Preserving Hmong Batik Through Video Games

This paper presents an ongoing research project examining how video games can help safeguard intangible cultural heritage, focusing on Hmong batik, a resist-dyeing craft practiced by the Hmong people of southwestern China. The author argues that games can serve as interactive vehicles for cultural preservation, reaching audiences that traditional documentation may not, and proposes that game design itself can function as a rigorous research method bridging ethnographic craft study and human-computer interaction. The central artifact is Batiked, a Unity-based 2D platformer built around a two-tone Hmong batik palette and a mechanic that mirrors the wax-resist process of waxing, dyeing, and melting.

The work is grounded in the Research through Design methodology, with the prototype positioned as an executable argument rather than a finished product. Its gameplay translates the sequential logic of batik into spatial puzzles: players harvest wax at basins, deposit it through a limited-capacity stylus, and manipulate hardened wax blocks that can be melted to reveal hidden glyphs. Each placement, flow, and melt is logged to generate data on player interaction, which the author proposes as a source of reproducible, evaluable findings. Level design draws on Hmong motifs, including patterns associated with stone and mythic imagery.

The paper situates its contribution against existing games that adopt distinctive artistic traditions, such as ink painting and embroidery-inspired styles, noting that batik has received little comparable attention. It identifies the decline of Hmong batik as a context of urgency, citing fewer skilled practitioners, youth migration, industrial imitation, and fragile intergenerational transmission in regions such as Qiandongnan, Guizhou. The author also raises concerns about attribution, as the names of the women who created these patterns are largely lost, and commits to considering how findings might be returned to Guizhou communities.