The Protagonist Training Project: How Simulator-Style Produsage on Social Media Shapes Our Gamified Daily

This study examines the Protagonist Training Project, a collective creative activity on Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social media platform, in which users ("produsers," combining the roles of producer and user) share gamified strategies for self-cultivation and self-motivation. Framing the phenomenon through game studies rather than general media studies, the research investigates how individuals adopt a hybrid role blending player-like and designer-like functions as they build gamified lifestyle practices. The analysis is preliminary, drawing on 20 posts retrieved under the search term "Training Project" and filtered by "Most Liked," each with over 10,000 likes, examined through text analysis of visual content, textual elements, hashtags, author acknowledgments, and top comments.

The findings identify two main patterns. First, posts employ gamified rhetoric, invoking personas such as the "Protagonist/Avatar" (Da Nü Zhu) and "Barbie," narrative frames like "Restarting Life," and game-style mechanics including task lists, management, planning, and victory conditions centered on overcoming adversity. Together these create a simulator-style experience in which participants construct and navigate their own goals and advance through self-directed "level-ups." Second, posts adopt an encouraging, companionable tone, frequently using words like "together," "become better," and "companion," and addressing other users as "players." The author argues this fosters a social atmosphere resembling multiplayer online games, though the interactions are characterized more by companionship and mutual support than by the interdependence typical of classic MMORPGs.

The study concludes that the activity simulates an idealized self rather than the routines of others, giving participants a sense of subjectivity, control, and immersion. It further notes that roughly 79 percent of Xiaohongshu users are reported to be female, arguing that the practice carries feminist undertones through the "big female protagonist" concept, which centers women as leads of their own self-investment narratives. The sample is small and the analysis largely qualitative, so the conclusions are offered as preliminary.