Zehui Zhou (Claire) is an independent scholar in game studies and a former user researcher from the gaming and fintech industry. She conducts her research projects in Chinese, English, and Japanese. Her research interests include women’s gaming experiences, video game characters, and how video games represent social identities, gender issues, and cultural phenomena. Claire got her MSc degree from The University of Hong Kong, and is an associate member of Sigma Xi, the scientific research honor society.
Xiaoxuan Huang currently is a PhD student at the Academy of Film, School of Creative Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University. Her research examines why and how cultural heritage is transformed into playable experiences through the production, circulation, and reception of video games. Her work is currently focusing on China and investigates the relationships among game companies, cultural institutions such as museums, tourism organizations, players, and local communities. Her work explores how these actors select, interpret, and represent cultural heritage; how games reshape public engagement with history and tradition; and how playable heritage contributes to cultural communication, and identity formation. Her research bridges game studies, heritage and museum studies, and media industries.
Nested landscapes and player identity: how the visual and gameplay design of Temple of Space in Genshin Impact affects the boundary between player and avatar
FROG 2026 – Talk
In terms of the interactions between video games and museums, scholarly discourses mostly fall into the representation of museums in video games (e.g., Giddings, 2013) and how video game museums in reality facilitate the preservation of video games and play culture (e.g., Eklund, Sjöblom & Prax, 2019). Little attention, however, is paid to the practice of building an in-game museum of the game itself and corresponding theoretical implications regarding the player’s identity recognition.
To fill in this gap, the research selects Temple of Space, an explorable space in one of the most popular long-term operated anime-style gacha games, Genshin Impact (GI hereafter), as the case for study. Through the theoretical lens of Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty, 2002[1945]) and by analyzing the interaction and visual design of this space using the MDA framework (Hunicke et al., 2004), we uncover how Temple of Space is presented as an in-game museum of the game itself and further argue that, by creating such a museum-like visiting experience and mimicing the process of curating exhibitions, the gaming experience in this space results in the blurring of boundary between the player and the avatar: while the player explores Teyvat (i.e., the world in GI) through the material interface of their devices, the avatar (i.e., Traveller) simultaneously recall their journey in Teyvat through snapshots of scenarios and exhibited heritage in the space, leading to the overlap between the player’s objective body and phenomenal body.
This study extends the examination of the player–avatar relationship (e.g., Klevjer, 2012; Martin, 2012) by demonstrating how museum-like space design enables players to revisit virtual worlds both through the avatar, the extension of their embodied experience, and through their own museum-going experience, thus reinforcing their identification with and cultural memory of the virtual worlds.
References:
Eklund, L., Sjöblom, B., & Prax, P. (2019). Lost in translation: Video games becoming cultural heritage? Cultural Sociology, 13(4), 444–460. https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975519852501
Giddings, S. (2013). SimKnowledge: What museums can learn from video games. In M. Henning (Ed.), International handbooks of museum studies (pp. 145–164). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118829059.wbihms307
Hunicke, R., LeBlanc, M., & Zubek, R. (2004). MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research.
Klevjer, R. (2012). Enter the Avatar: The Phenomenology of Prosthetic Telepresence in Computer Games. In J. R. Sageng, H. Fossheim, & T. Mandt Larsen (Eds.), The Philosophy of Computer Games (Vol. 7, pp. 17–38). Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4249-9_3
Martin, P. (2012). A phenomenological account of the playing-body in avatar-based action games. The Philosophy of Computer Games Conference, Madrid.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002[1945]). Phenomenology of Perception. (C. Smith, Trans.) London: Routledge.