Shan-shui Game: Worldbuilding for a Pluriverse Through Relational Game Assets

This paper argues that shan-shui games, a genre inspired by Chinese mountain-water painting, should be analyzed and created through Chinese and Daoist frameworks rather than primarily through Western theory. Building on Alenda Chang's notion of the Mountain-Water game and Yuk Hui's concept of cosmotechnics, the author contends that Western lenses such as cybernetics and anthropocentric game analysis fail to capture how shan-shui traditions conceive the relationship between body, cosmos, and technology. The paper proposes a comparative, non-binary approach that treats shan-shui as a worlding process, one that generates multiple temporalities grounded in non-Western imaginaries.

The argument draws on historical and theoretical evidence from the Song-Yuan dynasties (960-1368), a period when shan-shui painting was understood not as a scenic backdrop but as a cosmic body unified in rhythm with the human body. The author highlights Huang Gongwang, a Yuan Daoist painter who rendered stages of inner alchemy in landscape form, and Daoist "writing as landscape" practices, in which dragon script, registers, and talismans were used in rituals to summon powers within the land. Such traditions, the paper notes, present landscape as interactive, multisensory, and transmedia, in contrast to Chang's observation that the grand landscape in Journey minimizes player bodily presence.

The paper's analysis rests on two examples. The first is a close reading of the idle game Mountain (2014), which the author interprets as presenting the virtual landscape as a cosmic body that connects with players through affective resonance rather than external control. The second is the author's ongoing project Standing Within, a Daoist-inspired standing meditation game in which natural assets such as trees and mountains are procedurally generated in relation to the player's body. The work is primarily theoretical and practice-based rather than empirical, and it does not report survey data or quantitative findings.