The narrativization of ludic elements in videogame fanfiction

Abstract

Existing scholarship on videogame fanfiction focuses on how these fictions transform game characters and narrative settings. However, this misses out on an important trope in videogame fanfictions, where authors transplant game procedures, systems, mechanics, and play styles into their stories. We term this trope the narrativization of ludic elements. This article examines how three popular fanfictions based on the Chinese MMO Jian 3 narrativize ludic elements in a way that reinforces hegemonic masculinity. The article contributes to a fuller understanding of the rhetorical strategies of fanfiction writers and explores the ideological implications of the intermedial relation between fanfictions and their source texts.

Introduction

Several scholars have discussed videogame fanfiction (fanfics) as a form of transmedial adaptation from game to story (e.g., Burn, 2006; Rambusch et al., 2009). These scholars have argued that fanfic authors primarily adapt characters and settings – the most story-like aspects of games – rather than ludic elements – those formal features of games that are unique to, or at least characteristic of, the medium. Another approach to videogame fanfiction has been to focus on the ideological transformations that happen when these adaptations take place (Crawford, 2018; Dym et al., 2018; Wirman, 2015; Wu and Martin, 2023). In particular, these scholars focus on ideologies about gender, focusing on topics such as how fanfic writers include more diverse forms of masculinities in fanfics (Dym et al., 2018) or how they recast femininity in the game into an opposing femininity (Wirman, 2015). This cluster of scholarship, therefore, closely links to a tradition of fan studies and fanfic studies that researches gender representation (Lamb and Veith, 1986; Russ, 1985; Tosenberger, 2007). This article investigates videogame fanfics from both of these perspectives, looking at how videogame fanfics that transform ludic elements of their source texts impact the ideological meanings in these texts.

The term ‘ludic element’ is a somewhat fuzzy concept. The word ‘ludic’ comes from the Latin for ‘to play’ (ludere) and refers to objects, events and actions characterized by play and games, however, we are using it to specifically index videogame play (behaviors) and objects associated with gameplay (e.g., health, level, and quest-structure). A ludic element, then, is an aspect of the text that is primarily associated with videogames, including players’ behaviors and objects associated with gameplay. An example of a ludic element is the leveling-up system in many MMOs, where a player-controlled character becomes more powerful as the player completes particular game tasks. Another ludic element is the representation of characters in terms of quantifiable data relating to such things as health or experience, visualized in bars or as a score. A third is transgressive play, the name given to a particular style of play in which the player subverts in some way the game as a designed system.

Despite the lack of attention in the scholarship, videogame fanfics do frequently feature ludic elements of their source games, as we will show in the later analysis, often incorporating these ludic elements into the narrative in creative and surprising ways. When this happens, fanfics establish an intermedial relationship with videogames, where the story ‘thematizes, evokes or imitates elements or structures of another, conventionally distinct medium [videogames here] through the use of its own media-specific means’ (Rajewsky, 2005: 53). This sort of intermedial referentiality has become quite common in fanfiction. For example, the last 15 years has seen the emergence and development of a genre of Chinese (fan)fiction in which a godlike system controls and directs the fate of the story’s characters. This genre, known as ‘system fiction’ (xitongwen 系统文), originates from web-game fictions (wangyouwen 网游文) that make explicit reference to videogame systems, often combining with other popular elements in Chinese popular fiction such as apocalypse (mori 末日), rebirth (chongsheng 重生), and wuxia (武侠) (i.e., Chinese fantasy rooted in sword and sorcery (Rehling, 2012)). Some system fictions explicitly reference videogames, either videogames in general or specific games. But even those that do not explicitly mention games still feature elements such as quest-giving and leveling-up in their narrative structure and content. System fanfiction on videogames tends to present the game system clearly and emphasize its interaction with the protagonist. Their interaction is often a source of pleasure for the reader (e.g., how the protagonists negotiate with the system, how they try to get rid of the system, how they discover the origin or identity of the system, some systems are even personified and have their own personalities and goals to achieve, etc.). As such, formally transgressing the system often becomes a key part of fanfics, as it characterizes an interesting interaction between the protagonists and the system. On the contrary, the novelizations of certain game franchises tend not to present the game system clearly, but rather to focus on the part that is often associated with game narrative. Some system fanfics on videogames reflect a form of autobiographical writing, when the writers reflect their gameplay in the protagonists. However, this kind of reflection is not explicit or overwhelming in the fanfics. This is because system fanfic writers often place their works in an original context that is different from that of the game.

The intermedial relationship between videogames and films has been explored in the literature (Beil and Schmidt, 2015; Bittanti, 2003; Kallay, 2013; Lahdenperä, 2018; Mack, 2016; Sell, 2021; Thoss, 2014). These and other scholars have looked at different forms of remediation, such as the use of the forking path (Kallay, 2013; Lahdenperä, 2018), the quest structure (Sell, 2021), the extra life (Thoss, 2014), the avatar (Mack, 2016; Sell, 2021), and the meanings of adapted elements in the new contexts (Lahdenperä, 2018; Sell, 2021). For example, Linda Lahdenperä (2018) explores how films remediate videogames through time loop and finds that time loop films resemble videogames in their level-like and goal-oriented structure, since the protagonists in films, like the players of some videogames, often re-experience a scene over and over again in order to actualize the correct ending. She argues that the actualization of the paradoxical experience of somethings both happening and not happening can make the film more tragic, if the characters have to go through repeated loss.

While films’ intermedial references to videogames have been discussed, there is less work on the relationship between videogames and written fiction or on how fiction can evoke the gameplay experience. Heather Inwood’s (2014, 2017) work looks at the intermedial relationships of two types of Chinese online fiction (web-game fictions (网游文) and infinite fictions (无限流小说)) to videogames, and the meanings the intermedial relationships imply. Web-game fiction refers directly to videogames, often MMORPGs, and narrates how the protagonist, usually male, plays MMORPGs, ‘charting his progress through the levels as he earns money and weapons, wins over the hearts of female gamers, and establishes himself as the undisputed champion of the game’ (Inwood, 2014: 12). As a result, web-game fictions describe an imaginary and idealized gameplay experience that shows the internal thinking of protagonists/players, reflecting their engagement and enjoyment of the competitive and cooperative modes of social interaction, and urge the reader to identify with the first-person protagonist.

