







































 Humanities and Social Science Research; Vol. 8, No. 4; 2025 

ISSN 2576-3024   E-ISSN 2576-3032 

https://doi.org/10.30560/hssr.v8n4p84 

 84 Published by IDEAS SPREAD 

 

From Cultural Perception to Meaning Co-Creation: Analyzing 

Overseas Players’ Cultural Perception Pathways in Black Myth: 

Wukong 

Liang Zhang1 & Yunjun Zhang1 

1 College of Literature and Media, Jingchu University of Technology, China 

Correspondence: Liang Zhang, College of Literature and Media, Jingchu University of Technology, Jingmen, 

Hubei 448000, China E-mail: Ztutustrong@163.com 

 

Received: July 11, 2025; Accepted: July 24, 2025; Published: July 25, 2025 

 

Abstract 

As a burgeoning medium for global cultural dissemination, video games possess both narrative and immersive 

affordances. Yet, their actual impact on cross-cultural communication remains underexplored. This study focuses 

on Black Myth: Wukong, China's first AAA video game, and analyzes 18,916 English-language reviews from the 

Steam platform using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling and GoEmotions sentiment analysis. 

From the perspective of players, the research uncovers three major findings: (1) Players’ perception centers on 

combat design and gameplay difficulty, where high-challenge mechanics enhance immersion and enable cultural 

engagement; (2) Chinese cultural elements elicit both aesthetic admiration and interpretive confusion, revealing a 

psychological tension between curiosity and alienation; (3) Through social interaction and user-generated content, 

players actively participate in cultural negotiation and meaning co-creation, thereby fostering intercultural 

identification. This study offers a player-centered perspective on the complexities of cultural transmission via 

Chinese “Souls-like” games, providing both theoretical insight and empirical support for the internationalization 

of Chinese digital games. 

Keywords: cross-cultural communication, cultural perception, sentiment analysis, cultural adaptation, Black Myth: 

Wukong 

1. Introduction 

In recent years, the Chinese government has increasingly emphasized the cultural expression and international 

dissemination function of digital games. In November 2023, the National Press and Publication Administration of 

China issued a directive titled Online Game Publishing Excellence Project, calling for domestically developed 

games to “benchmark international standards” and integrate creativity, aesthetics, audiovisual quality, and Chinese 

cultural elements into high-quality productions [1]. In 2023 alone, overseas revenue from Chinese-developed 

games reached USD 16.366 billion, surpassing 100 billion yuan for the fifth consecutive year [2]. While Chinese 

mobile games have established a strong global presence, the market for high-cost, high-tech console and AAA 

games has remained largely untapped. The official release of Black Myth: Wukong in 2024, as China’s first AAA 

title, marks a significant breakthrough into the high-end international market, creating a new platform for cultural 

dissemination. 

Black Myth: Wukong draws on the Chinese classical novel Journey to the West as its narrative core, fusing 

mythological storytelling with fantasy aesthetics. Built using Unreal Engine 5 with ray tracing and motion capture 

technologies, the game offers an immersive Eastern world. As early as 2020, its initial gameplay reveal went viral 

on both Chinese and international platforms—garnering over 10 million views within 24 hours on Bilibili and 

similarly high engagement on IGN’s YouTube channel. Upon its release in 2024, the game topped the global 

Steam sales chart, with over 1.25 million concurrent players and more than 1.1 million reviews, creating a 

substantial base of user-generated content and feedback that offers rich data for cultural perception analysis. 

As a digital medium, games are inherently immersive, interactive, and emotionally engaging, making them a 

critical vehicle for projecting Chinese culture abroad[3]. Scholars have long explored the semiotic and aesthetic 

transformation of traditional culture in games, noting that their audiovisual styles, narrative structures, and 

interactive logic share expressive paradigms with film and literature, giving games unique storytelling capacities. 

Furthermore, immersive gameplay and participation in “third social spaces” within games help dissolve cultural 



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barriers [4]. However, games also face the “cultural discount” dilemma common to cross-cultural media, wherein 

fragmented information[5], interpretive autonomy, and cognitive biases among players can hinder cultural 

comprehension[6]. 

Existing studies on Black Myth: Wukong have mainly focused on its narrative symbolism, cultural representation, 

and media hybridity. Yet few have examined the actual feedback from real user communities, especially overseas 

players, regarding their cultural perceptions. There is a particular lack of research on the pathways through which 

international players experience, interpret, and emotionally respond to the game’s cultural content. Given that 

game reviews are organic reflections of players’ post-immersion reactions, often rich in interactivity and emotional 

nuance, this study uses over 40,000 foreign-language (non-Chinese) comments collected from Steam as the 

primary dataset. Combining LDA topic modeling and sentiment analysis, this research explores how international 

players perceive the game’s cultural elements, express their emotional responses, and participate in the negotiation 

and co-creation of cultural meaning. The goal is to reveal the mechanisms underlying cross-cultural reception of 

Chinese AAA “Souls-like” games, thereby offering empirical evidence and theoretical insights to support China’s 

global gaming strategy. 

