Single-channel digital video / PAL 4:3 / b & w + color / 2005 / 26 minutes Banging doors can be highly symbolic narrative objects – or are they simply a mechanical measure, or just a slip of tongue?Door Game is a narrative game playing with the found footage of a number of family ethics melodramas from HK Cantonese cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. By re-assembling loose fragments into some kind of coherent structures, I reveal the hidden logic of the genre, exposing the repetitive elements. Through story-creation, my critique of the gender-biased, formulaic quality inherent to Cantonese melodramas evolves. I want to expose the arbitrariness of pathos and ethos in the Cantonese melodramatic tradition, especially to point out how narrative logic turns open options into moral necessity, and how a particular form of morality is turned into absolute truth via plotting…Door Game comprises of three episodes: “Door Drama: please enter,” “(Short-)Circuiting Melodrama” and “Trap Doors.” From one to the next, the narrative function of sight and sound in Door Game diminishes. Images and sounds become more and more pure signs and tokens of shared story-telling practices, whereas the expressive and narrative function of the written text grows. Towards the end, text and noise take over images, and critique overrides narration.The 3-episode found-footage exercise is an artistic realization of what Salen and Zimmerman say about “games” in Rules of Play, “To play a game is to rely on and interact with the representations the game generates… Games can represent. Games are representations.” (p. 364)