Inwood (2017) also analyses the story Infinite Horror (无限恐怖, zhttty, 2007) as an example of infinite fiction. While infinite fiction most often bears an intermedial relationship to popular genre films rather than games, Inwood (2017) argues that the ‘conflict between the pre-written plot of the film and the agency of the characters to change the outcome of the story recalls the relationship between narrative and the ludic (or playful) in computer games’ (19). Infinite Horror also evokes the gameplay experience by making other references to online role-playing games, such as putting its protagonists in a situation in which they have to negotiate the narrative as though first-person players.

There are other genres of Chinese online fiction that make reference to videogame systems, either explicitly or not, and therefore share similarities with system fictions. For example, web-game fictions often refer to MMORPGs and infinite fictions often contain godlike systems akin to game systems. However, system fictions, the topic of the present article, are more centrally focused on videogames as a source.

System fictions, whether the system is explicitly identified as a game system or not, refer to fictions where a system finds and ties itself to the protagonist, to require and/or help the protagonist to achieve certain goals, such as taking revenge and earning reputation. A distinguishing feature of system fictions is that the fictions emphasize the existence of the system, by presenting rewards and punishments in terms of quantifiable outcomes, and explicitly describing the quests it issues and functions it has in terms familiar from videogames. There are generally two types of systems in system fictions. The first type of system has ultimate power over the protagonist, forcing the protagonist to do some quests with the supernatural power it provides. Throughout these stories, characters make use of game-like capacities explicitly. The second type of system only provides the protagonist with supernatural power without issuing quests. Whether the system makes explicit reference to a particular game system or not, system fictions tend to evoke a sense of playing, by including ludic elements of extra lives, multilinearity, and game capacities.

Previous research on narrative theory shows that the convergence of narratology and digital media brings new insights to narratology (Fjellestad, 2021; Fludernik, 1996; Punday, 2019; Ryan, 2004; Ryan and Thon, 2014). Punday (2019) argues for the importance of digital media to narrative theory without pitting digital media against narrative theory, but rather using digital media to explore existing narrative concepts. Punday explores what digital characters do for their texts, focusing in particular on their compositional functions. Compositional functions refer to functions that are ‘particularly relevant to digital characters, who are often used by the player to do things – navigate the world, progress the narration, change the view we have on a particular scene’ (original emphasis, Punday, 2019: 94). He emphasizes the importance of exploring the compositional functions of characters, rather than ‘our conventional (humanistic) ideas about character as an entity whose interest is primarily a matter of moral analysis and understanding’ (99). Danuta Fjellestad (2021) notes that there is a tendency for the ludic impulse to emerge in experimental literature. One of the transformative ways is what she calls ergodic ludicity: ‘a recasting or a transmission of the gaming element from the diagetic level, the level of the story, onto the material machine or platform for telling stories, the book. Books as objects morph, change shape, mimic other artifacts, surprise by their very looks, and challenge the reader when it comes to handling them in a most literal sense’ (311). Transforming a codex into a deck of cards, for example, is one such form of ergodic ludicity. While at first glance Fjellestad's concept sounds similar to our concept of narrativizing the ludic elements, they differ in that Fjellestad's concept emphasizes changing the form of the media to evoke a sense of play.

This article focuses on one game and the fanfics surrounding it, and explores how system fictions reinforce (sometimes to the point of parody) aspects of hegemonic masculinity already present in the game by highlighting, foregrounding and ‘narrativizing’ characteristics of hegemonic masculinity latent in the game mechanics and procedures. The term ‘narrativization’ has been used by Monika Fludernik (1996) to describe a reading strategy whereby readers recuperate an incomprehensible text by imposing a narrative form on it in their interpretation. Our use of the term is closer to that of Hayden White (cited in Fludernik), who sees narrativization as a strategy used by history writers, whereby they impose a story form on their material. In this article, narrativization also refers to a strategy of writing (rather than interpretation), but rather than transforming historical material into a story form, we are describing a process of transforming textual aspects that conventionally belong in a game into aspects of narrative. The fanfics narrativize ludic elements in three ways: first, they represent characters as data, mimicking the quantifying logic of videogames; second, they engage in quest structures and leveling-up systems that parallel those found in the game and that rely on stereotypically masculine performance of mental and physical power; and, third, the characters engage in transgressive play by opposing, shutting down or taking over the system that controls their world.

Our overall argument is that by importing and adapting ludic elements of videogames, the fanfics also engage with ideological aspects of these games, with our analysis focusing on the reproduction and intensification of the hegemonic masculinity already present in the videogame. First, through quantifying themselves and other characters as data, the fictional characters adopt mathematical certainty as their social and psychological characteristic, parodying the quantifying tendencies of hegemonic masculinity. This tendency to quantify characters in the fanfiction can be linked to what has been written about quantification and hegemonic masculinity in games. For example, Brandon Rogers (2020) describes masculine rationality as a ‘normalized version of logical reasoning that's structured upon objectivity and objectification’ (327). Rogers is specifically talking about health bars in games, describing the way health bars ‘encourage players to see health as both an object and a resource’ (331) rather than being something that is experienced in a qualitative way by individual subjects. Researchers in both the west (Connell, 2005) and China (Louie, 2002) have seen this kind of masculine rationality as a feature of hegemonic masculinity.

Second, the narrativization of quest-structure presents the protagonist’s submission to the System, which surveils him into the norms of hegemonic masculinity. Hegemonic masculinity is latent in the analyzed game, which features a series of quests that require players to accumulate wealth and improve their fighting skills. This form of self-development is a manifestation of Chinese hegemonic masculinity (Louie, 2002), which emphasizes wealth and physical strength.

