This book explores how video games transform history, fantasy, Indigeneity, trauma, and romance into interactive narratives, sparking transnational dialogues across game studies, area studies, and digital humanities.

By highlighting the complex ways in which reality and fantasy are continuously negotiated through code and play, this book urges area studies to seriously consider digital participatory cultures while simultaneously challenging game studies to address translocal narratives and postcolonial complexities. It connects research communities across North America, Europe, Australasia, and East Asia, enhancing our global understanding of what it means to be a player, a creator, and a historical subject in the digital age.

This book is written for scholars, graduate students, and industry professionals engaged in game studies, Asian studies, media theory, digital humanities, and related interdisciplinary fields.

Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 International license.

Chia-rong Wu is an Associate Professor (Reader) in the School of Language, Social and Political Sciences at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.