The thesis I was working on was about creativity of virtual worlds. More precisely, I am studying gamers who modify the massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) – World of Warcraft. The gamers who modify the game are called modders, and the products are addons known as mods in the gaming world. I am also studying comparing the modders in both US and China, and for every 5-10 mods that were created by modders active in the US, 1 was created in China.

Not wanting to say more about the background, which you could easily wiki for more information. I wanted to talk about my recent visit to China and meeting with these modders and mod users in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chongqing, Shi He Zi, and Liaoning. These locations almost covered all major commercial centers of modern China – Beijing in the northeast, Shanghai in the east, and Guangzhou in the south. Chongqing is located in the center of China, Shi He Zi in the north western edge, and Liaoning in the northeastern edge.

Generally, my perception of China is a dragon recovering from a long term illness. One that it is still fighting with. The dragon’s eyes and mouth is in Shanghai, where it has the most contact with foreigners, and goods flow through the Yang Tze river and out of China. The western part of China that my trip did not cover were the most remote and poorest, supplying cheap labor to the developing cities. There are satellite centers such as Urumqi and Chongqing, acting as a hub for these rural towns and villages. For true professionals able to work with International members, Shanghai is the place, and perhaps the only place to be. In my visit, some modders and players were finding or looking for work in Shanghai.

This arrangement was somewhat part of the communist party’s original plan, for the coastal cities to get rich first, and to lead the poorer region along. What happened now was an enlarging wealth distribution and also uneven opportunity. For instance, it was easier to get into top universities in Beijing and Shanghai if you are born there. One, you enjoy a higher quota, and two, your parents are rich enough to send you to classes like ballet and piano that earns extra points. In some provinces, your only chances of getting in is to be among the top 50 or 100 of the entire province. Thus leading to enormous pressure if you have high hopes. Another example was that of job opportunity. Because that China decided to focus its development at the coast, being in Shanghai could mean better future. The wealthy are not going to share their wealth easily, so everyone has to fight for their chances. Who knows when ‘the wealthy will pull the poor along.’ Thus, many people from rural regions rushed to Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, and other big cities to work in all sorts of occupation. The highly educated who can find jobs can migrate into these cities. Those who couldn’t found work in restaurants, ‘massage’ palour, selling vegetables on the street, and so forth. From my travels, I found the original citizens of the city, for example beijing’ers in Beijing, or Shanghainese in Shanghai, to be quite nice. But the internal immigrants brought along habits such as spitting, squeezing into lines, and being unkempt, leading to more tension between people. This is merely my impression from my contact with these people, which requires more hard facts.

Overall, China today is a battleground. Being a tourist shopping in malls, you will always feel that someone is trying to charge you more than the market price. No sellers are honest, and you would do well to have a local friend companying you. When trading, you have to know what you want and be prepared to fight for your rights. Having friends in China do wonders, you watch your back and see if you are being mistreated, bring you to nice restaurants you would not otherwise find, and perhaps even becoming your business partners. You may call this guanxi, however generic that term sounds like. The guanxi between a small group of people who can trust and helped each other forms a core team.

I found that the modding groups were organized similarly. Apart of CWDG (Chinese WoW Development Group), which was open to all to join, all other groups evolved around a core team. These are such as NGA, Duowan, Bigfoot, Wowshell, and even the Chinese WoW distributor – The9. Among them, only CWDG is non-profit. The others were for-profit, even if they are not making much money right now. A characteristic of for-profit organization is they have clear objective and every fight for it, such a developing a certain product. Another characteristic is that they communicate a lot with each other, but little with anyone outside. They do not want to let others know what is happening at their core team. The9, for instance, had not released any information regarding why Wrath of the Lich King, the next WoW upgrade, had been delayed in China. They just kept everything to themselves. Both attentiveness on a small number of objective and inward looking tendency means that core teams tend to be high effective and efficient, but hardly work together with other teams or inject new blood into it.

CWDG, on the other hand, is the only place in Chinese WoW today that maintained a wiki documenting modding techniques and had a chatroom where Chinese modders can talk about modding. It molded Wowshell’s (one of the two major Chinese mods) lastest designer-in-chief Yue Se Lang Ying, and developed many original and localization mods. CWDG’s founder, Simonw, wanted to develop an open and professional platform where different people can come together to discuss about modding. However, regardless of this vision and efforts, CWDG is walking on the path of turning into a core team structure like the others.

There are many instances of ignorant players who openly attacked CWDG authors blaming them for stealing accounts, asking questions with clear answers, or simply flaming in their chatroom. There are even cases of other modders taking their works onto other sites claiming to be their own. On top of these, praises and recognition for their efforts were few and far between. Sometime after, many CWDG modders asked the same question, “Why are we modding for these people?” Many CWDG modders found more support among themselves and become closer to one another. Some who were in the IT profession, found modding useful for their own technical development. These two factors drove their continue involvement, when if that involvement could have been greater. Some of them found their business partners in CWDG, others found work, and these people moved on to a more stable future. However, due to them spending more efforts encouraging and improving their relationship with each other, somewhat, the problem of injecting new blood into the group became overlooked. Slowly, when older members of CWDG were moving on in their lives, no new members were available to continue their future.

Because CWDG was open in the beginning, it enables many unforeseeable but pleasant outcome. However, its slow if undeliberate narrowing into a core team structure is shaping its future in gradual decay. It may sound far fetch to say that the experience of CWDG represents condition of the whole China. But comparing what I saw in the selfishness of the Chinese sellers, and opaque-city of the internal activity of The9, NGA, and the prevalence of team lunch and dinner 团队用餐, I am quite sure that core team was the default mode of work in China and quite well embedded in every Chinese behaviors.

I did not think that the ‘un’creativeness of Chinese is due to its tendency to form core team, and therefore I added the ‘ ‘ . However, I do think that core teams are missing the culture of cooperation between each other, and too likely to fight. WoW players who were not part of the modding team were too ready to slander and blame, pushing the team farther into their comfort zone. Therefore, my point is that Chinese is creative as a small team, but ‘un’creative as a society.

Taking a step back and look at China from 10’000 feet, we saw a large country with immerse potential, or eh… people. However, its vast population is unable to create, its people unwilling to create, those who created received little benefit, and found no one to help them create. I had been talking about creativity not as an idea in our skull, but as a process of adding something new to our society. This requires many factors – the inventor, the maker, the distributor, the marketer, and the users. In another word, creativity often requires a lot of strangers working together to form a new ecology where everyone benefits. When you cannot easily establish that ecology, and found yourself playing one of those roles, you look for an existing ecology to fit yourself in, and that is why factories and professionals in China are trading with foreign companies. It could have been ‘made in china,’ but it would always be design, distributed, and profited by these foreign companies. The modding community in China showed us exactly this picture, that in the US, Blizzard supported their modders, and with strong users and motivated modders, the mods that were created far exceeded China’s. Many Chinese mods were localization that fed back into the US modders’ works, as it has happened in the real world.

I would say that too few people in China are involved in understanding its own society. The protocols for teams to work with one another need to be ironed out, and a new culture shaped. These findings had to feed into its education. Its laws have to be strengthened to protect the intellectuals. I wouldn’t say these apply only for China. I think Singapore, where I came from, had been far too westernized. If Singapore is to be truly a knowledge society, its intellectuals, not the government, got to take the lead.