The Afterlife of Colonial Fiction in The Secret Games Company’s ‘Kim’

Several interactive examples of adapted Kipling have been released over the past three decades. Yet, unlike the literary and audiovisual afterlives of Kipling’s considerable output of fiction and poetry, which have been the object of serious work, these interactive adaptations of his literary texts have received very little or no attention at all from either Kipling or video game scholars. Admittedly, this might be understandable when it comes to the handful of multiplatform game adaptations of Disney animated films and TV series that are, in turn, based on Kipling’s ‘Jungle Books’, insofar as these interactive target texts seldom go beyond featuring characters from their literary and audiovisual source material. However, such neglect appears to be more regrettable in the case of ‘Kim’ (The Secret Games Company [SGC] 2016), which offers itself as a useful case study to explore pressing issues concerning both the process of adapting literary texts for an interactive medium and the representation/simulation of imperialist ideologies in video games. In this regard, Lindsay Meaning has recently attempted to explain how the game adaptation not only reproduces colonialist attitudes and practices depicted in the novel but occasionally foregrounds others implicit in the book. Expanding upon Meaning’s procedural rhetorical analysis, this paper will revisit SGC’s ‘Kim’ through the lens of Rachel Lara van der Merwe’s ‘imperial play’. In doing so, it will highlight the importance of as yet overlooked non-player characters adapted from Kipling’s 1880s short stories, such as Peachey Carnehan from ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ (to name but one), who, hinting as they do at their own source texts, further complicate the remediated representation of British colonial rule in the game. Whilst specifically contributing to charting the contemporary reception of Kipling’s literary works through the discussion of a case study, this paper also tries to make a more far-reaching contribution to the expanding fields of video game adaptation studies and postcolonial game studies