E-sports vs. Exams

Abstract Many Chinese students dislike hyper-competitive public school exams but find competing in e-sports games enjoyable. Some are perceived to game ‘too much’ by their parents, who, anxious about gaming's impact on grades, send children treatment camps for ‘Internet addiction’. This article documents parents’ and student-gamers’ experiences of competition China's formal education system, online gaming, professional e-sports. As student-gamers move between these competitive arenas, they develop counter-hegemonic understandings what does reconfigure sense self. Their movements reveal that, far from a symptom neoliberal ideology, the prevalence China marks dialectical interactions various ideologies lived experience practices. finding contradicts simplistic conflations economic models.