Playing the Othered Self as Wukong: A Resilience in Speculative-Mythological Games

This paper examines how Sun Wukong, the Monkey King of Chinese mythology, is reimagined within speculative and science fictional settings, and how such reimaginings in video games shape players' experience of selfhood. Its central argument is that the juxtaposition of historicism and futurism in speculative-mythological worlds gives players a means of working through existential crisis, marginalisation, and disorientation in a rapidly changing techno-social environment. Historicism preserves cultural memory and trauma, while futurism pushes myth toward adaptive transformation, so that the figure of Wukong becomes a site of temporal friction for both archiving and redemption.

The analysis draws on a range of precedents, including Chen Leng's late Qing novel Neo-Journey to the West (1909) and Ken Liu's short story The Litigation Master and the Monkey King (2013), and applies them to three single-player action-adventure games: Sun Wukong VS Robot (Bitca, 2019), The Crown of Wu (Red Mountain, 2023), and Black Myth: Wukong (Game Science, 2024). The paper reads these works as mechanically embodied narratives in which players jump, fight, and explore to recover freedom, honour, and identity, even where the narrative content of the indie titles is sparse. Its theoretical framework combines speculative mythology, structuralist and Eliadean accounts of myth, hauntology, and posthumanism, alongside existing scholarship on ludic subjectivity and transformative play.

The paper's broader claim is that mythical narrative in games can connect players' self-perception to collective memory in ways that generate fragmented, plural, and non-binary identifications. Playing as the othered Wukong thus becomes an affective declaration of resistance and resilience, rather than a straightforward heroic self-discovery.