Events

Over the past several years, Gaming Asia has emerged as a captivating cultural phenomenon. While established global centres of video games—the United States, Europe, and Japan—remain vibrant, Asia has become the world’s largest market and a core locus of production, innovation, and contestation in digital culture: video games are produced, modded, played, streamed, circulated, archived, and competed over at scales unmatched elsewhere. Yet Gaming Asia is not only about entertainment or economic revenue; it has also become a focal arena where national forces are entangled in projects of remapping—especially against the backdrop of a fragmented imagination of Asia, splintered into reified national categories and resurgent, reactionary nationalisms.

The tightening relationship between video gaming and nationalism has become increasingly apparent. From production pipelines and platform governance to localisation, streaming, esports, and fan communities, nearly every aspect of gaming is now read—and regulated—through national lenses. In 2024, for example, the award-winning Chinese video game Black Myth: Wukong became a cultural landmark, framed simultaneously as proof of China’s technological capacity, a celebration of national cultural heritage, and a showcase of market potential. In India, echoing Hindutva currents, a triple-A title The Age of Bhaarat is under development. In addition to directly developing local video-game industries, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund has taken major positions in global publishers and financed content such as Assassin’s Creed Mirage, including an AlUla expansion, leveraging games to revitalise UNESCO-listed heritage. More than serving as representations, these strategies of (re)imagining national pasts, presents, and futures within geo-cultural imaginaries, deeply entangled with real-world geopolitics, are embedded in socio-cultural practices such as streaming and in gaming infrastructures like player communities, where national forces and emotions are channelled.

Yet the relationship between video games and Asian states remains fundamentally ambivalent. Games mobilised for national purposes can be subverted, rerouted, or reinterpreted by players, creators, and platforms. Attempts to fence off “national” gaming cultures routinely collide with the translocal, and often global, infrastructures, economies, affects, and histories that make gaming possible. Moreover, national projects of cultural remapping through games frequently diverge, conflict, or overlap, producing contested visions of geography, identity, and heritage.

The increasingly tight yet intricate relationship between video games and Asian nationalism has not yet received sustained academic attention—particularly from bottom-up perspectives attuned to everyday politics and practices that navigate, appropriate, and contest the hegemonic framings of nationalism in macro-level discourses of video games.

Marking the tenth anniversary of the agenda-setting call for Regional Game Studies, this workshop invites papers that critically examine the evolving nexus of video games, nationalism, and geopolitics across and beyond Asia, past and present. It aims to investigate Asian nationalism through the lens of video games, offering a nuanced perspective on the proliferation of new gaming materialities, modalities, and mobilities, and their intricate entanglements with national politics in Asia. The workshop asks how gaming technologies and data infrastructures shape whose nations gain visibility, and how national trends across Asia, in turn, influence the supposedly apolitical landscapes of digital technology. On the one hand we focus on how games reflect and actively shape (geo)political, historical, and cultural dynamics. On the other hand, by approaching games as assemblages of economy, technology, history, infrastructure, and emotion that generate geocultural power for diverse Asian actors, we welcome papers that rethink the trans-Asian linkages and disjunctures produced through gaming practices, along with the competing concepts of “Asia” and “nation” they bring into being.

This workshop welcomes submissions on (but not limited to) topics that address the intricacies of video games and nationalism in Asia, including:

• (Counter-)memory, history, and heritage
• State regulation, platform governance, and/or unintended consequences
• Banal nationalism and video games
• Video games as transmedia cultural complex, ACG
• Esports, military simulation, and “patriotic” play
• Gaming communities, Cross-border fandoms; translation/localisation politics; streamer economies
• Platform capitalisms and regional infrastructures (payments, cloud, broadband, app stores)
• Labour, outsourcing, and supply chains in Asian game production; modding and grey markets
• Diasporic and translocal play
• Preservation, archiving, and platform death
• AI, AR/VR, Serious Games
• Methodological interventions: regional game studies, comparative/relational approaches, multi-sited ethnography, platform studies, inter-Asian referencing

We welcome work on any geography relevant to Asia’s gaming ecologies—historical or contemporary—and especially encourage submissions focusing on under-represented regions and communities in the exploration of video games. We particularly invite contributions that move beyond representational analysis to address the material, infrastructural, and affective dimensions of gaming. In addition to academic research, we also welcome multimodal submissions from practitioners such as designers, producers, streamers, and curators who engage with these themes.

Since this workshop centres on video games, and to emphasise the multimodal and interactive nature of academic engagement, participants will have the opportunity to ‘demonstrate’ game play in relation to their paper arguments. Recorded playthroughs and live demonstrations can be incorporated into presentations, depending on technical logistics.

SUBMISSION OF PROPOSALS

Paper proposals should include a title, an abstract (maximum 300 words), and a brief personal biography (about 150 words) for submission by 6 February 2026. Additionally, please include a statement confirming that your proposed paper has not been published or committed elsewhere, and that you are willing to revise the version of your paper presented at the workshop for potential inclusion in a special issue. Please submit your proposal using the form available on the website.

Authors of selected proposals will be notified in early March 2026. Presenters will be required to submit short draft papers (between 2,000-3,000 words) by 13 April 2026. These papers will be distributed to fellow speakers and chairpersons prior to the workshop and do not need to be fully polished.

This workshop will be held in person. Full or partial airfare funding will be offered to overseas participants, as well as three nights of accommodation in Singapore. Please indicate your need for funding support in the proposal form.

WORKSHOP CONVENORS

Dr Zezhou YANG
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

Dr Rani SINGH
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

Prof Tim WINTER
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore