Kowloon's Gate
Game
Documents about Kowloon's Gate
Whitepaper31 pages
The Hong Kong Past Made in the Digital Present: Playing with the (Un)familiar and (In)authentic
Video games featuring Hong Kong, such as Kowloon’s Gate and Sleeping Dogs, function as an epistemic genre that prioritizes interactive, playable symbols over strict historical or cultural accuracy.
- Digital representations of Hong Kong in games like Kowloon’s Gate and Sleeping Dogs function as mutable, interactive environments rather than static historical records.
- Cultural identity within these virtual spaces is not fixed by developer intent but is collectively constructed and renegotiated through active player participation.
- These games prioritize playable symbols over strict cultural accuracy, utilizing hybrid and romanticized imagery to bridge the gap between global audiences and the city’s history.
Digital Games Research AssociationNov 2026
Whitepaper3 pages
Gamifying Race: Play as Apparatus and Ludic Asianness as Diffracted Realities
The document explores the epistemic existence of video games and players, arguing that both come into being through "intra-action" during the act of play.
- The paper argues that games and players are ontologically inseparable, mutually constituted through play: play turns programs and audiovisual materials into 'video games' and turns participants into 'players,' rejecting the presumption of a pre-existing separate player (drawing on Karen Barad's intra-action and Donna Haraway's diffraction).
- The paper's central conclusion is that production locale, developer background, and setting are less useful criteria for defining 'Asian games' than examining how ludic race, games, and players are jointly configured through play.
- 'Ludic Asianness' is presented as not intrinsic to players but gradually produced through ludic design that interpellates players as Asian protagonists, building on Christopher B. Patterson's idea of ludic race as virtual identity tourism.
DiGRASep 2024
Whitepaper3 pages
Disciplined Play: Finding Foucauldian Architecture in Virtual Worlds
This paper, by Lawrence May of the University of Auckland, examines how virtual architecture in videogames both reinforces and destabilizes ideological positions, drawing on Michel Foucault's writings on space, power, and governmentality.
- The paper argues that videogame spaces discipline players both inside and outside the game, with environments, rules, interactivity, and narrative working together as a discursive circuit rather than as separate elements.
- Through textual analysis of Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), the author reads its late-nineteenth-century American frontier settings through Foucault's panopticon, arguing that invisible surveillance by programming and AI systems creates permanent visibility that regulates player conduct.
- The analysis suggests the game's spaces reinforce its thematic critique of a collapsing cowboy masculinity, linking architecture directly to the title's ideological content.
DiGRAJan 2020