2. Research Methodology 

2.1 Data Collection and Processing 

This study uses the Steam platform as the data source. As one of the world’s largest digital game distribution 

platforms, Steam hosts over 35 million concurrent users and more than 11 million active daily players, making it 

both representative and globally relevant. The dataset comprises foreign-language (non-Chinese) reviews of Black 

Myth: Wukong posted on Steam as of April 2025. Initially, 40,513 reviews were collected. After excluding 9,554 

non-relevant entries (e.g., Chinese-language reviews and those with less than one hour of gameplay), a total of 

18,916 valid review texts were retained. Table 1 illustrates sample data, including username, recommendation 

status, gameplay duration, and review content. While the recommendation flag offers a basic indicator of sentiment, 

it fails to capture the complexity of players’ emotional responses. 

 

Table 1. Sample Records from the Black Myth: Wukong Steam Review Dataset 

No. Username Recommended Review Excerpt Playtime 

1 itsKenser 
Recommended I suck at it and I still like it. Pretty sure everyone 

will say the same. 
4.5 hrs 

2 Why'sss 
Recommended This game reminds me of when I watched Journey 

to the West on VTV2... 
29.5 hrs 

... ... …… ... ... 

18915 ExaltedParrot 
Recommended After 10 hours, I have a few words to share. Pros: 

The game cannot look better. 
71.7 hrs 

18916 TheMightyGordo 
Recommended First impression: GOTY 2024. Unbelievable visuals 

and combat... 
10.5 hrs 

 

 
Figure 1. LDA Model Perplexity and Topic Coherence Evaluation 



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2.2 Data Analysis 

To ensure both model robustness and interpretability, the number of topics in the LDA model was determined 

based on two key indicators: topic coherence and perplexity. The model achieved optimal coherence when the 

number of topics was set to six (see Figure 1). These six topics form the basis for analyzing the players’ perception 

focus and pathways of cultural cognition. To further explore emotional dynamics, sentiment distribution was 

analyzed across all topic categories using a multilabel approach. 

All 18,916 reviews were preprocessed using natural language processing tools such as NLTK and spaCy. 

Preprocessing steps included lowercasing, punctuation removal, stop-word filtering, and lemmatization using 

WordNet. To enhance domain specificity, a customized dictionary of named entities was incorporated, including 

terms such as “Wukong,” “Black Myth: Wukong,” “Journey to the West,” “Monkey King,” and “Black Monkey.” 

A combined stop-word list from NLTK and manually defined game-specific terms was also applied to improve 

lexical precision. 

Next, TF-IDF vectorization was used to extract textual features for topic modeling. Using the 

LatentDirichletAllocation module from sklearn, LDA modeling was performed on the cleaned dataset. The six 

topics were identified based on representative keywords and a close reading of exemplar reviews. These topics 

were labeled as follows:Combat Design Perception; Challenge & Difficulty Perception; Character Construction 

Perception; Cultural Symbolism Perception; Technical Performance Perception; Personal Engagement Perception. 

To uncover emotional patterns within player discourse, the study further employed the GoEmotions model, a 

multilabel fine-grained emotion classifier built on the BERT architecture. The model supports 27 discrete emotion 

categories, including admiration, surprise, joy, confusion, disappointment, and anger. For each review, the first 

512 characters were processed to generate multilabel emotion tags. Emotion frequency distributions were then 

calculated for each topic, and a topic-emotion heatmap was constructed to visualize emotional variance across 

content dimensions. 

By integrating LDA-based thematic analysis and GoEmotions-based sentiment classification, this methodology 

enables a comprehensive examination of how international players engage cognitively and emotionally with Black 

Myth: Wukong, shedding light on their cultural perception pathways in the context of digital gameplay. 

3. Findings 

3.1 Player Perception Themes Based on LDA Topic Modeling 

Using LDA-based thematic analysis, player comments were categorized into six primary perception themes. These 

themes represent key focal points of user engagement and cognitive processing during gameplay. Table 2 presents 

selected high-frequency keywords for each topic. 

