Beyond the Screen: How Black Mythology: Wukong Transforms Cross-Cultural Communication Through Interaction
Abstract
Representing a huge cultural shift, Black Myth: Wukong is the first AAA video game from China. This is the first time profit-driven digital content is being shifted to a culturally significant digital export. This paper aims to analyze this game's ability to create cross-cultural communication by looking at the cultural craftsmanship and the interactive mechanics of the game and how they work together. Four-stage imagology model and Media Richness Theory were utilized to guide this analysis. This research argues that Black Myth's game architecture, character design, and game music, create an audiovisual design, which uses traditional Chinese culture, specifically from the Journey to the West, a 16th century novel. The game also uses a level of difficulty in the combat system to create a flow state in the player. Besides, this paper claims that this motivates players outside of China to immerse themselves in the culture, and is not a system designed for players to only observe the culture. It is argued that for many of these players, their first experience is some level of immersion, which creates curiosity and ultimately results in cultural immersion at some level. AAA video games are the only media that really create cultural environments and provide a way to transform cross-cultural communication from a one-way model, to an interactive model.
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