Collective Creational Play: 66RPG and the Hobbyist Game-Making Cultures in Early Chinese Indie Game Community

Abstract

This paper examines one of China’s earliest and most influential hobbyist game-making communities, 66RPG. Through digital ethnography and archival research, it explores how 66RPG functioned as a participatory playground where hobbyists engaged in both game creation and collective ludic practices. The study shows how members collaboratively built virtual storyworlds, engaged in MMOG-like creative experiences, and performed group identities through gamified systems from the mid-2000s. By introducing the concept of collective creational play, it theorizes a culturally situated mode of produsage in which the process of making games was itself experienced as a multiplayer, affective, and socially embedded activity, revealing the utopian, collectivist, and gamified creative cultural forms of early Chinese digital culture.