The Promise of Love: Love Is All Around and Vulnerable Masculinity in China

This paper examines Love Is All Around, a 2023 Chinese dating-simulation game by Intiny that remediates the conventions of bishōjo games by replacing anime-style graphics with live-action first-person video and drawing on micro-dramas and YY fiction. Written for the CDiGRA 2024 proceedings, the study asks why the game's impact in China extends beyond bishōjo fandom and otaku culture. Its analysis combines close reading of the game's narrative, mechanics, and audiovisual representation with an examination of news reports, interviews, and gamer reviews, and it frames these materials through Lauren Berlant's concept of the "intimate public."

The central argument is that the game offers young Chinese male players a mediated space to recognize and work through everyday experiences of precarious employment, intimate frustration, and gendered anxiety. Through what the author terms the "promise of love," the game eases a sense of vulnerable masculinity shaped by competitive achievement culture and post-feminist social conditions, since players can readily win affection within its fantasy structure. Creators and players alike are described as building "unhappy archives" and performing suku, or "speaking bitterness," so that real hardship becomes an undertone of the ludic experience rather than an absent backdrop.

The paper concludes that this process of adaptation depends on reinforcing patriarchal norms and on the exploitation of women within the game's gendered fantasy. Drawing on Berlant's notion of cruel optimism, the author contends that the comfort the game provides ultimately sustains attachment to conditions that place a better life and a more equitable society further out of reach.