Play (家用电脑与游戏)

» see joyplay.cn as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The State Science and Technology Commission approved it in October 1993, which is how magazines started in China then, and the first issue came out in June 1994 from Popular Science Press in Beijing. It was called 家用电脑与游戏机, Home Computer and Game Console, and it covered both halves of that title. It appeared every two months at first. From January 1995 it was monthly, and its own account of itself puts the circulation of those years among the ten most widely read periodicals in China.

In January 2001 it dropped the console half of its name along with the console half of its coverage. 家用电脑与游戏, Home Computer and Game, took the English word Play as its masthead, and became the first magazine in China written only about PC games. Full color arrived in January 2002. In 2003 the state press administration gave it a Jin Ling award for game media and it got its own floor space at ChinaJoy. Its own masthead figure for the good years was 185,000 copies an issue.

None of it is readable to me. The run covers 1994 to 2013, almost exactly my own years online, and all of it happened in Chinese on a newsstand I could not get to. The format, though, I know from the inside. A monthly you bought for reviews you had no second opinion on, with a hardware section for people assembling their own machines, is a thing I understand completely. In Turkey I got that part from forums, and I was already deep in donanimhaber threads by the time Play was at its biggest.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the newsstand years ~

The PC-only turn in 2001 was the right call for about a decade. Chinese console sales were officially frozen for most of that period and the PC was where the games were, so a magazine that covered nothing else had the field to itself. The awards came and the ChinaJoy booth came with them, and the magazine spent the 2000s as one of the few names any mainland player could produce without thinking.

The account that the games site Gamersky published in October 2013 is less kind, and it was written by someone who had clearly read every issue. It describes editors leaving steadily from around 2010 until roughly six were left, and advertising pages crowding out the writing until the title had no particular character of its own. None of that is the publisher's explanation, because the publisher never gave one.

~ the weibo post ~

On the night of 14 November 2013 the editor in chief, Liu Wei, posted the ending on Weibo: the November and December issues would come out as one, numbered 231, and that would be the last. His reasoning was that in an age of enormous and fragmented information a magazine is a closed and lagging way to carry any of it, and that the flaws of that are obvious. A reader elegy for the magazine had already gone up a month earlier, titled with the words for a song of mourning for an era, so the people who cared had worked it out before the announcement arrived.

~ what print was for ~

Two other long-running Chinese games magazines, 电子游戏软件 and 游戏基地, had stopped between the end of 2012 and the start of 2013, and the reports on Play's closure listed both as company. Electronic Gaming Monthly and Nintendo Power had gone the same way in America, so the Chinese reports treated this as weather and not as an accident. Print did not fail in one country.

joyplay.cn, the address printed inside every issue, no longer resolves to anything. The issues survive as scans traded by the people who grew up on them, which is the only distribution the title has left. It was filed under ISSN 1009-6183 and ran for nineteen years.

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