In contemporary game fandoms, sharing news, reactions, and gameplay videos serves as a personalized affective record and a semipublic practice of community bonding. The release of Black Myth: Wukong catalyzed such practices at scale: creators on Bilibili and YouTube circulated walkthroughs, edited clips, and commentary that drew large cohorts of “cloud gamers.” Interactions among these communities significantly reshape the game's global image. Through digital ethnography of leading creators and their interaction cultures, this study approaches video adaptations as both discourse and a form of fan-driven “entertainment journalism.” We analyze heterogeneous practices—across narrative, technology, and nationalism—to show how adaptations on platforms reconfigure the game from a singular “central text” into a transmedia heteroglossia. Within this arena, the game's story of resistance fragments into symbolic, non-narrative signifiers: domestically adopted into nationalist narratives, and globally operating as a metonym for “China.” Yet the same symbols are continually repurposed by creators and viewers to generate alternative articulations, transnational solidarities, and inclusive participation, including players and audiences constrained by various barriers. The “Wukong” imaginary crystallizes this ambivalence, being at once a nationalist emblem, an assertion of individual agency, and a marker of collective fan identity. The resulting fan-curated archive thus functions as a living cyberinfrastructure that documents and circulates noninstitutional cultural knowledge. Concurrently, “cloud-gaming” spectatorship produces an illusion of equality while maintaining the stratification between players and viewers. By introducing an East Asian fandom perspective, this article demonstrates how nationalist mediation can paradoxically incubate transnational heteroglossia.
Zhu et al. (2026) studied this question.