Prosthetic Memory and Schizophrenic Play: Historizing Sinophone Digital Games

Abstract

This thesis explores how Sinophone digital games open possibilities of historical contemplation through two case studies that focus on video games in Taiwan and mainland China. Each case study not only addresses a significant trend in its respective game history but also serves as a methodological experiment that links the media aesthetics of digital games to their broader social, cultural, and historical conditions. Chapter 1 reverse engineers prosthetic memory. It addresses the recent rise of Taiwanese historical video games and examines nationalist memory-making in Raid on Taihoku, an indie adventure RPG developed by the Taiwanese studio Mizo Games in 2023. It is an adventure RPG set during WWII in Taiwan that represents Japanese colonial rule and the Allied aerial attacks from 1943 to 1945 and centers on the Taipei Air Strike of May 31, 1945. Drawing on recent scholarship in history and memory studies on the one hand, and emotion and affect studies on the other, I examine how Raid on Taihoku generates what Alison Landsberg calls “prosthetic memory” in a medium-specific form that cultivates historical empathy toward Taiwan’s wartime trauma and shapes players’ political subjectivity. Its choreography of affective gameplay and narrative engages with the politics of playing with the past thereby transforming the gaming experience into what Korean historian Jie-Hyun Lim terms “victimhood nationalism.” Raid on Taihoku demonstrates not only how digital games and gaming have become sites of Taiwan’s nationalist imagination but also how Taiwanese historical games serve as an interface for understanding the island’s contemporary cultural-political condition. Chapter 2 invites schizophrenic play. It addresses the recent rise of games nostalgic for the 1990s in mainland China and focuses on Chinese Parents, a life-simulation game developed by the Beijing-based studio Moyuwan Games in 2018. The chapter explores how the game makes accessible the accumulated history of postsocialist China. Bringing Fredric Jameson’s theory of interpretation into dialogue with game studies discussions of ludonarrative dissonance, I propose “schizophrenic play” as a method for reading video games as layered formal structures in which heteroglossia reverberates across the game world and heterogeneous meanings overlap and collide. The chapter shows that Chinese Parents mobilizes three temporalities through its narrative, mechanics, and procedures: the sentimental everyday life of the 1990s, the existential fervor associated with the restoration of the gaokao in the 1980s, and the neoliberal rationality of universal economization and self-entrepreneurship that structures the present. While the game’s nostalgic reconstruction of the 1990s translates neoliberal operations into familiar postsocialist memories, the existential promise of agency associated with the 1980s collides with neoliberal control and points to a historical rupture within the postsocialist condition. Chinese Parents stages a poetics of pretending, in which players become historical mediators between a fading postsocialist imaginary and an emerging neoliberal reality, thereby revealing the nonsynchronous contemporaneity of postsocialist China. Together, prosthetic memory and schizophrenic play suggest two possible methods for thinking about the historicity of digital games.