“My Little Penguin Has Come Back to Life”: Chinese Nitizens’ Digital Memory and Narrative Practice of Tencent Pets Game

Abstract

As the world’s largest online virtual pet community, Tencent pets had accompanied numerous Chinese netizens, particularly the younger generations. It was not only their earliest “Internet memories”, but also became an integrated part of their personal life experiences, even influencing their understanding of social life. Through textual statistics, thematic analysis, and discourse analysis of 7,623 posts from Chinese BBS, this study identifies three narrative paths of memory—“mourning”, “nostalgia”, and “resistance”—which have formed around Tencent pets. People do not perceive Tencent pets merely as a “technical object”, but rather as a form of real “life”. Writing memories about Tencent pets also serves as a form of resistance against the passage of time and the fading of one’s own life course. This study contributes to a further understanding of China’s digital gaming culture, as well as enriches research on media memory and Internet history.

Keywords

• tencent pets
• digital memory
• media memory
• pet game
• virtual pet
• digital culture
• internet history
• memory studies
• game studies