Riot: Civil Unrest is an online game that blends real-world protests from recent history with objective based strategy gameplay. The game references four major civil unrests, Arab Spring in Egypt, No TAV in Italy, 15-M movement (Indignados) in Spain and the Anti-Landfill protests (Keratea) in Greece. The director of the game and previously an editor and cinematographer at Valve, Leonard Menchiari, has experienced riots personally and the game “Riot” was created as a way to express it and to tell the stories of these events. The player can pick between playing as police or rioters. Playing as either side will even tell you about the public’s opinion on how you handled the demonstrations. The game aims to depict scenarios in a neutral manner, allowing the player to explore both sides of the conflict.

Riot was launched in February 2019. It was highly recommended by LIHKG netizens in Hong Kong as early as June 2019 when the Anti-ELAB protest began. Protesters, whether they belong to the peaceful camp or the radical camp, can learn different tactics from the game.

• The gaming industry is a multi-billion-dollar, male-dominated industry that has a decade-long track record of shutting down legitimate criticism about under-representation of people of colour, sexualisation of women, appeasement of authoritarian governments and an occasional glorification of violence.
  
• Studios have been serving players with politically-charged material for decades: The critique of runaway capitalism in Bioshock, resisting oppression through violence in StarCraft, religious dogmatism in Halo.
  
• Politics are already deeply intertwined with gaming. When professional players get suspended for using their platform to take a political stance; when games are routinely edited or banned to please a local authority prior to a release; when studios fail their diversity efforts — or pretend that they don’t need them — all of this is politics at play.
  
• But the industry claims that they don’t want real-life politics.
  
  https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-06-18-too-little-too-shy-the-gaming-industrys-response-to-blm-opinion

• Most statements made by the makers and publishers of games are boilerplate: companies like Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo decry racism, affirm the need for inclusion and equality, and often directly address “the black community.”
  
• In a piece for Vice, Gita Jackson writes about how these statements aren’t just the bare minimum. They’re clueless and hollow, unwilling to confront their complicity and center the conversation on anti-black racism.
  
  https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/5/21281726/video-game-companies-george-floyd-protests-blm-support

Detention (Chinese: 返校; lit.: ‘Returning to School’) is a horror adventure video game created and developed by Taiwanese game developer Red Candle Games for Steam. It is a 2D atmospheric horror side-scroller set in 1960s Taiwan under martial law. The game also incorporates religious elements based on Taiwanese culture and mythology. A live action film adaptation distributed by Warner Bros. Taiwan was released on 20 September 2019.

The game references Taiwan’s White Terror period, when martial law was enforced on the citizens. The White Terror era refers to the suppression of political dissidents following the 228 Incident, an uprising that began on Feb. 27, 1947, which was brutally suppressed by the then-Chinese Nationalist Pary (KMT) regime. The government subsequently imposed martial law, which was lifted on July 15, 1987.

The background of the story centers on the love affair between a student and a teacher in 1960s Taiwan. The teacher helped smuggle banned books for a secret book club in the school, and when the love affair turned sour, the student reported the book club to the authorities. Consequently, the students and teachers who were involved in the club were sentenced to death or 15 years in prison.

Such persecution was very common during the White Terror period. The punishment was actually much more brutal in reality.

https://hongkongfp.com/2020/11/21/stop-playing-politics-or-face-a-wan-nintendo-warns-animal-crossing-gamers/

• Nintendo told businesses and organisations to “refrain from bringing politics into the game,” and said those who breached the guidelines could be banned.

• US President-elect Joe Biden is also among those who hope to capitalise on the game’s popularity. Biden’s campaign launched its own virtual island last month, allowing players to “volunteer” at the island’s campaign headquarters and visit polling stations. Under the new guidelines, the island is likely to be banned.

• “It is a shame that Nintendo overlooked the significance of this game.”, said Joshua Wong.

On October 6, 2019, during the Hearthstone Grandmasters streaming event in Taiwan, Ng Wai Chung, a professional Hearthstone player and resident of Hong Kong known as “Blitzchung”, was being interviewed following his match, during which he donned a mask similar to those worn by protesters in the 2019–20 Hong Kong protests and said “Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of our times”. The stream was cut off shortly after. The following day, on October 7, Blizzard announced that Blitzchung had been banned from the current tournament, would forfeit any prize money (approximately US$4,000 by that point), and would be banned from other Grandmaster tournaments for one year.

Hong Kong protesters borrowed tactics from online multi-player games such as PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS (Pubg). They would leave supplies such as helmets, masks, umbrellas, water and first aid kits along the roadside for others to pick up.

In the beginning of the movement (June 2019), there were supplies stations at protest sites. Protesters communicated with each other using hand signs, so that supplies could be passed down a human chain to frontliners. But later police began to crack down on these supplies stations. As many protesters are from a generation that grew up with gaming, they very naturally had a tacit understanding with each other that led them to take up different positions during confrontations with the police. Supplies such as helmets, umbrellas, water and first-aid kits were left along the road side for frontliners to pick up as in Pubg.

In October 2019, a Japanese writer/journalist Minetoshi Yasuda for Bungeishunjū came to Hong Kong to research about the protest. After conducting a series of interviews with frontliners, he concluded that protesters were familiar with military tactics because many of them were players of survival games and fans of Japanese manga and anime. He called the protest movement ‘Otaku War’.

