Features | Society | East Asia

China’s Companionship Economy: Paying for Someone to Play With Me 

From video game partners to romantic role-playing games, more and more Chinese are paying for the chance to forge real connections.

I’ve been playing computer games since I was a kid, so when “Shift at Midnight” came out in August and quickly became one of the hottest games on social media, I had to give it a try. It is a cooperative horror game in which players work the night shift at a supermarket. Players have to identify customers who are monsters in disguise, keep the supermarket running, and, of course, fight the monsters after nightfall. According to the game developers, this game is best suited for three players, so I needed two teammates. 

The easy option would be to find teammates in the game lobby. But as an introvert and also not-so-skilled player, I feel very reluctant to team up with strangers. In team games, a simple mistake can lead to failures and that means upsetting other players. Teammates easily lose patience and start pressuring each other. I hate the blaming and yelling; they really take all the fun out of the game.

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I’ve been playing computer games since I was a kid, so when “Shift at Midnight” came out in August and quickly became one of the hottest games on social media, I had to give it a try. It is a cooperative horror game in which players work the night shift at a supermarket. Players have to identify customers who are monsters in disguise, keep the supermarket running, and, of course, fight the monsters after nightfall. According to the game developers, this game is best suited for three players, so I needed two teammates. 

The easy option would be to find teammates in the game lobby. But as an introvert and also not-so-skilled player, I feel very reluctant to team up with strangers. In team games, a simple mistake can lead to failures and that means upsetting other players. Teammates easily lose patience and start pressuring each other. I hate the blaming and yelling; they really take all the fun out of the game.

So I found my teammates another way. I decided to hire two gaming companions through DONGDONG E-GAME, a platform dedicated to this type of gaming companion service that I had come across through........

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