CDCS Colloquium: Zhe Wang

Courting Uncertainty: Loot Box Gifting on Chinese Livestreaming Platforms

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Talk Description 

This talk derives from a chapter of my current book project, Fuzzy Visualities: The Platform Apparatus of Streaming Media in Digital China. Loot boxes, as randomized reward mechanisms, are widely employed in gaming and have been adopted in livestreaming gifting to enhance user engagement and monetization. Based on online and offline ethnography, this study explores how loot boxes have evolved into a broader affective economy in contemporary China. Focusing on Chinese livestreaming platforms, it argues that the introduction of loot boxes in virtual gifting marks a tipping point that transforms viewer–host interactions: emotional intimacy becomes tightly intertwined with probabilistic calculations of reward. In this process, the performativity of digital objects begins to substitute for viewers’ affective investment in streamers’ performance, while simultaneously enabling new modes of social interaction among participants and masking underlying power asymmetries. More broadly, the analysis suggests the emergence of a culture of uncertainty, one that cultivates a population attuned to the “contrived contingency” of life, recognizing the necessity of chance in times of crisis and actively navigating the challenges of converting opportunity into value.

About Zhe Wang

Zhe Wang is an Associate Professor at the Communication University of Zhejiang. Her research sits at the intersection of digital media studies and cultural studies, with a focus on youth culture and platform ecologies in China. She is the author of two books in Chinese on everyday social media practices and the embodied online activities of Chinese youth, and has published widely in leading Chinese journals. Her English-language work has appeared in Journal of Media Practice and the edited volume From Cyber-nationalism to Fandom Nationalism.