Gamification,Datafication,and Performativity: How Interface Design Builds “Stardew Valley” in Rural Governance

Abstract

In recent years, we have witnessed the Chinese government’s ambition for datafied governance and rural revitalization under the mind-set of technological optimism. Focusing on an emerging digital platform for rural governance—“ChuanShanZhi” (川善治; CSZ)—as a case study, this study interprets new design-centered techniques in Chinese primary-level governance from three lenses: gamification, datafication, and performativity. Specifically, CSZ’s design integrates motivational elements from games (e.g., upgrade, competition, and collaboration), datafied tracking means (e.g., surveillance), and user-generated content to operationalize political and social goals through the playful engagement of scores, points, and star ratings; streamline and centralize bureaucratic workflows; and perform a state-aligned vision of rurality, one that is harmonious, productive, and morally virtuous. In this process, CSZ reveals a distinct design logic behind China’s digital rural governance, which synthesizes socialist mass line traditions, Confucian moral discipline, digital platforms’ engagement metrics, and contemporary bureaucratic rationalization.

In June 2025, a female college student casually shared this fresh experience (see Figure 1) on Xiaohongshu, which unexpectedly gained more than 40,000 likes and thousands of online interactions. In the comments section, netizens widely compared the project to the popular farming simulation game Stardew Valley. The project “ChuanShanZhi” (hereafter called CSZ) they mentioned, developed by a special project team at Tencent, is an epitome of the Communist Party of China (CPC)’s attempt at datafied governance and rural revitalization, which employs points, competition, badges, rewards, punishment, leaderboards, collaboration, and virtual tokens to encourage civic participation in rural governance and, meanwhile, datafy primary-level officials’ performance. Chinese official media outlets like Farmers Daily ¹ and China Economic Net ² also co-opted this playful metaphor from grassroots discourse, transforming it into an official narrative legitimizing governance techniques. Related news articles celebrate that CSZ’s design is illustrative of gamification, a process through which authorities scaffold centralized rural governance within the structure, look, and feel of a designed game. Chen Yuanyuan, Tencent manager for CSZ, also stated in official interviews: “The game-like mechanic of ‘leveling up’ gave us the inspiration . . . The goal of the ‘scores system and gamification’ model is to make villagers’ participation in rural governance as effortless as playing a game. ³ ”

Figure 1.

The popular post and comments.

Numerous scholars have studied how games and gamification facilitate civic engagement in political campaigns, military recruitment, and civic learning (e.g., Akbar & Kusumasari, 2022; Soto de la Cruz et al., 2025) or empower citizens to protest in a playful and expressive manner (Stokes & Williams, 2018). However, most are limited to Western contexts. There is little research on digital governance for rural development, either. Over three decades of economic reform have profoundly transformed the Chinese state and its citizens. In rural China, a unique form of grassroots democratic self-governance has gained prominence (O’Brien & Han, 2009). This study complements the existing literature by focusing on an emerging rural China’s primary-level self-governance platform in the digital age through a design-centered analytical lens and asks:

• How does CSZ’s interface design encode and operationalize a particular model of rural governance? Whether and how this design can be interpreted through a gamification lens?

This study contributes to understanding the complex interplay between media technology, governance, and culture in a non-Western setting and reveals the hybridity and distinctions in China’s digital rural governance.

Context: Situating CSZ in a Broader Political Context of the Socialist New Countryside and Rural Revitalization

Since the early 21st century, China’s government has introduced a series of initiatives, including financial support, infrastructure construction, and talent cultivation, to promote rural informatization (Zou, 2023). In 2006, the “Building a Socialist New Countryside” campaign pledged increased investment in rural services, environment, and infrastructure, alongside a national initiative to develop rural informatics infrastructure and enhance digital connectivity (Keane & Su, 2019). The 2017 rural revitalization campaign (covering industries, talents, culture, and organization) sought to integrate technology with rural development and chart a digital blueprint for “a new countryside” (Zou, 2023). The 2023 “No. 1 central document” further outlined priorities for deepening rural reforms, including advancing all-around rural revitalization, strengthening villagers’ self-governance under CPC leadership, and promoting score systems, digitization, and immediate responses to public complaints. Taken together, this nearly two-decade policy continuum has significantly driven the improvement of rural digital infrastructure and the conceptual development of smart villages.

Simultaneously, influenced by “state-sponsored platformization” (Yang, 2021), Chinese tech giants, including Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance, have proactively aligned with the party-state’s rural policies and propaganda, as exemplified by Alibaba’s Taobao villages in e-commerce, Kuaishou’s promotion of cultural innovation among rural youth (J. Lin & de Kloet, 2019), and Tencent’s “WeCountry Project” and “Cultivators’ Revitalization Plan,” of which CSZ is a direct output.

