Digital Translation of Cultural Heritage and Audience Acceptance: Taking the Game "Black Myth: Wukong" as an Example

Abstract

Digital transformation is reshaping the protection, dissemination, and value logic of cultural heritage. Unlike the exhibition-style
"viewing", online games transform heritage from a "visible object" into an "experienced situation" through interactive rules, immersive
spaces, and multimodal narratives, fostering lasting identification and recreation. Taking "Black Myth: Wukong" as an example, this paper
explores from the dual perspectives of digital translation and audience reception: at the translation level, it analyzes the digital extraction,
mechanism integration, and semantic reorganization of cultural elements, as well as how audiovisual atmosphere and engine algorithms carry
cultural expression; at the reception level, based on comments on Bilibili, it uses word frequency and topic models to depict the progressive
and circular mechanism of aesthetic surprise, cultural recognition, emotional identification, and action tendency, and summarizes key variables
such as authenticity boundaries, playability thresholds, community and platform influences, and self-confidence and risk in the global context.
Finally, it proposes a sustainable path: shifting from exhibition to experience, from hit to ecosystem operation, and introducing governance
mechanisms between authenticity and misreading risks, providing a reusable analytical framework and practical insights for the digitization of
cultural heritage and game cultural expression.