Gaming companion apps pay gamers to play with others in a process called “game sparring” (游戏陪练). The idea is you get to test your skills and improve against a more established or higher-level gamer, or just have someone to play along with if you’re feeling lonely.
And one of these gamers-for-hire, surprisingly, is Wang Sicong, a notorious billionaire playboy/esports guru. The report made a splash on social media yesterday as netizens learned that Wang was the highest-paid gamer on popular “game sparring” platform Bixin, charging 666RMB (about 94USD) per hour for his services.
Wang Sicong, son of China’s wealthiest real estate tycoon Wang Jianlin, is somewhere between Tony Stark and China’s collective little cousin. But when he’s not being compared to Silvio Berlusconi by state media for talking about boobs, or buying Apple Watches for his dog, Wang is a celebrity in the esports world. The team he owns, Invictus Gaming, became China’s first League of Legends champions in 2018.
Bixin, the authors of the white paper and creators of one of China’s biggest gaming companion apps, reported that 1.5 million gamers work in the industry. According to Bixin, these game companions earn a monthly average of 7,857RMB (1,108USD) full-time and 2,929RMB (413USD) for part-time employment.
Gaming companion apps rose to popularity in 2019. Now, over a dozen apps offer the chance to spar with strangers (or famous billionaires) on the internet. As of today, the vice president of Bixin estimates that the game companion industry is worth 10 billion USD. And in the age of a global pandemic, that number may well be set to rise.
For his part, Wang responded to the news with a succinct message on his Weibo microblog: “No point in saying much. Whoever can get this price is making it.”
“The first time I heard ‘Purple Rain,’ I didn’t like it,” Click #15 frontman Ricky Sixx tells us.
Credited with bringing Chinese funk music to the mainstream through the group’s performances on iQIYI’s hit rock music show The Big Band, Ricky has garnered multiple comparisons to legendary musical polymath Prince, who died on this day, April 21, four years ago.
The comparisons often spring from Ricky’s performance style. He’s known for his dancing, snaking himself around the microphone stand while playing the bass on stage. The music, on the other hand, is all their own. As Ricky tells us, the reason funk music has struggled to catch on in China, is that the style is so hard to capture correctly.
“When you play funk music you have a swing feel, and playing that style of music is very hard,” he says, before adding, “If you want to play funk music right, you have to know about swing feel and everyone has a different swing feeling.”
“If you want to play funk music right, you have to know about swing feel”
The music, then, is deeply personal, coming not wholly from influences, but retaining that integral, internal “swing feel.” Still, he appreciates the comparisons to Prince, saying, “I’m never going to be like Prince, he’s such an amazing musician, but I have my own scale.”
That scale has shifted through the years.
Ricky began his musical career playing a very different style of music. You might have noticed that his name bears more than a passing resemblance to Mötley Crüe’s bassist, Nikki Sixx. The name is a reminder for fans of Ricky’s early days in underground glam-rock band Rustic, who he joined in late 2009 after moving to Beijing from Hebei province.
“With Rustic, I had the chance to talk to more people. If you stay in a small town you can’t think. Your mind is empty. Lucifer [the group’s singer and guitarist] is really wild, he wants to do everything, try everything. He took us to a different level, even if we weren’t able to do it.”
Over time, Ricky began moving on from the hedonistic hard rock of his youth, tiring of playing the same old songs and feeling himself drawn to disco, blues and funk music. He began experimenting with these new types of music and with new musicians, eventually founding a band called Bad Boogie in 2015, which eventually became Click #15 a year later. Today, Click #15 is primarily a duo, with Yang Ce on keys providing improvisational flair, while Ricky does the vast majority of the songwriting.
Click #15 began their life performing for crowds at the sweaty and cramped underground live music venues of Beijing. With his new group, though, was more ambition, more resolve to study the intricacies of music writing.
“I wanted to be a real musician, you can’t just copy them”
“I started to really practice guitar and learn how to practice playing music in the past five or six years. I wanted to be a real musician, you can’t just copy them. You have to be really serious. You have to tell your band members how to play your own music. For the past few years I’ve been really trying to find my own music.”
While The Big Band delivered Click #15 their opportunity to make it to the big time (they finished in the top 5 on the hit show and picked up a slew of advertising deals with everyone from Adidas to milk brand Yili in the aftermath), Ricky says that performing on the show was mechanical and that he didn’t learn much through its run.
“I felt nervous. Every time I played I felt very nervous. It felt like I was delivering my homework.”
To viewers, he didn’t seem nervous. Rather, he oozed charisma on stage.
“That’s experience, that takes lots of shows. When I was with Rustic, I wanted to get on the stage. When I was on The Big Band, I was under lots of pressure.”
During the show, Ricky expressed the sentiment, or the worry, that his biggest desire was to be a full time, professional musician. Now he’s revelling in the fact that he can pay for session musicians to join him in the studio to jam out and make tunes.
“Being a musician is really hard now. I can’t really play in the small venue because they don’t pay you well. Before, I had to make a cover band, I don’t really like that kind of band. I brought music friends to play in the cover band so we can have a good relationship so later we can play shows with no money.”
With more than ten years of performing and making music under his belt, Ricky sounds relieved when he talks about the band’s most recent recording sessions, for their new EP, The Funky Experience 2, released on Ruby Eyes Records on April 15.
“I can hire real musicians to play with us. Good musicians. The good ones understand really fast. For Get Funky, I made all of that myself. I don’t think that’s real music. I want people to play with us, give their opinions,” he says.