CSZ is a software extension of Tencent’s WeChat, developed in partnership with local authorities in Sichuan Province for rural governance. As one of the most ubiquitous applications permeating Chinese citizens’ daily lives, WeChat has demonstrated significant potential in rural governance due to its real-time functionality, connectivity, interactivity, community-building capacity, and distinctive economic attributes (Harwit, 2017). In 2019, the Chinese government explicitly advocated establishing “villagers WeChat groups” and “rural official accounts” to promote immediate public disclosure of village-level affairs and enhance mass supervision over grassroots governance (Zhao et al., 2025). On CSZ, users can register with their real identities as villagers, village officials, or government staff to join online village collectives and connect with community members or simply browse as “visitors.” CSZ was officially praised as a model project of party-led rural governance in 2024. ⁴ As of July 2025, over 28,000 villages from Sichuan Province have joined CSZ.

Notably, CSZ is not an isolated pilot project but part of the broader Cultivators’ Revitalization Plan, 耕耘者振兴计划 (CRP) initiative jointly developed by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs and Tencent. The same core platform operates in other provinces under different localized names, such as “Yue Zhi Mei” (粤治美) in Guangdong Province, “E Can Yu” (鄂参与) in Hubei Province, and “Qing Song Zhi” (青松治) in Qinghai Province. ⁵ This context indicates that CSZ can represent a replicable platform-based rural governance model, which is gaining central government support and being actively promoted nationwide.

Theoretical Backgrounds

Gamification in Civic Engagement

Gamification is an approach to design that uses game elements in non-game contexts to shape motivation and engagement (Woodcock & Johnson, 2018). Common mechanisms include exploration, collection, competition, status acquisition, rankings, badges, collaboration, leaderboards, levels, rewards, and challenges (Tobon et al., 2020). Yee (2006) identifies three core motivators behind engagement with gamification: (1) achievement, the desire to compete, control others, and optimize performance; (2) sociality, satisfaction derived from building relationships, teamwork, and community integration; and (3) immersion, the desire to escape reality, adopt virtual identities, engage in role-playing, and uncover hidden content.

Historically, gamification emerged from two pioneering movements: mid-20th-century Soviet “workplace-based socialist competitions,” which aimed to harness games as a more humane alternative to capitalist competition for stimulating productivity, and the late 1990s and early 2000s American corporate trend of reimagining the workplace as a playful locale (Nelson, 2012, p. 23). In recent years, digital technologies have driven large-scale gamification adoption across public and private sectors (Bogost, 2015), expanding from marketing, health, education, culture, environmental protection, and consultancy into the political sphere, exemplified by gamified governance systems and civic platforms (Biancalana & Vittori, 2023).

Previous literature has mapped both the opportunities and risks of gamification in civic participation. Advocates argue that it can promote civic learning, cultivate skills, enhance engagement (Lerner, 2014), optimize community planning, reduce governance costs, and increase public trust (Hassan, 2017). Integrating gamification into online civic platforms offers distinct practical advantages over traditional methods; they are accessible via personal devices, circumventing physical constraints, and can reduce participation costs (Hassan, 2017). More importantly, gamification is not merely a technical fix. The rules, rewards, and narratives embedded within game structures can subtly shape participants’ perceptions and behaviors. As Zou (2022) notes, games serve as a medium through which individuals engage with politics and can function as a pathway for ideological engagement and reconstruction.

However, several critical scholars have raised questions regarding the efficacy of gamification. Prominent game designer and scholar Bogost (2015) even calls it “bullshit.” The extant research indicates that the use of positive rewards and feedback to guide normative behavior can result in the construction of hierarchical structures and power inequalities among users. This can manifest in the subjectification of “good” and “bad” citizens, as discussed in the work of Schrape (2014). Furthermore, such practices carry the potential for surveillance and discipline (Woodcock & Johnson, 2018) and can come to be employed intentionally or accidentally as means of “sugar-coating” to mask coercive government actions (Ampatzidou et al., 2018). Following this vein, some scholars (e.g., Foxman & Forelle, 2014) have further explored player activity, showing how citizens opt out of the game or work around the rules (e.g., tweeting the same comment multiple times and checking into news shows without watching them) to achieve personal ends (e.g., beating the competition and wining prizes) instead of developing their ongoing civic participation. This agency has also been applied (obliquely) in the Chinese context to describe how online discourses of citizenry are gamified to creatively resist within the confines of government censorship (e.g., Xie et al., 2021).

