{"http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.14288\/1.0441268":{"http:\/\/vivoweb.org\/ontology\/core#departmentOrSchool":[{"value":"Arts, Faculty of","type":"literal","lang":"en"},{"value":"Non UBC","type":"literal","lang":"en"},{"value":"Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, Institute for","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"http:\/\/www.europeana.eu\/schemas\/edm\/dataProvider":[{"value":"DSpace","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"https:\/\/open.library.ubc.ca\/terms#identifierCitation":[{"value":"Patterson, C. B., & Fickle, T. (2024). Made in Asia\/America : why video games were never (really) about us. Duke University Press.","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"http:\/\/purl.org\/dc\/terms\/creator":[{"value":"Patterson, Christopher B.","type":"literal","lang":"en"},{"value":"Fickle, Tara","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"http:\/\/purl.org\/dc\/terms\/issued":[{"value":"2024-04-10T18:28:23Z","type":"literal","lang":"en"},{"value":"2024","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"http:\/\/purl.org\/dc\/terms\/description":[{"value":"The contributors to \"Made in Asia\/America\" explore the historical entanglements of video games, Asia, and America, showing how examining games offer new ways of imagining empire, race, and coalition.","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"http:\/\/www.europeana.eu\/schemas\/edm\/aggregatedCHO":[{"value":"https:\/\/circle.library.ubc.ca\/rest\/handle\/2429\/87734?expand=metadata","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2009\/08\/skos-reference\/skos.html#note":[{"value":"Made in Asia\/AmericaDuke University PressDurham and London 2024Power Play: Games, Politics, CultureA series edited by TreaAndrea\u00a0M. Russworm and Jennifer MalkowskiWhy Video Games   Were Never ( Really)  about UsMade  in Asia\/AmericaEdited by Christopher\u00a0B. Patterson  and Tara Fickle \u00a9 2024 Duke University PressThis work is licensed  under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International License,  available at https:\/\/ creativecommons . org \/ licenses \/ by - nc - nd \/ 4 . 0 \/ .Printed in the United States of Amer i ca on acid- free paper \u221eProj ect Editor: Ihsan TaylorDesigned by Aimee C. HarrisonTypeset in Untitled Serif and DT Getai Grotesk Display  by Westchester Publishing ServicesLibrary of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication DataNames: Patterson, Christopher B., editor. | Fickle, Tara, editor.Title: Made in Asia\/America : why video games were never (really) about us \/ edited by Christopher B. Patterson and Tara Fickle.Other titles: Power play (Duke University Press)Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2024. | Series: Power play | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2023033376 (print)LCCN 2023033377 (ebook)ISBN 9781478030263 (paperback)ISBN 9781478026037 (hardcover)ISBN 9781478059264 (ebook)ISBN 9781478093961 (ebook other)Subjects: LCSH: Asian Americans in popular culture. | Asian Americans and mass media. | Video games\u2014Social aspects. |  Video gamers. | Racism in popular culture. | BISAC: SOCIAL  SCIENCE \/ Ethnic Studies \/ American \/ Asian American & Pacific Islander Studies | GAMES & ACTIVITIES \/ Video & MobileClassification: LCC E184.A75 M33 2024 (print) | LCC E184.A75 (ebook) | ddC 794.8\/452995073\u2014dc23\/eng\/20231025LC record available at https:\/\/lccn.loc.gov\/2023033376LC ebook record available at https:\/\/lccn.loc.gov\/2023033377Cover art: Christian Kealoha Miller, still from Neofeud 2.  Silver Spook Games, 2024. Courtesy of the designer.Open access support provided by the University of British  Columbia Open Access Fund for Humanities and Social Sciences Research and the Office of the Vice-President, Research and  Innovation, the University of Oregon, and the Oregon Humanities Center. In loving memory of  Y- Dang Troeung (1980\u20132022).  You  were my summoner,  my familiar, my collaborator,  my sweet- teaser. Thank you  for always playing along.\u2014 ChrisTo the players and the workers,  the spoilsports and the lurkers.  Yes, that\u2019s you.