The Crumbs of Our Representation
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Published:April 2024
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.