し) refers to a person’s “favourite” character whom they actively support (emotionally and often financially). In this context, spending is frequently rationalised as devotion to one’s oshi rather than as purely instrumental optimisation, aligning monetisation with parasocial intimacy (Horton and Wohl 1956). The franchise’s concerts, voice-actor performances, and “Winning Live” sequences further aestheticise grind and improvement, converting optimisation labour into shareable proof of commitment and creating feedback between play, spectatorship, and social circulation.

By foregrounding genealogical gacha as a design pattern, the paper contributes a vocabulary for analysing how heritage and historical referents can become functional components of monetisation, not merely representational flavour. It also clarifies a regulatory and ethical tension specific to heritage-driven gacha: when real-world identities and histories are curated into collectible assets, questions of disclosure, odds legibility, and harm mitigation remain pressing even when overt gambling signifiers are downplayed (Xiao 2023). Ultimately, Uma Musume shows how durable gacha attachment can be produced at the intersection of probabilistic optimisation, care-based player identification, and culturally specific heritage infrastructures.

Alyce WU, Trisha NGUYEN, Katherine PARENT, & Emily RAMOS, Building and Burning Fandom Libraries: Maintenance in Transnational Media Ecologies through English-speaking Ensemble Stars!! Fans (Remote)

Transnational media flows are no longer dominated by a Western-centered hierarchy (Crane 2016; Fuchs 2010; Waisbord & Mellado 2014), as observable in how global audiences interact with games. In this context, gacha games combine strong affective player investment (Woods 2022) and a constant stream of periodically released content (Dubois 2021) to encourage long-term engagement. Because of this, players must continuously interpret and navigate an ever-growing amount of information, much of which remains fragmented across or buried within the game itself. These conditions make fans of gacha games particularly dependent on fan-organized paratextual materials beyond the game – even more so in transnational contexts – positioning resources created through “playbour” (Kücklich 2005) as critical components of the gaming experience (Consalvo 2017).

This abstract sets up a case study on transnational playbour by analyzing the relationship dynamic between corporate actors and English-speaking fans of long-running gacha-based Japanese franchise Ensemble Stars!! (Enstars). Originally launched in 2015 as Ensemble Stars! (Cacalia Studio 2015), the mobile game quickly hit 1.5 million downloads within its first year of release (Aetas Inc 2016). In 2020, the franchise rebranded as Ensemble Stars!! (Cacalia Studio 2019), dividing the game into two separate apps that would move forward releasing the same post-rebrand content: Basic, maintaining original gameplay and all pre-rebrand content, and Music, a rhythm game omitting pre-rebrand content. Together, they reached 10 million downloads by 2022 (Happy Elements K.K 2022), surpassing over 19 million downloads by October 2024 (@ensemble_stars 2024).

Despite this success, no English version of the game existed until the June 2022 release of Ensemble Stars!! Music (@enstarsmusic_EN 2022). Yet long prior to its release, Enstars developed a substantial English-speaking fanbase supported through various fan-made resources facilitating accessibility to English speakers. Notably, The Unofficial Ensemble Stars!! English Wiki (the Wiki) evolved into a scaffolding resource for English-speaking fans, hosting fan-translated content, fan-organized game guides, and varied forms of community activity.

Tensions between the fanbase’s playbour-sustained resource networks and corporate oversight were sparked in August 2021 when Happy Elements K.K., the parent company of Enstars, made contact with the Wiki for the first time to issue a sudden copyright notice. This notice required all story translations be removed from the Wiki in anticipation for the yet-to-be-revealed official English localization of Ensemble Stars!! Music (@enstarsEng 2021). Paired with the ongoing lack of localization for Basic – and by consequence pre-rebrand content – this removal created a significant void in narrative material previously accessible through fan-translations on the Wiki, leaving frustration amongst long-term English-speaking fans and sparking initial inquiry for this case study. Added discourse surfaced in January 2025 with the introduction of new character Ibuki Taki, an Okinawan-American character, into AKATSUKI, a unit defined by its three members and traditional Japanese cultural theming (@ensemble_stars 2025a). The change disrupted longstanding character dynamics and raised concerns about cultural representation within the narrative, a conversation that became widespread within the English-speaking community. These concerns challenged the attachments of long-term fans, particularly as it occurred near the franchise’s 10-year anniversary (@ensemble_stars 2025b).

Taken together, these events underscore ongoing friction between fan participation and corporate control in transnational media engagement (Jenkins et al. 2013; Johnson 2007), revealing fractures in authority as fans contest the treatment of community-generated paratexts (Consalvo 2017). In this study, we examine how fan and corporate forces co-construct the international existence of Enstars, asking:

● What roles do fan labor and informal networks play in shaping engagement dynamics within transnational fandoms?

● How do fan-generated paratexts and infrastructures mediate the global accessibility and spread of Ensemble Stars!!, particularly for English-speaking audiences?

● How do interactions between fandom communities and corporate activity impact brand loyalty and perceived boundaries between fandom and franchise?

Building on foundations of participatory culture (Jenkins 2006; Jenkins et al. 2013), gaming paratexts (Consalvo 2007, 2017), fan translations (O’Hagan 2008, 2009), and fantagonism (Johnson, 2007), we conducted an online ethnography (Dawson, 2019a, 2019b; Hine, 2015a, 2015b) to analyze how fan-created resources and paratexts shape a franchise's accessibility and how corporate interventions may destabilize those efforts. By tracing the perceived relationships between fans and the game's parent company within the English-speaking Enstars community, we examine the interplay of corporate-driven action and fan-driven grassroots efforts, highlighting how conflicts over authority in fandom spaces act to reshape community structures, brand loyalty, and long-term sustainability of international fandoms.

Session 6 – Game Design

Orlando WOODS & Liyana DONEVA, When Fandom Meets Faith: Gacha Gaming and Religious Governance in Southeast Asia

Whilst video games are accessed through a screen, they are played within socio-cultural and political structures of governance. These structures shape how games are accessed and played, the limits of play and enjoyment, and the contestations that might arise when video games contravene, or even subvert, pre-existing codes of value, morality, dress, and/or behaviour. This paper explores the nexus of gacha gaming and religious – specifically Islamic – governance in Southeast Asia. Since the 2010s gacha gaming has gained in popularity throughout the world and has become associated with free-to-play (f2p) mobile gaming, public debates around (youth) gambling, hypersexualised characterisations of gender, and more. These associations contrast starkly with the Islamic governance of society and culture in Brunei, Indonesia, and Malaysia. In Brunei, for example, since 2013 a Syariah Penal Code has been introduced that outlaws, amongst other things, gambling, black magic, and non-Islamic acts of worship. The popularity of gacha games amongst Muslim youth in these countries has sparked public debate about what is permissible (halal) and what is not (haram), and how the tensions between religious law, digital consumerism, and fandom culture are navigated by players, regulators, and game developers alike. Drawing on a content analysis of newspaper articles, discussion forums, and policy documents, we explore the negotiations and trade-offs that arise when fandom meets faith.

