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Games and Culture: Using Online-gaming Data to Cluster Chinese Regional Cultures Xianwen Wang1,2,3*, Wenli Mao1,2, Chen Liu1,2 1WISE Lab, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116085, China. 2School of Public Administration and Law, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116085, China. 3DUT- Drexel Joint Institute for the Study of Knowledge Visualization and Scientific Discovery, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116085, China. * Corresponding author. Email address: xianwenwang@ Abstract To identify cluster of societies and cultures is not easy in subject to the availability of data. In this study, we propose a novel method to cluster Chinese regional cultures. Using geotagged online- gaming data of Chinese internet users playing online card and board games with regional features, 336 Chinese cities are grouped into 17 clusters. The distribution of clustering units shows great geographical proximity when the boundary of the clusters coincides well with the geographical boundary of provinces. Keywords Chinese culture; geotagged data; usage data; big data; online game. Introduction Unlike the massive data available for natural sciences, data in social science are hard to collect (Latour, 2007). However, with the vast geotagged usage data generated by people in the web, it is possible for researchers to reveal and understand details of both individual and social behavior with unprecedented detail (Manovich, 2011; Girardin et al., 2008; Eagle and Pentland, 2006). Based on the fast development of big data, it’s possible for researchers to create and define new methods of observing, recording, and analyzing human dynamics (O’Neill et al., 2006). With the data collected from 100 Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone users for 9 months, Nathan Eagle Pentland make a good try to capture daily