Datafied Governance in a Platformed Society

Platformization is defined as “the penetration of economic and infrastructural extensions of online platforms into the network” (Nieborg & Poell, 2018, p. 4276). In recent years, diverse stakeholders, including individuals, media organizations, corporations, and public actors, have progressively developed dependencies on powerful platforms. Algorithmic data governance—characterized by its automated, systematic, and often opaque nature—has witnessed a marked rise in its prevalence across digital platforms, thereby prompting extensive research in this domain. Concepts such as “dataism” (Van Dijck, 2014) and “metric culture” (Lupton, 2016) have emerged to explain how digital platforms collect user data, convert it into digital scores, and calculate individual value (Ruckenstein & Pantzar, 2017). In many countries worldwide, due to its efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control, quantification is becoming a routine means of surveilling and governing citizens and a key mechanism for enhancing personal well-being and optimizing bureaucratic efficiency (Cheney-Lippold, 2017).

In recent years, China has seen a marked increase in platform construction within its public administration and governance sectors. Unlike their Western counterparts, Chinese platforms are subject to state political power and serve to advance techno-nationalism, deliver public services, realize official socioeconomic agendas, and enhance traditional social infrastructure (J. Lin & de Kloet, 2019). For example, research on China’s Social Credit System shows how the government integrates distributed platforms (e.g., Tencent and Alibaba) into a centralized data infrastructure that scores individual and organizational “creditworthiness” (Liang et al., 2018, p.430). During COVID-19, the government collaborated with Alipay and WeChat to develop the ubiquitous “Health Code” system, which centralized data and standardized governance through a nationwide algorithmic framework, embedding quantification, calculation, and optimization into everyday social life (Liang, 2020). Similarly, state power partnered with commercial platforms to design and operate “XueXiQiangGuo,” a propaganda platform that reinforces ideological persuasion and citizen assessment through restrictive control, platformized persuasion, and user datafication (Liang et al., 2021). These emerging “technologies of the state” enable authorities to guide and shape subjects toward political objectives of power centralization (Sun & Wang, 2022).

As Foucault (1991) noted, governance operates not only through top-down regulation but also through internalized self-discipline. Digital platforms facilitate self-tracking and self-governance across domains like health, physical activity, sleep, and diet by translating identity into numerical data perceived as “clean, contained and unemotional” (Lupton, 2013, p. 266), serving goals of personal growth, self-expression, and well-being. The underlying logic suggests that by knowing oneself through numbers, individuals can optimize, empower, and even achieve personal and social enlightenment (Catlaw & Sandberg, 2018). This datafication and normalization of surveillance culture embody what Foucault (1988, p. 18) termed “technologies of the self,” practices through which individuals shape their own subjectivities and lifestyles via self-monitoring and discipline to attain happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.

So far, the motivational logic of gamification and the quantifying logic of datafication provide general functional analytical frameworks for digital-era civic governance. However, to understand the socio-political specificity of CSZ in the context of Chinese rural governance, the lens of performativity becomes essential, as it provides a constitutive analytical framework to examine how CSZ consciously enacts, visualizes, and naturalizes a specific, state-aligned vision of the “socialist new countryside.”

Performing Digital Rurality on Chinese Social Platforms

The concept of performativity has been pivotal in social and cultural theory for understanding how realities are constituted rather than merely reflected. Originating in the philosophy of language (Austin, 1975) and profoundly developed in theories of gender and identity (Butler, 1990), it has been productively extended into rural studies. Scholars (e.g., Edensor, 2006; C.-M. Wang, 2022) argue that spatial terms such as “rural” or “urban” are not static, self-evident products that exist a priori but are continually remade, performed, and enacted by a range of practices, involving social arrangements and material assemblages.

In the context of digital China, this performative perspective shifts the analytical focus onto how social platforms, through their affordances, policies, and user-generated content, become key sites for the digital performance and remaking of rurality. Zhao (2024)’s findings reveal how romanticized discourses performatively construct Chinese rurality on digital platforms, emphasizing its symbolic, cultural, and ecological value. This performativity of rural romanticism not only echoes global utopian tropes of rural life (Bell, 2006) but also acquires its distinctive potency in China. On one hand, the state has fused these imaginaries of rural romanticism with indigenous cultural resources like pastoral poetry and instrumentalized them to lend visual and emotional legitimacy to national campaigns such as Rural Revitalization and the ideological slogan that “lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets” (Zou, 2023). On the other hand, this curated rural romanticism caters to the desires of urban middle-class audiences, who project onto the countryside a fantasy of authenticity and ecological purity as an antidote to urban anxieties over “cramped lifestyles, poor air quality, and an exhausting . . . life” (H. Li, 2020, p. 3782).