Yiru ZHAO, Rules Are Meant to Be Broken: Glitch as Procedural Resistance in Genshin Impact’s Housing System

Serenitea Pot (teapot) housing system in Genshin Impact (miHoYo 2020) is a player housing feature that allows users to create and decorate a personalized virtual home. Drawing on a four-year (2021-2025) hybrid digital ethnography and autoethnography of Serenitea Pot community on HoYoLAB, Bilibili, YouTube, and X (Twitter), I argue that players actively engage in a form of playbour (Kücklich 2005) where values are generated not by complying with the procedural rhetoric (Bogost 2007), but by breaking it. In line with scholarship that treats alternative play as queerness (Ruberg 2019) and transgression (Aarseth 2007), teapot players understand glitches as “playable artifacts” (Leino 2012) rather than malfunctions. In practice, this gives rise to a distinctive form of player creativity – particularly among self-identified “teapot mains” – centered on exploiting game glitches (e.g. object sinking and floating item placement) as a means of pushing the boundaries of the designed system. Players discover that by leveraging these unintended loopholes, they can bypass the official building constraints and construct elaborate scenes far beyond the game’s initial imagination. For instance, in an official housing design contest it was stipulated that using overlap or floating glitches would count as an illicit loophole and was prohibited. Yet within the teapot player community, such techniques are celebrated for granting greater creative freedom.

Therefore, the technical manipulation of glitches constitutes a form of “procedural resistance”, reshaping the game’s internal rule structure to reconfigure its space of possibilities. By engaging with the materiality of codes (Newman 2008), players essentially turn the game itself into an object of play, subverting and repurposing the rules to serve their vernacular engineering. This bottom-up technical improvisation underscores that players perceive the game not as a closed product but as a malleable assemblage of tools and opportunities. Their clever manipulation of glitches challenges the developers’ monopoly over creativity in the game, proving that even within strict programmed limits, there remain latent possibilities for innovative expression.

The research findings further illustrate that this procedural resistance becomes the player-driven collective creativity, and rule-bending grows into a significant force shaping the gameplay experience. Around glitch exploitation, a vibrant culture of knowledge production and sharing has emerged: players collaboratively discover, document, and disseminate methods to trigger and use Serenitea Pot glitches via in-game chats, forums, and social media, all on a volunteer basis. While Meades (2013) identifies counterplay could be a valuable social activity, he also notes that our understanding of what constitutes a “well-played game” from the perspective of counterplay remains underdeveloped. This study addresses this question by examining the internal value system within the teapot player community. Notably, many Genshin Impact players expressed concern that future patches might remove these glitch capabilities, fearing that “fixing” the bugs would essentially “kill” the creative spirit and even “core gameplay” of Serenitea Pot. In their value system, playing well does not entail strict adherence to designers’ rules, but rather demonstrates mastery over codes and design creativity in breaking system boundaries. In practice, the community stabilizes these glitches and transforms them into essential design tools, effectively making them a prerequisite literacy for competent play. This communal exchange not only spurs innovative design but also strengthens social bonds and sustains a gift economy. Through the use of glitches, it fosters alternative game aesthetics, which retroactively influence game designers’ future decisions. For instance, by 2022, the widespread technique of object overlapping – previously achieved through glitches – was canonized as an official mechanic.

The Serenitea Pot case thus provides a fresh perspective to Julian Kücklich’s (2005) playbour theory. Playbour denotes a hybrid of play and labour in which players’ unpaid creative efforts in the game generate values, often benefiting stakeholders without formal compensation. Previous discussions of playbour frequently cite game modding as a prime example (Bulut 2020; Münch 2013), but this case goes a step further to reveal that playbour is not limited to creating content within the given rules; it also encompasses players actively deconstructing and recombining the system’s rules as part of their playbour. By using collective ingenuity to uncover hidden possibilities in the system and perform inventive “misuses” of the game, they push back against the confines set by developers and the game’s code. During the aforementioned procedural resistance, teapot players are not merely providing free labour (Terranova 2000) passively, but rather leveraging their labour to actively counterplay at the game’s rules, injecting their own creativity into the system’s fabric. The Serenitea Pot community’s glitch-driven innovations and knowledge-sharing behaviors thus expand playbour theory by adding a crucial layer of rule-level critique and creative politics. Players collectively transform their play into a form of creative resistance, thereby extending the concept of playbour to encompass the ludopolitics of rule-breaking and the democratization of creativity in game worlds.

Yumeng DOU, Gameplay Beyond the Game: the Temporal Structures in Gacha Game Participation

Game as temporal structures

Gaming, as a daily activity, is often intertwined with the player's social life, whether they connect to the device (Crawford, 2012). The analysis of Gacha games should be situated within the context of everyday life, not as an isolated island, but rather as part of a complicated networked structure that repeatedly negotiates and intertwines with other daily activities.

The researcher had recruited 48 free-to-play game players in the Chinese mainland for interviews between October 2020 and June 2021 (Dou, 2023). The results show that the players will 'naturally' integrate gaming time into their social schedules: checking the completion of daily tasks before the end of the day, ensuring stamina points, reserving weekend time for game events, etc. As Woods (2022) argued, players apply the hyper-rationalisation of time as a playing resource to replace the investment of real-world currency. Meanwhile, this differs from the playbour model of 'gold farming'; the Gacha game's 'premium' currency usually does not correlate linearly with playtime but rather closely with the mechanism related to out-of-game social time. Those mechanisms, such as daily logins, tasks, and monthly passes, typically lack challenge, instead comprising a series of highly repetitive, simple actions. Normally, the obtainable premium currency is largely concentrated within the first ten minutes of daily gaming and refreshes its availability as real-world time progresses.

This indicates that the Gacha game quest-reward systems refer to a temporal structure of player daily life, a set of guiding rules that embed gameplay within the daily social timetable, and a process of player socialisation in the online game world under the control of a digital system. Taking the example of Genshin Impact (miHoYo, 2020), the Blessing of the Welkin Moon (monthly pass) has a cumulative benefit of approximately 3000 Primogemsi, which significantly exceeds the 300 Primogems through direct purchase. The source of disparity—30 regular, consistent daily logins—does not exist or is not described by any narrative or gameplay within the game. In other words, what exchanges with the Gacha currency is the player's external participation in the game's internal world. The 'exceeded Primogems' correspond to the physical act of unlocking the smartphone, tapping the icon of Paimon, and the bodily actions performed within the physical world. The player's rationality, specifically, the time investment strategy aimed at maximising in-game gains, becomes the driving force behind adherence to this gamified temporal structure. This characteristic aligns with Evans (2016) ’s anylyse of ‘freemium game impatience economy’ (see also Lundy et al., 2024). The freemium players pay for instant gratification by spending real-world currency, whilst the game pays players for sustained, routine engagement by virtual currency. This disparity highlights the different temporal expectations from games system and players on the location and structure of gaming activities, and reflects the negotiations between ‘player-system’ on the everyday life.

In the research interview, the majority of players exhibited loss aversion, regarding the anticipated rewards from completing logins and tasks as 'rightfully' earned, and elicited strong negative perceptions for failure to complete the game schedule. Consequently, the stable, repetitive, and regular engagement with the game, driven by Gacha mechanics, is an integral part of players' daily temporal structures.

