Changting Lu on heritage-at-scale, game IP, fast tech adoption and the new rules for international collaboration.
Most discussion about China’s experience economy focuses on its size, speed and how willing the creators and operators and consumers are to adopt new technology.
That’s interesting, but it misses the bigger opportunity.
China is becoming one of the world’s most valuable laboratories for experience design.
Rather than creating Chinese versions of Western attractions, its creators are combining heritage, gaming, fandom and technology in ways that challenge many of the assumptions behind Western attractions, immersive theatre and brand experiences.
In her WXO Campfire ‘Inspiration to Innovation: How China’s Immersive Entertainment is Finding Its Own Voice’, Changting Lu – a former Walt Disney Imagineer, show writer on Shanghai Disneyland’s Zootopia land and founder of Shanghai-based studio Get Dreams Done Co. – shared examples from across China’s immersive entertainment sector. Together, they point to five lessons every experience leader should be thinking about.
1. Design Around Desire, Not Technology
Experience teams often begin with technology.
- AI
- XR
- Projection mapping
- Interactive media
Lu suggests starting somewhere else.
“What are the things that people crave but can’t get from their real life?”
Her examples came from China.
Because gambling is illegal, experiences that recreate the thrill of gambling—without using real money—have found commercial success.
Because psychedelics are illegal, experiences that create altered states through music, lighting and scenography can become highly desirable.
The lesson isn’t to copy those ideas.
Lu wasn’t arguing that audiences want illegal activities. She was arguing that they pay for experiences that safely recreate emotions they can’t easily access in everyday life: risk without danger, transgression without consequences, intimacy without uncertainty and adventure without real-world cost.
It’s to recognise that the strongest experiences often satisfy unmet desires.
Not every audience wants spectacle.
- Some want adventure
- Some want belonging
- Some want permission to break the rules
- Others simply want to become someone else for a few hours
Technology may help deliver those feelings.
But it rarely creates them.
2. Turn Heritage Into Participation
Lu’s first major trend was heritage-at-scale.
Many heritage attractions ask visitors to observe history.
China is showing another approach.
Lu described the transformation of a historic attraction in Kaifeng into a wuxia-themed world inspired by Chinese martial arts stories.
Instead of building rides, the attraction built participation.
Today it includes:
- Around 2,000 performers
- More than 3,000 live performances every day
- Song Dynasty-inspired paper currency that visitors earn, trade and spend
- Interactive games where guests negotiate with performers, complete challenges and even experience gambling-style mechanics using fictional money
Visitors aren’t simply learning about history.
They’re living inside it.
That’s an important distinction.
History becomes less like an exhibition you go to see, and more like a social system you can play in. At Kaifeng, visitors earn currency, negotiate with performers, complete challenges and shape their own individual journey through the world.
3. Learn From Games, Don’t Copy Them
Open-world games have changed how many people expect interactive experiences to work.
Players are used to:
- Discovering hidden content
- Talking to characters
- Completing quests
- Trading
- Earning status
- Making choices that affect what happens next
When those audiences arrive at a physical experience, they don’t leave those expectations behind.
“So these mini-games make it a lot more interactive,” Lu said, “and people really loved it.”
u showed how attractions are designing for those behaviours rather than forcing visitors back into passive observation.
The Kaifeng attraction rewards exploration.
Visitors familiar with wuxia games already understand how to interact with characters and navigate the world.
Elsewhere, successful game IPs are expanding into physical experiences.
Lu discussed Love and Deepspace, a popular love simulation game with a large fan base in China. Because players love the characters, some commission cosplayers to perform as their favourite character and spend time with them on a date.
Fans of Love and Deepspace commission one-to-one immersive encounters with professional cosplayers playing favourite characters.
Publishers including Honkai: Star Rail and Reverse: 1999 are creating concerts, immersive activations and physical environments around their digital worlds.
Lu also pointed to Arcane, the immersive musical in Shanghai created by Tencent, Riot Games, Punchdrunk and SMG Live.
The production worked because it wasn’t introducing audiences to a new behaviour. Chinese audiences already understood cosplay, fan gatherings, role-play, concerts and game-world activations. The immersive show simply gave those existing behaviours a new physical expression.
The lesson here isn’t that every experience should become a game.
It’s that audiences are becoming increasingly comfortable participating rather than simply watching.
Experience designers should think carefully about what that means for the environments they create.
Game companies have noticed. Lu described an immersive activation in Shanghai for Love and Deepspace. In the game, players can have five husbands or boyfriends. The activation built a pop-up luxurious house beneath one of Shanghai’s famous landmarks, the Oriental Pearl Tower. Fans queued to enter the house and take photos with official cosplayers of their favourite characters.
Other game companies are doing similar work. Lu mentioned Honkai: Star Rail and Reverse: 1999 as examples of companies using immersive concerts, activations and themed buildings that match the game world.
