Told to evacuate, Sleeping Dogs crowds panic instead

In 1989, the British government drafted a contingency plan to evacuate millions of people from Hong Kong before the 1997 handover. Officials called it the Armageddon Scenario; it was never enacted, and the files stayed sealed until 2025. Wai-Keung Hui has now staged it in the one Hong Kong that will still take direction: the city inside Sleeping Dogs, where the Hong Kong-born, Taiwan-based artist reprograms the game's crowds to drop what they are doing and leave.

The politics of Awakening Armageddon Plan live in a translation error. The engine has no routine for an orderly evacuation, so the order passes through the only crowd behaviors a crime game owns, pursuit and panic, and the streets fill with people running, jostling and screaming from a threat that is never on screen. Hui's earlier pass at the archive, Sleeping Armageddon Plan, told the story as narrative at the Milan Machinima Festival in March. The new version hands the document to the system itself, which generates variation after variation of mass flight, a bureaucratic what-if run as a simulation that can only express fear.

The 12-minute machinima streams free as VRAL #138 through Oct. 15, per the festival's announcement. Hui holds an MFA from City University of Hong Kong's School of Creative Media and has shown at Tokyo Arts and Space and Chicago's VGA Gallery.

VRAL has become a reliable place to watch artists hold game engines to account. In August we covered Kara Güt reading a dead PS3 like an excavation site in the same series. Hui's film belongs beside it: both treat the machine's limits, what it cannot say or save, as the text.