In October 2019, a group of Hong Kong activists have developed a homemade computer game that uses virtual reality to recreate what it is like to take part in pro-democracy protests sweeping the financial hub. Put together in less than a week, “Liberate Hong Kong” allows gamers to don a VR headset and dodge tear gas and rubber bullets during a nighttime clash in the district of Mongkok, a regular scene of battles between police and protesters in the real world.

The developers said they decided to create the game after local eSports player Ng “Blitzchung” Wai Chung was punished by Blizzard Entertainment for shouting a pro-democracy slogan during a live-streamed interview following a competition win.

https://hongkongfp.com/2019/11/13/hong-kong-protests-re-imagined-homemade-virtual-video-game/

On the other hand, there is a protest game in China called ‘Everyone Hit the Traitor’. The web game lets players beat protesters and pro-democracy activists.

Some view the gaming world as a utopian medium to explore and express their social, ethical and political values, but like any technology, gaming is not deterministic, it is not either good or bad. Video games become a platform where the feature of social movement — Movement-countermovement interaction manifests itself. The pro-democracy camp uses video games to express their political views while the pro-establishment camp borrow the same strategy to counter these views. Such interaction is in fact very common in the real world.

• Media freedom activists have built a 125 million block library in a Minecraft map called the “Uncensored Library” which contains a collection of banned publications and is available to read for users within oppressive regimes that otherwise censor such information.
  
• The publications are available in English and the original language. The texts within the library are contained in in-game book items, which can be opened and placed on stands to be read by multiple players at once. These articles generally discuss censorship, unjust punishment, and other critiques of the writer’s government.
  
• The Uncensored Library works because though many of the works currently within the library are censored, the Minecraft software is not currently censored in any country.
  
• The Chinese government may try to lean on Microsoft to remove the map from within the game. Worst yet, the Chinese government may leave the map up and instead use their powers to log information on who accesses the Uncensored Library within Minecraft and China and forward that information to their internet police.

Gaming activism is not new. It started as early as 2004 when video games broke into the world of politics, advocacy, and activism. In April 2020, Hong Kong protesters began to shift their protest actions to the virtual world of Animal Crossing because of the restriction of public gatherings in the name of health security. The game was used by Hong Kong activists to spread pro-democracy messages, and consequently it was removed from sale on websites in China.

In July/August, protesters in the US also started to voice out in Animal Crossing and other video games such as World of Warcraft, Splatoon, ToonTown, Grand Theft Auto, and NBA 2K20. In The Sims, a BLM rally hosted by Ebonix (as her avatar is known) was attended by at least 200 players. (from The Guardian)

A spin-off of ‘Heung Shing Online’ was launched on 31 December 2019 (with revenue from advertisements donated to the cause). This time it is a real game but in a milder/more peaceful form. It’s actually an information sharing app in disguise of a game. In the app, protesters can find a timeline of major events, memes, information about protest schedules, frontliners’ tasks and a map of all the yellow shops (shops that voice out for the movement) etc. Once you enter the app, you can create your own character like in any other game. There are both tasks online and in real life that you can complete. For online tasks you can tweet info or ‘like’ a post on other protest apps such as LIHKG; for real life tasks you can participate in street protests or visit yellow shops. Once a task is completed, points can be earned.

The story of ‘Heung Shing Online’ is fascinating. It’s a perfect demonstration of how the virtual and physical realms are blurred. The yellow text in the above image reads,

‘Disclaimer: We urge all netizens to be clearheaded. Please distinguish reality from fantasy. Don’t indulge in gaming to excess. This webpage is only for the purpose of gaming, we don’t instigate nor encourage real violent acts nor criminal behaviour. We take no legal responsibility in the usage of the content of this webpage’

On 19 July 2019, one month into the Anti-ELAB movement, a netizen on LIHKG posted about their idea of creating an online game like Sim City, that mimics the street protests in Hong Kong. (LIHKG is an online forum much like reddit. It was highly influential, generating images, slogans, discussions and strategies. I would say LIHKG was the leader of the leaderless movement, especially in the early months.) On the same LIHKG post, they also uploaded a ‘strategy guide’ created with excel.

‘Heung Shing Online’ was never meant to be a real game, only the strategy guide exists. However it was labeled by pro-Beijing media as the ‘Biggest real life RPG (role-playing game)’ that instigates violence against police, the strategy guide as a training manual for frontliners, especially secondary school kids who ‘do not’ have the ability to distinguish reality from fantasy.

In the following months, netizens continued their discussions of strategies on LIHKG with gaming terminology as if the protest was a real RPG. This was to minimise the risk that one day the posts could be used against these netizens in court.

The Dutil-Dumas messages were sent out by SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) scientists in 1999. Different messages about the conditions on planet Earth were represented with special symbols designed to maintain a high level of information even in a noisy reception. The whole set of characters is made by small bitmaps of 5×7 pixels.

For my residency, I will selected a series of symbols and re-create them on the virtual art space of Hong Kong’s Cattle Depot Artist Village. I will also compile my own glossary for these symbols on the studio page.