Black Myth: Wukong - A Case Study

Black Myth: Wukong didn’t just sell copies, it sold a feeling, and that feeling got people on planes

Most media induced tourism stories are simple, and a bit boring.

A show makes a location look cool. People visit. Local businesses cheer. Everyone moves on.

Black Myth: Wukong, though, feels different. Not because it is the first game to push players into the real world, Ghost of Tsushima already proved that a game can turn a place into a pilgrimage, but because of the mechanism.

This game did not only hand people a map. It handed them embodied memory.

Ziqi Shi’s 2025 chapter argues that what we are seeing is not just a causal link between a game and tourism, it is a shift in how culture gets practiced, with players extending virtual empathy into physical action and community driven meaning making across digital spaces. (Proceedings of ICLAHD 2025, 2025).

The research, in plain terms

Shi is making one core move.

Instead of treating Black Myth: Wukong as another example of media induced tourism, the paper treats it as a case study in cultural participation, where play becomes the bridge between imagination and lived reality. (Proceedings of ICLAHD 2025, 2025).

The argument runs in three steps:

1. Emotion first, action second. The game evokes empathy and identification, which primes people to do something in real life.

2. The body matters. High fidelity, sensory design creates a kind of “virtual body” memory, and visiting the real location becomes a reactivation of those embodied memories.

3. Communities scale the effect. Player communities turn individual curiosity into collective cultural practice through comparison videos, discussion, reinterpretation, and sharing.

Title Splash Art for Black Myth: Wukong - http://blog.bestbuy.ca/video-games/black-myth-wukong-review

Quick check

This is a cultural and media studies style analysis, not an experimental study.

Shi pulls on:

• Cultural theory and participatory culture to explain how meaning gets remade by communities.

• Game studies and embodiment to explain why games hit differently than films.

• Tourism research to situate Black Myth: Wukong in “virtual to real” travel behavior.

  
  

That matters, because we should treat the results as a well argued framework, not conclusive proof. There are stats in the introduction, but they are presented as context, not as measured outcomes by the author.

The tourism spike is real, but the interesting part is why

Shi cites a pretty wild number.

Within two months of launch, Shanxi Province recorded 5.36 million visits across 27 related attractions, with 166 million RMB in ticket revenue. (Proceedings of ICLAHD 2025, 2025).

If you stop there, you end up with a standard “games drive tourism” narrative.

What Shi pushes us to notice is the psychological and embodied pathway.

Players are not only drawn to a destination because it is famous. They want to confirm something they felt in the game, and they want to do it with their own body.

Virtual empathy, the emotional engine behind physical travel

Shi argues that video games “afford cultural experience,” they do not just depict it. That is a fancy way of saying games do not only show you culture, they let you act inside it. (Proceedings of ICLAHD 2025, 2025).

Black Myth: Wukong uses Journey to the West as source material, but does not just retell it.

It reframes it as a post Journey narrative, where Sun Wukong’s spirit fragments into six faculties, and the player becomes the “fated one” recovering them. (Proceedings of ICLAHD 2025, 2025).

That structure matters because it creates a participatory relationship with a cultural myth. You are not consuming a story, you are reconstructing it.

And Shi makes a second point that is useful for anyone thinking about global culture.

The game’s emotional themes, resistance against power, freedom, fate, show up as cross cultural “affective legibility,” meaning people can feel what is going on even if they do not share the cultural background. (Proceedings of ICLAHD 2025, 2025).

The paper anchors that claim by pointing to earlier evidence that simulation games can increase global empathy, such as Real Lives, where players reported stronger empathy and interest in other cultures. (Simulation & Gaming, 2012).

Embodied experience, why the game “sticks” in the body

Shi argues that embodied experience is not just immersion, it is a loop between:

• Virtual action and sensory feedback, and

• Real world revalidation, when players visit the actual spaces. (Proceedings of ICLAHD 2025, 2025).

  
  

Black Myth: Wukong leaned into this with photogrammetry and one to one reconstruction of Shanxi sites, paired with multimodal sensory design, sound, lighting, and controller feedback. (Proceedings of ICLAHD 2025, 2025).

