Lineage of Line Age: Transculturation of Global Play-scape Video Games in East Asia

This essay sets to explore the significance, mode, and complexity of videogame-playing in processes of social reconfiguration and cultural transmutation under conditions of further globalization, digitalization, and multinational capitalism through the online game Lineage in the context of video gaming in East Asia. Growing together with the gaming industry, there are the increased collective zests for the consumption of image, symbolic meaning, sensory spectacles and simulacra, as well as the global enthusiasm for cultural soft power and culturecreative industry. Eventually, these all constitute and transform the political-economic environment of multinational information-capitalism in the so-called post-industrial era, where video gaming is considered an ideal-type commodity and powerful form of cultural statement and participation mechanism. It also expects to shed some light upon the East Asian agencies within this transcultural dynamism, providing a counterargument and third path to those opinions, which consider globalization and contemporary popular culture as either homogeneous techno-oriented pan-Americanization or self-enclosed multiculturalism