“Block the Spawn Point”: Play and Games in the Hong Kong 2019 Pro-democracy Protests

The Hong Kong 2019 anti-government protests leveraged the potential of digital games in an unprecedented breadth. Play and games were employed to gain visibility, create a sense of belonging, and to explain wearing topics through a common language among young people. Grassroot contributions and linking of immediate political events with young people’s digital entertainment interests illustrates a new way of appropriating game and play structures, logics, and discourses during societal crises (Sezen and Sezen 2016). This provides strong support to the idea that play can take place “everywhere”, as the DiGRA 2020 conference theme suggests. Our aim is to document and categorise (see Table 1) this innovative and wide-ranging utilization of games in a protest.