Third, the protagonist reclaims his hegemonic masculinity by formally transgressing the System’s restrictions, and gaining a superior social position. Hegemonic masculinity is also latent in the game because this transgression generally implies suppression of the game system, where the player takes a superior position. The players' superior position over the system reveals their authority, a central feature of hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 2005; Louie, 2002).

The article contributes to previous scholarship about intermedial relationships between Chinese online fiction and videogames (Inwood, 2014, 2017) and between videogames and videogames fanfics (Burn, 2006; Rambusch et al., 2009), as it analyzes the intermediality in videogame fanfics by identifying what is being narrativized, how it is being narrativized, and what the narrativized element is doing in this new context both formally and ideologically. It contributes to game studies and fan studies by challenging Burn (2006) and Rambusch et al. (2009) by arguing videogame fanfics do frequently feature ludic elements of their source games. It also contributes to game studies and gender studies by discussing how the videogame fanfic transforms players’ agency, hegemonic masculinity, and the process of becoming subjects.

Empirical material

This article analyzes fanfics of the popular Chinese MMO, Jianxiaqingyuan Online (Jian 3 hereafter, Seasun Game Studio, 2009). Jian 3 is selected as it is a popular game that has generated a large number of fanfics, many of which are widely read in the game’s player community. The game and its fanfics also frequently engage with themes of gender. This makes available a large sample of texts that a subsection of the player community finds meaningful. By selecting a Chinese MMO, the analysis seeks to broaden game scholarship’s coverage of videogame fanfics beyond western player communities in single-player games, the primary site of analysis for existing studies (Burn, 2006; Newman, 2008).

The fanfics were collected between September 2020 and January 2021 from Jinjiangwenxuecheng (Jinjiang, Jinjiangwenxuecheng, 2003), a frequently used (fan)fiction publishing website in China. Purposive sampling was used to select fanfics that incorporated aspects of the game system into their fictions. We searched Jinjiang, Baidu and Google using the keywords ‘Jian 3, system’, for searching fanfics that explicitly make use of game system, procedures, and mechanics. This returned to 204 fanfics as of August 1^st 2020. We selected the most popular three based on the numbers of reads. The more popular a fanfic is, the more likely it is to contribute to the analysis of ideology, because popular texts are where ideologies happen. A popular text is popular when people recognize the ideological context in the text (Fiske, 2010). All selected fanfics are long slash stories, with an average of 620,000 words. They borrow game systems, procedures and mechanics from Jian 3, but have original male protagonists and storylines. For ethical reasons, this article hides the fanfic links and anonymizes fanfic authors and titles to protect authors and the community. The protagonists’ names are also anonymized because they are original characters and may reveal authors’ identities. This is necessary because fans did not submit their works for broad dissemination but to their fannish circle. Fandoms are vulnerable and studies on them may disrupt or even ruin in the fandoms (Busse and Hellekson, 2012). For example, fans who disapprove of the fanfics being analyzed may attack the authors of the fanfics through the researchers' articles. This could happen to this article because it points out that hegemonic masculinity is latent in the games and is reinforced in the fanfics. Since hegemonic masculinity is not seen as positive, this article might put the authors of the analyzed fanfics in an unfavorable position. We anonymized data also because fanfics contain sexually explicit content. This is particularly important in the Chinese context, where fiction with sexual scenes are viewed as ‘immoral productions’ and fanfic writers sometimes find themselves in legal troubles. For example, a slash writer named Tianyi was imprisoned in 2018 for writing and selling slash fiction with sexual scenes.

We adopt critical discourse analysis (CDA) to analyze the game and its fanfics. We identify three categories for analysis, derived from previous work on representation of masculinity: body, mind, and social positions (Connell, 2005; Kong, 2012; Louie, 2002; Song, 2021). The body category relates to aspects of physique, age, and skin colors. Different ideologies of masculinity tend to value or idealize different body types. For example, western hegemonic masculinity values a white, young, strong body (Connell, 2005). Soft masculinity, alternatively, values a young, beautiful, attractive body (Song, 2021). Chinese hegemonic masculinity prefers a scholar-type body over a strong, warrior-type body (Louie, 2002). The second analytical category is the mind. This is another important indicator of masculinity, referring to the cognitive capacities and resources of the ideal man in a given ideology. For example, Connell (2005) argues that western hegemonic masculinity requires men to be dominant and independent, while Louie (2002) argues that Chinese hegemonic masculinity prefers an intelligent mind over a strong body. The last category is social position, and specifically refers to the position of hegemonic men in relation to women and nonhegemonic men. For example, Connell (2005) defines western hegemonic masculinity as a ‘configuration of gender practice…which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women’ (77) and other men (79).

To conduct the analysis, we identified aspects of the chosen episode that featured one or more of these categories and analyzed the connotations of these representations in relation to theories of masculinity already discussed.

In fanfic 1, the male protagonist is transported between worlds as different avatars from Jian 3, with his progress in each world governed by Jian 3’s game systems. These game systems, collectively referred to as ‘the System’, require the protagonist to build up his avatars’ reputation. The story follows the protagonist as he establishes and develops his avatars’ reputation. Every time he does something that increases or decreases reputation, the System rewards or punishes him by giving or taking away some points. For example, when the protagonist is first flung into a storyworld, he is startled and acts irrationally. Passersby think he is mad, and the System punishes him by saying, in a voice only audible to the protagonist, ‘52 points have been taken off, and your current progression is −52/10,000’. When the protagonist collects 10,000 points for an avatar, he is able to leave one storyworld and move to the next. The protagonist travels to 12 different storyworlds each one based on an existing novel or videogame. In each storyworld, the protagonist embodies a different avatar from one of the clans in Jian 3. When the protagonist manages to establish the reputation for his twelfth avatar, he takes complete control over the System and returns to his own world.