\u2014 TaraThis page intentionally left blankContentsxi Acknowl edgments1 IntroductionAsia \/ Games \\ Amer i caTArA fICkLE ANd CHrISTOpHEr\u00a0B. pATTErSONPart 1 Gaming Orientalism27 Designer Roundtable #1 Mixed ConnectionsEMPERATRIZ UNG, PATRICK MILLER,  MINH LE, AND MATTHEW SEIJI BURNS35 1  Gaming while AsianEdMONd\u00a0y. CHANG52 2  The Asiatic and the Anti- Asian PandemicOn Paradise KillerCHrISTOpHEr\u00a0B. pATTErSON66 3  Asian, AdjacentUtopian Longing and Model Minority Mediation in Disco ElysiumTAkEO rIVErAviii  ContentsPart 2 Playable Bodies89 Designer Roundtable #2Choose Your MothershipSISI JIANG, DOMINI GEE, TOBY \u0110\u1ed6, AND NAOMI CLARK99 4  Playable DeniabilityBiracial Repre sen ta tion and the Politics of Play in Metal Gear SolidkEITA MOOrE115 5  Designing the Global BodyJapan\u2019s Postwar Modernity in Death StrandingyASHENG SHE132 6  The Trophy Called \u201cAsian Hands\u201dOn the Mythical Proficiency of Asian GamersprABHASH rANjAN TrIpATHyPart 3 Localizing Empire149 Designer Roundtable #3De- Cultural Imitation GamesJOE YIZHOU XU, LIEN\u00a0B. TRAN, CHRISTIAN KEALOHA MILLER, AND PARALUMAN (LUNA) JAVIER159 7  Colonial Moments in  Japanese Video GamesA Multidirectional PerspectiverACHAEL HuTCHINSON176 8  The Video Game Version of the Indian SubcontinentThe Exotic and the ColonizedSOuVIk MukHErjEE190 9  High- Tech Orientalism in PlayPerforming South Koreanness in EsportsGErALd VOOrHEES ANd MATTHEw juNGSuk HOwArd Contents ixPart 4 Inhabiting the Asiatic207 Designer Roundtable #4The Crumbs of Our Repre sen ta tionROBERT YANG, DIETRICH SQUINKIFER (SQUINKY),  RACHEL LI, AND MARINA AYANO KITTAKA217 10  Chinese\/CheatingProcedural Racism in  Battle Royale ShootersHuAN HE232 11  Romancing the Night AwayQueering Animate Hierarchies in Hatoful  Boyfriend and TusksMIyOkO CONLEy250 12  The Fujoshi Trophy and Ridiculously Hot MenOtome Games and Postfeminist SensibilitiesSArAH CHrISTINA GANzONPart 5 Mobilizing Machines269 Designer Roundtable #5How Do We Talk about  Things That Are Happening  without Talking about  Things That Are Happening?MIKE REN YI, PAMELA PUNZALAN, MELOS HAN- TANI, AND YUXIN GAO277 13  Hip- Hop and Fighting GamesLocating the Blerd between New York and JapanANTHONy dOMINGuEz290 14  \u201cThis Is What We Do\u201dHong Kong Protests in Animal Crossing: New HorizonsHANEuL LEE307 CodaRole \/ Play \\ RaceCHrISTOpHEr\u00a0B. pATTErSON ANd TArA fICkLEx  Contents319 Bibliography349 Contributors353 IndexAcknowl edgmentsThe art of collaboration did not come naturally for  either of us. We  were kids who preferred to play by ourselves; we are adults who prefer to write and read with only the com pany of our selves. The energy and willingness to make this collection came not from us but from the many collaborators, contributors, editors, and players who guided us along the way.\/ There are several thinkers and editors whose guidance was pivotal to this proj ect. Thank you to Bo Ruberg, LeiLani Nishime, Lily Wong, Petrus Liu, Vernadette Vicu\u00f1a Gonzalez, Joseph Jonghyun Jeon, Betsy Huang, Amanda Phillips, Soraya Murray, TreaAndrea Russworm, and Jen Malkowski. Thank you to Ed Chang, Robert Yang, Naomi Clark, Melos Han- Tani, Marina Kit-taka, and Christian Kealoha Miller, whose voices appear in this book but whose roles often blended with ours as  organizers and curators. Thank you to Duke University Press and Courtney Berger, who shepherded this work and gave much- needed encouragement, as well as Eric Zinner at New York Univer-sity Press, who suggested the manuscript\u2019s title. Thank you to the University of British Columbia Library and Research offices, and the Oregon Humanities Center, for funding this book\u2019s Open Access initiative, so that readers around the globe could (legally) download it. Thank you to the anonymous reviewers who read it so generously from the beginning.\/xii  Acknowl edgmentsTara would like to thank, in addition to  those above, interlocutors who have sustained and supported this proj ect in vari ous forms since its inception: Jon Abel, Tina Chen, Se Young Kim, Keita Moore, and Brendan O\u2019Kelly. She would also like to thank her  daughter Mimi, who since her own inception has taught Tara more about play than she could have  imagined.\/Chris would like to thank his Vancouver squad: Christine Kim, Danielle Wong, Kim Bain, Mila Zuo, Ayasha Guerin, Ulrike Z\u00f6llner, David Chariandy, and all the \u201c bubbles\u201d who have been  there for him and his  family. Thank you to his  family\u2014 the Guillermos, the Pattersons, and the Troeungs, especially Dion, Cameron, Chanel, Jacob, Heung, and Yok. Thank you most of all to his departed wife, Y- Dang, and their son, Kai.