The gameplay out of the game

Friedman (1998) proposed the 'symbiotic circuit' to define the process by which a player internalises the computer logic to learn 'how to play' a game, as he emphasised: "Computer games teach structure of thought" (p. 136). The ability to play games is an acquired skill; video games train players how to employ physical movements to accomplish in-game objectives (Chess, 2005), building connections between the physical body, external device buttons, and in-game feedback (Keogh, 2018). Keogh (2018) called this method of connections the 'performative grammar' of the game.

Within the context of Gacha-based games like Genshin Impact, 'the game's capabilities' extend from controlling the avatar on adventures to encompassing coordinating schedules and negotiating commitments to secure the gaming time location within daily life. Unlike the Blood Moon event in The Legend of Zelda, Genshin's daily logins and monthly passes inherently incorporate external societal time progression. Consequently, the internalisation of the player in game logic naturally includes the reflection of game mechanics on daily life. Gameplay extends beyond the game, where the player logs in daily to calculate the growth of Original Resin, plans pulls by physical days, and arranges playing time between everyday life intervals. Keogh (2018) noted in his book that the X button on the controller and the in-game jump action possess no inherent logical connection, yet players "instinctively" and almost unconsciously associate the two. In Genshin Impact, the connection between "daily logins" and 'Primogems' is the same game grammar; the temporal logic embedded in Gacha mechanics was ingrained in players' internalised consciousness through long-term, regular, and repetitive engagement. In Genshin Impact, gameplay is not limited to exploring the world of Tevyat and also involves balancing daily gaming schedule within the everyday life.

The space of play is no longer confined to the virtual world on the smartphone screen, instead, it becomes a hybrid realm (De Souza e Silva, 2006) where digital and physical intertwine. In Gacha games, ‘gaming’ unfolds across players’ social and virtual schedules. This overlap resonates with Markus Montola(2005)’s definition of pervasive games for ‘expand the contractual magic circle of play spatially, temporally, or socially’ (p. 3). Daily logins, stamina systems, and time-limited events consistently orient toward temporal expansion of f Gacha gaming, and also refer to gameplay beyond the digital interface and expand to the organisation of everyday life.

This work aims to contributes to a broader understanding of how Gacha game mechanism shape, occupy, and regulate the temporal structures of contemporary life, and may help to inform the development of more robust ethical guidelines for Gacha games.

Helen Yau Hing LAM, Dick Kin Tung THUNG, Sum Yee LAU, & Zixuan WANG, The Paradox of Profit: Structural Constraints on Game Design and the Need for Systemic Replayability in the Gacha Genre

The gacha game/gacha genre business model, epitomized by Genshin Impact's (miHoYo 2020) staggering profits, has validated the strategy of monetizing character acquisition and progression. This financial success, however, is often achieved at the expense of sustainable game design. Drawing on the MDA (Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics) framework to analyze the friction between business goals and player experience (Hunicke et al, 2004), this paper posits that the primary challenge facing the gacha genre is the fundamental conflict between the need to sell new characters (which requires a high production rate of consumable, linear narrative content) and the need to offer deep, high-agency gameplay that ensures long-term player retention. We argue that overcoming this "Paradox of Profit" requires a fundamental shift toward robust systemic depth and non-linear, skill-based content.

The current design architecture of Genshin Impact (miHoYo 2020) is inherently linear. New content is released as vast new regions or narrative quest chains, which are rapidly consumed by veteran players. The primary loop—daily quests and resin expenditure—is designed to be maximally frictionless and minimally challenging, reinforcing a sense of financial obligation rather than genuine engagement. The key constraint is "monetization lock-in": since new characters and weapons are the central product, any significant design changes, such as introducing a new, highly effective progression system outside of linear leveling, must be carefully calibrated so as not to devalue past investments or future sales.

This constraint prevents the creation of permanent, challenging content that might otherwise reduce the perceived need to acquire new, powerful characters. Consequently, this leads to the widely reported feeling that the game lacks meaningful "endgame" content (Blom, 2023), driving player churn when the linear story content is exhausted.

To combat this structural fatigue and achieve long-term viability, gacha game designers must move beyond the content treadmill by prioritizing systemic depth and genuine replayability. We propose solutions across three dimensions, focusing on their design feasibility within the current live-service model:

1. Horizontal Replayability and Reward Diversification

Currently, quest rewards are dominated by Primogems, the gacha currency. This structure forces players to treat story progression as a means to an end—the gacha pull—rather than an intrinsically rewarding experience. Once the pull is made, engagement often drops, particularly if the desired reward is not achieved. We propose expanding and diversifying the types of rewards to build permanent value outside the Primogem economy. Rewards should include novel items that interact with the world and deepen the player experience, such as wearable items (cosmetics obtainable through complex world exploration or secret missions) and interactive instruments. From a feasibility standpoint, these rewards utilize existing assets but recontextualize them: validating time spent exploring and developing the world's cultural capital, rather than just funding the next banner.

2. Implementing Skill-Based and Non-Resource-Gated Modes

To decouple success from monetary investment, gacha games should introduce modes where success relies primarily on player skill, mechanical mastery, and character synergy, rather than raw character stats. A negative example is Honkai: Star Rail's (miHoYo 2023) Arbitration Challenge, which heavily emphasizes resource accumulation and requires twelve fully built characters. Conversely, HoYoverse's own Zenless Zone Zero (miHoYo 2024) provides a superior model in its Simulated Battle Trial, where success and reward acquisition are tied directly to physical gameplay skills. Implementing such modes in Genshin Impact is design-feasible as it does not require new assets, but rather a retuning of enemy logic and damage values to prioritize mechanics (dodging, reaction timing) over raw statistical output.

3. Macro-Level Ecosystem Solutions

Furthermore, gacha profitability can be enhanced through the integration of the IP ecosystem. Given the high overlap in player bases across miHoYo titles (Honkai Impact 3, Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail), cross-game collaborations should evolve beyond simple character drops. These collaborations should be systemic, featuring shared storylines, coordinated mechanics. This mirrors the "content ecosystem" approach seen in successful user-generated content platforms, transforming the linear story flow of individual games into a cyclical experience. This approach provides a powerful retention tool that incentivizes players to re-engage with all titles, ultimately achieving a win-win balance between sustained player replay value and commercial gains.

In conclusion, the immense profitability of the gacha model has constrained game design toward linear, consumable content. To ensure the long-term sustainability of the genre, particularly for flagship titles like Genshin Impact, designers must embrace structural changes that prioritize systemic depth, non-monetary rewards, and skill- based challenges. This shift will transform the genre from a platform for narrative consumption into a challenging and enduring live-service game.

