Love as/in Game, or Chinese Streaming Media in the Age of Involution

Around 2021, involution (in Chinese: neijuan) emerged as a widely used term in everyday discourse to critique the culture of overwork in contemporary China, which pushes younger generations into relentless pursuits of progress and competition, only to find themselves coiling inward rather than moving forward. This social malaise has become so pervasive that it permeates not only work but also leisure and intimate life. In this talk, I examine “involution” as the cultural logic of contemporary China through a critical reading of Love Game in Eastern Fantasy (Tencent Video, 2024), a book-travel (chuanshu) TV serial whose interplay of love and game, work and play at once expresses and symptomatizes the involutionary conditions of its own production.

Combining close reading of the serial narrative with critical analysis of its gamified streaming interface, I examine how involution—marked by the desire for linear progress and its inevitable inward-turning spiral—underlies the narrative form, interface design, and viewer engagement. Within the diegetic world, the serial follows a young office worker who transmigrates into the fictional world of a novel she once read, where a game system governs her fate: she can return to reality only by fixing the novel’s ending and winning the male lead’s love, as tracked by a favorability progress bar. This narrative finds its extradiegetic mirror in Tencent’s streaming interface design, which foregrounds playback progress and encourages a viewing experience centered on monitoring, seeking, and managing one’s own streaming progress.

Reading Love Game’s serial narrative alongside its streaming interface, I argue that the serial negotiates the existential challenges of romance storytelling in what I call the “post-love” era— an era in which love becomes game, and game, like work, is measured, monitored, and managed. At the same time, it also reveals how streaming media is built on the faltering desire of linear progress, gamified to offer viewers a way to “play with” and work through that progress as it turns inward or stalls in the contemporary moment.

Jianqing Chen is an Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her PhD in Film and Media Studies from UC Berkeley in 2021. She specializes in cinema and media cultures in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan; digital media theory; media infrastructures; critical studies of visual AI; global techno-capitalism; post-socialist critique; and feminist media theory, with a special focus on digital media in global China. She is completing a book manuscript titled Touch Screen: Everyday Media in Mobile-First China, which traces the rise of a touchscreen-centered media landscape in contemporary China as it emerges through dynamic, everyday user practices. This mobile-first ecology often departs from prevailing technological imaginaries, standing alongside and at times challenging its Silicon Valley counterparts in reshaping the global digital landscape.