"Region lock China" has echoed through the virtual landscape of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and equally caustic player communities alike as the result of the transnationally networked play. This presentation aims to show how the chorus of frustrated English-speaking gamers betrays the phantasmic insularity of the Internet and how the precarious reachability of cross-territory networked play effectively throws the inequalities and material distance into sharp relief. This project equally pays close attention to geopolitical formations of gaming publics while also parsing the matrix of corporate structures and platform powers involved in the dissemination and regulation of Battlegrounds in South-Korean, Chinese, and North-American markets.
Presented as part of the Global Emergent Media Lab's "Life Streaming" working group on May 2nd, and was previously presented at the Video Games and Material Culture seminar at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Toronto, March 18th 2018.