Scattered heritage in digital worlds: cultural authority, everyday practice and platform governance in Chinese MMORPGs

This study investigates cultural heritage practice and meaning-making within historically themed Chinese massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). JX Online 3 and Sword of Justice are examined as digital heritage ecologies where reconstructed cities, ritual practices, soundscapes and collective events generate dynamic forms of cultural production. This study addresses the under-theorisation of practice, sensory experience and governance in Chinese digital heritage. Its central argument is that Chinese MMORPGs reveal a transformation in the basis of heritage authority, as heritage meaning gains force through circulation, repeated practice, shared memory and distributed custodianship across players, developers, platforms and policy environments.

This study asks: How is cultural heritage meaning recreated and cultural authority redistributed through players’ everyday heritage practices under platform and institutional conditions in Chinese MMORPG ecologies? The methodology combines digital and sensory ethnography with constructivist grounded theory. Long-term participant observation, interviews, focus groups and community archives form the empirical foundation. The findings demonstrate how players transform historical materials into playable architecture, build sensory atmospheres infused with heritage feeling, negotiate cultural boundaries through identity work and construct ritual events that support shared memory.

The research presented here offers two original contributions. The notion of narrative diffraction model conceptualises heritage meaning-making as a recursive process shaped by six mechanisms: active perception, multiplicity, subjectivity at the forefront, dynamic reconstruction, temporal interplay and sharing memory. The concept of scattered heritage reframes digital heritage as a relational and generative process, where dispersed practices, fragments and memories gain coherence through patterns of connection, offering a new lens for understanding heritage under contemporary digital and institutional conditions while remaining vulnerable to deletion, commercial capture and unequal visibility.