Nostalgia And Revival Under Globalization

The critical research of the digital game “Gujian 2” is conducted in the semiotic intercultural approach.The larger cultural context of “Gujian 2” is “Gufeng” cultural movement which revives traditional Chinese culture against the backdrop of globalization.It is an intercultural study with popular culture as its focus.There is not much academic endeavor into digital game studies from the intercultural perspective.Furthermore,it is a nostalgia study,which adds a new brick to the insufficient nostalgia studies in the Chinese academia.The paper follows the critical pattern of semiotic analysis.There are three pillars to support the theoretical framework.They are: semiotics as tool of analysis,nostalgia and modernity as theoretical perspective and additionally Baudrillard?s consumption and simulation as further interpretation.Through thorough semiotic analysis,the intercultural messages encoded in “Gujian 2” are categorized and synthesized into several key concepts.Based upon the intercultural messages,the way in which the past and the present and the East and the West are negotiated can be revealed.The popular culture product “Gujian 2” is a created world of nostalgic imagination built upon the intercultural dialogues both in time and in space.In addition,it is,made up of signs,a nostalgic field of simulated reality where its players,or to say,consumers achieve temporal escape from modernity for comfort and easement by consuming the nostalgic signs in it.To sum up,“Gujian 2” comes from defiance against modernity whereas it is in the end incorporated into modernity for the consumption of the game is the typical consumption of signs brought about by modernity.There are limitations of the research: future studies can include music in digital games to conduct intercultural enquiry;a comparative study of nostalgic popular culture products in the East and its counterparts in the West is suggested;there can be other methodologies to unravel the implications of traditional Chinese elements in popular culture besides semiotics.The research makes contribution to the field for it provides a new angle to interpret digital games,builds up a framework to study Chinese popular culture from the intercultural perspective and offers its intercultural communication standpoint to the insufficient academia of nostalgia studies in China.