In January, earlier this year, he travelled to the US to record the five songs included on The Funky Experience 2. He had two and a half demos he knew he wanted to record, while two others came out during the 10 days he spent recording in Las Vegas.
In addition to the tracks for this record, Click #15 have set out a marker for 2020, aiming to record another five songs within the year. These new songs should help the pair with performance fatigue. Ricky tells us, “Last year, we played the same songs over and over and it made me feel very tired.”
While the release of a new record would usually presuppose a tour in support of it, the outbreak of Covid-19 has put a halt on any plans that the group had to perform their new songs. They’re planning to get back together to practise once keyboardist Yang gets out of self-quarantine, but the rest of their plans for 2020 are down to circumstance.
“If we can do shows we can do shows. We have to at least write five other songs. That’s the goal,” Ricky says matter-of-factly.
When we look at life fondly, it’s said that we’re looking through “rose-colored glasses,” basking the world around us in a pink-tinted hue. Although he clearly loves the color, for Chinese designer Gong Li, nostalgia comes in a wider variety of shades.
Season after season, Gong’s label 8on8 whisks watchers and wearers on a nostalgic trip down memory lane, from childhood through his university days until now. But that shouldn’t imply 8on8’s nostalgia ever loses its edge. Combining crisp tailoring with jersey fabrics, British clean-cut silhouettes clashing with casual ease, the label “tailorports” — a term from Gong’s own mouth — his retro inspirations into a thoroughly modern vision of menswear.
The Ningbo native has good reason to look back fondly on his years living in London, where he and his label are currently based. In his final year at London’s esteemed Central Saint Martins, Gong was awarded both the Grand Prix LVMH Scholarship, as well as the 2017 Lane Crawford Young Talent Award. These accolades enabled him to realize his label, and that same year, 8on8 was born. The brand would then go on to show at Shanghai Fashion Week for the first time, and be stocked across Lane Crawford stores in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Chengdu later that year.
Designer Gong Li (center) with SS20 models
And in case you’re wondering, “8on8” stems from “Gong,” the designer’s last name — inspired by a happy accident when his name was accidentally squashed while being printed. The name has since become synonymous with soft, easy elegance, but with edgier details — plaid trousers with biker-esque spandex panels on the inner thighs, or jackets with structured shoulders and a multitude of zippers.
Returning to the London Fashion Week stage in January with support from GQ China, 8on8’s “Wait Rose!” AW20 collection seemed ripped from the playbook of Wes Anderson. Set at an imagined exclusive party populated by aging celebrities, the collection featured flaming roses, flowing silk, and even a baby blue bellboy-inspired suit. Donned by a diverse group that included plus-size and transgender models, 8on8’s mash-up of goofy glam rock and stretchy seventies tailoring proved a winning recipe of loving absurdity. The label hammed things up even more with a collaboration with Italian sportswear brand Kappa, topping out in a hand-washed gold tracksuit.
The title of the collection, too, was a reference that reminded him of his younger, cheekier days — this time it was to British upscale supermarket Waitrose where Gong, back in his Central Saint Martins days, used to buy his groceries. Through the collection, Gong embarked on a melancholic trip back to the future of what, according to WWD, he “imagined what he would treasure at the age of 70.”
Models in 8on8 SS20
In a collection back in time for SS20, 8on8 delivered effervescent pastels and silky fabrics inspired by that one rare uplifting episode of Black Mirror, “San Junipero.” True to form, the collection was replete in optimistic pink, crushed velvet, and washed-out prints reminiscent of TV and ’80s graffiti.
In the world of 8on8, a thing of the past is a trend of the future.
While the world is suffering from the global pandemic of novel coronavirus Covid-19, Jingjing talks to Donna, a Chinese student studying in the UK. On this episode, Donna shares her perspectives on a life under lockdown overseas, including how she ended up getting military food and her experience with racism in the UK.
Michael Jordan can finally take a break — China’s Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the NBA superstar in an eight-year long legal battle with a company using his name.
Sportswear-maker Qiaodan — the Chinese transliteration for Jordan — was ruled to have used the name illegally.
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The victory comes after a smaller one in 2016, where the court ruled in favor of Jordan against Qiaodan’s use of his name’s Chinese characters, 乔丹, but not against the pinyin “Qiaodan”.
Funnily enough, the court ruled that Qiaodan would be permitted to continue using its knockoff “Jumpman” logo. Qiaodan said in a statement that the ruling would not affect its other existing trademarks or business operations.
In an appearance on the Howard Stern Show, McCartney called China’s wet markets “medieval” and “obscene” in the era of Covid-19.
“It wouldn’t be so bad if this is the only thing it seems like you can blame on those wet markets,” he told Stern. “It seems like SARS, avian flu, all sorts of other stuff that has afflicted us […] and what’s it for? For these quite medieval practices. They need to clean up their act. This may lead to [change]. If this doesn’t, I don’t know what will.”
Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Market was widely pointed to as a potential origin point of the outbreak, but the hypothesis is far from confirmed. That hasn’t stopped a flow of international outrage against China’s wet markets and regarding eating habits that the majority of the country doesn’t identify with.
“We’ve seen various forms of crisis before but nothing that’s affected everyone in the world at the same time,” McCartney said about the pandemic in general. “I must say, it’s scary. The thing for me is, I’m from the generation that had just come out of World War II, my mum and dad were in World War II, and the spirit that they showed was: we’ll get on with it, we’ll do whatever’s necessary, we’ll pull together and try to stay happy […] that spirit is kind of what they needed, and is what we need now. That’s what we’re seeing now, a lot of people are pulling together […] it’s inspiring.”