Session 7 – Monetisation & Psychology

Claudia FU, Leon XIAO, & Luke CLARK, Luck and Labour: A Thematic Analysis of Players' Grinding Behaviours in Genshin Impact

In-game purchases (‘microtransactions’) for randomized prizes have become an integral part of contemporary video games. Past research has shown that engagement with these features raises the potential for gamers to overspend, including overlaps with gambling problems. But players can often bypass spending money for items by ‘grinding’ - the act of repeatedly completing tasks to earn in-game currency, which can then be used to purchase in-game items. The present study focuses on one specific game, Genshin Impact, a popular ‘gacha’ game in which it is possible to both grind and/or pay for virtual items. We surveyed UBC undergraduates who were active Genshin players (n = 237), including an open item to describe their experiences grinding for in-game prizes. Thematic analysis was conducted to analyze the qualitative responses, from which 4 main themes emerged. 1) Game design: Key mechanics within Genshin that players come into contact with, such as the cyclical reward system, and the grind or pay mechanics, 2) Emotions: Feelings expressed by players regarding the grinding process and outcomes, for example emotions that are conditioned on the reward outcomes, 3) Gameplay style: The types of behaviours that players engage in while grinding for rewards, categorized by adaptive, maladaptive, and neutral changes to their usual playstyle, and 4) Grinding-related evaluations: Factors influencing players' decisions in regards to their grinding approach, such as assessments on the time commitment and financial cost of grinding. Findings from this study provide a more comprehensive understanding of how players engage with the randomized reward mechanisms in modern video games by both spending and working for prizes.

Alina QURESHI, Rituals of the Wish: Performing Luck and Identity in Genshin Impact’s Gacha Culture

Gacha games have become a major phenomenon in mobile gaming, taking their name from Japanese gachapon capsule toy machines (Kanerva, 2023). They are primarily free-to-play video games that incorporate a lottery-style “pull” or “summon” mechanic, where players spend in-game currency to receive a random item such as a character, equipment, or cosmetic. Each pull has a specific probability of reward, and the system is often not transparent, leaving players uncertain of their exact chances (Thavamuni et al. 2025). Many gacha games alleviate this problem by introducing a “pity system”, which guarantees a rare reward after a certain number of pulls (Ma, 2025). These systems have been analysed as revenue mechanisms that balance chance, guaranteed rewards, and player behaviour, with some resembling gambling under certain conditions. (Chen and Fang 2023).

Developers like HoYoverse use limited-time banners and compelling character design to encourage long-term engagement and spending (Qi 2025). Yet, player response may not be fully determined by these mechanics alone. Many players engage in elaborate “summoning rituals” before attempting to pull for a desired character, believing that certain contexts or behaviours might influence the outcome. In Genshin Impact (HoYoverse 2020), such rituals often take place at collectively constructed “lucky” spaces, and are treated by players as meaningful sites of homage where symbolic luck could matter. Many travel to specific in-game locations such as “Barbatos' statue in Mondstadt”, “the Grand Narukami Shrine”, “Qingyun Peak”1, among other locations tied to a character's lore or spots the community has deemed lucky, before summoning desired characters. Others engage in communal “prayers” in online forums (USC Digital Folklore Archives n.d.; Huang 2023) or perform exaggerated in-game “sacrifices” meant to summon luck or appease the “Gacha Gods”.2

These practices emerge organically within player communities, and circulate through livestreams, TikTok, YouTube, Twitch streams, and Discord servers, where reactions to luck or misfortune become entertainment and social currency (Zhang 2024). Pulls performed on stream are viewed as authentic moments of joy, frustration, and disbelief, strengthening bonds between players, audiences, and characters. Players often describe themselves as “lucky,” “cursed,” or “blessed,” suggesting that luck becomes more than a mechanic; it functions as an identity marker shaped through community interaction. This raises questions about what gacha pulls actually are for players. The rituals suggest that gacha systems might function not only as transactional mechanisms but as possible sites of player-driven devotion, where affection and desire become ritualised.

This paper seeks to explore whether these patterns can be understood as part of a broader emotional economy, using Genshin Impact as a primary case study. Rather than treating pulls as discrete probabilistic events, it will consider how players may transform them into emotionally charged performances that balance desire and disappointment. The aim is to examine whether these ritualised practices offer new ways of understanding the affective dimensions of gacha play, expanding beyond addiction or monetisation-focused frameworks. With the use of digital ethnography across Genshin-related online communities and discussion forums on Reddit and Discord, this study shall attempt to analyze rituals, trends, and shared superstitions around gacha luck. It also analyzes publicly shared summoning videos to identify recurring ritual patterns. Together, these methods will allow the paper to explore how players collectively produce meaning around gacha systems and how these practices may transform gacha pulls into socially shaped experiences rather than isolated, individual acts.

In doing so, this investigation may provide insight into how gacha can be understood as a socio-cultural practice. Accordingly, this paper seeks to contribute to game studies by reframing gacha pulls as potentially ritualised, performative, and identity-forming practices. It considers how livestream culture might amplify emotional performance and how players possibly create meaning and belonging within systems defined by chance. Ultimately, players appear to participate in an affective economy of luck, where social recognition and personal identity may become intertwined with the randomness of the pull.

Bitong LIN, Investing Play: How Genshin Impact Players Legitimize Gacha Monetization

Critics often argue that video game monetization may degrade gameplay experience and even infringe upon players’ economic rights, yet monetized models such as Gacha games that employ randomized reward systems in which players spend in- game currency, often purchased with real money, to obtain virtual items or characters—have achieved remarkable commercial success (Denoo and Petrovskaya 2025; Karlsen 2022; Lehtonen et al. 2023). While players’ motivations for in-game purchases vary, a key question remains: how has this monetization model become widely accepted by much of the player community (白帆 2021; Zhang et al. 2025)? This study examines the social construction of legitimacy surrounding Genshin Impact (miHoYo 2020)’s monetization by analyzing user-generated content (UGC) and related online discussions. It explores how players perceive monetization and justify that their spending ultimately flows back to the game’s stakeholders. In other words, how do players internalize and reproduce the legitimacy of monetization?

Producing UGC itself constitutes a form of free labor—voluntary, unpaid work that benefits commercial platforms and corporations (Andrejevic 2009; Terranova 2012). UGC circulates widely on social media, and companies increasingly rely on consumers’ continuous creation and circulation of brand-related content. Through cultural strategies such as relationship-building, emotional mobilization, and identity formation, firms harness consumers ’ creativity to strengthen brand value while reducing marketing costs (Koivisto and Mattila 2018; Luca 2015; Pires et al. 2006). Thus, beyond direct in-game purchases, player-produced cultural outputs—videos, artworks, and analyses—also generate value for publishers. While previous studies often suggest that such free labor is obscured by its framing as leisure or play (Kücklich 2005; 曹书乐 2021), UGC explicitly focused on commercial and financial performance reveals more reflexive rationalizations of spending and monetization.

Empirically, this study draws on revenue-oriented discourse surrounding Genshin Impact on a major Chinese video-sharing platform. Data were collected through a targeted search conducted on 1 October 2025 using the keyword “原神流水” (“Genshin Impact cash flow”), a vernacular term widely used by players to denote game earnings and revenue rankings. This keyword was selected after pilot scoping searches and inspection of platform titles and tags, and iteratively refined until it consistently returned content centered on revenue analysis rather than gameplay or narrative discussion. To approximate the information environment encountered by ordinary players, I archived the top 100 recommended videos returned on that date under both logged-in and logged-out account states, excluding obvious official promotions and non-Chinese content. Each video’s content, uploader profile, and comment section were examined.

