A Textile Market Mysteries
Videogame, 2019
#Procedrual Game
#Can Videogame be Art?
#Videogame as Documentation
After the reform and opening up in 1979, China was transformed into the world’s factory. Guangzhou International Textile Market is an important fabric trading center in China, and its customers come from all over the world. There is a huge trading area, composed of large shopping malls, dense textile shops and low-cost residential buildings. What interests me is the delivery men from the village who drive various modified electric bike to transport fabrics. In such a dense and chaotic textile market, electric bike are very practical. They make the textile market operate efficiently, and China’s economy depends on them to a certain extent.
But It is a paradox that electric bike like this are forbidden in metropolis like Guangzhou, and such unsightly and unmodern vehicles cannot be seen outside the textile market. There is a subtle com- promise between these delivery men and local government. The social rules established by the gov- ernment also expect these delivery men to break in a “Chinese” way, so that both sides can survive.
I used videogame as a new form to document it. It is worth noting that I reduced the narrative of the game and there is no goal, no destination and no end. I summarized the story of those delivery men through the game’s mechanism and procedrual itself. As the American academic and videogame de- signer Ian Bogost theorized the term - “Procedrualist Videogame”. Since the delivery man joined this capitalist game, they have only two choices - either continue with this game or leave. Unfortunately, there is a paradox if they leave.