POLITICAL GAMES IN VIRTUAL HONG KONG

Abstract

Following Akbar Abbas’s seminal 1997 study Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, this paper argues that just as Hong Kong is disappearing in the real world, it is re-appearing in the virtual world of videogames. With attention to the 2019 protests in the city of Hong Kong, this paper reviews media reportage, academic scholarship and explores virtual game spaces to examine how videogames and other digital platforms came to enact, elaborate and represent the 2019 activist movement. Discussing a number of videogames that were specifically developed as objects of protest such as Liberate Hong Kong (2019), Revolution in Our Time (2019), and Add Oil (2019), this paper also considers the ways in which existing digital games such as GTAV (2013), Pokémon GO (2016), Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020) as well as digital platforms such as Twitch, Airdrop, and Uber were tactically deployed as sites of protest by Hong Kong activists.