Abstract: Drawing on Giddens's structuration theory, this study employs participant observation and in-depth interviews to examine the bidirectional transformation of social capital between virtual and real-world domains within China's virtual gaming fields. The findings are threefold. First, within the interplay between structure and agency, players are constrained by technological architectures and rule systems while utilizing the fluidity of virtual identities to break through the limitations of ascribed real-world identities, thereby achieving the redesign and reconstruction of social capital in the digital field. Second, China's gaming field exhibits distinctive localized landscape. The embedding of strong-tie platforms based on WeChat and QQ enables the direct transfer of real-world capital, while the master-apprentice system and face competition rooted in Confucian ethics facilitate the reconstruction of quasi-kinship social capital in virtual settings. Third, from a critical perspective, the transformation of social capital is not a neutral process; rather, it intensifies power inequalities within gaming communities. Such inequalities are manifested in the exploitation of female players' objectified emotional labor under gender norms, and the structural exclusion faced by digitally marginalized players constrained by material thresholds in their social capital transformation. By transcending the prevailing analytical framework that treats social capital transformation as a unidirectional process, this study situates the virtual and the real within a continuously inter-embedded relational process to reveal the mechanisms of cross-field flow, reorganization, and reproduction of social capital, and consequently extends the explanatory boundaries of social capital theory in the context of China's digital society.

Key words: Structuration, online games, social capital, emotional labor, virtual-real transformation, digital capital, digital governance