Memory Strategies at Play: Gendered Trauma in Japanese and Taiwanese Historical Digital Games

This paper explores how Japanese and Taiwanese historical video games transform cultural memory and trauma into playable experience. Drawing on Alison Landsberg’s concept of prosthetic memory, Paul Ricoeur’s ethics of remembrance, and Michael Rothberg’s notion of the implicated subject, I examine how four titles—Kantai Collection (2013), Fatal Frame IV (2008), Detention (2017), and Raid on Taihoku (2023)—mobilize gendered embodiment as a medium of historical engagement. Each game enacts a distinct memory strategy: evasion, haunting, introspection, and reenactment. Through these affective frameworks, femininity functions alternately to aestheticize, externalize, or critically reframe trauma. From Japan’s post-imperial amnesia to Taiwan’s postcolonial reckoning, these games illustrate how memory in digital media is not simply represented but actively performed. By rendering remembrance interactive, they expose the ethical and emotional stakes of how players inhabit histories of violence and survival. Ultimately, the paper argues that when memory becomes playable, gendered affect becomes both the site of forgetting and the condition of reckoning.