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OuterIslands Online
2020, 2023
Livestream of MapleStory (Southeast Asian server)
The South Korean online game MapleStory (2003–present) holds a multitude of worlds within worlds. While its 2D pixel art, time-consuming gameplay, and anime-inspired graphics are now gazed upon with nostalgia, the videogame still embodies realms of role-playing fantasy, digital kinship, and flows of currency — virtual and otherwise — for many millennial youth growing up in the 2000s. Launched in 2005, MapleStory’s Southeast Asian server (known as MapleSEA) features Singapore and Malaysia-themed locations populated by black slime enemies.
Yamin’s exploration of MapleSEA, OuterIslands Online, borrows its name from the shifting meaning of the term Nusantara. Through the question of a “Southeast Asian” online game server that excludes most other Southeast Asian territories, the livestream considers the dissolution of essentialist ideas about Southeast Asia as regional construct. OuterIslands Online complicates static regional boundaries by inhabiting the sticky viscosities of digital worlds as realms for alternate imaginations of place and time.
2020 iteration: pulausomething.space
2023 iteration: opensystems.sg/programmes/broadcasts