\/Though it might seem redundant, we must also thank all our contributors to this book, whose generosity, patience, and works gave us desperately needed injections of hope and beauty. Many of you  were our mentors, our guides, our sages. The opportunity to create a book with your names, your personalities, and your ideas has been a true gift.\/And fi nally, we must thank each other, Tara and Chris. This book was made in times of  great challenge for both of us. We are both the person who called the other believing our worlds  were crashing, and that we would leave the proj ect in the safe and capable hands of the other. And we are both the person who gave all we could, who took on more of the work, who patiently waited for the other to recover. From one of  these  people to the other: Thank you for being exactly what we needed, a collaborator and a companion.Tara FickleChristopher\u00a0B. PattersonIntroductionAsia \/ Games \\ Amer i caIn the opening sketch of Saturday Night Live on October\u00a025, 2019, host and musical guest Chance the Rapper reprised his role as \u201cLaz,\u201d a bas-ketball reporter asked to cover unfamiliar sports: in this case, a video game tournament.1 The sketch finds Laz baffled by the League of Legends esport he witnesses, having mistakenly assumed it \u201cwas  going to be a basketball game with NBA legends. This is . . . not that\u201d (figure I.1). The SNL audience, too, is meant to share Laz\u2019s disbelief not only that playing video games can be considered a sport but also that anyone would actually want to watch and report on it. Nearly breaking character and erupting into laughter, Laz quips, \u201cI did not know this was a  thing. I guess esports is what white and Asian kids have been  doing while Black kids  were inventing hip- hop.\u201d  After being surprised by yet another unfamiliar sight\u2014 a \u201cgeeky\u201d Asian esports player (played by Bowen Yang) relentlessly pursued by a group of admiring \u201ce- girls\u201d\u2014 Laz says, his face in shock, \u201cwhat I just saw was so unexpected that my brain went into a Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan mode.\u201d  After 2 Fickle and Pattersona wakeful headshake, he then deadpans: \u201cLazlo Holmes, coming to you live from the upside down.\u201dWe begin with this offbeat anecdote of Black and Asian pop cultural dy-namics as a means of playing with and exploring how game worlds appear to the \u201creal world\u201d\u2014in par tic u lar, through the \u201cupside- down\u201d depiction of Asian male esports stars and the \u201ce- girls\u201d (a sometimes derogatory term aimed at female gamers) who desire them. During a period of escalating Cold War  political tensions and ongoing racisms against Asians as robotic, geeky, economic aggressors, the game world that might see esports players as ob-jects of heterosexual desire certainly can appear upside down (even more upside down in this case, as the actor playing the esports star, Bowen Yang, publicly identifies as gay). Whereas in a previous skit, Laz appeared baffled by the rules of hockey, where he saw \u201clots of white dudes on skates  running into each other at full speed,\u201d  here it is less the game itself that confuses Laz than the nerdiness, bizarreness, and foreignness of the culture surrounding it. Hence, Laz refuses to read the esports players\u2019 names aloud and derides the tournament as \u201cLeague of Legos.\u201dIn seeing esports as an \u201cupside- down\u201d world, the Saturday Night Live sketch humorously encapsulates the tangle of social anx i eties, affects, and  political meanings that video games represent as a medium often re- presented through Asian racializations. The skit\u2019s association of \u201cwhite and Asian kids\u201d with video games and \u201cBlack kids\u201d with \u201cinventing hip- hop\u201d reestablishes the \u201cnormal world\u201d of devalued Asian masculinity (and serves I.1. Chance the Rapper as \u201cLaz,\u201d on Saturday Night Live. Image courtesy of NBC. Introduction 3as a self- referential joke, considering Chance\u2019s own hip- hop success). The skit places front and center the  imagined associations of video games not only as a \u201cwhite and Asian\u201d cultural practice, but as an invention compa-rable to the association of \u201cBlack kids\u201d and the invention of hip- hop, both recent global medias produced through transnational routes\u2014in the case of video games, the transpacific flows between \u201cAsian kids\u201d in Asia and \u201cwhite kids\u201d in Amer i ca. Figured as both \u201cmodel minorities\u201d and \u201cforever foreign-ers,\u201d Asian