Carving Out a Spiritual Homeland

Abstract

This chapter examines the perspective of gamers who reject the addiction discourse and argue that Internet games are, in fact, an important “space of one’s own.” Through the narrative lens of the 2010 machinima, War of Internet Addiction, this chapter investigates the claim that games are a spiritual homeland (jingshen jiayuan)—imagined communities with both a social and a geographical reality. Unlike the college students who spoke about games in terms of skill building, these gamers’ visions of the game space were often utopian, portraying it as a bucolic landscape of equality, camaraderie, and physical beauty. Far from being a mere form of escapism, the film demonstrates that games are also locations of potential political mobilization. It portrays government efforts to control the game space as an instance of interrupted manifest destiny and suggests that freedom of mobility, including the freedom to live, work, and play where one wishes, is a key point of tension between the state and the people.