The analysis combined close qualitative reading with computational assistance. To establish an interpretive baseline capable of capturing in-group slang, memes, and ironic registers characteristic of this player community, I manually coded a benchmark set of 500 comments. A broader sample of approximately 2,000 comments was then drawn, stratified by video reply counts (high, medium, and low), to support descriptive analysis across different levels of visibility. BERTopic was employed as a supplementary robustness check rather than a primary discovery tool: topic clusters were evaluated in relation to the manually coded reference set, and only those introducing substantively new discursive patterns were retained. Model parameters were varied to test thematic stability and saturation.

Across both videos and comments, explicit criticism of monetization was rare. Instead, discussions frequently celebrated the game ’ s financial performance, suggesting that Genshin Impact ’ s monetization mechanism has achieved a high degree of legitimacy within its player community. The analysis identifies several interlocking discursive strategies through which players reframe monetary spending as a collaborative contribution to the game ’s creative and technological project. Players commonly depict spending as an investment necessary to sustain production quality and future content, thereby transforming consumption into participation. They also express empathy and respect toward developers, portraying them simultaneously as passionate “geeks” and competent entrepreneurs, a framing that aligns players with the company’s self-presentation and fosters a shared sense of purpose.

Potential tension between player consumption and corporate profit is further displaced outward: rather than being articulated as an internal conflict, it is redirected toward other social groups, turning the defence of monetization into a defence of collective identity and taste. By emphasizing Genshin Impact’s commercial success and mainstream recognition relative to other anime, comic, and game (ACG) products, players derive symbolic rewards—pride and distinction—that further stabilize support for monetization. In this process, technology and capital become rhetorically intertwined, with technological development serving as a legitimate justification for capital accumulation. Free labor in the form of UGC plays a central role in this legitimation by normalizing monetization practices and embedding them in shared cultural values. By framing spending as mutually beneficial rather than exploitative, players collectively sustain the game’s economic model and reshape broader perceptions of monetization in digital games.

Anjuman ALI & Marcus P. J. TAN, A Framework for “Gacha Psychoeducation” – Building Young People’s Awareness of Gambling-Related Risks in Games Children and Young People

Introduction

The anticipation and rush that comes from wishing for a character in Genshin Impact (miHoYo, 2020) is a feeling many gamers would be familiar with, as would the disappointment of receiving a lower star character whose constellations are already maxed out. Lootboxes and gacha systems have become a dominant mechanism in games used by children and adolescents, with 77.0% of the 100 highest-grossing iPhone games containing loot boxes in June 2021 (Xiao, Henderson & Newall, 2022). It is said to have originated from the Japanese gashapon vending machines, and then rapidly diffused into East Asian mobile titles and subsequently into the West (Tang, Yiu, Mi & Lai, 2025). Structurally, they operate via variable-ratio reinforcement schedules, whereby a player pays real (or functionally real) money in exchange for a randomised outcome; in the case of Genshin Impact (miHoYo, 2020), the variable is a maximum of 90 pulls for a 5-star, with grindable Primogem currency. Variable-ratio reinforcement underpins slot machines and strongly triggers reward and anticipation circuits in the brain (Belmar & Subramanian, 2025). Younger players are particularly vulnerable because developmental immaturity impairs probability reasoning, future discounting, and inhibitory control, producing gambling-like reinforcement in games without children recognising it as gambling (Belmar & Subramanian, 2025).

Discrepancies in identification across studies suggest that prevalence may be underestimated due to hidden or bundled loot boxes and methodological differences(Belmar & Subramanian, 2025). This prevalence means that children encounter gambling-like mechanisms in games they already play. Beyond structural reinforcement, gacha systems operate through ‘affective embedding’: aesthetic, parasocial, and identity-based attachments to characters and game-worlds that alter cost-benefit cognition (Woods, 2024). Players can often spend because it feels like “taking care of the character” or “showing loyalty,” not because they rationally evaluate probabilities or cost. Examples of this in Genshin Impact (miHoYo, 2020) can be observed through the ‘story’ functions with characters, as well as the through letters received by obtainable characters in the player’s mailbox. ‘This relational mis-labelling is especially relevant in child mental-health populations, where attachment needs and emotional regulation are often therapeutic targets (Kirkbride, Anglin, Colman, Dykxhoorn, Patalay, 2024).

Lootbox purchase is associated with elevated odds of problem gambling independently of other gambling activity in countries such as Australia (12–17 years) (Kristiansen & Severin, 2020), and Japan (~14 years) (Ide, Nakanishi, Yamasaki, Ikeda, Ando, Hiraiwa-Hasegawa et al., 2021). The “pay-to-win” model in gacha games is suggested to exploit psychological vulnerabilities, such as the fear of missing out, which can subsequently escalate the risk of diminished self-control, financial harm, and risk of problem gambling (Tang, Yiu, Mi & Lai, 2025). A Frontiers study in an Italian adolescent sample found that lootbox engagement predicted both problem gaming and gambling before and during COVID-19 lockdown (Primi et al., 2022). Together, these studies indicate that lootbox risk intersects gambling, gaming disorder, emotionregulation, and evelopmental neurocognition, rather than being merely a literacy problem. CAMHS populations share relevant vulnerabilities which include impulsivity and sensation seeking, in addition to the fact that younger patients generically are more likely to exhibit impulsive behaviours and to find risk-taking appealing (Ide, Nakanishi, Yamasaki, Ikeda, Ando, Hiraiwa-Hasegawa et al., 2021; Primi et al., 2022). Psychoeducation targeting reinforcement mechanics and relational binding can therefore have a key role to play in building player insight into such mechanics, reducing possible gambling and mental-health related risk, and encouraging a more positive relationship with such games.

Methods

A two-phase approach is proposed: Phase 1 delivers psychoeducation to university anime and gaming societies (a low-risk, developmentally mature analogue sample) with pre/post surveys using Likert scales in order to measure effectiveness. Content includes an initial exercise using drama therapy techniques, then content on the history of gacha games and loot boxes, dopamine and reward anticipation, variable-ratio reinforcement, in-game currency value distortion, social comparison, parasocial relationships, and affective embedding (Brooks & Clark, 2019; Lakić, Bernik, Čep, 2022; Risco, Lee, Mills, 2025; Tang, Yiu, Mi & Lai, 2025)9,10,11]. The introductory exercise utilises the dramatherapy technique of reenactment, embodiment and mirroring, by playing a video extract of a wishing animation (Son & Shiozawa, 2025). It will then be followed by a Menti quiz, probing reflection on feelings and experiences. Pre and post measures will be used to assess awareness of mechanisms, subjective ‘ability to stop’, beliefs about gacha game fairness, and relational attachment to characters. These will then be evaluated using appropriate statistical difference tests.

