ChinaJoy in pictures: A sexy, crazy, and uniquely Chinese gaming trade show

Disclosure: The organizers of ChinaJoy paid my way to Shanghai. Our coverage remains objective.

SHANGHAI — ChinaJoy, the big game trade show in Shanghai, is a vast visual feast celebrating all things gaming. It draws 250,000 people to Shanghai’s gigantic expo center. Ten gigantic buildings house 120,000 square meters of booths that use enough electricity to juice a small city. Those booths are full of colorful displays and lots of “booth babes,” the women who show off the latest and greatest games for Chinese game publishers and developers.

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This show dwarfs the biggest U.S. trade show, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, which draws 52,000 people to Los Angeles each June. ChinaJoy is comparable to Europe’s Gamescom fan event, which is spread over a much larger territory in Cologne, Germany. At those shows, games are front and center. But at ChinaJoy, somewhat to the dismay of show organizer Howell International Trade Fair, the booth babes command the most attention.

Nearly every booth — even those run by foreign companies like Electronic Arts and Super Evil Megacorp — featured booth babes, who are called “show girls” in China. They’re sexy, stirring primordial passions in the mostly male game attendees with their long camera lenses. The game companies are torn. They can put their titles front and center, and many of them do, but the show girls draw the attention. They’re symbols of success and status, and the cynical game companies want the attendees to associate the girls with their own titles and brands.

“The principle we adhere to is show girls are complementary. They are leaves, and the flowers are the games themselves,” said Han Zhihai, chief executive of Howell, in an interview with GamesBeat. “The opinions of the public and the media go beyond what we want [them] to be. We set up rules for the show girls to bring them back into the principle. We should communicate more to the media and focus more on professional skills. We have invited CEOs from core game companies, and we think this is what the media should report on rather than show girls. The media should report in a more rational way.”

Well, good luck with that.

Last year, ChinaJoy limited the number of show girls per booth to 25. That’s because the girls were taking over, and the games were suffering. This year, the girls had to cover their navels and wear longer dresses. They couldn’t show as much skin, and if they did, their companies were fined. As ChinaJoy goes international, and invites more international visitors like me, the government doesn’t want this to be an embarrassment. It wants a Chinese game industry that it can be proud of. And that means the organizer wants the game companies and media to focus more on quality games.

“Chinese players are young and enthusiastic,” said Han. “Despite the hot weather, I am touched that fans stand in queues for a long time. As the organizer, we should provide fancy exhibits and more high-quality games for them.”

Westerners are going to this show because they can get deals done. More than $350 million in deals are expected to get done at the show this year. That is really what happens at the show, particularly in three big business-to-business halls that don’t have the pomp of the consumer halls.

Western visitors may look at the booth babes as part of a barbarian, sexist culture that the West has moved beyond. But what if I told you that China is the future? China has the world’s largest game company, Tencent, and it is the world’s largest market. The Chinese government is actively encouraging its domestic game industry to go global. It wants to make titles for Chinese gamers and then export them to a world that embraces them, rather than looks at them as crazy or weird. China is expected to generate $22.2 billion in revenue in 2015, up 23 percent, making it larger as a game market than the U.S. at $22 billion, according to market researcher Newzoo.

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I’m not sure why the show girls have such a hold on the attendees. China has strict laws on sexual freedoms, like a ban on pornography. The girls aren’t always dressed as “cosplayers,” or costume play, like in Japan. ChinaJoy appears to take its cues from South Korea’s G-Star show.

The culture of ChinaJoy is uniquely Chinese, and China wants the world to notice that culture and accept it as the future. Here’s a photo essay that I hope conveys what ChinaJoy is like, both in spectacle and behind the scenes. Beyond showing the girls, I’ve included other images to help convey what the ChinaJoy experience is like.