Barroso Sánchez, D. (2025). Queering Hong Kong: Modded History in A Summer’s End: Hong Kong 1986. Digital Culture & Society, 11(1), 187-210. Diego Barroso Hong Kong has seen its fair share of portrayals in video games (over 300) – some, where it plays a more central role than others; however, academia has shown little interest in exploring how the city’s history and people are represented in video games. While there is historiographical value in how the city is portrayed in n

Diego Barroso Hong Kong has been the setting of several games, like the open-world action game Sleeping Dogs. Although they may be exciting for a while, these environments often end up feeling stereotypical and lifeless. I’m developing an analysis approach that focuses on three layers of referentiality (visuals, environment, and agency) to help game designers build meaningful spaces and scholars explain them more effectively. I’ve already worked on this project by writing abo

Barroso, D., & Holopainen, J. (2024, September). Play to make a city. Cultural-historical identities and affordances in videogame versions of Hong Kong. In Conference Proceedings of DiGRA 2024 Conference: Playgrounds. Diego Barroso and Jussi Holopainen With the spatial turn in cultural studies of the 80s and 90s, the idea of (historical) narratives embedded in spaces gained traction. This spatial turn has also come to the fore in video games, as they both create previously no