Phase 2 adapts this educational content for CAMHS patients, combining dramatherapy methodology with findings on key topic areas, to tailor the psychoeducation. Gacha rolls are performative events - the ‘reveal’, the dramatic beat, and rarity promise - so dramatherapy provides an embodied metaphor and non-shaming reflective container. Phase 2 is co-designed with CAMHS clinicians to tailor materials to developmental stage and clinical vulnerabilities. Similarly to Phase 1, we will be looking to use preand post- surveys, if possible, to evaluate the effectiveness of the session on awareness.

Results (achieved/anticipated)

For Phase 1, we delivered an integrated psychoeducation session to a group of university students, in collaboration with a gaming and an anime and manga society. The sample characteristics of the cohort were young adults ages 18-25 years, of male, female and other genders.

Due to technical faults, we were unable to obtain pre-session survey data using a Likert scale and therefore used a dichotomous scale. The feedback from the introductory engagement exercise revealed that students associated wishing with vulnerable emotions such as ‘excited’, ‘skeptical’, ‘curious’, ‘dread’, and ‘scared’. Just under half of the students expressed spending their in-game currency as soon as possible, rather than saving it.

Feedback from the session shows that majority of students feel they can engage positively in the chance-based aspects of their games and stop themselves from playing the games. All students reported being able to identify when the games are no longer fun anymore. The section on variable-ratio reinforcement was well received, with an 80% increase in awareness.

These results are hoped to be used in the further development of a psychoeducation programme for Phase 2, deepening areas of understanding for a more vulnerable and younger audience.

Discussion

Loot boxes are gambling-like mechanics without social signals of gambling. Children cannot legally enter casinos, but a casino contingency can enter a child’s bedroom via content drops, wishes, or gacha banners. Evidence shows high prevalence, consistent associations with gambling and problem gaming, psychological distress, and affective embedding that bypasses rational cost–benefit evaluation (Risco, Lee, Mills, 2025; Xiao, Henderson & Newall, 2022; Zendle & Cairns, 2018). Prevalence data from UK studies highlight that even games previously considered “safe” may contain hidden loot boxes (Xiao, Henderson & Newall, 2022).

The results from our phase 1 showed that the students reported a good understanding and relationship with gacha games and lootboxes, yet still had a percentage of students feeling that they had to roll as soon as they had enough in-game currency. Despite most of our sample reporting control over their gaming, they continued to associate vulnerable emotions with rolling. These findings highlight that self-reported insight into the chance-based nature of these games may not by themselves be indicative of how susceptible players are to their emotional impact. Dramatherapy techniques were noted as being particularly useful in developing their insight into potentially addictive inclinations and encouraging reflections on these despite their previous positive selfreport. We believe this demonstrates the value of psychoeducation in healthy populations, and its potential role in earlier recognition of risk and self-regulation before addictive inclinations solidify. However, further research is needed to identify which outcome measures may be more robust in identifying how this also relates to vulnerability to gaming-related risks in these games, which CAMHS populations may be disproportionately vulnerable to.

Limitations include Phase 1’s non-clinical, self-report sample; causality uncertainty due to cross-sectional designs; a difference scale used with different data sets and the UK-specific CAMHS trials yet to be conducted. Nonetheless, the convergence of neurobiological, epidemiological, and cultural evidence justifies this preventative intervention. Future research should examine longitudinal outcomes of psychoeducation in clinical populations, the impact of parasocial and affective embedding, and interactions with comorbid mental health conditions.

Session 8 – Regulation

Taylor HARDWICK, Marcus CARTER, Tianyi ZHANGSHAO, Ben EGLISTON, & Leon XIAO, “Literally just child gambling”: Children and paid chance features in games in the Australian context

In recent years, there has been increasing focus on how children are impacted by digital game monetisation. These concerns typically centre around ‘addiction’ and ‘gambling’, and the impacts these outcomes have on children’s wellbeing. This paper reflects on two Australian-based studies on children and random reward mechanics (RRMs) – including, but not limited to, loot boxes – in digital games, canvassing the landscape of children’s access to and experience with “gambling-like” features.

We conducted semi-structured interviews with 22 Australian children aged 7-14 in 2024 regarding how they experience digital game monetisation. In this study, children articulated experiencing ‘harm’ in this context as being deceived or misled by monetisation features. In particular, children considered RRMs to be particularly deceptive, despite their prevalence in games popular with children, especially games on Roblox. One child characterised Roblox game Pet Simulator 99 as “literally just child gambling” because it encouraged children to make larger purchases to increase their chances of receiving rare items. Despite recognising these features as gambling-like, most children we interviewed did not feel they had the necessary skills to successfully navigate these features.

In an attempt to limit children’s access to such “gambling-like” features in games, Australia introduced mandatory minimum age classifications for video games containing such features in September 2024, requiring games with “in-game purchases linked to elements of chance” to be available only to users aged 15+. Six months after the new classification scheme’s introduction, we investigated compliance with the scheme across the 100 top-grossing mobile games on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. We found widespread non-compliance, with 20% of games on the Apple App Store and almost 50% of games on the Google Play Store failing to meet classification requirements. This suggests significant shortcomings in enforcement, platform accountability and regulatory clarity, challenges exacerbated by the fast-moving nature of the games industry.

This paper therefore argues that the current classification framework does not adequately navigate the realities of contemporary digital game production, distribution and monetisation in protecting children from potential harms of gambling-like features in games. There are significant improvements to be made to game design and regulation in order to better protect children from monetisation harm resulting from random reward features in digital games.

Gabriela BIRNFELD KURTZ, Camila FREITAS, & Leandro LIMA, No Wishes for Kids in Brazil: The repercussions of Law 15:111 in Genshin Impact

INTRODUCTION

Brazil offers a critical Global South perspective on the regulation of gamblified monetization systems in digital games. As one of the largest gaming markets worldwide, Brazil has historically occupied a peripheral position in global regulatory debates dominated by European and East Asian jurisdictions, despite facing comparable social and economic impacts. Law No. 15.211/2025 emerges within a national context shaped by enduring tensions around internet governance, gambling, and state oversight of digital platforms—issues that extend well beyond games themselves. Public debates around the law frequently intersect with broader concerns about online censorship, platform accountability, and the uneven application of regulation across global digital industries. This context suggests that player interpretations of loot box regulation in Brazil are not merely legalistic but politically and culturally situated, offering insight into how regulatory narratives circulate, mutate, and acquire meaning in Global South digital publics.

The Statute of the Child and Adolescent (ECA), sanctioned in 1990, remains a key rights instrument but was created before the rise of the internet, leaving gaps in digital protections. These deficiencies led to Law 15.211/25, the “Digital ECA,” sanctioned on September 17, 2025—a landmark in safeguarding minors online. Senator Alessandro Vieira (MDB-SE), who proposed the bill, called it the “first law of its kind in the Americas.” Digital platforms and product providers must comply within six months, as the law takes effect in March 2026 (Abreu, 2025). It enforces strict age verification, default protective privacy settings, accessible parental controls, bans on loot boxes for minors, restrictions on targeted ads, and oversight by the National Data Protection Authority (ANPD), which can fine up to R$ 50 million (approximately USD 9.3 million) per violation (Brasil, 2025).

