Queering Hong Kong. Modded History in A Summer’s End: Hong Kong 1986
Barroso Sánchez, D. (2025). Queering Hong Kong: Modded History in A Summer’s End: Hong Kong 1986. Digital Culture & Society, 11(1), 187-210.
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 non-historical games (ludoforming and modelling are just as important), a more direct approach to how history is recorded gives us a different understanding of its development and potential future. This paper argues that video games offer affordances that allow designers and players to reflect and reassess history by ‘modding’ (modification in video game terms).
Movie-based videogames (like those based on the performances of Jackie Chan during the 70s and 80s, for instance) were for many years our only window to the colonial era in this medium; therefore, the recent release of interactive digital narrative game A Summer’s End: Hong Kong 1986 (ASE) (Oracle & Bone 2020), which brings a momentous period in Hong Kong’s colonial history to the fore, is of capital
importance. Both the city and its main characters, Michelle and Sam (typical Hongkongers), find themselves steeped in uncertainty. First, by the coming Handover (1997), which signalled the end of British colonial rule of the city; and second, by their budding non-heterosexual relationship jeopardising Michelle’s ‘fairy tale’ upbringing.
This paper offers an in-depth playthrough of ASE informed by Harmut Koenitz’s hermeneutical approach to interactive digital narrative, supported throughout by an interview with the game’s developers, where the fascinating implications of ludonarrative feedback from the perspectives of design and gameplay are discussed. Ultimately, this game is shown to be an example of modded history in several ways: not only does it portray the homosexual relationship of two young women in a light-hearted/heartening way, but this candidness also echoes a sense of optimism that pervades the hopeful ending of the game. Michelle and Sam can prevail as a couple just as Hong Kong can overcome the historical challenge that was/is the ‘1997 Handover’.