Mobilizing Machines

This roundtable opens part 5 of the collection, “Mobilizing Machines,” by exploring how Asia and America are separated in games through implicit political and historical narratives rooted in militarism, tech, and artistry. The roundtable designers discuss the social and political impacts of games centered on geopolitical and racialized frictions, especially in local acts of protest and community-building. It features Mike Ren Yi (creator of Yellowface), Melos Han-Tani (creator of All Our Asias), Yuxin Gao (creator of Out for Delivery), and Pamela Punzalan (creator of Asian Acceptance). Conducted over Zoom in the spring of 2021, during a global pandemic, the roundtable considers how the playful space of games has provided opportunities to reflect on the increasingly serious (and increasingly anti-Asian) world punctuated by unexpected moments of connection and community. These thinkers thus attempt to catalogue the ways that games have sought not only to understand our world but also to make new worlds.

Chapter 13 develops a brief historical overview of the development of the Black nerd (Blerd) as an identity during the last twenty years. Using the author’s own firsthand experience as a Blerd born and raised in New York City as a framework, this essay examines New York City’s fighting-game community (FGC) as it was nurtured by the physical space of Manhattan’s Chinatown Fair Arcade and, after its shuttering, the Next Level arcade in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, as well as the NYC-based Twitch channel “Team Spooky.” The chapter ultimately argues that a specific brand of the Blerd as an identity was formed by the combination of New York City’s local hip-hop culture and the Japanese otaku as a consumer of video games and anime.