The year is 2029, and you wake up one morning living in a community called Hope, a dystopian dictatorship. “Everyone here wears the same outfit, lives the same repetitive routine, and is happy … For many, Hope is their entire universe. They are uninterested in the outside world. However, you are different—you have the ability to choose.” This is how you are introduced to the game Name of the Will on Kickstarter.
A 2D indie game by Zeitgeist Studio, Name of the Will is being developed by a team of diasporic Hong Kongers based out of New York. They are at once video game developers and impassioned supporters of the pro-democracy protests that engulfed their home city in 2019. As mysterious events begin to unfold, the player must navigate Hope by completing missions and puzzles to “collect intelligence” in a community where anyone could be a snitch and one wrong decision could trigger deep-running consequences. Your aim is to eventually figure out the truth about Hope and how you got there.
The developers started working on the game in late 2019 and expect to publish the full game later this year. Their aim is to help keep their home city’s spirit of freedom, dissent, and democracy alive in a permanent way—even now, as it has come under siege with the imposition of a new national security law (NSL). The pro-democracy protests may have been crushed, but the city’s spirit lives on—if not in the streets then on gaming platforms.
The law, which was imposed unilaterally by mainland China’s central government in July 2020, criminalizes most forms of dissent. This means that simply playing Name of the Will could be against the law. Though the NSL only has jurisdiction in Hong Kong, it can technically be applied to anyone, anywhere—meaning that the Zeitgeist team could be in the line of fire too.
The protests were initially triggered when the government introduced a bill that would allow suspected criminals in Hong Kong to be extradited to mainland China for prosecution, where the justice system is much less transparent. The protests quickly evolved into a fight against encroaching influence from the central government on Hong Kong in general—and in support of a more democratic and free system. At their peak, it is estimated that 2 million people took to the streets to protest against the government.
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If Name of the Will’s story sounds Orwellian, that’s because it is. Inspired by George Orwell’s classic novels like Animal Farm and 1984, the developers hope to emphasize the urgency of movements like that in Hong Kong. Specifically, the developers thought that Animal Farm’s use of animals as metaphors to recount the story of the Russian Revolution was clever and made the complex history easier to comprehend. In 1984, the dystopian society is under mass surveillance and information control, ensuring conformity by the population. This draws some parallels to where Hong Kong seems to be headed.
By creating a dystopian universe that is supposed to resemble life under a dictatorship in the near future—not just in China, but anywhere—the game serves as a warning to the world: Here’s what happens when people don’t stand up to authoritarian regimes. But it is also a way of preserving the memory of the protests in Hong Kong. There is concern that the government is trying to spin the narrative, in a direction the developers believe doesn’t do justice to the events that unfolded.
