Cross-Lingual Cultural Resonance and Heritage Spillovers in Chinese-Fantasy Game Communities: A Reproducible Benchmark Study Using Embedding-Based Topic Discovery and Large Language Models
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63646/LXHN3708Keywords:
Digital games; chinese culture; cross-lingual communication; multilingual benchmark; topic discovery; large language models; tourism intention; player commentaryAbstract
Digital games are increasingly used as transnational interfaces through which players encounter, interpret, and redistribute culturally specific symbols. The multilingual analysis of player commentary, however, still faces semantic fragmentation, weak identification of low-frequency cultural cues, and reproducibility problems where raw platform data cannot be redistributed. This article develops a reproducible benchmark framework for studying cross-lingual cultural resonance in Chinese-fantasy game communities. The empirical component uses a distribution-preserving multilingual benchmark corpus of 128,400 synthetic review instances parameterized from public platform affordances, multilingual cultural lexicons, and discourse routines associated with Chinese-fantasy action role-playing games. The analytical pipeline integrates embedding-based topic discovery, density-adaptive clustering, and large-language-model semantic reconstruction to identify cultural themes, affective uptake, and behavioral spillovers such as tourism intention and purchase advocacy. Compared with LDA, NMF, and multilingual TF-IDF plus k-means baselines, the proposed framework raises the silhouette coefficient to 0.61, increases cultural keyword recall to 95%, improves cross-language agreement to 0.91, and captures 93% of rare cultural symbols in the benchmark. Regression analysis shows that cultural recognition and positive affect are the strongest overall predictors of tourism intention, while heritage architecture and landscape aesthetics are the most powerful theme-level drivers. The findings support a four-stage mechanism of cultural dissemination—symbol encounter, semantic stabilization, affective amplification, and offline behavioral projection—and demonstrate that platform affordances shape how cultural meaning moves from game discourse into broader social and economic imagination.
How to Cite
References
Archak, N., Ghose, A., & Ipeirotis, P. G. (2011). Deriving the pricing power of product features by mining consumer reviews. Marketing Science, 30(6), 1235-1252. https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.1100.0561
Ben Arbia, M., et al. (2025). How destination trust in video games shapes real-world travel intention. Administrative Sciences, 15(12), 470. https://doi.org/10.3390/admsci15120470
Bianchi, F., Terragni, S., & Hovy, D. (2021). Pre-training is a hot topic: Contextualized document embeddings improve topic coherence. Proceedings of ACL-IJCNLP 2021, 759-766. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.acl-short.96
Boyd, D., & Crawford, K. (2012). Critical questions for big data. Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), 662-679. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.678878
Camuñas-García, D., et al. (2024). Digital game-based heritage education: Analyzing the cultural communication potential of one hundred video games. Education Sciences, 14(4), 396. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14040396
Camuñas-García, D., et al. (2023). Maximizing engagement with cultural heritage through digital games. Sustainability, 15(3), 2350. https://doi.org/10.3390/su15032350
Cerezo-Pizarro, M., et al. (2023). The cultural impact of video games: A systematic review. Education Sciences, 13(11), 1116. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci13111116
Chen, R., Guo, Y., & Yu, M. (2023). Investigating the impact of Chinese cultural elements on player loyalty in video games: A cross-national exploratory study. Proceedings of SDMC 2023, 282-289. https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-178-4_34
Ćosović, M., & Brkić, M. (2020). Game-based learning in museums—Cultural heritage applications. Information, 11(1), 22. https://doi.org/10.3390/info11010022
DaCosta, B., & Caeiro, M. (2023). Serious games in cultural heritage: A review of practices and design considerations. Education Sciences, 13(1), 47. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci13010047
Devlin, J., Chang, M.-W., Lee, K., & Toutanova, K. (2019). BERT: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2019, 4171-4186. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/N19-1423
Fajre, D. P., et al. (2025). Local social concerns and video games: Case study from Malang City, Indonesia. Societies, 15(11), 317. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc15110317
Garcia-Fernandez, J., & Medeiros, L. (2019). Cultural heritage and communication through simulation videogames: A validation of Minecraft. Heritage, 2(3), 2262-2274. https://doi.org/10.3390/heritage2030138
García-Gil, M. Á ., et al. (2024). Exploring video game engagement, social–emotional learning, and sustainable education. Sustainability, 16(1), 99. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16010099
Giannoulakis, C., et al. (2024). Consumer brand engagement and video game media communities. International Journal of Sport Communication, 17(2), 229-248. https://doi.org/10.1080/14241277.2024.2336263
Hayes, A. F., & Krippendorff, K. (2007). Answering the call for a standard reliability measure for coding data. Communication Methods and Measures, 1(1), 77-89. https://doi.org/10.1080/19312450709336664
Hope, R. (2025). Containing games. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 42(3), 217-232. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2025.2599286
Hou, Y. (2024). From virtual journeys to real travels: Exploring the impact of Chinese-themed digital games on international players’ tourism intentions. Modern Economics & Management Forum, 5(5), 910-918. https://doi.org/10.32629/memf.v5i5.2882