 
Figure 2. Semantic Mapping of Player Perception Themes 



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Table 2. Player Perception Themes and Representative Keywords 

No. Theme Representative Keywords 

1 Combat Design Perception boss, combat, story, chapter, design, enemy 

2 Challenge & Difficulty soul, game, play, elden ring, hard, boss, beat 

3 Character Construction great, year, monkey, graphic, GOTY, masterpiece 

4 Cultural Symbolism wukong, myth, chinese, journey to the west, black 

5 Technical Performance setting, issue, fps, performance, crash, frame 

6 Personal Engagement long, life, grind, bug, spare, brain 

 

3.1.1 Combat and Challenge: Salient Perceptual Focuses for Player Engagement 

As shown in Figure 2, the visualization results of LDA topic modeling display the semantic distribution of six 

major themes. Among them, Topic 1 (combat design perception), Topic 2 (challenge and difficulty perception), 

and Topic 3 (character construction perception) are tightly clustered, exhibiting significant semantic overlap. 

Players actively discuss the combat mechanisms in the game, including character move combinations, skill design, 

and boss battle strategies, emphasizing the refinement of the combat system and the tactile feel of gameplay. 

Players process the information they receive in the game based on their previous gaming experiences and personal 

preferences—essentially engaging in the reception and perceptual processing of sensory information surrounding 

combat design, challenge, and character development. This serves as the perceptual foundation for processing 

cultural elements and interpreting meaning. 

The semantic overlap indicates that when players evaluate the combat system, difficulty level, and character 

representation, they often use similar vocabulary, suggesting a cognitive linkage between the three. This densely 

populated area in semantic space reveals that combat, challenge, and character collectively form the core axis of 

players’ experiential perception, and belong to the realm of deep participatory perception at the gameplay level. 

3.1.2 From “Monkey” to “Wukong”: The Character as a Bridge for Cultural Interpretation 

Theme 4 revolves around cultural elements and is semantically distinct from the previously mentioned cluster of 

combat-related themes. Upon entering the game, players’ initial impression of the main character as a generic 

“monkey” gradually transforms into the culturally specific symbol of “Wukong,” imbued with narrative and 

personality traits. This cultural transition represents the player’s process of accepting Chinese culture, particularly 

as manifested through character cognition and emotional projection. 

The symbol “Wukong” carries rich pretextual connotations. Some players had been exposed to the character 

symbol prior to playing the game via various channels, and thus the role-playing experience evokes original 

memories that become embedded in the overall gameplay experience, prompting strong identification with the 

game. For example: “You play as Wukong, what more needs to be said?” Conversely, if a player lacks the 

necessary cultural background knowledge, they may struggle to understand the character’s motivations and 

narrative details, which hampers immersion and negatively affects their perception of cultural elements in the 

game. 

3.1.3 Constructive Attention to Technical Performance Driven by High Expectations 

Upon release, the game received widespread acclaim in China, where praise from players, game media, and public 

opinion was overwhelmingly positive. This surge of favorable reviews was often accompanied by nationalist 

sentiment and collective identification, generating an atmosphere of grand celebration. This celebratory mood—

disseminated via social media, professional reviews, and live streaming—also influenced foreign players and 

raised their psychological expectations:“…Still worth a grab, just don't get lost in the hype and see it for what it 

is.”Unable to fully participate in this domestic wave of enthusiasm, foreign players paid heightened attention to 

the game’s technical aspects. 

The high-frequency keywords in Topic 5 show that international players are highly sensitive to technical 

performance. Frame rate, stability, and compatibility were frequent focal points in reviews. Many players offered 

concrete suggestions regarding game settings and hardware optimization. For example:“I am running a RTX 3060 

with 32GB RAM… 60 fps with high and medium settings.” 

Such comments reflect a non-confrontational and constructive feedback tendency. In this context, technical 

parameters not only describe user experience but also function as a medium for communication and collaboration 

among players. 

 



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3.1.4 Emphasizing Immersion and Effort in Constructing Personal Gameplay Meaning 

The alternate world constructed by the game also serves as a complex site for self-formation. Players’ in-game 

decision-making and interaction patterns not only reflect their internal value systems but also constitute part of a 

dynamic self-concept construction process[7]. The high-difficulty setting typical of Souls-like games compels 

players to repeatedly confront challenges and endure trial-and-error cycles. This bittersweet dynamic—“…And 

the way it really makes you Rage after losing to a boss after 69+ Tries…”—demonstrates players’ understanding 

and acceptance of the game’s mechanics and fosters a sense of belonging within the gaming community. 

Keywords in Topic 6, such as “grind,” “life,” and “brain,” reflect the considerable energy players invest in the 

game and how they derive personal meaning from it. Comments often include phrases like “100% achievements” 

or “played for 3 hours,” indicating that players view the game as a process of self-expression and value formation. 

