Traditional Chinese Music Goes Global: Encoding and Digital Audience Reception in Black Myth: Wukong
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Keywords
video game music, encoding-decoding, online reception, traditional Chinese music, cultural communication
Abstract
Video games can circulate culturally specific music widely, but positive audience response does not by itself show how that music is interpreted. This study examines the encoding and English-language online reception of traditional Chinese musical material in Black Myth: Wukong. The encoding analysis draws on identifiable official soundtrack and production sources. The reception analysis uses 225 source-traceable analytic records purposively retained from 42 public Reddit and Steam discussion threads dated between 18 August 2024 and 19 August 2025. To reduce searchability and avoid retaining user identities, the dataset stores anonymized paraphrases rather than verbatim comments; each record is linked to its public thread URL and source metadata. One decoding-position code and eight non-exclusive thematic codes were applied. Dominant readings accounted for 151 records (67.1%), negotiated readings for 60 (26.7%), and oppositional readings for 14 (6.2%). Track identification was the most frequent theme (n = 110), followed by emotional appreciation (n = 56), access and distribution (n = 44), and historical contextualization (n = 37). Cultural-learning discourse appeared in 17 records, while no record met the conservative criterion for exoticizing language. The results show that online reception frequently involved naming, locating, and contextualizing musical material rather than affective evaluation alone. Because the corpus is purposive, Reddit-heavy, and coded by one researcher, the findings describe the selected discourse and do not estimate platform populations or causal effects.
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