American racializations trace the tangled flows that video games represent. Chance, a successful rapper himself, reiterates tropes about Asian Americans as \u201chonorary whites,\u201d yet in  doing so he also points to how the emergence of gaming technology and game cultures has been made pos si ble by material and imperial routes across the transpacific, creating hybrid and transnational forms of play, community, and spectatorship. Embedded within his remark is a point about racial privilege\u2014 about which groups have bet-ter widespread access to technology, to computers, to digital literacies, and to the means necessary to play games in the first place.2 As Mary Yu Danico and Linda Trinh Vo have shown, gaming cultures among youth often respond to a lack of  acceptance in \u201creal sports,\u201d pushing Asian American youth to foster alternative communities in pC rooms, arcades, and online forums.3 Though Black youth have remained vis i ble in some esports (particularly in fighting game communities), Chance\u2019s sketch- breaking line, \u201cI guess esports is what white and Asian kids have been  doing while Black kids  were inventing hip- hop,\u201d still delivers an unsettling truth nested within his Black masculine bravado: that the divergent pathways of youthful play route some racialized communities into physical and traditional sports, and  others into the  mental and futuristic realm of esports.If video games are the terrain on which esports is played, then the per-ceived merging of nerdiness with foreignness marks the culture of video games as itself a blend of Asia and Amer i ca, a mixture that invokes at least three racial anx i eties: (1) the economic and affective anx i eties of \u201cyellow peril,\u201d (2) the disgust and disdain for racial mixture, miscegenation, and fetish, and (3) the privilege and power of new media technology as  limited to par tic u lar populations in North Amer i ca, alongside the exploitation and unfreedoms of many who manufacture and program such technology in Asia (an oft- overlooked piece of the puzzle that is likewise absent in the sketch). The world of gaming thus feels upside down not merely  because it turns Asian geeks into desired celebrities, but  because its logics expose and thus threaten the normalized racial bound aries of Asia and Amer i ca. The upside- down world 4 Fickle and Pattersonof games displays the anx i eties that have defined the Asia\/America geopo-liti cal relationship since at least the end of the nineteenth  century: the fear of an Amer i ca invaded by, indebted to, mixed with, and mastered by Asians, whose gamelike advantage has always been depicted through technological and gamelike prowess.Made in Asia\/America is the first edited collection to explore this upside- down world, the way its logics, flows, and intimate relations orbit the social anx i eties and racializations of Asia\/America. By recognizing the vari ous ways that Asia, Amer i ca, and games have been historically entangled, this collection sees games as not merely reflecting or refracting given national racializations but also offering other ways of imagining otherness; hence, games can help us understand the racial and geopo liti cal assumptions that are pre sent when we talk about Asia, Amer i ca, and Asian Amer i ca. This collection\u2019s contributors explore the medium of games through the rich and historical transpacific intimacies that video games trace. If the connection between video games and Asia\/America resembles a world that is upside down, then how might  these relations invert, expose, or exceed our own racial, gendered, and national gravity?We deliberately speak of \u201cAsia\/America\u201d rather than \u201cAsia and Amer i ca\u201d or \u201cAsian Amer i ca,\u201d using the solidus to signal how games slide along ele-ments of Asia, Amer i ca, and Asian Amer i ca through what David Palumbo- Liu calls a \u201cdynamic, unsettled, and inclusive movement.