Fanfic 2 also features a male protagonist who embodies an avatar and interacts with Jian 3’s game systems. At the beginning of the story, the protagonist finds himself resurrected in an apocalyptic world of zombies. In his previous life, he had been betrayed by his team members, who used him as a research object due to the supernatural powers he derived from the game systems. In this life, he decides to take revenge, and manages to do so by his extraordinary power. The protagonist then travels to different countries with his new team, protecting China from invasion. At the end of the story, the protagonist destroys the source, a tree, whose power transforms humans into supernatural beings or zombies, and becomes a superior authority.

In fanfic 3, the protagonist and his two team members use supernatural powers derived from the game systems to survive in an apocalyptic world. The characters must accumulate resources to survive. Different instances are opened by a gigantic tree called xunmu. It creates portals between the apocalyptic world and different instances for three to 4 months. During this time, characters can travel to the instances to find and eat the tree’s seeds, lushis, in order to increase their supernatural power. The fanfic is about how the protagonist and his team compete for lushis with other supernatural beings in the instances.

Each fanfic contains several different sorts of game systems. For convenience, we call the combination of borrowed game systems in a fanfic ‘the System’. Fanfic 1, for example, borrows and adapts Jian 3’s leveling system, with the protagonist able to see others’ levels and names. It also adapts the transportation system, whereby the protagonist can teleport; the navigation system, showing him how to get to particular places and who is nearby; the chatting system, enabling the protagonist to send messages that are audible for everyone in the chatting zone; and the forging system, enabling him to forge weapons. The System is visible only to the protagonist. The components and the functions are similar in each fanfic, being based on the systems in the original game of Jian 3. The main difference between the fanfics is that the System in fanfic 1 is an external agent that delivers quests to the protagonist, but the Systems in fanfics 2 and 3 do not deliver quests, instead being the source of the protagonists’ supernatural power.

An analysis of fanfics

Each of these fanfics adapts aspects of the original game and applies them to a story that focuses on the adventures of a central protagonist whose inner world is narrated. In this analysis, we focus on three ludic elements reproduced in the fanfics: the narrativization of quantified play, the narrativization of leveling-up and the narrativization of transgressive play. In each case, the transformation of a ludic element into a narrative element has two implications. First, the meaning of the ludic element is transformed as it becomes part of a fictional world instead of a game system. Second, the ludic element is changed from something that is performed by the player into something that is interpreted by the reader.

The analysis focuses on how these processes engage with gender ideology, in particular as it relates to the representation of masculinity. The particular form of masculinity available in this game and in these fanfics is hegemonic masculinity; an idealized masculinity that produces and legitimates the unequal and hierarchical relations of masculinity over femininity, and of hegemonic men over women and nonhegemonic men (Connell, 2005; Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005; Messerschmidt, 2012). While the traits of hegemonic masculinity are changeable under different social, political, and cultural contexts, it is commonly defined by a set of normative traits such as homophobia, toughness, autonomy, domination, reason, the rejection of femininity, and the stoic suppression of emotions (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005; Levant et al., 2013; Messerschmidt, 2012). These traits assert an authoritative claim without engaging in direct violence, though, as Connell reminds us, ‘violence often underpins or supports [this] authority’ (Connell, 2005: 77).

However, it is necessary to develop Connell’s original concept of hegemonic masculinity to account for the Chinese context in which the game and its fanfics are produced and primarily consumed. Chinese hegemonic masculinity (Louie, 2002) resembles western hegemonic masculinity in that both employ authority and power to maintain a leading position for hegemonic men over women and nonhegemonic men, and for masculinity over femininity. However, there are also differences, mainly around the Chinese concepts of wen and wu, two hierarchical traits of hegemonic masculinity: ‘[W]en can refer to a whole range of attributes such as literary excellence, civilized behavior, and general education, while wu can refer to just as many different sets of descriptors, including a powerful physique, fearlessness and fighting skills’ (Louie, 2002: 161). Both wen and wu are desirable in the Chinese masculinity schema and the combination of both wen and wu on a man is most desirable.

The narrativization of quantified play

In borrowing game systems and transforming them from ludic elements of a game to narrative elements of a story, the fanfics represent the characters as data. While game players are used to thinking of game characters as a set of data that change according to player decisions and performance (e.g., health, strength, experience), this ludic way of seeing transforms its meaning as it becomes part of the fanfics’ stories.

This feature of games has been discussed in the literature. For example, Ben Egliston (2019) describes the self-tracking features of DotaPlus as a mnemotechnical system of surveillance that empowers players by providing information. But this empowerment, he argues, also establishes the player in a consumer-oriented subject position. Egliston (2020) describes this sort of self-tracking as ‘quantified play’. Pérez-Latorre and Oliva (2019) also discusses what Egliston terms as quantified play with the term quantification, and link it to neoliberal governmentality, whereby reality is made calculable and phenomena become information; a form of biopower that, in Foucault’s words, ‘brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge/power an agent of transformation of human life’ (Foucault, 1998: 143).

As has already been hinted, quantified play can convey ideological meanings that function on players. Pérez-Latorre and Oliva (2019) argue that the constant monitoring of the avatar’s level of health, ammunition, and damage is a way to encourage the player to make strategic choices based on this information to best allocate and use limited resources, a central feature of neoliberalism. Brandon Rogers (2020) argues that the quantification and visualization of health in games ‘encourages players to see health as both an object and a resource’ (331), facilitating ‘ways of seeing and being in the world that align with masculine rationality and objectification’ (331) where masculine rationality here refers to ‘a normalized version of logical reasoning that’s structured upon objectivity and objectification’ (327).

While these scholars have made a convincing case for the presence of quantified play, self-surveillance, biopower, and ideological meanings in many games, it is unclear how or to what extent this ‘shows up’ for players of these games. In the following, we ask what happens when this presence (perhaps latent or unconscious for the player) becomes treated as a narrative element in the Jian 3 fanfics.

