Director: Liu Xiaoyang
Writer: Liu Xiaoyang
Cast: Lu Siyu, Zhao Xiaodong, Li Yanxi, Yu Junchen
Running time: 24mins
Game Boy is a slickly produced feel-good film, which ends on an endearingly sweet note. Some well-timed editing and charming child actors give the film a cute edge, while its story playfully critiques some norms relating to the government’s family values drive.
With that being said, it struggles to impart any of its characters with any relatable motivations, or what is at stake when those motivations conflict with each other. This means that Game Boy’s pacing invariably suffers. A quote attributed to Lenin has it that ‘there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.’ Here, there are minutes where nothing happens, and seconds where minutes happen – with Liu Xiaoyang’s script putting little substantial risk at play in what should be dramatic or expository scenes, while cramming a lot of information into moments of levity, where jokes needed space to land properly.
The film follows Xiaoyang (Lu Siyu) – a pre-teen, who can’t wait for summer. Not because he has big plans for grand explorations across his hometown, or for adventures with his friends, but because he will have more time to devote to an online multi-player game. The opening scene of the film sees Xiaoyang and his friend Linjie (Yu Junchen – who along with Lu Siyu is excellent) rushing home from school, so that Xiaoyang can compete for a coveted Flame Dragon Sword – while Linjie watches.
It doesn’t seem like a particularly arresting activity. The game itself features chunky graphics, button-mashing combat with unresponsive dragons, and precisely zero ways for a second gamer to participate in the action, beyond cheering at the low-resolution bloodshed. But having grown up in rural Norfolk, at a time when the hideous cuboid world of the Sega Dreamcast was briefly seen as a futuristic window into a world of escapism, I can also identify with it. Because what the hell else is there to do, really?
As much as adults like to romanticise the idea of ‘childhood adventures’, through a Stand by Me-style set of rose-tinted glasses, reality is much more mundane. The outside world is either outright hostile to kids with spare time, or looks to subject them to extra-curricular drilling for their entry to the workforce, that masquerades as leisure, but ultimately offers no reprieve from the enforced tedium of school. This is something which initially escapes Xiaoyang’s authoritarian father (Zhao Xiaodong), who forbids his son from gaming outside of the weekend.
Interestingly, this echoes the stance of Xi Jinping’s government. Just as has been the case in the West for decades, video games have been lazily stereotyped as dangerous wastes of time, luring otherwise ‘healthy children’ into an addictive world of subversive ideology. And just like the West, the Xi regime has tried (and largely failed) to bar children from digital art and entertainment which does not fit with its ideological programme. In 2021, China ordered gaming companies to prevent children under 18 from playing online video games from Monday through Thursday, and to let them play for only one hour – between 8 and 9 pm – on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, and national holidays.
From the reckless abandon with which Xiaoyang throws himself into gaming at an internet café, you can see just how seriously online games companies, and the kids easily engaging with them via anonymous accounts, have taken that diktat. But for some reason, his father seems determined to adhere to the rule more strictly – suggesting he should do something more constructive with his time.
Beyond shipping him off to swimming ‘lessons’ (a fantastic comedic beat sees Xiaoyang bundled into the changing room, before a hard-cut to one of his tiny classmates being hurled screaming into the pool by the ‘teacher’), or extra reading to prepare for the new year of class, the father has few suggestions of what could be more constructive, though. He is mystified when his suggestions don’t seem to capture the imagination of his son in the same way fighting digital dragons does – and along with Xiaoyang’s mother (Li Yanxi), deploys increasingly outlandish means to thwart the ‘addiction’; from padlocking a cover over the PC monitor, to sneaking a monk into their son’s bedroom to chant away the bad energy.
The unfolding trials and tribulations ultimately teach the father an important lesson in empathy. His actions lead Xiaoyang to lose control of his gaming account to a hacker, sending him into a fit of depression. The story then becomes about the father’s efforts to set that right – but in the process, he also discovers what was driving his son deeper into the virtual world in the first place: a disengagement with the world around him, and most immediately, his family. As soon as his father makes the effort to come down to Xiaoyang’s level, and treat him like a human being – instead of relentlessly nagging him to prepare for life in the workforce – Xiaoyang’s desire to escape into video-games diminishes.
As with Below the River – which Tony Moore reviewed last week – this reconciliation ultimately means the film probably won’t make China’s government too upset (although the appearance of a certain cartoon bear on a window sticker in the background may or may not change that). After all, the end result is showing that a reconciled family unit can move China’s youth away from gaming addictions. But the film does hint that the best way to do that is not through tyrannical policing of individual lives – and instead by giving young people more spaces to just enjoy themselves in real life.
That is a fine point, worth making. But it would work a lot better if the motives of the father were more clearly defined. During his confrontations with his son, he never elaborates on what he actually hopes to achieve by cracking down on gaming in his house. Is it really that he just wants the best for Xiaoyang’s future, and so is trying to push him to study at every chance, or is there some more insidious assumption about the content of the games at play? It would help us understand what is at stake, add tension where there ought to be, and also add more substance to his apparent conversion in the finale. Similarly, it would be better if we had more of an idea of what his son is trying to escape from – and if he would dare to vocalise why he is so resistant to his father’s control during one of their arguments, it would also help bring the friction in their relationship to life.
There is a lot to like about Game Boy. Along with some genuinely funny takes on childhood in modern China, there are also valid attempts at satirising public policy – albeit carefully. What lets it down is a failure to communicate the core beliefs and desires of its two central characters – which means when they are reconciled, it is harder to understand why, or to value what really should be a sweet, and poignant moment between two people who do love each other; even if they struggled to show it for the longest time.