We saw this a few years ago with the Notre Dame Cathedral being rebuilt using the one-to-one scale that existed in Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed game.

So when someone later walks into a real temple, the brain is not just thinking “I have seen this before.”

The body is going, “I remember moving through this.”

If you want a sports analogy, this is like doing reps in a training environment that is close enough to the real thing that your nervous system starts building the same timing, posture, and anticipation. When you step into the real competition space, you are not learning from scratch, you are reactivating pattern memory.

The Shanxi campaign shows how institutions can turn play into practice

Shi gives a concrete example.

The 2024 National Day campaign “Travel with Wukong in Shanxi” created themed routes and side by side comparisons of in game screenshots and real sites. (Proceedings of ICLAHD 2025, 2025).

Survey data cited in the chapter includes:

• Visits to Xiaoxitian increased 335% year on year.

• About half of respondents said they came “because of the game.” (Proceedings of ICLAHD 2025, 2025).

  
  

Again, the headline is not just that people travelled.

It is that the campaign intentionally helped players map virtual memory to physical space, making tourism a kind of embodied confirmation.

Digital spaces are where cultural practice scales

Tourism is not the only spillover.

Shi describes how player communities, Reddit, YouTube, Bilibili, turn individual experience into collective meaning making through:

• “Game vs reality” comparisons

• Symbol interpretation

• Sharing cultural context

• Encouraging other players to explore Journey to the West adaptations and texts (Proceedings of ICLAHD 2025, 2025).

  
  

The theoretical frame here is participatory culture, where audiences are co creators rather than passive consumers. (NYU Press, 2006).

This is where “virtual empathy” extends into digital space as a social practice.

People do not only feel something privately.

They perform that feeling socially, through posts, videos, arguments, and shared interpretations.

So what, why this matters for learning and development

I think Shi’s best contribution is that it gives L&D folks language for something we already know intuitively.

Practice is not just information transfer. Practice is participation.

If a game can get someone to:

• care about a cultural story,

• embody a space through repeated interaction, and

• join a community that keeps the meaning alive,

then it is doing something most training programs struggle to do.

Not because it is “fun.”

Because it creates a full loop of emotion, body, and social reinforcement.

What this means, if you are designing COTS based experiences

Here are three practical takeaways you can steal.

1. Design for re enactment, not recall.

   
   

   • Research insight: Players want to re enact and validate virtual memories in real life.

   • L&D application: Choose games where the core loop mirrors the real skill loop.

   • Implementation detail: In your pre brief, name the loop explicitly, “Notice, decide, communicate, adapt,” and then have teams track where they repeat it.

   • Success indicator: Teams can describe the loop in their own words and identify at least two repeatable patterns.

     
     

2. Use embodiment cues to make debriefs stick.

   
   

   • Research insight: Embodied memory is created through sensory feedback and action.

   • L&D application: In debrief, ask for “body moments,” not just cognitive reflections.

   • Implementation detail: Ask, “When did your shoulders tense up,” “When did you stop breathing,” “When did you start spamming controls,” then connect that to workplace pressure.

   • Success indicator: Teams can name one physiological cue and one coping strategy they will use next time.

     
     

3. Build a community layer, or the learning decays fast.

   
   

   • Research insight: Communities scale individual meaning into shared practice.

   • L&D application: Put a lightweight social container around your sessions.

   • Implementation detail: Create a shared “clip and reflect” thread where teams post one moment, one interpretation, and one workplace transfer idea.

   • Success indicator: Participation continues after the session, and transfer reflections become more specific over time.

     
     

Citations

• “How Video Games Inspire Real-World Cultural Practice: A Case Study of Black Myth: Wukong” (Ziqi Shi, in Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Literature, Art and Human Development, ICLAH D 2025). (DOI, 2025).

• “Simulating REAL LIVES: Promoting global empathy and interest in learning through simulation games.” (Simulation & Gaming, 2012).

• “Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.” (NYU Press, 2006).