In each fanfic, the System reduces characters and their behaviors to mere data that can be analyzed and sorted according to objective criteria. For example, in fanfic 1, the System observes and measures everything the protagonist does and converts it into a quantifiable score to reward or punish him. It warns the protagonist that failing to complete the quests incurs precisely calculated punishment that act not upon the body of the protagonist but upon an abstract quantity or score that constitutes the protagonist himself. In the other two fanfics, other characters are also constantly measured and quantified. The System pegs their lives and abilities at precise levels based on objective, mathematical criteria and presents this information to the protagonist, who uses this information to evaluate them. For this reason, character description often entails a series of quantifications, as fanfic 2 shows,

He [the protagonist] cannot see an exact number of health points, but a rough figure…For example, if his own health points are 80,000, then Character Y in front of him has 5,000 health points, which is better than most ordinary people. An ordinary person generally has a few hundred health points: this is the difference between the evolved and the ordinary. An ordinary zombie has several hundred health points, a figure that is a little above an ordinary person’s. However, an evolved, level B zombie has approximately 10,000, being hard to defeat with the efforts of a single person, even if they are evolved.

In these stories, every particular of the characters is quantifiable and explicitly quantified. The characters themselves learn to treat each other in terms of quantification. For example, in fanfic 1, when the protagonist sees a character’s health points labeled as ‘unknown’, he fears the character’s power far outweighs his own, and changes his attitude toward him:

He [i.e., the protagonist] frowned. This monk has a bad attitude, and wanted to rob his friend. But he changed his attitude when he saw that the monk’s level was 95 and his health points are labeled as unknown. This is not a person he can confront, he thinks. He immediately changed his attitude.

By developing a perspective on the world that reduces others to quantifiable data to be operated on, the stories present a social world in which qualitative relationships are entirely supplanted by quantifiable ones, and characters embody a highly rationalistic, mathematical and utilitarian approach to human intercourse. The protagonists in particular quantify their enemies and other characters to evaluate them and make use of them. They also quantify themselves, making decisions about which actions to perform and how by considering their quantified health and capacity level.

Quantification forms a basic feature for masculinity, because masculinity epistemologically relies on objective knowledge, and quantification is a way of providing objective knowledge. Brandon Rogers’s (2020) masculine rationality helps to explain the tight relation between masculinity and quantification, through the tight relation between masculinity and rationality. Rationality here refers to ration, the allotment of resources. Masculinity intertwines with rationality because they both epistemologically rely on objective knowledge, such as quantified numbers. As quantification is a way to provide objective knowledge and masculinity epistemologically relies on objective knowledge, quantification forms a basic feature for masculinity.

The narrativization of game systems transforms ludic strategies of quantification found in the game into structuring principles of the fictional world the protagonists inhabit. As such, the hyper-rational mode of quantifying every aspect of behavior in order to sustain the cybernetic feedback loop for the player becomes integral to how the characters themselves perceive and engage with others and themselves. Mathematical certainty, which in the game is a means of giving players access to the gameworld, becomes in the fanfics a social and psychological characteristic of the fictional characters. Placed in this fictional context, the rational and quantifying approach of the game system borders on the absurd, parodying the characteristics of quantified play that structure the game.

The narrativization of quest-structure

The three fanfics privilege and normalize a particular form of masculinity by representing a protagonist actively adjusting his behavior to align with a set of ideological norms. According to Foucault (1980), individuals are actively involved in their self-formation through a process of subjectivation which is constituted by a variety of ‘operations on [people’s] own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct’ (Foucault, 1980). These operations entail a process of internalized discourse mediated through external cultural norms and power formations through which self-identity, conscience, and self-knowledge are developed (Foucault, 1982). Subjectivation is present in videogames when players actively respond to game rules in a process that conforms to certain norms.

While this adjustment to a norm is something that game rules frequently require of a player, the translation of this into a narrative setting makes it available as an object of textual interpretation rather than rule-based performance, and so brings the ideological aspect to the surface. The protagonists move more and more toward an ideal of Chinese hegemonic masculinity as they complete quests and try to gain rewards and avoid punishments, because this process reproduces and legitimates the hierarchical relation of masculinity over femininity. The System in fanfic 1 uses quests, rewards, and punishments to divide normal, privileged behaviors that are coded as masculine – such as engaging in violent acts of physical domination and strategic calculation of allocating resources (Louie, 2002) – from abnormal, deviant behaviors that are coded as feminine – such as displaying emotion and losing a duel. For example, when the protagonist is defeated in a duel, he loses 5000 reputation points.

Being significantly injured, the protagonist was lying on the lower surface of the Range Star Pool, listening to the System's notification, feeling hopeless.

System notification: Reputation Point -5000 for you were defeated in the duel.

On the contrary, when the protagonist wins a dual as a general, the System rewards him for encouraging behaviors that are coded masculine.

X [the alias of the protagonist] flipped half a circle in the air, and his Taiyin Finger Power [a capacity name] spat out at B's [a character for the antagonist side] back. B turned back but could not dodge in time. X landed steadily on the back of his horse, with a gentle look on his face. Taiyin Finger Power forcibly knocked down the target from his horse. The entire antagonist side erupted with many incredulous cries of astonishment.

System notification: You sit at the helm of a great army, lifting its heart and power against the foreign armies, so that the foreign races will not dare to create dissenting voices again. Reputation Point +2000.

The story traces the protagonist’s trajectory as he becomes a docile body (Foucault, 1979). As Rogers (2020) emphasizes, players are encouraged to be subjects who can and must monitor and control quantified and visualized resources in games to engage in strategic self-construction through optimal resource allocation, becoming a docile body of masculine rationality. The protagonist’s journey in this regard mirrors back to the reader the player’s journey in mastering a game.

