Choose Your Mothership
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Published:April 2024
This roundtable opens part 2 of the collection, “Playable Bodies,” by following the first section of theoretical framing with a focus on queered experiences of bodies in video games, game making, and the processes of manufacture. The roundtable features the game makers Naomi Clark (creator of Consentacle), Sisi Jiang (creator of LIONKILLER), Domini Gee (creator of Camera Anima), and Toby Do (creator of Grass Mud Horse), who discuss racial representation in games from the perspective of the North American industry, noting how pernicious racist stereotypes of Asians as “below-the-line” rather than “creative” workers get exacerbated by racist presumptions of Asian American designers’ perpetual foreignness and their connection to a monolithic Asian “mothership.” The discussion thus considers how bodies appear in games and games discourses as geopolitical entities for which the expectation is translation and return.