4. Patriotic Leisure: Internet Games, Esports, and the Discourse of Productivity

This chapter builds upon the previous chapter’s discussion of Internet addiction by closely examining the criteria used to separate healthy games from unhealthy games, arguing that such categorizations reveal competing political and ideological orientations guiding the modernizing logic of the Chinese state. Even realms of leisure often assumed to be free are assigned their proper place in the narrative of upward mobility in which China’s young middle-class urbanites are ensconced; games too are governed by a kind of neoliberal logic, coming to reflect concepts about what constitutes productive play and proper behavior in the quest to better the self. Through analysis of ethnographic interviews, this chapter also demonstrates how characterizations of games as either addictive or athletic insinuate themselves into young college students’ own narratives about game play. Far from completely resisting official efforts to control Internet games, many young college students become active agents in perpetuating the discourse of Internet addiction and stigmatization of Internet games in general. As a result, we come to see how the same segment of the population described by Lisa M. Hoffman as patriotic professionals are also cultivating, or, at the very least, paying lip service to a sort of patriot leisure.