Remediating Multilingualism in The Secret Games Company’s ‘Kim’

Over the last two decades, the ever-expanding field of video game studies has been enriched by excellent work on the various linguistic dimensions of video games and gaming, as researchers have examined not only the language used in video games as texts and translation in game localisation, but also paratextual discourse about video games, language in gamers’ interactions and the place of video games in language teaching and learning. However, the combination of the textual complexity of modern video games with the multifocality of such commendable scholarly efforts appears to have resulted in a relative scarcity of detailed discussions of in-game language. Taking its cue from other rare linguistic investigations of specific titles, my paper aims to contribute to tackling this shortage through a close analysis of the overlooked politics of language within The Secret Games Company’s ‘Kim’ (2016), an interactive adaptation of Kipling’s 1901 novel of the same name. This open-world top-down role-playing game has recently received some scholarly attention for its remediation of colonialist attitudes and practices. Yet, given the ideologically charged multilingualism of its main source, The Secret Games Company’s ‘Kim’ also offers itself as a useful case study to explore the underresearched process of adapting multilingual literary texts for an interactive medium. Triangulating multimodal discourse analysis with insights from video game adaptation studies and postcolonial game studies, this paper focusses on the linguistic representation of player and non-player characters in ‘Kim’ the computer game with a view to highlighting significant similarities and differences with ‘Kim’ the novel in terms of multilingual characterisation