From Journey to the West to the West: Evaluating Black Myth: Wukong's Exhibition on Ancient Chinese Culture for Cross-Cultural Communication

This paper examines how Black Myth: Wukong, a Chinese-developed action role-playing game inspired by the classical novel Journey to the West, mediates traditional Chinese cultural knowledge for international audiences through English localisation. Its central argument is that global visibility of the game should not be confused with cultural comprehension, and that localisation functions as a form of cultural mediation comparable to museum curation. The author proposes that in-game texts act as interpretive labels, and that when these labels omit context or misclassify cultural material, the game's potential as a digital heritage exhibition is limited.

The study uses a qualitative comparative analysis of the Chinese source text and English translation, focusing on the character Lingxuzi, whose backstory in the in-game Journal is dense with Taoist terminology and mythological references. Drawing on hermeneutics, cultural semiotics, and textual comparison, the analysis identifies three problems. The transliteration of the name retains its sound but drops the meaning of the Taoist honorific suffix zi. The epigraph describes the character as following Buddhist ways, misidentifying a figure the source text explicitly marks as Taoist. Finally, the terms Yao, Jing, and Guai, which denote distinct classes of supernatural beings in Chinese mythology, are collapsed into a single category, erasing the classificatory logic of the narrative.

The paper also draws on platform data to contextualise audience reach. As of late December 2024, the game had over one million Steam reviews, with English-labelled reviews making up only about 6.4 percent of the total, against roughly 89 percent in Simplified Chinese. Mentions of cultural unfamiliarity or localisation issues were rare in the reviews. The study is limited to a single character and a single language pair, so its conclusions are illustrative rather than general, but it contributes a framework for evaluating intercultural learning in commercial games.