This article uses the Bourdieusian tradition to examine the relationship between gameplay elements and contentious politics. When investigating Chinese progressive social movements, this study found that the development of local gaming industries has conditioned three ways in which gameplay elements are employed to organize “playful resistance”: game as an action tactic, game as the mechanism for critical pedagogics, and game as a tool for public education . Gaming capital has become a useful resource for organizing contentious activities and disseminating progressive political views. Two forms of gaming capital are identified: one is the technical competencies needed to design games; the other is the cultural capacity to imagine social movements through game design mechanisms. This article shows how playful resistance challenges both authoritarian governance and the capitalist logic of gaming, offering a glimpse into how the actual process of gamification has taken place in a non-Western context.

This article considers the ways in which the super-sticky all-in-one platform WeChat acts as the coordinator of a polymedia environment – and not just part of the polymedia environment – in mediating intercultural romantic relationships in the Greater Bay Area of China. Based on qualitative interviews, the article explores how WeChat coordinates a diverse range of digital communication tools for typical intercultural couples (Chinese women and foreign men) to mediate and maintain intimacy. The article contends that WeChat mainly derives its coordinator legitimacy and power from the government's prohibition of non-Chinese social media, WeChat's multi-functionality and its ‘local’ nature – Chinese language, social networking capacities and connectivity to other Chinese applications. Finally, this article finds that the power asymmetry caused by WeChat coordinating ecosystem of converged communication has significantly empowered middle-class Chinese women to take control of their intimate intercultural relationships. Research limitations and theoretical implications are discussed.

This article applies the Foucauldian concept of practiced freedom to examine how Chinese female gamers work hand in hand with game developers to negotiate government restrictions on in-game erotic material. Game developers have redesigned certain visual and textual game elements and used sexy dubbed voices to comply with state censorship while maintaining a game's appeal. Female gamers have meanwhile aligned themselves with the game developers by spending significant money on games and creating fan fiction, demonstrating their financial and sexual agency. This article explores how the practice of sexual freedom can serve as a useful lens for understanding the alliance between game developers and players, providing a glimpse into the everyday, conditioned, leisure-driven micro-resistance by engaging with existing scholarship that criticizes the commercial nature of digital games. Instead of overthrowing the conservative political framework, the goal of such gaming micro-resistance is to increase the profits of game developers and the sexual, consumptive rights of women gamers.

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