Inhabiting the Asiatic

This roundtable opens part 4 of the collection, “Inhabiting the Asiatic,” which responds to many of the previous sections’ critiques by considering how players and game makers inhabit Asiatic medias to transform, parody, and queer the traditional and imperial conventions of games and dominant gaming cultures. It features the designers Robert Yang (creator of Radiator 2), Dietrich Squinkifer (Squinky, creator of Dominique Pamplemousse), Rachel Li (creator of Hot Pot for One), and Marina Ayano Kittaka (cocreator of Even the Ocean). These thinkers reflect on games as opportunities to simulate, or alternately render “unplayable,” experiences of disorientation, alienation, and marginalization, especially in regard to racial, queer, and trans elements of play. The game makers thus ask how games, in giving virtual proximity to Asia, can also allow new and critical ways of reinhabiting Asianness.

Chapter 10 examines the conflation between “Chineseness” and “cheating” as a phenomenon in battle royale shooters such as PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Apex Legends. Drawing from player-generated textual and media sources on Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube, the author traces this racial logic across ludic and sociohistorical contexts. The case of Chinese cheaters illustrates what the author terms “procedural racism,” racial meaning that forms when technical operations of software misuse and malfunction converge with cultural signifiers of invasion. Mobilizing cheating as an analytic, the chapter argues that video game hacking functions as an “Asiatic” procedure that marks the virtual borders of fair play for global server-based online multiplayer shooter games.