This reflects a dynamic mechanism of identity construction, in which players extend aspects of their real-life 

identities into virtual practices. 

3.2 Emotional Characteristics under Each Perception Theme 

Using the GoEmotions model, each comment was labeled with multiple emotion tags. In total, 28 distinct emotions 

were identified. Based on the overall emotion distribution, the comments were aggregated by their LDA topic 

assignments to construct a topic-emotion matrix. 

 

Figure 3. Overall Emotion Distribution in Player Reviews 

 

3.2.1 Rational Appreciation Reflects Cultural Integration of Chinese Games in the Global Context 

Overall, admiration emerged as the most dominant emotion across reviews, followed by neutral and approval (see 

Figure 3). This indicates that players generally held positive evaluations of Black Myth: Wukong, but their 

expressions tended to be rational rather than emotional. Many reviews assessed the game systematically, touching 

on aspects like storyline, visual effects, audio quality, and combat system—e.g., “Story Line Good. Voice Overs 

Good. Graphics/Audio Good...”—placing the game squarely within the evaluation framework of AAA Souls-like 

titles. 

Players are no longer viewing the game from an outsider's perspective or simply appreciating its "exoticism." 

Instead, they evaluate the game through the lens of its genre-specific merits. This structured expression of 

appreciation is itself a sign of cultural acceptance and engagement. Such rational and systematic commentary 

reflects not only the game’s integration into international discourses, but also signifies the growing discursive 

parity of Chinese games on the global stage. 



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Figure 4. Heatmap of Emotion Distribution Across Perception Themes 

 

3.2.2 Emotional Identification Rooted in the Experience of "Playability" 

Themes 1 to 3 show significantly higher emotional engagement. Combined frequencies of admiration and approval 

exceed 6,000, and emotions like joy and love also appear frequently. For instance:“…the combat however is 

fundamentally flawed… but I guess I had too high expectations…”This indicates that gameplay is the most 

emotionally stimulating component for players. As producer Feng Ji once stated in an interview, “The most 

important thing about a game is whether it’s fun to play.” Players’ approval is fundamentally grounded in their 

rational judgment formed through deep engagement. 

This experience-driven evaluation model reflects a high-involvement, high-standard cognitive approach. Players 

often compare Black Myth: Wukong to other AAA Souls-like games in horizontal evaluations. This seemingly 

critical attitude actually implies recognition and appreciation. Stripped of the domestic players’ “sentimentalism” 

and the foreign players’ “novelty effect,” the game is now evaluated primarily on the quality of its gameplay—

signaling its formal entry into global competition. 

3.2.4 Technical Performance Triggers Strong Resonance and Positively Skewed Emotions 

Comments related to technical performance show highly concentrated positive emotions. As shown in the heatmap, 

admiration is most frequently associated with Theme 5, with 3,705 instances—the highest across all themes. In 

addition, joy (313 instances), love (309), and excitement (124) are also prevalent—reflecting an immersive and 

satisfying experience. 

Such positive feedback often includes “constructive information sharing,” as in:“...4090 and ran everything on 

max settings...”Players frequently share hardware configurations and gameplay experiences. These technical 

exchanges establish a shared, communicable user experience. Technology here not only enhances acceptance of 

the game, but also serves as a carrier of emotional connection and community bonding. 

4. Conclusion 

From gameplay mechanics to cultural expression, and from technical performance to emotional resonance, 

overseas players’ evaluations of Black Myth: Wukong demonstrate a high level of engagement and cultural 

awareness. These findings reveal the complex pathways through which players receive and reconstruct meaning 

during the international dissemination of Chinese games. Overall, the communication effects of Chinese AAA 

games have transcended superficial entertainment and consumption, giving rise to a cross-cultural communication 

mechanism driven by immersive gameplay, aesthetic curiosity, and user co-creation. 



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4.1 Immersive Mechanism: Souls-like Challenge Induces Flow Experience 

Player reviews consistently focus on combat systems and gameplay difficulty, with emotional expressions showing 

strong involvement, high praise, and sharp criticism. This emotional tension indicates that challenge design is a 

key source of immersion. According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of “flow,” high-difficulty and low-

tolerance tasks stimulate users to persistently iterate, adjust, and refine their behavior, resulting in deep absorption 

and intrinsic satisfaction [8]. Black Myth: Wukong continues the Souls-like tradition through boss battles, real-

time feedback, and goal-matching systems, constructing a highly focused gameplay scenario. This leads players 

into a cognitive loop of “challenge–feedback–adjustment,” enabling dual immersion on both operational and 

narrative levels. 