Genshin Impact (MiHoYo, 2020) is one of the games that is affected. Under the new law, its monetization feature “Wishes” qualifies as a loot box and would be banned for minors or in games accessible to them. The game has about 15.2 million monthly users worldwide and around 328,000 in Brazil, growing 2.8% annually (Powell, 2025). Comparing the law to the game’s Terms of Service and Privacy Policy reveals multiple non-compliance issues, including illegal loot boxes, lack of age verification, targeted profiling, and unclear jurisdiction. Online communities have reacted strongly. Players are debating the law’s implications across YouTube, Reddit, and Discord. This research analyzes those discussions using a netnographic approach to identify recurring themes about Law 15.211/25’s impact on Genshin Impact.

BACKGROUND

Between 2015 and 2025, research on the intersections between video games, law, and regulation has expanded alongside monetization models that mirror gambling dynamics, such as loot boxes and gacha systems. Scholars (Abarbanel, 2018; Heinisuo, 2022; Xiao, 2021, 2023) highlight that these mechanisms reproduce gambling structures of risk, chance, and reward, raising ethical and legal issues related to transparency and player vulnerability. Studies (Drummond & Sauer, 2018; Macey & Hamari, 2022) describe gamblification as a sociocultural process that normalizes speculative consumption in digital play. While countries like Belgium, China, and Australia have implemented restrictive regulations, Brazil has only recently advanced with the Digital Statute for Children and Adolescents (Law No. 15.211/2025), which restricts loot boxes for minors. Nonetheless, there remains a notable gap in Brazilian research, particularly in game studies, where the cultural and political dimensions of gamblification are still insufficiently explored. Rather than assessing the legality of gacha systems per se, this study examines how regulatory discourse is translated, contested, and re-signified within player communities.

METHODOLOGY

This study adopts a qualitative, two-phase research design combining exploratory legal–textual analysis with community-focused netnography. The first phase was exploratory and diagnostic in nature. We conducted a close reading of Law No. 15.211/2025 and compared its provisions to Genshin Impact’s core mechanics—particularly its monetization systems—as well as to the game’s publicly available Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. This phase aimed to identify potential points of legal friction and ambiguity rather than to assess formal compliance. During this process, we observed an intensification of player-led debates across social media platforms regarding the law’s implications for the game, which informed the focus and scope of the second phase.

Based on this exploratory stage, three working hypotheses guided the subsequent analysis: (1) that player discussions would conflate legal, moral, and political concerns when interpreting the regulation of gacha systems; (2) that discourse surrounding Law No. 15.211/2025 would extend beyond game mechanics into broader debates about internet regulation and state control in Brazil; and (3) that legal ambiguity would contribute to the circulation of partial or inaccurate interpretations of the law within player communities. These hypotheses were not treated as propositions to be tested deductively, but as sensitizing concepts guiding thematic coding.

The second phase employed a netnographic approach focused on Brazilian Genshin Impact communities on YouTube and Reddit. Data consisted of user commentary from two YouTube videos (N = 422 comments) produced by Brazilian content creators specializing in Genshin Impact and other HoYoverse titles, and four Reddit threads (N = 351 comments) drawn from three subreddits. Threads and videos were selected based on visibility, engagement levels, and explicit focus on Law No. 15.211/2025 and its implications for the game. Data collection was limited to publicly accessible content in Brazilian Portuguese and was conducted using Reddit Scraper and YouTube Data Tool.

The analytical process combined human-led thematic analysis with AI-assisted triangulation. Initial codes were generated manually by the researchers based on close reading and the guiding hypotheses. These codes were then cross-validated using two data-input-based AI systems—NotebookLM and DeepSeek 3.2—following an AI–human triangulation strategy (Bennis & Mouwafaq, 2025). AI outputs were used to test code consistency and identify overlooked patterns, while interpretive decisions remained with the researchers to mitigate model bias and contextual misreading (Nguyen-Trung, 2025; Christou, 2024).

Several limitations should be noted. The dataset privileges highly engaged users and visible discussions, potentially underrepresenting more moderate or disengaged perspectives. Additionally, the analysis focuses on Brazilian online spaces and does not account for cross-national player discourse. Nevertheless, the volume and intensity of engagement observed provide a meaningful snapshot of how regulatory narratives are interpreted and negotiated within Brazilian gaming publics.

RESULTS AND NEXT STEPS

The iterative coding process led to three main themes. The first theme raises concerns about the legal and technical application of the law, focusing on the company's adherence to it and the suitability of the game. Commenters engage in lengthy discussions about the differences between gacha and loot boxes, which could potentially lead to technical legal misinterpretations. A second theme discusses the effectiveness of the law’s application, as it still depends, ultimately, on parental supervision, and it would be easy to “bypass the age verification mechanisms.” The third theme is connected to a national discussion about gambling, censorship, and platform regulation in Brazil, considering the law a “smokescreen” to censor platforms and regulate the internet. They contend that the government should prioritize regulating online gambling platforms and sports betting companies. In summary, the initial analysis reveals that the community is engaged with the issue in a way that extends beyond the immediate effects on gaming culture in Brazil; it is also linked to the country's political landscape and its conflicting ideologies concerning online content moderation.

In the next stage of this research, we intend to extend this discussion through a semi-structured interview with legal specialists in gaming regulation, seeking to confirm our preliminary observations and refine our understanding of how the juridical field envisions the unfolding of this scenario. Through this dialogue between law and game studies, we hope to illuminate how regulatory narratives interpret, and perhaps reshape, mechanics of chance and monetization in digital environments. The interviews aim to identify gaps between juridical interpretation and community understandings, rather than to adjudicate legal correctness. Furthermore, we will investigate more deeply how Law 15.211/2025 may affect specific in-game functionalities, such as Genshin Impact’s “Wishes” system, and what these changes could imply for developers, players, and digital governance in Brazil. Ultimately, these continuations aspire to enrich the interdisciplinary debate on how legislation, culture, and technology co-produce the limits of play in contemporary societies.

Xiaoyu XIONG, Yuchen HUANG, & Sunny Jie YANG, Compliance of Gacha Probability Disclosure Regulations: a Comparative Study across East Asia

“Gacha” is a monetization model in video games that allows players to use real-world money to purchase random rewards (Koeder and Tanaka 2017). Regulators are concerned about their gambling-like features. Psychology research has found an association between gacha spending and problem gambling (Zendle et al. 2020). However, most gacha cannot be regulated under gambling law due to the rewards lacking real-world monetary value (Nielsen and Grabarczyk 2019). Therefore, a more widely adopted alternative approach to regulating gacha is to provide more transparency (Leahy 2022).

Probability disclosure is one approach widely adopted either by law or in industry self-regulation. In East Asia, Mainland China was the first jurisdiction to legally require game companies to disclose the probabilities of obtaining rewards in gacha (Xiao et al. 2024). Later, South Korea and Taiwan (China) also released probability disclosure regulations (Xiao 2024). However, Japan continues to adapt industry self-regulation to improve the transparency of gacha (Schwiddessen 2018).