In fanfic 1, the System shapes the protagonist by privileging both intelligence (a feature of wen) and physical strength (a feature of wu), the two fundamental features of Chinese hegemonic masculinity. When the System awards the protagonist points for brokering a peace treaty through a cunning strategy, it is rewarding intelligence and reinforcing qualities of wen. When it gives points for defeating enemies through outstanding martial skills, it is rewarding qualities of wu. The story carefully quantifies how often the System rewards or punishes different kinds of behavior, informing the reader that the System rewards/punishes (lack of) intelligence 32 times, awarding 43,008 points in total. It rewards/punishes (lack of) physical strength 23 times, awarding 31,018 points in total. Fanfic 1, then, represents a System that seems to value both intelligence and physical strength, with an emphasis on the former, and this aligns with the gendering and ordering of attributes in Chinese hegemonic masculinity.

Unlike the game, these fanfics cast a light on the inner lives of the protagonists as they comply with the System’s gendered expectations, transform themselves into docile bodies enacting hegemonic masculinity, and learn to be appropriate men. In fanfic 1, the protagonist changes his behavior in line with the System’s surveillance and feedback, but he also changes his way of thinking. When he discovers the System is able to surveil his every action he initially feels resistant, but he quickly accepts the surveillance and adjusts his thoughts and behavior to earn reputation. Soon he learns what behavior the system will reward, and he acts out generic performance scripts when interacting with other characters. Here, he meets a female enemy:

He leans back against the door to drink the alcohol casually. His gesture is clean and free. His eyes, with disdain and warning, glance coldly in her direction. She quivers and feels freezing…. [He thinks] it is just establishing reputation ….[The System issues a notification] the protagonist is dominant. Reputation points +10.

In this scene, the protagonist moved from being resistant to the System to accept the system, and eventually fully submitted to the System. However, while the protagonist normalizes his behavior according to the expectations of the System, he also sometimes challenges the System for better rewards and more freedom. On one occasion, he manages to make the System concede and become dormant, so that he has more time and freedom to complete the goal he set for himself. In the short period when he is free from the System’s surveillance, he feels a sense of liberation and relaxation:

The protagonist takes a deep breath. The System becomes quiet and dormant. When he tries to call the System, no feedback is given to him. He can still use the game capacities, but he is sure that something has disappeared. He looks down, spreading his palms and then holding them up. He feels a strange sense, as if he became a living person again.

However, this moment of freedom from the System merely acts as a foil against which his general submission and alignment with its norms is displayed. Most of the time, he follows the System’s quests, becoming an ideal subject of Chinese hegemonic masculinity. He actively explores the rules of the System to earn as much reputation as he can and eventually internalizes the System’s logic, acting in line with this logic even in the absence of surveillance when the System is dormant. Eventually, his internalization of the System’s gendered logic is rewarded as he becomes his country’s top general, wins respect from the people of his country, and even achieves immortality.

By turning the quest structure of the game into a narrative trope, the fanfics lay bare the protagonist’s trajectory as he internalizes and acts upon norms of hegemonic masculinity. The story documents his mental and emotional changes in this process in a way that is absent from the original game. Indeed, it is not the character in the original game who undergoes this change but the player. As such, it might be better to say that the narrativization of ludic elements is more to do with narrativizing the ideological transformations that the player goes through in playing the game. Quest structure, which in the game is a means of creating a possibility space for interaction, becomes in the fanfic a means of domination and surveillance. The protagonist’ mental transformation – from resisting, to accepting, and eventually to internalizing surveillance – reveals the lack of freedom of players while playing the game.

The narrativization of transgressive play

The fanfics, then, translate the game’s quest structure into a means by which the protagonists become a docile body, aligning himself with the norms of hegemonic masculinity. But, as already indicated, there are moments in which the protagonists resist this interpellation. In this final section we will consider this resistance as a form of transgressive play that, though resisting the overarching authority of the System, ends up paving the way for the consummation of the ideal hegemonic masculinity that the System represents. This last section is not, then, so much about the narrativization of a game procedure and more about the narrativization of transgressive play; a mode of resistance to the game’s logic.

Transgressive play, originally conceptualized by Espen Aarseth (2007) can be seen as a form of subjectivation. Like subjectivation, transgressive play is play against the rules in ways not anticipated by design (Aarseth, 2007; Mortensen, 2008). Transgressive play happens when the players ‘do unexpected things, often just because these actions are not explicitly forbidden’ (Aarseth, 2007: 132), such as ‘the lucky shot, the brilliant move, the last-minute goal’ (133). It is ‘a symbolic gesture of rebellion against the tyranny of the game, a (perhaps illusory) way for the played subject to regain their sense of identity and uniqueness through the mechanisms of the game itself’ (132). ‘Transgressive’ in Aarseth’s sense is the transgression against the formal restrictions of the game, and is termed ludic transgressivity (Pötzsch, 2018) and intraludic transgressions (Mortensen and Jørgensen, 2020) as it breaks in-game rules. This transgression in the formal sense can also have ideological meanings. For example, players may use a bug that allows them to avoid fighting in games where fighting is the main game mechanic. By transgressing the expectations of the designers, the player is transgressing the ideology inherent in the game design.

At several points in the fanfics, the protagonists engage in forms of transgressive play. However, rather than undermining the prevailing ideology of hegemonic masculinity, these moments of transgressive play serve to reproduce their hegemonic masculine status. This is most clearly seen in each protagonists’ eventual overthrowing of the System that initially controls their fate or gives them their powers. While this representation of play is formally transgressive, then, it actually serves to cement hegemonic masculinity as a central value in the texts by establishing at the end of the narrative the unchallenged authority of the male protagonist over the System.

