When to Use a First-Person Shooter as a Historical Tool: Ludic Site Preservation in Hong Kong

This paper argues that the playable space of the first-person shooter should be treated as an active medium of historical representation rather than a neutral container for 3D reconstructions, particularly when game engines are used in virtual archaeology. Its central case is Autosave: Redoubt, a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) mod recreating the Shing Mun Redoubt, a World War II-era British military site in Hong Kong's Kowloon mountains, built on the Valve Source Engine. The author positions the work as both a research contribution and a practice-based project, examining how the FPS's "camera-gun" perspective and "tunnel vision" spatiality shape what a historical site can communicate, and how these affordances risk the "institutional amnesia" that virtual archaeologists Gareth Beale and Paul Reilly warn against.

The paper's rationale for selecting CS:GO rests on the fit between the site's enclosed tunnels and bunkers and the shooter's spatial logic, as well as the site's contemporary use by airsoft players. The author also raises the question of whether a mod hosted on one of the longest-running and most widely played competitive games constitutes historical preservation at the level of reception and dissemination. The project draws on a 2011 Hong Kong University survey of the Redoubt, which used line-of-sight analysis to interpret the site's events. That study linked the site's rapid British defeat and relatively low casualties to Paul Virilio's theory of bunker architecture as monuments to technological redundancy.

Methodologically, the paper is an extended abstract presented at Chinese DiGRA 2018, combining theoretical framing from Rune Klevjer and Olli Leino with a practice-based account of the mod's development. The work's scope is a single site in Hong Kong and a single game, so its claims are argued through case analysis rather than broad sampling. The author concludes that FPS gameplay is an unconventional but valuable extension of the walking simulator, and that the engine's representational limits, which emerged during the pursuit of architectural accuracy, are themselves a productive site of critical reflection for game studies and virtual archaeology.