This confluence of top-down orchestration and bottom-up consumption creates the conditions for a new form of digital performativity. A growing cohort of rural microcelebrities dubbed “Sannong Wanghong” (三农网红, influencers in agriculture, rural areas, and farmers) has emerged as core performers, using livestreams and short videos to convey a romanticized sense of place that is nostalgic, pre-industrial, family-centric, and characterized by simplicity, authenticity, and locality (Zhao, 2024). Major platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou amplify this performance through dedicated rural initiatives connecting grassroots producers with urban consumers (Duan et al., 2023). These initiatives facilitate commerce and advance the visibility of rural lifestyles while also engendering neoliberal aspirations, prompting rural creators to become “entrepreneurs of the self” in pursuit of future career rewards (Z. Lin & Zhao, 2020).

Notably, this performativity operates within what Zhao (2024) terms an “authenticity bind.” To succeed, rural creators have to perform a “right” degree of authenticity, one that is raw and relatable enough to satisfy urban consumers’ thirst for the “real,” such as the presentation of mundane scenes of cooking, agricultural practices, animal husbandry, artisanal crafting, and mechanical repairs (Zou, 2023), yet appealing enough to align with the state’s modernizing script and the platform’s own governance and commercial algorithms. Elements such as complexity, controversy, inconsistency, instability, exploitation, and hardship are rarely depicted on stage (Y. Wang & Wang, 2025).

Methodology

This study employs a design-centered critical analysis to examine how CSZ’s interface design encodes and operationalizes a particular model of rural governance. Following the methodological tradition established in platform studies (Entrena-Serrano, 2025), this approach aims to establish a foundational understanding of the platform’s design mechanisms, an understanding that can subsequently inform user-centered research investigating how users resist, negotiate, or appropriate these technological arrangements for their own purposes.

Data Collection

This study employed an online ethnography over the course of 6 months (January 30 to July 30, 2025) to understand the interface design of CSZ. Data were generated through four primary sources.

Platform Observation in General

Step-by-step observations were made daily, and each session lasted between 15 min and 3 hr, during which the author directly engaged with the platform to monitor the platform structure, interface layouts, and content (e.g., campaigns, public information, leaderboards, and datafied reports in CSZ’s “Recommendation,” “Trends,” “Exploring Villages,” “Markets,” “Village Life,” and “Big Data” sections). Observations were conducted from a “lurking” perspective (Varis, 2015) without logging into an account to minimize algorithmic personalization and observe the platform’s default presentation of its governance model.

Village Observation in Depth

This study purposively selected the top 10 Five-Star Villages on the leaderboard for more in-depth analysis. In the “Visiting Villages” section of CSZ, the author regularly examined these villages’ latest developments, such as villagers’ suggestions for public life, public affairs, service records of village officials, villagers’ daily life, rules, regulations, and so on. High-rated villages were chosen because they were identified as exemplars of the platform’s promoted ideal type for successful digital governance, which helps to understand the model of village life being performed and celebrated by the system. By contrast, lower-rated villages typically exhibit minimal data output and user-generated content, offering limited material.

Official News Articles and Documents

This study searched for the government’s and Tencent’s public documents that highlighted the rationale of CSZ’s initial development and launch, as well as the policy initiatives and corporate power devoted to the early stage of development. Chinese state media’s news reports were also collected to map the broader social and political environment of CSZ’s development and enforcement. In addition, this study collected the user manual developed by the authorities and several guidelines published by Tencent. These supplementary data help us gain further understanding of the development and operation procedures of CSZ.

Notably, this study seeks to understand the “blueprint” of governance as conceived by the state-platform partnership, not to conduct a comprehensive audit of its on-the-ground “construction.” This design-centric approach is both its strength and its boundary because the absence of user interview limits the analysis of user perceptions, motivations, or subjective experiences with the platform, offline power dynamics, or informal negotiations. However, securing reliable ethnographic or interview data in this specific context presents considerable methodological and ethical challenges (e.g., social trust, privacy concerns, and the potential for performative responses). Therefore, rather than attempting to gather potentially limited or constrained user testimony, this study focuses on the publicly visible behavioral traces of users on CSZ to supplement the player (user) perspective.

Public User-Generated Content

This included villagers’ posts, particularly in sections like the “Recommendation” feed and public reviews for village affairs. For the “Recommendation” feed, a time-based stratified sampling strategy was adopted: on each sampling day (every Monday and Thursday at approximately 10:00 a.m.), the first 20 consecutive posts were systematically captured as they appeared in the feed, yielding 800 posts. For village-specific public reviews, a purposive stratified sampling approach was employed. The primary sample focused on the top 10 Five-Star Villages, from which all publicly visible reviews from the most recent month were collected. To address the concern that exclusive focus on high-performing villages might overgeneralize, three “internship-level” villages were also included. As anticipated, these exhibited minimal output, with 15 reviews recorded across all three during the observation period. In total, 416 reviews were collected.

