Games on Foot-binding in Imperial China: Women as Hapless Victims or Active Agents?

Abstract

My project is to develop a series of online visual fiction games in Chinese, presenting a diversified foot-binding experience of women in the middle and late imperial China (960-1912), and thereby complicating game players’ understanding of large concepts such as gender, modernity, and free will. The games are intended to serve a community of Chinese players who are not interested in learning history from books, and who find the premodern era distant, alien, and unrelatable. There are three major goals, namely, to reject the popular and simplistic stereotype of ancient Chinese women as hapless victims of their men’s morbid taste, to popularize the studies of history and archaeology through a quasi-immersive gaming experience, and to relate the topic of foot-binding to modern social phenomena and offer my own critiques.