Love Letters to India?: Adapting Colonial Fiction in The Secret Games Company’s ‘Kim’

This extended abstract describes a work-in-progress study of The Secret Games Company’s ‘Kim’ (2016) – an open-world top-down role-playing game based on Kipling’s 1901 novel of the same name – through the lens of ‘imperial play’, a concept recently introduced by Rachel Lara van der Merwe. In my analysis, I propose to pay closer attention to marginal non-player characters (NPCs), such as those adapted from Kipling’s 1880s short stories ‘Lispeth’ and ‘The Man Who Would Be King’. Whilst specifically contributing to charting the contemporary reception of Kipling’s literary works through the discussion of a case study, my still ongoing research will also address pressing issues concerning the process of adapting literary texts for an interactive medium and the representation/simulation of imperialist ideologies in video games, with a view to making a contribution to video game adaptation studies and postcolonial game studies as well