The above empirical material was collected in the form of field notes and screenshots. The author documented critical reflections after each day’s observation. Key designs and representative content were saved as screenshots.

Data Analysis

Data analysis followed an inductive, multi-stage coding approach. In the initial phase, all collected materials were examined line-by-line to identify recurring patterns, such as (1) visual motifs (e.g., abundant harvests, scenic landscapes, home-cooked meals); (2) narrative themes (e.g., filial piety, community service, entrepreneurial success); (3) gamification elements (e.g., points, badges, leaderboards, tiered village ratings); and (4) datafication features (e.g., real-time score tracking, public performance metrics). In the second stage, these open codes were grouped into broader analytical categories aligned with theoretical lenses: (1) gamification-related (point-seeking behaviors, competitive dynamics, quest-like participation); (2) datafication-related (self-quantification, algorithmic visibility, production of “data subjects”); and (3) performativity-related (romanticized depictions of rural life, strategic authenticity). Constant comparison across data sources and over time refined these categories. The final stage integrated the axial categories into a coherent analytical narrative addressing the research questions.

Ethical Considerations

Considering the platform’s public nature, with minimal expectations for privacy from participating parties, little ethical concern could be raised for the “lurking” practice, either (Zhao, 2024). This study avoids including identifiable information about the villagers and village officials in the writing to maintain their anonymity.

Games of Upgrade, Competition, Collaboration, Surveillance, and Performativity

The analysis reveals that CSZ blends traditional role-playing, strategy, dataficated evaluation, motivational competitions, and collaboration into a gamified rural governance scene. Underlying these forms is a distinct hybrid rationality that synthesizes socialist mass line traditions, Confucian moral discipline, the engagement metrics of digital platforms, and contemporary bureaucratic rationalization. The following analysis is structured around two primary “Roles” (villagers and village officials) and one main “Storyline” (building a thriving and harmonious “home”).

Villagers as Players: The Hybrid of Neoliberal Rationalities and Collectivistic Orientation

First, CSZ translates the broad agenda of rural revitalization into a concrete, quantifiable system of rules. Villagers can obtain “scores” (积分) each time they contribute to public life, such as keeping positive familial relationships, constructing spiritual civilization, participating in voluntary service, protecting the natural environment and resources, and so on. And vice versa, credits are subtracted for violating village self-regulation conventions, such as domestic violence, sexism, and feudal superstition. These rules vary from village to village and have been discussed and unanimously approved by village officials and representatives of villagers, dynamically adjusted, following a ritual of participation (e.g., promotion, discussion, solicitation of opinions, voting, and review) that lends legitimacy. ⁶ Although these rules carry local characteristics, they broadly embody widely recognized public and private virtues, merging Confucian communal ethics, socialist collectivist values, and state ecological discourse into measurable indices of “good villager.” In addition to participatory deliberation of village conventions, villagers are granted a form of agency through claiming points by submitting evidence (time, location, reason) to the platform and appealing deductions. ⁷ However, the substantive power of verification and adjudication resides with the points management team, typically composed of local officials. ⁸ Besides, CSZ typically publicizes simplified rules (see Figure 2); the specific point values for daily behaviors are usually not transparently disclosed on the platform. In other words, CSZ’s design performs a script of participatory, legible self-governance through its front-end interface and procedural rituals, while structurally embedding an interpretive “black box” where final authority is retained by local authorities. This contradiction exactly reveals the distinctive logic of CSZ’s governance model: participation is structured and channeled, and agency is performed within prescribed boundaries.

Figure 2.

Screenshots of villagers as players.

Second, the system operates through a dual logic of incentivization and visibility that seeks to shape daily conduct. Villagers with higher scores are prioritized in terms of employment recommendation, evaluation for rewards, and the application for joining CPC. Once villagers reach a certain level of scores, they can receive material rewards by redeeming food, edible oil, and other daily necessities in the online market. The village authorities also regularly publish the “Red & Black announcement” (红黑榜): the former aims to praise villagers with top scores, and the latter denounces those who are at the bottom of group rankings. In other words, CSZ provides “nudges” to individuals in the form of rewards for conformity to the positive image of a “new farmer” and simultaneously curtailing inappropriate conduct in the form of discipline. This configuration can be analyzed as a “gamified social credit” system at the village level, where the platform design operationalizes a neoliberal rationale of calculative self-management (Foucault, 1995) in the service of state-led social engineering goals.

In addition to “scores,” “enthusiasm points” (热情值) are another key index designed to encourage villagers’ active and frequent online engagement on the platform of CSZ. Engaging in these ritual interactions, such as daily login, browsing notifications, participating in online events, sharing high-quality content, giving “likes,” posting comments, rating village officials’ administrative performance, public deliberation, and so on, villagers can accumulate their “enthusiasm points,” reflecting the “always-on” work ethic of gig economies, which prioritize measurable output over substantive quality. Among these functions, the design of “rating village officials” administrative performance affords users the positional role of a judge, potentially structuring an experience of playful oversight aimed at fostering affinity with the collective. Similarly, the “public deliberation” feature formally enacts a space for opinion expression and discussion, materially instantiating a discourse of villager autonomy within the platform’s governance framework. Thus, the platform’s architecture performs the forms of a digital public sphere, wherein the very acts of rating and discussing are designed as important practices through which “democratic governance” is discursively enacted by villagers.

Although higher points do not necessarily mean internalized civic virtues or increased public enthusiasm, the constant assessment of points/scores further creates algorithmic visibility and identity for all villagers, families, communities, and villages, as the platform accurately tracks and records users’ all online actions. These results are synchronously transformed into detailed charts (e.g., visualization of score trends, when and why scores are added or deleted each time, and the general distribution of scores), virtual trophies, and badges (e.g., junior “seed cultivators” and senior “harvest cultivators”), which are constantly updated and exhibited on the public leaderboard of the platform. By doing so, CSZ creates a peer-reviewed mechanism for online monitoring by which users can compare themselves with others and identify villagers (and villages) with low scores. Villagers are encouraged to compete with each other in the quest for being recognized as enthusiastic “cultivators” who can finally enjoy the “harvest.” This title echoes with the spirit of model citizen campaigns since the Mao era, which mobilizes pride and shame to guide the minds and bodies of its citizens to behave as desired by the ruling body in its quest (Chong, 2011). The “seed” to “harvest” metaphor also promotes a narrative of self-entrepreneurship (Rose, 1998), where individuals are tasked with cultivating their own value.

These points are not only integrated and ranked at the individual level but also at the collective level. Villagers’ enthusiasm values are one of the important indicators for measuring “Five-Star Villages.” The title of “Five-Star Villages” is not only a virtual badge of honor but also can bring material rewards for village construction. Only “Five-Star Villages” are eligible to participate in the competition for incentive monetary funding supported by Tencent. For example, the “Assist Watering” competition encourages villagers to cooperatively “water” the virtual tree to obtain incentive funds for the collective. The funds are used to invest in the village collective for the greater good. This collectivistic framing functions as an emotional architecture within the platform’s design, aiming to channel individuals to contribute to the digital performance of their community for its material benefit and honor.

Village Officials as Players: The Hybrid of Socialist Governance and Platform Bureaucracy

In the Chinese grassroots governance system, village party branches serve as the “leadership core” (O’Brien & Han, 2009). CSZ integrates this political structure into a gamified framework, designing two primary quest lines for officials: building a “Five-Star Village” (main quest) and resolving villagers’ “Help Wanted” posts (side quests). This design (see Figure 3) translates political responsibility into a series of quantified, trackable performance objectives.

Figure 3.

Screenshots of village officials as players.

First, the “Five-Star Village” quest operates as a competitive ranking engine. Villages are categorized into six levels (from one to five stars), with rankings subject to downgrade for poor performance. The “Five-Star Village” consists of two core requirements: villager activity and participation on CSZ. The former is quantified by “enthusiasm points,” while the latter depends on officials’ continued engagement of CSZ’s core governance functions. They are further refined and standardized into a visual “digital service radar chart” containing nine indicators (e.g., the score system, service diaries, notifications, disclosure of party, village, and finance affairs), accompanied by national averages and medians for reference and incentive purposes. Only “Five-Star Village” is able to unlock the new function of “welfare commune,” which offers village collective opportunities for winning material rewards. The star ratings of all villages across the province are also publicly displayed on the leaderboard to promote competitive behavior. Indeed, such a practice of performance contests was adopted in the early years since the founding of the People’s Republic of China to boost morale and mobilize concerted efforts (D. Li et al., 2022). Hereafter, it was developed into a governance model of Chinese characteristics, predicated on centralized personnel control, strong comparability due to standardized hierarchical structures, and substantial local official control over resources and outcomes (D. Li et al., 2022). CSZ further digitizes and gamifies these performance contests through designing a step-by-step upgrade mechanism that legitimizes authorities’ delicate management techniques of categorization and calculation and reduces rural governance into playful, measurable tasks. This also embodies Weber’s view on a hierarchically structured bureaucracy that is validated by clean lines of authority and rational rules (Gao & Tan, 2020).