Previous studies have investigated the prevalence of gacha and the compliance of probability disclosure regulations in top-grossing video games in Mainland China (Xiao et al. 2024) and South Korea (Xiao and Park 2025). However, the compliance of probability disclosure regulations in the other two jurisdictions in East Asia, Japan and Taiwan (China), remains unknown.

In Japan, the government has already focused on gacha regulation since 2012, when “kompu gacha” was declared illegal (Koeder et al. 2018). However, it gradually shifted from government-led to industry self-regulation in the development of the Japanese gaming market (Schwiddessen 2018). As for Taiwan (China), the government requires game companies to disclose the probabilities of obtaining each item in a gacha. In addition, it requires companies to provide a warning message of ‘此為機會中獎商品，消費者購買或參與活動不代表即可獲得特定商品 [This is a chance-based product; the consumer is not guaranteed to obtain any specific product by virtue of purchasing or participating] ’ or a similar message to that effect alongside the disclosed probabilities (Consumer Protection Office, Consumer Protection Committee, Executive Yuan 2022).

By examining the compliance with these specific regulations in the Japanese and Taiwanese (China) gaming markets, this study provided insights into the effectiveness of probability disclosure regulations and guided future regulatory efforts to benefit policymakers both inside and outside East Asia.

Research Question

To what extent game companies comply with gacha probability disclosure regulations in Japan and Taiwan?

Method

Two lists of the 100 highest-grossing iPhone games in Japan on 31 August 2025 and in Taiwan on 7 September 2025 were collated from data.ai, a leading analytics company that provides consolidated data on app downloads, revenue, and spend. A full-screen gameplay recording for 1 hour and screenshots of all gacha that require real-world money to activate were taken. The presence of probability disclosure for any gacha found, and the accessible method of probability disclosure, were recorded. The presence of kompu gacha was checked for games in Japan, and the presence of warning messages was recorded for games in Taiwan.

A content analysis was conducted for Japan and Taiwan (China)’s results, respectively, and a transnational comparative analysis was applied to the data across Japan, Taiwan (China), Mainland China, and South Korea.

Preliminary results

As for the in-game probability disclosure in Japan, among the 100 top-grossing games, 91 games contain loot boxes (91%), while 82 of these 91 games disclose probabilities for at least one loot box (90.1%), and only 38 out of 91 games disclose probabilities for all loot boxes (41.8%). Specifically, potential kompu gacha was identified in 5 of 100 games (5%). In Taiwan, 93 of the 100 highest-grossing iPhone games contained loot boxes (93%). 89.2% of 93 games disclosed probabilities for at least one loot box, but 36.6% did so for all loot boxes. Only 23.7% of 93 games provided warnings.

Preliminary discussion and conclusion

The prevalence of gacha in both Japan and Taiwan is similarly high (90%+), consistent with data from Mainland China and South Korea. Compliance with the gacha probability disclosure regulations in Japan and Taiwan is not optimal. Although the compliance in Taiwan is better than in Japan, the rates in both jurisdictions are far lower than in Mainland China (96.9%). Particularly by considering the probability disclosure of all gacha, the compliance in both Japan and Taiwan is significantly low. The accessibility and visual prominence of most disclosures should also be improved. Regulators in both regions should act more proactively to address respective non-compliance.

Specifically, in Japan, 5 of 100 games are suspected of containing kompu gacha, and some have been detected changing the rules to avoid enforcement. In Taiwan, most companies failed to provide such a warning message at any required location, even though they stated they would do so in terms and conditions. More actions are needed to improve compliance with this specific requirement.

Further approaches to improve companies’ compliance with gacha probability disclosure regulations in Japan and Taiwan are necessary to protect customers.

Kaijing XU, Owning the Unownable: Legal and Social Perceptions of Virtual Property in Genshin Impact

Genshin Impact (miHoYo, 2020) has evolved into a global cultural phenomenon, attracting millions of players and fostering a sophisticated virtual economy driven by gacha mechanics. Players invest substantial time, money, and emotional energy in acquiring in-game characters, weapons, and cosmetic items. However, the game’s End-User License Agreement (EULA) explicitly negates any ownership rights over these assets, granting users merely a revocable license. This contradiction—between players’ emotional and economic investment in virtual assets and the legal non-ownership stipulated by EULAs—exemplifies the growing tension between platform governance and player autonomy in virtual spaces. Against this backdrop, this study explores a core research question: How do Genshin Impact players perceive ownership of their in-game assets within the legal framework of EULAs?

To address this question, the study adopts a mixed-methods approach. Theoretically, the study draws on the psychological ownership framework developed by Pierce, Kostova, and Dirks, which was originally formulated for organizational contexts. Crucially, the theory is not treated as directly transferable to virtual gaming environments. Instead, it is adapted to focus on three core dimensions: feelings of possession (“this is mine”), identity extension, and perceived control. This adaptation is justified by EULA game spaces' unique legal constraints: players lack core property rights, making legal ownership irrelevant. Instead, the three dimensions capture use-, investment- and identity-based "ownership-like experiences"—a viable basis for studying non-ownable virtual assets.

Empirically, the study relies on two primary data sources: an online survey (N=300) and twenty semi-structured interviews with players from China, the EU, and America. The three dimensions of psychological ownership guided the deductive coding of interview data, while inductive coding was employed to capture platform-specific practices and narratives not covered by the original organizational framework. This dual coding strategy ensured that the analysis both adhered to theoretical anchors and remained responsive to the unique context of Genshin Impact.

Complementing the empirical research, a comparative doctrinal analysis was conducted. The analysis revealed a consistent pattern of contractual dominance by the developer: all EULA versions retain absolute authority to modify or delete player assets, regardless of the player’s monetary investment2. Conflict between players’ psychological ownership and the legal reality of non-ownership aligns with Cifrino’s concept of the “contractual governance” of virtual worlds, wherein user relationships are defined entirely by adhesion contracts rather than property or consumer protection law3.

By situating Genshin Impact within global regulatory contexts, this paper contributes to ongoing debates about the legal nature of virtual property and its social implications. While copyright law and contract doctrine currently support total developer control, emerging scholarship suggests the need for hybrid approaches recognizing limited user rights or consumer interests4.Such recognition would better reflect the real-world investment of time, labor, and capital that players contribute to digital worlds.Recognizing the interplay between emotional attachment, economic value, and legal status may also inform policymaking, particularly as regulators in jurisdictions such as South Korea and the EU explore digital consumer protections.

The study is not without limitations. Its sample is not statistically representative, as it is shaped by self-selection and online recruitment methods. Nevertheless, the findings offer valuable qualitative insight into how legally non-ownable digital goods acquire social and emotional meaning—a phenomenon that remains understudied in legal and media scholarship.

Ultimately, Genshin Impact illustrates that virtual property exists at the intersection of code, contract, and culture. Legal systems must evolve to address the affective realities of ownership in online environments, where the boundaries between play and property are increasingly indistinct.

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Get in touch at leon@beclaws.org

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