Transmedia Narrative and Cultural Communication in Video Games—Black Myth: Wukong Empowering the Global Dissemination of Chinese Culture

Abstract

In the digital age, video games are gradually replacing film and television as a dominant medium of mass culture, thereby playing an increasingly significant role in the global dissemination of culture. Through modern modes of expression, the video game Black Myth: Wukong brings traditional Chinese culture into the public spotlight, rapidly attracting widespread attention across social media, cultural industries, and market sectors, and generating notable economic and cultural impact. Literary resources, cultural symbols, and narrative styles drawn from different media are integrated into the platform of video games, giving rise to this large-scale transmedia production. Through its configuration of main and side questlines, cutscenes, and the Portraits system, the game emulates the literary features of the novel Journey to the West, including its chapter-based structure, alternation between prose and verse, the intervention of a storyteller’s voice, and multi strand narration, thereby endowing classical poetics with renewed contemporary relevance. Natural and cultural landscapes from the real world are creatively reconfigured within the game’s secondary world through the application of Chinese artistic concepts and techniques, enabling players to experience the depth of Chinese cultural heritage alongside a fantastical Eastern aesthetic. Moreover, shaped by creative contributions across multiple media, the story world generates within the video game platform a new heroic image characterized by collective consciousness and moral responsibility, thus challenging the individualism prevalent in the tide of globalization. Having already produced a phenomenal impact in terms of transmedia production and dissemination, Black Myth: Wukong offers a valuable model for knowledge production in the new era, the development of cultural industries, and the global dissemination of Chinese culture.

Keywords

Black Myth: Wukong / transmediality / media agency / video games / global dissemination

Rights & permissions

Higher Education Press