\u201d4 We also strategically use the term to unsettle zero- sum logics of place\u2014 which would insist that any globally circulating product is  either \u201cMade in Asia\u201d or \u201cMade in Amer i ca\u201d\u2014 and to emphasize the dynamic transpacific pro cesses whereby games are \u201cmade\u201d: as a function of  labor and of \u201cnonhuman\u201d resource production, bear-ing the traces of imperial history as pursuits of intellectual creative classes, and as artifacts and conduits of ideology. We also hope to recognize how our worlds are often made through the effects of narrative, history, art, and in-deed, games. While narratives about games can make gaming into a patholo-gizing practice, games themselves make games into practices of interaction and self- reflection. In writing about  performance art, Dorinne Kondo argues that being conscious of \u201cmaking\u201d helps both creators and scholars understand world making (rather than worldbuilding) as acts of transformation that af-fect our material world. For Kondo, world making \u201cis always collaborative, in relation with other  people, abstract forces, objects, and materials that are themselves imbued with potentiality.\u201d5 This emphasis on making rather than building has also become  popular among  independent game designers, who  Introduction 5often prefer to be called \u201cgame makers\u201d rather than game programmers or game designers as a way to highlight the many creative roles of game making and to disrupt \u201cthe production paradigms of the larger game industry.\u201d6 In centering how games are made and where games come from, we ultimately mean to explore how video games make and remake our communities, our selves, and our worlds.Video Games Have Always Been Asian\/AmericanSince the unexpected rise of  Japanese arcade games like Space Invaders (1978), Pac- Man (1980), and Donkey Kong (1981), and the release of the Nin-tendo Entertainment System (which debuted in the United States in 1985), video games have been associated with  Japanese media products rooted in post\u2013 World War II  Japanese aesthetics. Since this time, Asia as a  whole has become the manufacturing home for video game hardware, the primary site of e- waste disposal in the never- ending cycle of innovation and obsolescence, the center of game innovation and the birthplace of most game genres, and the largest reliable resource of consumers.  Today, nearly half of all game players reside in Asia. South  Korea remains the capital of esports, and Asian and Asian North American players are some of its best- known stars. In game development, South and East Asian employees are well represented in certain sectors of Silicon Valley (but not, as we discuss in our designer roundtables, as industry creatives) and in outsourced game production sites across Asia. And, providing the narrative grist of  these material nexuses, games have been cen-tral to the racialization of Asians, as early Chinese immigrants to the United States in the late 1800s  were cast as gambling addicts, and  stereotypes of Asian inscrutability in characters like Charlie Chan or Fu Manchu often pre-sumed that Asians  were cold, calculating, and strategic foreign entities who saw the world itself as a game to be won.The history of Asian\/American racialization offers fundamental but con-tradictory discourses about Asians as si mul ta neously hypercompetitive and unplayful, as \u201ccheaters\u201d and uncreative rule- followers, offering both models and warnings of what games can do. The immediate association of Asian\/Americans with gaming cultures has bred new forms of techno- orientalism, which, as David\u00a0S. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta\u00a0A. Niu point out, involves \u201cimagining Asia and Asians in hypo- or hypertechnological terms in cultural productions and  political discourse.\u201d7 Intertwined with  these paradoxical 6 Fickle and Pattersondiscourses of Asian racializations in and around games are notions of games as gateways for non- Asians to enter a \u201cdigital Asia\u201d whose aesthetics and forms are firmly intertwined with  Japanese gaming industries, thus allow-ing non- Asian subjects to inhabit \u201cAsianness\u201d as a form of virtual identity tourism.8 Indeed, some of the most influential theoretical work in game stud-ies hails from Asian and Asian Americanist scholarship: Lisa Nakamura on \u201cvirtual tourism,\u201d \u201ccybertypes,\u201d and the \u201cgamic model minority\u201d; Wendy Chun on the (white) \u201cconsole cowboy\u201d who exercises \u201ccontrol\u201d over (Asian) media, Koichi Iwabuchi on  Japanese companies seeking to neutralize the \u201ccultural odor\u201d of their exported products (the  process whereby  Japanese games are rendered into both global and local commodities), and more.9 In our previous books, we built off the work of  these scholars to see games as a \u201cludo- orientalist\u201d medium, as Tara wrote, \u201cwherein the design, marketing, and rhe toric of games shape how Asians as well as East- West relations are  imagined,\u201d10 and as an \u201cAsiatic\u201d medium, as Chris wrote, to characterize games for their \u201cforms, spaces, and personages that many players  will find similar to Asia, but that are never exclusively Asian, or are obscured from any other recognizable racial genre.