Throughout fanfic 1, the System has authority over the protagonist, coercively dragging him into different instances and forcing him to fulfill quests in order to get back to his own world. As discussed in the previous section, this forces the protagonist into behaviors that reinforce norms and characteristics of hegemonic masculinity. However, the authority of the System diminishes as the protagonist increases his reputation among the characters in the various instances. By aligning with the protagonist rather than the System, the characters increase the protagonist’s authority in the world, and there is a concomitant decline in the System’s power over the protagonist. Eventually, the protagonist first shuts down the System and then becomes its ‘manager’. At the end of the fanfic, the protagonist voluntarily travels to Jian 3 as an autonomous character without being restricted by any predetermined gameplay. Jian 3’s players in the fanfic even elevate him as a god because of his bug-like physical power.

[At this stage, X has voluntarily traveled to Jian 3 as an autonomous character, without being restricted by any predetermined gameplay. He is invincible in Jian 3.] One day, a player followed in two NPCs’ footsteps [X and another character] to secretly record what they were doing and was shocked to find out that X was very powerful. He was shocked to find out that X had a lot of influence, not only was he close to the heads of various sects and bigwigs, but he was also recruiting players and calling on them to unite to fight against the Wolf's Teeth Army.

If you give him money, when it reaches a certain amount, you will be rewarded with [Lost Respect] and the rare [Nine Heavens] Reputation Point.

Players got excited, and gradually giving money to X became a daily event for them.

The world echoed with the loud cries of the players:

‘Who can tell me which map God X went to today?’

This transgressive play in the formal sense – shutting down and controlling the System – offers the protagonist authority in terms of autonomy and bug-like physical power.

The protagonists in fanfics 2 and 3 also gain authority over the System. They do so by internalizing and gaining personal control over the powers it has conferred on them and breaking the restrictions of these game capacities. For example, in fanfic 2, the System gives the protagonist the power of ‘catching’, which can initially only be used on members of the protagonist’s own team and on his own turret. However, as the protagonist internalizes this capacity, he becomes capable of using it on any target.

S [the alias of the protagonist] smiled slightly. Main Flying Claw and Sub-Flying Claw are skills that have just become available in the System. In Jian 3, these skills can only be used on teammates or his own turret, but that is no longer the case. The dark silver chain is thin and long, and it can be used to hook things as if it were an arm, so it is very useful.

Moreover, the protagonist later becomes the only one who is powerful enough to destroy the tree that radiates tremendous energy transforming humans to supernatural beings or zombies, and the only one who can resist the desire of smuggling the branch of the tree, which can make him more physically powerful. He destroys the tree independently. By freeing himself from the System’s initial restrictions, the protagonist moves toward greater authority: invincible physical power, assertiveness, independence, and self-control. A figure of hegemonic masculinity fully emerges in the final chapter, which closes with the line, ‘now who does not respect him?’

This transgressive play is coded as masculine and hegemonic because the authority it offers evokes (Chinese) hegemonic masculinity from two aspects. First, the authority – in terms of physical power (wu), assertiveness, independence, autonomy, and self-control (the central features of wen and wu) – evokes the traits of (Chinese) hegemonic masculinity (Louie, 2002; Messerschmidt, 2012). And second, more importantly, this authority reproduces the unequal and hierarchical relations of hegemonic men over women and other men. In fanfic 1, the protagonist eventually processes invincible power that elevates him as a god by Jian 3’s players, being women and nonhegemonic men. In fanfic 2, the protagonist’s heroic behavior – destroying the tree – saves the world and offers him a higher social position than others.

The narrativization of game systems represents the formal transgression found in the game and gives it new meanings as an ideological transgression. The protagonists whose data can be measured and monitored eventually break the Systems’ constraints and achieve a climax of authority through enacting traits of hegemonic masculinity such as physical power, assertiveness, and independence, and establishing a superior position over others – even the once omnipotent System. Placed in the fictional context, the formal transgression magnifies the characteristics of hegemonic masculinity latent in formal transgressions potentially available to the player of the game.

Conclusion

From the above analysis, it can be seen that the narrativization of ludic elements entails two related transformations. The first refers to the new meanings the ludic element takes on as it becomes a narrative element. The second refers to the different interpretive structure of a player performing a ludic element and a reader reading about a character performing a ludic element. This final section will discuss the implications of these transformations.

Ludic elements mean new things when they are put in the context of fan fiction. In the present case study, we see ludic elements gain new meanings as they interact with the inner life of characters and the social relations between characters – two aspects that are more central to the fanfics than they are to the original MMORPG. Because the fanfics focus more on the inner life of the protagonist than does Jian 3, issues such as freedom, as discussed above, take on new meanings. Often when game scholars discuss freedom, the discussion is about the presence or absence of player freedom (Inwood, 2014; Pérez-Latorre and Oliva, 2019). When freedom becomes an issue in Jian 3 it is most often an issue of player freedom. While different players may have different experiences, Jian 3’s design does not encourage reflection on the character’s freedom or lack of freedom. In Jian 3, the players’ avatars are empty and have no inner life; they are just vehicles severely constrained by the game rules. System fictions, however, establish inner lives for these avatars, while never entirely doing away with the constraints of the game’s rules and systems. They exist rather uncomfortably between what Burn and Schott (2004) describe as ‘the heavy hero’ of stories and the ‘digital dummy’ of games.

The fanfics allow readers to see the avatars as characters with their own thoughts and feelings, something that is absent from the game. For example, the narrativization of the quest-structure lays bare the protagonists’ inner lives as they constantly resist the Systems but eventually internalize norms of hegemonic masculinity. The System’s surveillance of the avatars/protagonists and their resistance to it reveal the protagonists’ lack of freedom. In this respect, the fanfics explored here contrast with the web-fictions discussed by Inwood (2014), which, she argues, present an idealized gameplay experience that is always joyful and liberatory for the protagonists/players. In the Jian 3 fanfics discussed here, gameplay is presented as a system that enslaves players more than it liberates.

