Affective Historiography in Play: Taiwanese Indie Games and the Memory of Japanese Colonialism

This paper examines how contemporary Taiwanese video games engage with the memory of Japanese colonialism through affective and interactive design. Focusing on The Legend of Tianding (CGCGC, 2021) and Raid on Taihoku (Mizoriot, 2023), I argue that these titles function as technologies of cultural memory that invite players to feel history rather than merely learn it. Drawing on Alison Landsberg’s concept of prosthetic memory, Ian Bogost’s procedural rhetoric, and Souvik Mukherjee’s notion of postcolonial counterplay, I explore how gameplay transforms historical representation into embodied experience. The Legend of Tianding channels anti-colonial anger through kinetic empowerment before confronting players with inevitable historical defeat, while Raid on Taihoku translates trauma into slow, repetitive survival, evoking emotional exhaustion rather than triumph. Together, these games reveal how postcolonial East Asian developers use play to negotiate empire’s afterlives, reworking historical emotion, agency, and moral ambiguity. Through this lens, video games emerge as affective archives where colonial memory continues to be reimagined and contested in the present.