\u201d11 Following the ideas and conversations of our previous work, this collection engages in the  labor, as many collections do, of recognizing and bringing together a transdisciplinary field that has thus far felt scattered and diffuse.Given the proliferation in games of so many racial  stereotypes and fanta-sies, Made in Asia\/America considers  whether the shift to a digital, interactive medium\u2014 the transition from \u201c stereotypes\u201d to \u201ccybertypes,\u201d or \u201corientalism\u201d to \u201ctechno- orientalism\u201d12\u2014 has constituted a novel phenomenon or is simply further evidence of how, as Nakamura pointed out in 1995, racial thinking is easily encoded into digital media through its supposed absence.13 As a \u201cstrat-egy of repre sen ta tional containment,\u201d orientalism clearly continues to shape the production and reception of \u201cexotic\u201d game settings and characters.14 It provides the aesthetic template for combining, as Souvik Mukherjee points out in this collection, the \u201cmisty\u201d with the \u201cmystical,\u201d and a retrograde cast of endlessly recycled samurai, ninjas, and geisha girls alongside a handful of more \u201cempowered\u201d yet hypersexualized female fighters; hordes of non-player character (NpC) \u201cnatives\u201d; and, as Takeo Rivera writes in this col-lection, Asian sidekicks who function as \u201cadjacent\u201d in ways that have long  shaped Asian\/Americans\u2019 perceived proximate or \u201chonorary\u201d relationship to whiteness.15 Introduction 7The association of the digital itself with East Asianness\u2014 what Wendy Chun dubs \u201chigh- tech orientalism\u201d\u2014 has become such a staple of science fiction media that even when Asians are not directly represented, their racial forms remain starkly vis i ble in settings (as in Blade Runner) and in Eastern spiritualist tropes (as in Star Wars). In video games, yellow peril  stereotypes and caricatures peaceably coexist alongside model minority ones and are often pre sent without direct repre sen ta tion of Asian bodies but emerge through settings, mechanics, and game logics.16 So, too, such racializations are often disguised  because they  don\u2019t reference or name Asian bodies, countries, or spaces directly but, rather, reference racial difference through digital objects, aesthetic forms, and Asiatic styles. When they are explic itly pre sent, Asian racializations are further obscured in games as they connote positive rather than negative feelings of  pleasure, fun, silliness, cuteness, and masculine heroism. Yet anti- Asian racialization has often been entangled with positive feelings, what Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan in 1972 famously called \u201crac-ist love,\u201d17 a term that Leslie Bow revisited in 2021 to explore \u201chow the Asian American reduction to type masquerades as racial knowledge while operating as a fetishistic  pleasure.\u201d18 As Bow and many Asian American authors stress, racist love does not necessarily read as anti- Asian (and can even be voiced as \u201cpro- Asian\u201d), yet it still builds from and perpetuates a virulent antagonism against  peoples from Asia through typing, commodifying, fetishizing, and foreignizing. Fi nally, familiar racialized narratives about Asians continue to circulate in discourses about games, including assumptions about Asian bodies\u2019 dexterity and singular affinity for gaming\u2014 what Todd Harper and Tripathy in this volume call the \u201cmyth of Asian Hands.\u201d To state that \u201cvideo games have always been Asian\/American\u201d or that they are \u201cMade in Asia\/America\u201d is not a claim to owner ship but a refusal of the ways games and games discourses have obscured, erased, and distracted from the racializa-tions that have been ever pre sent within them.As we discuss with the twenty Asian\/American game designers in this volume\u2019s roundtables, discourses of game players and designers additionally re- present familiar racialized dynamics of Asian invisibility and hypervis-ibility, wherein, as Dean Chan wrote in 2009, Asian\/American workers in games industries are \u201cboth hyper- visible and out of sight.