The Stroller in the Virtual City: Spatial Practice of Hong Kong Players in Sleeping Dogs

Ge Zhang's study examines how Hong Kong players engage with the virtual city of Sleeping Dogs (2012), arguing that the game's space is co-produced by developers' designs and players' everyday cultural practices rather than existing as a static representation. Drawing on Lefebvre's triad of conceived, perceived, and lived space, the analysis treats gameplay as both a structured experience shaped by the developers and an active appropriation by players who inhabit the city. Rather than assessing how accurately the game depicts Hong Kong, the work draws on qualitative evidence from Cantonese online forums, five player interviews, and participant observation, centering the perspective of native players who experience the virtual city simultaneously as insiders and tourists.

The study finds that the game, produced by a Western studio relying on cinematic stereotypes rather than ethnographic experience, frequently frustrated local players. They judged its representations against their own knowledge, objecting to elements such as the depiction of the Tin Hau Temple, the merging of Kowloon locations into Hong Kong Island, and the absence of realistic congestion, which the developers reasonably avoided to preserve gameplay. Players negotiated between the conceived and lived dimensions of the space through practices such as minibus nostalgia, playful experimentation, and satirical performance of the avatar's body, subverting the game's spatial and disciplinary structures.

The analysis further argues that players' behavior, including harassing non-player characters to document Cantonese profanity, is playful yet analytically cynical and can reflect genuine anxieties about the hyperurbanised, disciplined character of daily life in Hong Kong rather than mindless violence. Situating the game within a long Japanese-led tradition of digitally preserving and stylising the city, including the Kowloon Walled City, the study concludes that its virtual Hong Kong functions as an allegory rather than a faithful representation. It also notes a paradox in the post-1997 period: triad and street violence have largely receded, while urban anxieties and uncertainty have intensified amid growing corporate monopolies shaping city life.