Second, the “side quests” and service functions centralize and streamline bureaucratic processes. Common public services and six key governance functions are integrated into dedicated sections (issuing notices, recording important events, party affairs’ disclosure, village affairs’ disclosure, financial disclosure, and event announcements). This design addresses structural inefficiencies in multilayered bureaucracy by creating a centralized, transparent workflow. However, it also consolidates administrative visibility and control within the digital platform, making officials’ response time and completion rates publicly traceable metrics.

In addition, a key innovation is the “Secretary’s Living Room” section, which digitally re-stages the “mass line” (群众路线), a Maoist principle of governance that encourages close engagement with the populace in policy implementation within rural areas (Tian & Tsai, 2023). The “Secretary’s Living Room” section integrates functions like “Secretary’s Open Letter” (information release), “Secretary’s Assignments” (quest allocation), “Secretary’s Deliberations” (inviting villagers to participate in public deliberation), and “Villagers’ Discussions” (villagers identifying problems and making suggestions regarding from facilitating community building to improving governance), performing a modern, responsive, and intimate interface between the party and villagers. The prescribed workflow (inform, deliberate, implement, and evaluate) scripts a performative cycle of responsive governance. The mandatory villager rating (1–5 stars) provides quantified quest feedback.

This system of accountability is further materialized through the public “service diary” function. Officials are prompted to detail their political thoughts, learning, and daily work. Different from Foucault’s (1988) concept of “technologies of the self,” these diaries are not private reflections but public, archived records that render an official’s daily activities visible and assessable to villagers, peers, and superiors. By doing so, the platform structures a form of participatory surveillance (Albrechtslund, 2008), where the act of writing is positioned as a curated performance of the “model cadre” according to the platform’s norms of transparency and diligence.

Home-Building as the Storyline: The Collective Performance of “Positive Rurality”

In addition to two major controllable “roles,” CSZ designs its main storyline of constructing a thriving and harmonious “home.” Similar to the “rural idyllic life” depicted in Stardew Valley, CSZ integrates multiple spheres in rural everyday life, such as event promotion, agricultural merchandise trade, carpooling, local recruitment, housing rental, life moments sharing, and policy learning, which provides villagers with their fantasy thriving and harmonious “home,” a virtual community built around reciprocity, care, and shared local experiences (see Figure 4).

Figure 4.

Screenshots of home-building.

The “Recommendation” section on the default page is one of the most important channels that transforms the platform into a stage for the digital performance of rurality, where user-generated posts and videos become the primary means of enacting a state-aligned ideal. In Mao’s era, Chinese peasants were always depicted as personifying the core traits of authentic socialist culture: they were simple, loyal, and down-to-earth. Short videos in the “Recommendation” section re-popularize these merits in the current Xi era by drawing on the symbolic values of rural grassrootsness and nostalgia. Specifically, the making of home-cooked dishes, the recording of beautiful rural scenery (e.g., lucid waters, lush mountains, expansive fields, quaint cottages, or lively gardens), the recording of labor, sweat, harvest, and joy in croplands, and the sharing of leisure activities (e.g., dancing, drawing, and working out) are common themes in villagers’ representation of positive, hopeful, lively, and vibrant rural life. The promotion of specialty agricultural products, the recommendation of local industries, modern agricultural technologies, scenic spots, the training of online entrepreneurship, and the sharing of traditional customs and cultures are common themes in village officials’ performance of rurality, always loaded with social and educational values for expressing and reinforcing official ideology. For example, Luo, the village party secretary, introduced in the short videos the village’s specialty aquaculture industry and how they have opened up trade channels through e-commerce to achieve common prosperity and rural revitalization. In addition, the platform often launches hashtag activism (e.g., #share my vegetable farm, #my village’s special industry, #my village’s spring, and #share summer cuisine) to encourage villagers to create and share positive content about their rural lives. This platform-orchestrated participation reveals an inherent design tension between voluntary expression and structured inducement. While content appears as spontaneous grassroots sharing, it is systematically encouraged through point-based incentives and platform-initiated hashtag campaigns. This does not imply that villagers lack genuine willingness to share, but it does suggest that the platform’s design actively channels participation toward preferred content categories.

Instead of being carefully choreographed, these rural short videos are often roughly made, with shaky images, and lack any flattering lighting or professional sound-collecting devices, which could filter out background noises. Performers often speak Mandarin with local accents. All of these give viewers a sense of naturalness and realism as if everything were captured uninterrupted in its most natural state. As Zhao (2024) notes, creators must navigate performing a “right” degree of authenticity, raw enough to be credible, yet polished enough to align with the state’s revitalization script and the platform’s own governance logic. This “staged authenticity” points to a structural feature of CSZ’s content ecosystem that themes of hardship, conflict, inequality, or failure are conspicuously absent. This does not necessarily indicate active suppression or self-censorship by individual creators, but it does reveal that the CSZ’s affordances (e.g., incentive structures, visibility mechanisms, and content policies) systematically favor positive, aspirational narratives.