The result is a market where the line between player, fan, visitor, customer and participant is blurred.
This is why Arcane could happen.
Lu cited the Arcane immersive musical performance in Shanghai, a collaboration between Tencent, Riot Games, Punchdrunk and SMG Live. She described it as a huge production and said it had become popular in Shanghai.
The important point is not simply that a big Western game/animation IP was adapted into a physical production. It is that the Chinese market already had habits that made the move legible: cosplay, fan gatherings, commissions, game-world activations, concerts, role-play and high-intensity IP fandom.
An international producer looking at China only through the lens of theatre or theme parks would miss this. The better lens is convergence. Games are not just content. They are social infrastructure.
4. Let Story Lead Technology
China is often described as a leader in technology adoption.
Lu argued the more interesting question is how technology is used.
She discussed Three Body Problem: Beyond Gravity, an immersive production she creative directed that was funded by an AI company rather than an entertainment company.
When development began, conversational AI wasn’t convincing enough to play a realistic human character.
Rather than forcing it to behave like one, the creative team rewrote the role.
The AI became a four-dimensional alien intelligence.
Its unusual responses suddenly felt believable.
- The technology hadn’t changed
- The storytelling had
It’s a reminder that emerging technology doesn’t always need to imitate people.
Sometimes the better creative decision is to build a world where the technology’s limitations make narrative sense.
A side note specifically about China: Perhaps Lu’s most surprising business insight wasn’t creative at all. Three Body Problem: Beyond Gravity wasn’t produced by an entertainment company. It was funded by an AI company. In China, Lu explained, technology companies increasingly invest in immersive experiences because they want to demonstrate the future they’re building. The experience becomes more than entertainment. It becomes a way of helping audiences imagine how the company’s technology fits into everyday life.)
5. Local Stories Need Local Authors
Lu introduced an old Chinese saying:
“Foreign monks chant better.”
For many years, international creators benefited from the assumption that overseas expertise automatically meant better experiences.
Lu believes that advantage is disappearing.
International creators often assume that adapting a successful format is enough.
Lu offered a cautionary example.
A major European production opened in Shanghai with impressive production values and ambitious staging.
But audiences struggled with the story.
Historical events, mythology and fantasy had been combined in ways that didn’t feel authentic to Chinese audiences. According to Lu, the production closed during previews before reopening after significant changes.
Her conclusion was clear.
If you’re telling local stories, involve local creators from the beginning.
Authenticity isn’t achieved through architecture, costumes or translation.
It comes from understanding how local audiences interpret their own history, culture and mythology.
Without that understanding, even beautifully produced experiences can fail.
Interestingly, Lu argued the opposite can also be true.
A French company telling an authentic French story may succeed in China precisely because it offers something genuinely different.
The problem wasn’t that the creators were foreign.
The problem was trying to tell a Chinese story without sufficient Chinese authorship.
The Bigger Lesson
None of this suggests the rest of the world should copy China’s formats.
That’s not the point.
The opportunity is to understand the thinking behind them.
Across every example Lu shared, the creative teams started with audience behaviour before deciding on technology, business model or format.
They asked:
- What do people want that everyday life doesn’t provide?
- What behaviours already exist?
- What stories already matter?
- How can participation feel meaningful rather than decorative?
Those questions apply just as much in London, Los Angeles and São Paulo as they do in Shanghai.
They may also be the better place to start the next generation of experience design.
About this Experience Report
This Experience Report is the product of a recent WXO Campfire.
WXO Campfires are online gatherings where WXO members from multiple sectors, specialisms and countries come together to discuss the future of the Experience Economy. Case studies, frameworks and toolkits are shared, with attendees able to put questions to guests in an intimate setting as well as discuss and reflect on the session with their peers
As well as the ability to attend live Campfires, all WXO members receive the on-demand recording and full transcript, along with any supporting presentations, decks or frameworks.
Members also receive an Experience Briefing straight after the Campfire ends. Each Experience Briefing summarises the session in an easily-digestible format, and is designed to be read in under five minutes. These come together to form an easy-to-scan directory of the current landscape of the Experience Economy,
Recent sessions have covered such topics as the rise of functional multi-sensory experiences, designing for anticipation, ROX and the role of tech, the emerging Chinese immersive market, designing for inclusivity, experience design as protest tool and how to map local experience ecosystems.
Guest speakers have included Joe Pine (The Experience Economy), Alain Thys (The Transformation Architects), Katherine Templar Lewis (Kinda Studios), Laura Hess (REMARKABLE), Tom Middleton (Senzomi), Barbara Bouza (Walt Disney Imagineering), Charlie Melcher (The Future of Storytelling) and Abigail Taylor-Sansom (SCAD).
You can check out listings for forthcoming Campfires here.
For more information on how to join the WXO, head here.
