When the World Is Your Enemy, Play a Game

When Jing Wong beckons a journalist into his studio at the Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre, it feels like that scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory when the children who have won a golden ticket meet Gene Wilder at the factory gates: there’s surprise in the air and something like Wonka’s “world of pure imagination” just over his shoulder.

Wong is setting up to host a group of Chinese University of Hong Kong students who will play a card game he has created to teach them… anthropology. Spend time with this 44-year-old polymath, and that will no longer seem peculiar. Wong’s résumé includes acting and directing, fashion design, gigging Clockenflap as an indie-rock musician, and lately, PhD studies in creative media. If there was a Pinterest board for his studio — chockablock with posters of his previous shows, gnomic drawings, a wooden bar, candelabra and black curtains — it could be a mid-century murder mystery. The backbar holds no booze either, just tabletop role-playing games, shelves and shelves of them: Tyrants of the Underdark, 7 Wonders, Everdell, Unsettled, Blood Rage, Terraforming Mars…

Wong doesn’t identify as a gamer, but a certain “interactive, live-action world-building simulation” that he created last March at Freespace argues differently. When the World is Your Enemy harnesses audiences to save human civilisation from a capricious pantheon of gods. Like Wong’s studio, the vibe is maximalist: actors play cyberpunked Greek and Norse deities while video screens carry the humans’ labours interspersed with interviews and commentary. The teams’ odds of success are analysed and displayed in real time and there are breaks for puppet theatre, poetry and music; Wong calls these the “abstract bits.” All of this is shot through with enough side-eyed tropes from mythology, TV commercials, game shows, war propaganda and broadcast news to choke a Hydra. Wong says he was going for something “epic and very manga.” It can feel like Homer wandered into a Fox studio while placing a bet on FanDuel. By popular demand, the show is getting a supersized reboot for more players in September and October.

Getting at what this all means — the “meat” in tabletop role-playing (TTRPG) parlance — takes a long discussion, during which Wong and Adrian Au, the show’s game master/emcee, casually drop gamer terms like “thunder smite” and “loot” and debate the virtues of Eurogames versus “Ameritrash” — game styles relying on strategy or luck, respectively — with no self-consciousness whatsoever. The pair met when Wong, who was playing board games five days a week, six to eight hours a day during the Covid-19 pandemic, discovered Au’s “seriously cool” Dungeons & Dragons Facebook page and begged to join. Au, a concert producer with a straitlaced look that says he does not suffer upstarts, grimaces at the memory before conceding that Wong’s cred as a musician eventually got him in.

A big experiment

When the World… is Wong’s baby though: an experiment for his PhD in how to create interactive theatre experiences using game rule mechanics. A classic board game like Monopoly tends to be rules-driven and low on personal investment: roll the dice, advance along the board, buy property, etc. Live-action role-play games (LARP), on the other hand — think historical re-enactments or murder mysteries, the latter of which are insanely popular in China at the moment and have sparked a subculture known as jubensha — see players dressing as characters and making many individual decisions, even if the story’s arc is already determined. Wong is interested in creating something new that could occupy “a sweet spot where mental agency and tangible, physical agency overlap,” he says, using both game rules and a narrative and where, he hopes, “anything could happen.”

And so, When the World… invites us into a reality TV competition entitled “Late Night on Mount Olympus!” Ticket-buyers must participate as either Humans or Gods. The former are tasked with forming teams and choosing homelands to defend, then are incentivised to amass resources, infrastructure and diplomatic alliances to build and consolidate power. While they are at work, the Gods — not to be confused with the actor-deities who are running the show — are closely following the action and sticking their divine fingers in its grinding wheels, whether by bestowing gifts on preferred teams or shifting the odds in their favour. It doesn’t take a degree in Greek classics to know where this is leading; war is the inevitable outcome, but who will win?

Even after running this experiment for two years — the show has seen more iterations than they care to admit, including one so complex they had to abandon it — the results never fail to surprise them. This is literally by design. While there is always uncertainty in gaming, Au says, “It depends where you want to put it.” And in the Eurogame vs Ameritrash debate, he is partial to the latter: “I like to introduce a lot of luck because that’s the wow factor when it comes to game designing.”

Wong’s research, meanwhile, “is focusing on the balance of control and agency,” he says in his rapid-fire delivery that sounds like a voice memo played at 1.5x speed. “One of my findings, which I find really fascinating, is that it’s the rules that inspire action because they kind of focus people’s intent.” We’re talking in laymen’s terms, of course; “game dev” is a byzantine enterprise of mechanics, loops, random inputs and outputs, builds, playstyles, min/max stats and more, ad infinitum. Au patiently explains that he just wanted “a different experience every different show,” which meant building a game that depends on audience dynamics. So when one team beats another, it isn’t necessarily luck, he says; there are human variables like skill and cunning that individuals bring and that the game cannot predict.

