This paper examines one of China’s earliest and most influential hobbyist game-making communities, 66RPG. Through digital ethnography and archival research, it explores how 66RPG functioned as a participatory playground where hobbyists engaged in both game creation and collective ludic practices. The study shows how members collaboratively built virtual storyworlds, engaged in MMOG-like creative experiences, and performed group identities through gamified systems from the mid-2000s. By introducing the concept of collective creational play , it theorizes a culturally situated mode of produsage in which the process of making games was itself experienced as a multiplayer, affective, and socially embedded activity, revealing the utopian, collectivist, and gamified creative cultural forms of early Chinese digital culture.

The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has sparked both enthusiasm for their potential to drive economic, social, and cultural transformation and concern regarding their environmental implications. While AI is often celebrated as a driver for productivity and efficiency, its environmental footprint, particularly in terms of resource extraction, energy consumption, and electronic waste, presents significant challenges. These challenges are compounded by geopolitical dynamics, with the Global North benefiting most from AI’s development while the Global South bears the brunt of environmental degradation. This work examines the intersection of AI technologies and ecological imperialism, highlighting how the global deployment of AI intensifies inequalities by shifting ecological burdens to vulnerable regions. By exploring the life cycle of AI, from the mining of critical minerals to the operation of data centres, this research underscores the urgent need for a political ecology of communication that addresses both the environmental and socio-economic impacts of AI. We call for a more comprehensive understanding of AI’s environmental footprint, one that considers not only its potential for climate mitigation but also its role in reinforcing existing global power structures. In this context, fostering transparency, ethical responsibility, and a decolonial approach to AI governance becomes imperative to ensure that technological advancements do not deepen ecological and social injustices.

The rapid development of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) marks a critical turning point for media and communication scholarship. In dialogue with earlier analyses of platformization, this commentary identifies three interrelated challenges that emerge as GenAI systems are progressively integrated in key sectors of the economy and spheres of life. First, it explores the deep economic and infrastructural entanglements between GenAI and platform capitalism. Cloud infrastructures developed by major US and Chinese tech companies underpin the training, deployment, and scaling of large AI models, reinforcing corporate concentration and dependency. This raises urgent questions about evolving divisions of labor, data extraction, and value generation in the GenAI economy. Second, the commentary examines the performative interplay between AI hype and practice. While grand narratives about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and a global AI race shape policy and investment, they also obscure the situated realities of GenAI development and use across diverse global regions. The challenge lies in developing situated analyses and conceptual perspectives that account for the sociotechnical, political-economic, and epistemic specificities of AI adoption worldwide. Third, the commentary reflects on the possibility of public and non-profit alternatives to Big AI. Drawing on critical current scholarship, it argues for smaller, locally grounded, and ethically curated models—while recognizing the structural limitations that constrain their scalability. Taken together, these challenges demand renewed critical attention to the global political economy of platforms and GenAI.

This study investigates how Black Myth: Wukong negotiates cultural hybridity within global digital game flows, drawing on Bhabha’s theory of “third space”. Through a dual-method approach—Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of in-game and paratextual content, and Computer-Assisted Content Analysis (CACA) of player discourses on Weibo, Reddit, and Steam—we reveal asymmetric audience reception. Chinese players emphasize cultural authenticity, symbolism, and narrative depth, reinforcing national identity and pride, while international audiences prioritize gameplay, technical innovation, and accessibility, often misinterpreting or overlooking Chinese cultural nuances. This divergence highlights both the possibilities and limitations of cultural translation in the global circulation of games, embodying the dynamic negotiations central to Bhabha’s hybridity. The research advances glocalization theory by demonstrating how games act as both instruments of soft power and sites for emerging intercultural identities. Methodologically, it exemplifies the value of integrating CDA and computational analysis to capture multi-layered audience responses. The findings underscore that while hybridized game narratives can foster cross-cultural engagement, enduring asymmetries persist—suggesting that genuine intercultural understanding in digital games will require ongoing negotiation, localization, and dialogic participation.

AI technologies present both opportunities and risks to post-secondary institutions, requiring educators and students to reevaluate their epistemologies and practical guidelines at this particular juncture. The aim of the paper is not to propose specific curricular models for communication in the AI era. Instead, it seeks to offer normative considerations that communication scholars and students must reflect on. By engaging with a handful of core areas—creativity, creative thinking, AI ethics, interdisciplinarity, and originality—it intends to highlight practices that should guide both research and teaching. These dimensions are not discrete but interdependent, working together to inform not only curricula development but also broader normative guidance in the age of AI.

The rise of short-dramas on vertical screens has captivated global audiences with their fast-paced, quirky, and addictive romantic narratives, offering a compelling alternative in the shift from long-form to short-form content consumption. This format has quickly developed into a transnational media product: driven by economic incentives and China’s ‘Going Global’ policy, numerous short-drama platforms have emerged, with ReelShort as an exemplar business and content template in the international drama market. Despite its commercial triumph, research on short-drama content strategies, particularly as a new generation of cultural export, remains limited. This article examines how ReelShort utilises glocalised content production, particularly in its primary U.S. market, to export not only individual episodes but also media templates. Drawing on content analysis and twelve semi-structured interviews, we argue that ReelShort’s success lies in its vertically integrated approach to intellectual properties (IPs) and its use of localised narratives in content creation. This study examines a new wave of transnational entertainment media exchange from one of the non-major cultural exporters, demonstrating how emerging media models can enrich global narratives, with ReelShort serving as an updated example.

In Chinese fantasy narratives spanning literature, animation, and games, characters will often practice martial arts and meditative techniques to become stronger and extend their lives. This process is called cultivation. This paper explores Chinese cultivation games, a unique genre of videogames deeply rooted in Chinese culture and cosmology. Through the theoretical lens of cosmotechnics, the analysis aims to elucidate the cultural complexity and imaginative possibilities within these games. Doing so, it is argued, opens up sinofuturist trajectories of technological thinking in which new possibilities can be imagined beyond Western contexts. The paper begins by explaining key terminology around “cultivation” in Chinese fantasy literature and games. It then traces the evolution from earlier wuxia -themed games to contemporary cultivation games. Next, the paper relates cultivation games to discourses on magical thinking and sinofuturism. It argues these games can exemplify an alternative sinofuturism aligned with traditional Chinese philosophies of cultivation rather than Western notions of endless progress. Through game analysis and theoretical discussion, the paper explores how Chinese cultivation games can diversify technological imaginaries. At stake in this paper is how cultivation games and the Chinese cultural understandings they impart can help to broaden the collective imaginary horizon in relation to culture, technology, and the future.