\u201d19 As has long been the case with the US census and other national data, Asian Americans are simply disregarded as statistically insignificant in most quantitative and qualitative research on video game play patterns.20 However, the few sources 8 Fickle and Pattersonthat do take up Asian American play suggest that Asian Americans are the most likely to play video games, and, like Black and Latin\/x groups, remain overrepresented as players, but underrepresented as designers.21 Many of the Asian\/American designers and artists in this volume speak to the way that white supremacies in the US gaming industry are evidenced through the pre-sumed association of Asians with programming work rather than narrative or other \u201ccreative\u201d forms of design. The designers in this collection, situated in places like Shanghai, Manila, and Hawai\u2018i, provide insights on the mul-tiple ways games are racialized within a range of geopo liti cal contexts, even as they remind us that, on a global scale, only 25\u00a0 percent of the global game market is in North Amer i ca, while about half remains in Asia.22  Whether we are talking about the international or the domestic context, we agree with games scholar Adrienne Shaw that repre sen ta tion (in the liberal multicultur-alist sense of pluralism and diversity) should not be our primary yardstick for evaluating games, as it too often flattens the complex relationships between repre sen ta tion and other  factors that shape audience reception and player motivation.23 Many of our designers, for example, speak to the way that the North American and  European game industry has in recent years sought to appeal to the Cjk (China, Japan, and  Korea) player base through a very dif-fer ent set of racial tropes and narratives that exceed traditional US rubrics for \u201cgood\u201d and \u201cbad\u201d repre sen ta tions.While Asianness has been omnipresent yet obscured in the ways that games are made, innovated on, and played, it has remained nearly invisible in academic game studies discourses. Asianness in games has remained, as Rachael Hutchinson argues in this collection, the elephant in game studies conference rooms, and  those who wish to discuss Asianness in games (as  we\u2019ve experienced in multiple venues) often find themselves the spoilsport of the game studies magic circle. As one Asian American conference attendee put it to us, \u201cAsian fetishes are the social lubricant that has allowed game studies to flourish.\u201d The erasure of Asianness vis- \u00e0- vis eroticization, and the friction it produces, feel especially apropos for an academic field that is absorbed in ideas of  pleasure and play. Similarly, if we understand games as an Asiatic media, they too position players (as well as games scholars) within an analogous position of implicit domination, sovereignty, and agency over techno- orientalized worlds. To win a game can thus follow a similar logic of understanding, analyzing, and theorizing a game: the ability to master an Asian technological space. Given that, as Tan Hoang Nguyen writes, Asian\/American subjects (specifically men) are already culturally relegated to a  Introduction 9\u201cbottom position\u201d in an East\/West hierarchy, the positioning of North Ameri-cans as the playing subjects who desire and extract  pleasure from Asiatic media reinforces the way that games, as Nguyen emphasizes of sexually ex-plicit material more broadly, \u201care instrumental in shaping how we think about what is normal, natu ral, and pos si ble.\u201d24 In game studies, this naturalized\u2014 and desexualized\u2014 intellectual form of subjection is evident when scholars write about games that have gone through laborious pro cesses of translation, localization, and remarketing for North American audiences as if they are simply universal (i.e., Western) products whose historical origins and context are in need of  little more than parenthetical acknowl edgment, or when a par-tic u lar game\u2019s Asia\u2013 North Amer i ca relations are denied as having anything to do with colonialism, orientalism, or other structures of power.The prob lem we trace in this collection is not just that the \u201ccultural odor-lessness\u201d that Iwabuchi identified in  Japanese products has been overwhelm-ingly successful in \u201cdeodorizing\u201d games of their creative and manufacturing origins, but that game scholars rarely even consider Asian\/American theorists of  popular culture like