Similarly, the “Event Promotion” section is exclusively created by official sources (e.g., village officials, government staff, and mainstream organizations) and focuses on public values, promoting nonpolitical content, such as public welfare activities and development plans related to the building of a beautiful countryside (e.g., the popularization of traffic safety and women’s rights and welfare, the advocacy of filial piety, and the construction of village music and sports, the initiative of village cleanup and environmental protection, the exposure of the tricks of telecom frauds, the sharing of patriotic films, etc.). These channels are all the default settings, and users cannot customize them. This means that CSZ enables propagandists and local governments to carefully integrate ideological content into its architecture. This positive rurality can also be found in its green-themed color and foliage-themed icons, signifying the nature and liveness, distinct from the red-themed color used for political content.

The above examples illustrate that the “home-building” storyline is not merely a metaphorical frame but a performative achievement co-constructed by users within the affordances and constraints of the platform. Villagers and village officials, as players, actively produce the digital artifacts (videos, posts) that furnish this virtual home. In doing so, they participate in a broader performance that synthesizes top-down ideological orchestration (the state’s romantic, modernizing lexicon) with bottom-up, platform-mediated cultural production. The performance of rurality thus emerges as a site of subtle governance, where certain narratives are systematically amplified while others remain unseen, not necessarily through direct suppression, but through the mundane operation of incentive structures, visibility mechanisms, and content policies. The outcome is the continuous digital enactment and naturalization of a specific, politically resonant rural idyll, making CSZ a key site where the “socialist new countryside” is not just governed, but visibly and collaboratively performed into being.

Conclusions

As Foucault (1991, p. 203) wrote, “governing people is not a way to force people to do what the governor wants; it is always a versatile equilibrium.” Numerous studies on civic governance through gamification remain largely confined to Western contexts, with scant attention to digital rural governance in China’s unique political landscape of “grassroots democratic self-governance.” This study extends the literature by decoding the distinct design logic behind China’s digital rural governance, illustrating how technology, governance, and culture converge to enact a state-aligned vision of the countryside.

What is arguably new about CSZ is that it merges socialist mobilization traditions (e.g., mass line) with digital platforms’ engagement metrics, Confucian moral discipline, and contemporary bureaucratic rationalization. This synthesis not only digitizes existing practices for efficiency but also actively scripts a new governance game through gamification, datafication, and performativity.

First, gamification provides the motivational architecture infused with local political and moral culture (e.g., model citizen campaigns, performance contests, and filial piety), operationalizing political and social goals through the playful engagement of scores, points, and star ratings. The upgrade functions as both symbolic commendation and material benefit. The “seed” to “harvest” metaphor highlights self-entrepreneurship, while collective competitions like “Assist Watering” channel individual efforts into socialist collectivist outcomes. Second, datafication provides the infrastructure of legibility and control, serving contemporary bureaucratic rationalization. It structures the activities spurred by gamification as quantifiable, comparable metrics for villagers, families, and entire villages. Through this process, individuals and communities are rendered visible, rankable, and manageable via a logic of optimization, extending the reach of governance into newly quantified domains of social life. This not only embodies a kind of “computational surveillance” (Holmes, 2017) but also streamlines and centralizes bureaucratic workflows (e.g., integrated service platforms and transparent approval processes). Third, performativity explains how this interplay actively generates a social reality. CSZ continuously performs a specific, state-aligned vision of rurality, one that is harmonious, productive, and morally virtuous (Zou, 2023) through its design and the user-generated content it channels. Villagers and officials, as participants (players), co-produce this digital performance within the boundaries set by the platform’s affordances and the broader “authenticity bind” (Zhao, 2024). Notably, through the above logics of design, CSZ invites participation while carefully structuring its parameters; it performs empowerment while retaining discretionary authority; and it renders governance visible while keeping its most consequential mechanisms opaque. From a broader perspective, CSZ echoes with China’s ambition to build a society based on indicators and data (Liang et al., 2021), as well as an efficient, responsive government whose primary goal is to serve its citizens. This mind-set is rooted in technological optimism and attempts to translate rural governance and revitalization into technical problems to be solved with technical solutions.

Finally, considering the methodological boundaries, to get a deeper understanding of how this designed “game” is lived and contested necessitates returning squarely to the player perspective. Future studies are expected to examine the interaction between the “design blueprint” revealed in this study and the complex “local practices” (e.g., the “silence” of low-activity villages) through user interviews and offline ethnography.