Send message to Author

Paper Short Abstract:

Facing the challenge that fun is experienced but not acknowledged, this paper explores fun as both an ephemeral experience and a cultural representation through the case of Chinese gamers who deny fun in gaming but yearn for it in work, and thus further examines the fun in non-play situations.

Paper Abstract:

Individuals are often presumed to be faithful receptors of fun, capable of accounting for fun experiences immediately or retrospectively, albeit with diverse expressions. Yet, how fun can be captured when it is experienced but rejected from being acknowledged, described, or represented? Drawing upon my ethnographic study with Chinese working adult gamers, this paper explores this issue by seeing fun as both an ephemeral experience and a cultural representation. Building on this perspective, it proposes a potential approach to reconceptualize fun in light of its disconnection from play.

A paradox observed among many working adults in urban China is that, despite their daily engagement in videogames, they avoid discussing the fun within it. Instead, individuals dismiss the fun as unimportant and traceless, asserting that they don’t play for fun. This paradox may result from people’s strategic reconfiguration of their experience of fun in order to navigate the stigma against fun experience in an increasingly competitive and self-entrepreneurial Chinese society. However, this doesn't imply that they are not drawn by fun during play. Rather, it reveals the duality of fun – as ephemeral fun that exists solely in the moment of being experienced, and the representative fun that can only be referred to by individuals retrospectively according to their socio-cultural understanding of it. This duality of fun is crystalized not only through Chinese working adults’ denial of fun in play but also their yearning for it in work, and thus also provides an opportunity to revisit the fun appearing in non-play situations.