Hu, M., & Liu, B. (2004). Mining and summarizing customer reviews. Proceedings of KDD 2004, 168- 177. https://doi.org/10.1145/1014052.1014073
Kearney, C., & Liu, S. (2015). Textual sentiment in finance: A survey. Journal of Business Research, 68(10), 2190-2203. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2014.10.010
Kim, H., & Richardson, S. L. (2003). Motion picture impacts on destination images. Tourism Management, 24(2), 216-226. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0261-5177(03)00129-1
Kontogiorgakis, E., et al. (2024). Gamified VR storytelling for cultural tourism using 3D digitized artifacts. Technologies, 12(6), 73. https://doi.org/10.3390/technologies12060073
Kosti, M. V., et al. (2025). i-Game: Redefining cultural heritage through inclusive game design and advanced technologies. Electronics, 14(6), 1141. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics14061141
Lin, H. C. K., et al. (2024). Integrating digital technologies and alternate reality games for cultural heritage education. Sustainability, 16(21), 9451. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16219451
Liu, H., et al. (2023). Sentence-aware encoder for neural topic modeling. Proceedings of CoNLL 2023, 171- 181. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.codi-1.14
López-Martínez, A., et al. (2020). Empowering museum experiences applying gamification and semantic technologies. Applied Sciences, 10(16), 5419. https://doi.org/10.3390/app10165419
Marques, C. G., et al. (2023). A systematic literature review of gamification in/for cultural heritage. Heritage, 6(8), 312. https://doi.org/10.3390/heritage6080312
McInnes, L., Healy, J., & Astels, S. (2017). hdbscan: Hierarchical density based clustering. Journal of Open Source Software, 2(11), 205. https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.00205
McLoughlin, E. (2025). Digital media and cultural hegemony: Class, power, and historical play. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 22(1), 66-84. https://doi.org/10.1080/16078055.2025.2516648
Miah, M. S. U., et al. (2024). A multimodal approach to cross-lingual sentiment analysis using transformers and large language models. Scientific Reports, 14, 60210. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-60210-7
Murray, J. H. (2006). Toward a cultural theory of gaming: Digital games and the co-evolution of media, mind, and culture. Popular Communication, 4(3), 185-202. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15405710pc0403_3
Reimers, N., & Gurevych, I. (2019). Sentence-BERT: Sentence embeddings using Siamese BERT-networks. Proceedings of EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019, 3982-3992. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/D19-1410
Rousseeuw, P. J. (1987). Silhouettes: A graphical aid to the interpretation and validation of cluster analysis. Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics, 20, 53-65. https://doi.org/10.1016/0377- 0427(87)90125-7
Sangamuang, S., et al. (2025). Gamification in virtual reality museums: Effects on engagement and
satisfaction. Games, 12(1), 27. https://doi.org/10.3390/g12010027
Shaw, A. (2025). Video games as cultural studies other. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 28(2), 189-204. https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779241295771
Srdanović, P., et al. (2025). InHeritage—A gamified mobile application with AR and VR for cultural heritage promotion. Applied Sciences, 15(1), 257. https://doi.org/10.3390/app15010257
Stalheim, O. R., et al. (2024). An embodied perspective on an augmented reality game in communication and interaction. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 21, 60. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40561-024-00308-7
Tirunillai, S., & Tellis, G. J. (2014). Mining marketing meaning from online chatter. Journal of Marketing Research, 51(4), 463-479. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmr.13.0235
Veresov, N., & Barrs, M. (2023). Digital games and digital play in early childhood: A cultural-historical approach. Early Years, 43(5), 1045-1059. https://doi.org/10.1080/09575146.2022.2056880
Walkington, C., Bernacki, M. L., & Cheah, K. (2024). Multimodal analysis of interaction data from embodied technologies. Educational Technology Research and Development, 72, 1097- 1120. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-023-10254-9
Wang, H., Gao, Z., Zhang, X., Du, J., Xu, Y., & Wang, Z. (2024). Gamifying cultural heritage: Exploring the potential of immersive virtual exhibitions. Telematics and Informatics Reports, 15, 100150. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.teler.2024.100150
Wilson, M. (2002). Six views of embodied cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9(4), 625-636. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196322
Wu, C.-H. (2023). Gamification of culture: A strategy for cultural preservation and cross-cultural communication. Sustainability, 15(1), 650. https://doi.org/10.3390/su15010650
Xie, Q., Zhang, X., Ding, Y., & Song, M. (2020). Monolingual and multilingual topic analysis using LDA and BERT embeddings. Journal of Informetrics, 14(3), 101055. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2020.101055
Xu, K., et al. (2023). Relations between video game engagement and social development. Behavioral Sciences, 13(10), 833. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs13100833
Yun, H., et al. (2023). Combining cultural heritage and gaming experiences. Sustainability, 15(18), 13777. https://doi.org/10.3390/su151813777
Zhang, R., et al. (2024). Enhancing user participation in cultural heritage through serious games. Sustainability, 16(17), 7608. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16177608
Zhang, S. (2025). A case study of Chinese Generation Z mobile game players. Social Sciences, 14(6), 362. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci14060362
