Making sense of diaspora politics, regardless of culture and country involved, is a singularly painful dance with no fixed steps and no finale. It is a landscape littered with well-intentioned armchair warriors, white people, privileged expats, weird nationalists, and foetid trolls; everyone disagrees almost all of the time, with some blessed exceptions that bring people around the world together to ridicule a clown. Diaspora discourse might involve the fraying borders of a motherland or a monoculture, authenticity, racism, accents and code-switching, and dozens of other things that remain wholly untranslatable to an outside party. The psychology at play is a weird chimaera that can never be accurately captured in codified language of research and focus groups; the very idea of applying “accuracy” and objectivity to its study is a joke. It is also not the same repeated anecdote about white kids making fun of a stinky homemade lunch at school – friends, let’s move past this as the core signifier of marginalised childhood. But it is always a mess, because the diaspora is chaotic by nature and necessity.
Sunset Visitor’s speculative fiction adventure 1000xResist knows the fractal intensity of this mess well – so well that the game does an almost sociopathic job at mirroring the exhaustive cycles and repetition that define this world. At times it gets a little too solipsistic – understandable, given that the main premise is about clones facing the burden of existence – and at times I have to walk away because I’m just so damn tired. But it’s also an extraordinary piece of work – one that places diasporic trauma front and centre in all its ugly glory.
This is a story that traces the echoes of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Revolution, which left a city-sized wound that hasn’t yet closed or been allowed to scar with dignity. And as much as certain audiences might want to frame 1000xResist as a neat one-dimensional exploration of queerness, there is so, so much more to it than that. There is nothing especially unique about its structure or core concept – the difficult process of a character finding the man behind the curtain – and I certainly would not describe it as “the first game of its kind.” What makes it so jarring and so open to these claims is the fact that it is simply not a game made for the white gaze, and I think that’s beautiful.
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