Gaming Orientalism

The first of five roundtables of four game makers each, this roundtable seeks to understand the textured, global understandings of race depicted in games. The eclectic roundtable features Minh Le, the creator of Counter-Strike; the games writer Matthew Seiji Burns; the fighting game champion Patrick Miller; and the indie game maker Emperatriz Ung. The discussion asks how games, despite their lack of Asian American representation, operate as hybrid Asian/American aesthetic and mechanical products that allow Asian Americans themselves to feel at home in gaming. This roundtable opens the collection’s part 1, “Gaming Orientalism,” by enhancing and expanding the frameworks of Asian American studies and game studies to produce new theoretical variations.

Chapter 1 weaves together close playing, theory, memoir, and choose-your-own-adventure to analyze the cultural and gamic stereotypes and tropes of Asian bodies, identities, and representation in video games, analog games, and other media. It imagines and interrogates what the centering of Asian/American identities and experiences offers to the study, consuming, and playing of games, and it reveals the ludic, representational, personal, and political ramifications of “gaming while Asian.”