The characters in the fanfics do not just have an inner life, they also have a more fully worked out social life, and this social life again reveals hegemonic masculinity buried in the game. As illustrated above, the narrativization of quantified play transforms ludic strategies of quantification into the social experience of characters, revealing hegemonic masculinity latent in the game. That is, while the essential relations between the player’s avatar and other characters in the game are instrumental – quest-giver and quest-fulfiller, for example – their relations in fanfics are more complex and visceral. However, in the fanfics, while other characters are not a means to an end for the reader, they do remain a means to an end, much of the time, for the protagonist. For the reader, the text is no longer a game, but the game logic remains, with the protagonist continuing to treat other characters in an instrumental and quantified way, even as the reader sees them as people. Fanfics thus make visible the instrumental relation between characters, highlighting the instrumental aspects of hegemonic masculinity in the game.

The different interpretive structures of these forms also explain the difference in how ideology shows up in the game and its fanfics. A player performing a ludic element and a reader reading about a character performing a ludic element position the player/reader differently, and this different positioning impacts the visibility of ideology. To elucidate this difference, let us consider how players and readers relate themselves to actions taken in games and fiction.

Daniel Vella (2017) argues that players constitute their ludic self through actions they take in the game. For Vella, action results from intention. In the context of gameplay, the player forms an intention to change the state of the game in some way (choose this path instead of that one, kill the guard or sneak past him, etc.) and then implements that intention in an action that may or may not succeed. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, Vella argues that through this intentional action the player ‘discloses’ their self, answering the question, if only in part, ‘who are you?’ More specifically in the context of gameplay, the player brings a particular ‘ludic subject’ into being through intentional action. In performing an action, the actor engages in a process of self-ascription, whereby they constitute their self as the person who formed and acted on that specific intention. However, as Vella further argues, there is no need for this self-ascription or disclosure to rise to the level of consciousness. Many actions that are taken without conscious awareness are nonetheless intentional and nonetheless disclose the actor’s self. Self-ascription then, does not have to be a conscious labeling of an action one takes.

Contrast this with how ascription of intentions arises in (fan)fiction. The reader, rather than forming intentions and attempting to act on these intentions, rather observes actors taking actions and (usually consciously – this is a central pleasure of reading fiction) ascribes intentions to those actions. N. Katherine Hayles identifies this difference in communicative modes in her discussion of the distinction between deep attention (a cognitive style she associates with novel-reading) and hyper attention (a cognitive style she associates with videogame play). Her examples are two pieces about the fictional artificial intelligence system Galatea, the interactive fiction Galatea and the novel Galatea 2.2:

Whereas the interest in Galatea lies in discovering the complexity of Galatea's responses, which typically vary with each game play and spring from the sophisticated coding of the game engine algorithm, in Galatea 2.2 the words remain the same but their meaning varies depending on how the characters' actions are interpreted (Hayles, 2007: 197).

For Hayles, the interactive fiction progresses through the player’s intentional probing of the system, whereas the novel progresses through the retroactive interpretation of actions taken by the protagonist.

We are not arguing here that there is a hard and fast distinction between games and fanfiction, whereby games can never raise intention to conscious level and that fanfictions always do. A counter-example is discussed by David Ciccoricco (2010), who sees the videogame God of War as featuring a narrative/ludic structure that fills out the protagonists’ inner life as the player progresses. Similarly, Vella contends that games do indeed have the capacity to raise intention to a conscious level and open it out for reflection and judgment. When they do this, games can raise to the surface the ideological implications of the game mechanics that structure them. However, we claim that the narrative form of fanfiction positions readers in such a way as to encourage this sort of reflection. This sort of reflection is aligned with the prevailing rhythm of narrative interpretation – see an action and infer an intention on the part of the character – but misaligned with the prevailing rhythm of game interpretation – form an intention in relation to a problem and attempt to execute that intention in an action. This is a similar point to Eskelinen’s (2001, np) distinction between games and stories, where we move from interpretation to configuration in games but from configuration to interpretation in stories. The important point in understanding how ideology is revealed (or not) in games and fanfics is the following: whereas a unit of gameplay (a boss fight, a quest, a level etc.) ends with a successful action, and is succeeded by a new task that requires us to form a new intention, a unit of fanfic (a scene, a chapter etc.) ends with an implied question – why did the character do that? This moment of reflective inference is built into these fanfics, it is central to the experience of reading them. And such questions about intentions and causation naturally give rise to ideological reflection.

It would be unwise to extrapolate from this single case study any ‘rules’ for the intermedial relationship between games and fanfiction in general. This article has considered a particular genre of game and particular sorts of story adaptations of that game. No doubt other kinds of games and other kinds of fanfics would yield different analyses and different kinds of intermediality. While it may be the case that there are some general formal conventions and reading strategies that distinguish games in general from written stories in general, and that these general conventions and strategies give rise to predictable intermedial relations in game fanfics regardless of genre, figuring out what these are is the work of further studies on game fanfics.

However, what the foregoing article demonstrates is that media form and its transformation matter if we want to understand ideology across intermedial transformations. Previous scholarship characterizes fanfics as a place that allows women to fantasize about gender equality (Dym et al., 2018; Wu and Martin, 2023). However, our study shows that the specific media roles of the characters, derived from their canon (games), can actually undermine such a fantasy. As shown, by narrativizing the ludic elements, fanfics magnify the hegemonic masculinity latent in the game.

The analysis of ludic elements also contributes to fan studies and fanfic studies in general. As mentioned above, by transforming the ludic elements into the fanfics, fanfics challenge Burn (2006) and Rambusch et al. (2009) by showing that videogame fanfics often contain ludic elements of their source games. Furthermore, Punday (2019) notes that characters in digital media serve two functions: a media-specific role, such as a vehicle for managing a scene's point of view, and a humanistic function, in which the character is ‘an entity whose interest is primarily a matter of moral analysis and understanding’ (99). Our article shows that characters in fanfics can also have the function of media-specific roles. This may lead us to another way of studying characters in fanfics: their media-specific roles derived from their canon media.