The Spread And Influence Of Traditional Festival Virtual Rituals In Online Game

Traditional Chinese festival culture is facing a severe test,with some traditional festivals slowly losing their connotations of reuniting family and friends and strengthening relationships,and certain rituals and customs are gradually being marginalised or even abandoned.In recent years,with the development of internet technology and the popularity of mobile devices,the online game market has grown very rapidly.Its own attributes such as transcendence and socialization have given more room for expression and imagination for the digital transformation of traditional festivals,so mobile phone online games are gradually becoming an important part of the digital culture and creation industry,and the virtual rituals of traditional festivals in online games can become a new channel for the dissemination of festival culture and give traditional festival culture a new contemporary connotation.As an online game that makes use of digital technology innovation to inherit traditional festival culture,“Game for Peace” integrates traditional culture into its game content and constructs traditional festival virtual rituals that can build an immersive festival scene for game players,thus conveying the cultural and social value of the game.This paper takes the traditional festive rituals in the game “Game for Peace”as the object of study and applies Rosenbue’s theoretical framework of ritual communication.Through the method of rooted theory and participatory observation,the elements of traditional festivals presented in the virtual rituals of the online game are analysed,and from the perspectives of "ritual as a communication phenomenon" and "communication as a ritual phenomenon",the motivation of the game’s intervention in traditional festivals and the subsequent construction of the game are analysed.The study also analyses the motivation for the involvement of games in traditional festivals and the impact of the new spatial and temporal changes they have created on people’s views of traditional festivals,as well as their socio-cultural significance.The study found that online games represented by "Game for Peace” are constructing a new kind of traditional festival virtual ritual: on the one hand,online games,under the strict regulation mechanism of the game industry,form traditional festival activities with differentiated contents in order to achieve their own differentiated competition,and construct traditional festival virtual rituals along with real festival rituals through virtual entities,virtual spaces and virtual customs to realize their commercial,On the other hand,due to the tonality of the game itself and players’ needs for festivals in the real environment,online games can influence or even alienate players’ cultural cognition,behavioural habits and intimate relationships through innovative traditional festival rituals.At the same time,in the process of the virtual digitization of traditional festivals,the entertainment and commercial attributes of online games themselves also allow traditional festivals to be held hostage by entertainment and consumer culture,and the spiritual core of traditional festival rituals is partially dissipated.When players are highly involved in the virtual rituals of traditional festivals,the boundaries between the virtual and the real begin to blur,interpenetrate and even overlap,and players’ high level of participation will connect them to their daily lives and trigger thinking outside of game time,influencing the performance of the real world to produce a more advanced "flow of meaning ".