As game master, Au is responsible for everything that happens during the show’s three-hour running time: he has the final say in conflicts and must monitor and sometimes guide whatever is going down at any moment. Since he designed the game to allow for so much unpredictability, that’s a big job that requires lightning-quick adjustments to handle unforeseen situations. Case in point: while the teams usually end up waging war against each other, on one occasion the humans joined forces to overthrow the gods and won (full disclosure: this writer was on the team responsible for the mutiny). When that happened, Au had to quickly improvise a conclusion. Not for nothing is his character Loki, the Norse god of mischief. Au’s quick reflexes and sang froid are why, Wong says, he had to cast him as his game master. For his part, Au admits his role can be exhausting. “I lose a lot of weight during the show,” he confesses while Wong continues to gush over him.

Materialising Wong’s vision took an army, too: he turned to coaches, designers of all stripes and consultants in philosophy, history and architecture. He and Au even made a research trip to Gen Con, the mecca of tabletop gaming held annually in Indianapolis, where hundreds of games run simultaneously.

Big business

Side note: gone are the days when D&D was the sport of lonely middle school nerds; the TTRPG industry is valued at about US$2.3 billion and is projected to keep growing. Hong Kong wants a piece of that action: InvestHK points prospective companies towards a number of funding opportunities and incubation programmes, including the Game Enhancement and Promotion Scheme, which is sponsored by the Cultural and Creative Industries Development Agency and organised by the Hong Kong Digital Entertainment Association. To whet the public’s appetite, the current The Power of Play exhibition at City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK), where Wong is studying, surveys different kinds of games and explores their cultural impact. The exhibition is curated by Espen Aarseth, one of the world’s foremost experts in game studies who was recently lured by CityUHK to serve as chair professor of game studies and dean of the School of Creative Media: quite a flex for Hong Kong’s newest creative industry.

Wong also enlisted Cheng Ho-yin, with whom he shares a passion for Through the Ages, a civilisation-building strategy board game that focuses on military, economic and social development, much like When the World does. Cheng is a professional game designer especially versed in megagames, which combine elements of board games, role-playing, LARP and wargames and typically involve dozens of players over the course of a day. Au reflects that the three designers came to form “a very interesting trifecta”: whereas Cheng is a strategy guy, Au advocated for luck and drew ideas from video games, leaving Wong to arbitrate. Listening to this, Wong opines that The Legend of Zelda, Nintendo’s long-running game series, is “still amazing.”

It almost feels like an ironic flourish when Wong reveals that his favourite LARP character is a Bard: a sort of minstrel who uses story and music to entertain team members and influence the mood of the game. Wong has been playing some version of that persona in most of his performances. This is most obvious in his career as a singer-songwriter of what he calls “book rock,” but it’s a strong thread in his theatre projects too. These include a theatre concert, A Spy in the House of Love (2018), a tap dance musical, The Drifters (2021) and a murder mystery parody, A Joyful Christmas on Doughnut Island (2024). Wong performs in these as a struggling artist seeking recognition and understanding while indulging his insecurities; he encourages audiences to give him immediate feedback on the shows, even if that means pelting him with light projectiles that he supplies. “A bard really allows me to interact with people a lot,” he says, using uncharacteristic understatement.

After studying theatre directing and design in London and launching a fashion brand there with his sister, he came back to Hong Kong looking for somewhere new to direct his boundless imagination, and he thinks he has found it. “I want to build a community that’s interested in this kind of format,” he explains of his move into interactive theatre. “So I have to keep on finding interesting games and designers to create events here so that people will follow.” Au agrees: “Nowadays, [gaming] is all about being in the community more. Having a more healthy community is the start.”

Maybe that’s also why When the World feels the teensiest bit like one of those psychology experiments studying human behaviour from behind a one-way mirror; make no mistake, Wong is watching us intently for his thesis. He thinks it’s the perfect space to be in right now, especially in Hong Kong. “Being able to stay in the business and doing my dream projects and focusing just on this project is a super luxury. I don’t think I can do that anywhere else in the world, actually.”

Let the games begin.

When the World Is Your Enemy runs from 25 September to 4 October 2026 at Freespace. Check our What’s On page  for more details.

All photos by Cheung Tse Kin & Lester Leung; courtesy of West Kowloon Cultural District Authority.