This immersive mechanism not only enhances player stickiness but also motivates players to actively seek out 

storylines and cultural backgrounds, forming an extended pathway from mechanical immersion to cultural 

cognition[9]. Especially when confronting high-difficulty gameplay, players undergo repetitive trial-and-error, 

gaining experience and adjusting pace over time. In doing so, they develop a sense of self-efficacy [10]. This 

provides a valuable reference for constructing globally competitive immersive standards in Chinese games. 

4.2 Cultural Dissemination: Coexistence of Admiration and Confusion Drives Cross-Cultural Learning 

Within the LDA-derived themes, cultural perception is not the most dominant focus, but it generates stronger and 

more complex emotional reactions than other themes. Players frequently discuss cultural signifiers such as 

“Wukong” and “Journey to the West,” expressing curiosity and admiration toward the Chinese mythological 

system. However, difficulties in understanding plot details and character motivations also emerged, highlighting 

typical experiences of cultural distance. 

This reaction reveals the paradox of high-context cultures in international dissemination: cultural elements serve 

both as sources of attraction and as barriers to comprehension. Since Black Myth: Wukong is rooted in Journey to 

the West, its story contains many untranslated metaphors and symbolic constructs. For players lacking relevant 

cultural schemas, these elements form cognitive black boxes. Some players noted that “the plot is hard to 

understand” or “I can’t empathize with the character’s motivations”—responses that can be interpreted as cognitive 

resistance caused by frame mismatches in communication psychology. 

However, analysis of specific comments shows that despite these cognitive obstacles, players are not rejecting 

cultural content. Instead, the game’s audiovisual aesthetics inspire curiosity and a desire to explore. Elements such 

as “demonic character designs,” “Oriental music,” and “ancient architecture” create sensory attraction, evoking a 

form of aesthetic cosmopolitanism [11]. Players approach Chinese culture from a globalized perspective, and for 

many, this visual enjoyment translates into cross-cultural learning motivations—some even mentioned reading 

Journey to the West to better understand the game. 

The cultural dissemination of Black Myth: Wukong does not follow a linear model. Initial shock and novelty 

arouse interest, encouraging players to overcome cultural barriers. However, subsequent interpretive challenges 

reintroduce a sense of cultural otherness. Due to the Souls-like structure of the game, players are required to engage 

in “iterative labor” [12], repeatedly going through cycles of “understanding–misunderstanding–reinterpretation.” 

The game’s cultural impact thus emerges from an interplay of emotional arousal and cognitive adaptation. Through 

the delivery of culturally distinct experiences, Chinese games construct a participatory arena for intercultural 

understanding and identification. 

4.3 Co-Creation Mechanism: Players Actively Construct Cultural Identification 

Built on intertwined processes of understanding and emotional response, players are no longer passive receivers 

of content; instead, they participate as co-creators in constructing the meaning of the game. Beyond the game 

environment, they engage in conversations through social media, livestream platforms, and comment sections, 

discussing plotlines, cultural symbols, and character interpretations. These interactions constitute a “co-

construction–resonance–consensus” pathway in cultural dissemination. 

This aligns with Henry Jenkins’s notion of participatory culture, in which players break the designer’s monopoly 

on interpretation through comments, fan art, and mod development. In this way, they continually generate new 

cultural meanings through collective discourse. Players become not merely individuals who “play,” but cultural 

agents who embed themselves into the narrative and construct significance. From the moment the game is released, 

narrative authority begins to shift from developers to the community. Player engagement not only enriches the 

cultural context of the game but also enhances its longevity and global communicative efficacy. 

Moreover, in cases of cultural misunderstanding or divergent interpretations, the collaborative negotiation of 

meaning among players helps lower interpretive barriers. Diverse perspectives from the player base contribute to 



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a pluralistic framework of cultural cognition, thereby facilitating the internalization and acceptance of foreign 

cultural elements. This shift transforms cultural dissemination from a unidirectional model of “telling stories” into 

a dialogic process of “co-performance,” achieving deeper transitions from perception to identificationp[13]. 

As a representative of China’s AAA game production, Black Myth: Wukong demonstrates a multi-layered 

mechanism of cultural perception among international players—one that evolves from immersive gameplay to co-

created meaning. Through challenging gameplay, aesthetic engagement, and interactive user participation, the 

game not only succeeds in overseas entertainment markets but also offers a model for the digital dissemination of 

Chinese culture. By perceiving, interpreting, and regenerating meaning through play, players help position games 

as vital mediators in cross-cultural exchange. Future studies may further explore variations in player reception 

across cultural backgrounds, or delve into the negotiation of cultural identity, in order to advance the international 

communication of original Chinese digital content. 

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