Incidental Transmission Of Traditional Chinese Culture In MMORPGs

With the rapid penetration of globalization in the current world,culture has become an increasingly important source of national cohesion and creativity and a factor of growing significance in competition for overall national strength.In recent years,however,China has not performed well enough in culture transmission.Instead,Chinese traditional culture has been greatly threatened by foreign cultures,such as Hollywood films,Japanese animation,South Korean TV plays and so on,which are deeply favored by Chinese audience.Domestically,the situation has been made worse by the boring content and less innovative ways of transmitting information and culture.In this context,online games,especially massively multi-player online role playing games(henceforth abbreviated as MMORPGs),as a typical new mass culture,can provide an alternative platform for the promotion of Chinese traditional culture.With the recent development of modern science and technology,especially in the fields of computer,Internet and communications,culture has been increasingly coded multimodally in words,images and sounds.In the current project,therefore,a multimodal discourse analysis of The Chinese Ghost Story,a representative of MMORPGs,will be conducted by incorporating systemic functional grammar and visual grammar as the theoretical framework,focusing particularly on image-text relation and incidental learning with an aim to demonstrate the feasibility of transmitting Chinese culture incidentally by multimodal means.This thesis aims to address three research questions:(1)How do images in the game reflect their representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning respectively?(2)How can the meanings of the texts and images interact to get culture across?(3)Can Chinese culture be incidentally transmitted to players who play the specific game?In order to testify the feasibility of incidental transmission of Chinese culture in MMORPGs,the thesis conducts an empirical study.Up to forty-three game players are tested to finish the designed questions related to Chinese cultural values and knowledge interweaving in the game adventures and tasks.The questionnaire has two parts.Questions in the first part aim to test the degree of preference for culture-steeped activities,and questions in the second part are divided into two groups with the difference on whether the knowledge acquired is learned from the game.Based on a qualitative and quantitative analysis of MMORPGs,this thesis draws the following conclusions.Firstly,MMORPGs can be employed as an effective means to transmit representational,interactive and compositional meanings simultaneously.Secondly,the modality of text and image can be related in a complex way – they may be identical,complementary or even contrary to each other.Thirdly,apart from magazine covers,films,textbooks and so on,visual grammar can be applied as a feasible approach to analyzing online game discourse.Fourthly,the incidental learning of vocabulary in the practice of language acquisition gives an inspiration that Chinese culture may also be transmitted to players incidentally.This hypothesis is testified by the current empirical study of incidental culture-transmission in MMORPGs.Finally,since culture is multimodal in nature,online games can be utilized as a good medium for transmitting Chinese traditional culture incidentally by getting players involved in various adventures.The project has not only theoretically extended the domain of multimodal discourse analysis and proved the feasibility of systematic functional grammar and visual grammar in analyzing online game discourse but may also throw some new light on multimodal literacy.