Iwabuchi, Hiroki Azuma, Chen Kuan- hsing, or Chris-tine Yano as relevant to their studies.25 While this indifference is certainly not exclusive to game studies, it exercises an especially troubling form of epistemic vio lence in a field entrusted with studying video games, an Asi-atic cultural phenomenon that has become a dominating force in reflecting transpacific geopolitics and in shaping Asian\/American racializations.26 In game studies discourses where Asianness has become nearly meaningless and Asian\/American theorists irrelevant, orientalist readings of games fre-quently blur with the orientalism of the games themselves.27 For the writers and designers in this collection, the forms of Asian racializations in games deserve to be seen as complex and dynamic expressions that can reveal the continuous colonial biases and vio lences embedded within North American and  European game audiences. As Souvik Mukherjee writes in this collec-tion, such racializations have been reproduced within specific contexts in Asia\u2014 and at times are even self- orientalized\/internalized as a secondary marketing technique.The ahistorical emptying out of Asianness in many game cultures is in-extricable from the circulation of global capital in a neoliberal age. Yet the point that many of our contributors compellingly drive home is that this absence must be understood also as a racial issue, not epiphenomenal to but constitutive of such flows. As Naoko Shibusawa has argued, including histories of Asian racialization in studies of racial capitalism is crucial for 10 Fickle and Patterson\u201can understanding of US  labor and immigration history, and history of US empire\u2014 particularly the master\u2019s tool of cap i tal ist divide- and- conquer.\u201d28 Similarly, micha c\u00e1rdenas has urged scholars to \u201cdecolonize the digital by understanding the communicative capacities of digital technologies as an outcome of the settler colonial socioeconomic support structure of the United States.\u201d29 Video games have emerged as a power ful node at this intersec-tion between the need to revisit histories of empire in Asia and the need to decolonize the digital. In the next section, we tackle the per sis tent issue of empire, race, and colonialism in game studies, and subsequent attempts to combat it, by noting the looping insularity of the field in the way that video games, masked as they are as commodities made for us (the academic Global North \u201cus,\u201d as well as the \u201cUS\u201d of the United States), are ultimately made and remade through game studies as being about us.Playing with Ourselves: On Game StudiesThe meat of this book was written and edited during the anti- Asian rhe torics of COVId-19, when we  were both engaged in virtual book tours for our previ-ous books on video games, often presenting them together. As we felt the blunt mechanisms of yellow peril discourse through everyday invocations and on  every news source, we also felt its background hum within game studies spaces, as we witnessed scholars engage with media from Asia as if they had been created solely for English- speaking, North American, majority- white audiences. Our attempts to root out  these issues publicly was often met with suspicion and disregard, and the virtual chats during our book talks, on more than one occasion, became spaces of masked ridicule. Difficult as  these en-gagements  were, they also helped us in understanding the presumptions that many games studies scholars bring to what a game studies book is supposed to do: that game studies texts are ultimately about games and how we play them, and that games are exceptional forms of media, so that to do game studies is ultimately not to do literary studies, new media studies, critical ethnic studies, or other disciplinary modes.The protective attitudes we faced during our book talks  were rooted in game studies before video games even came along. The \u201cfounding  fathers\u201d of modern game studies, Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (1872\u20131945) and French sociolo-gist Roger Caillois (1913\u201378), characterized games by naming their bound aries: games  were playful rather than serious; had \u201cno material interest\u201d; and  were  Introduction 11further divided from the social and  political world through a \u201cmagic circle.\u201d30 Similarly, Bernard Suits\u2019s foundational game studies text, The Grasshopper (1978), has been revisited in game studies to define \u201ca game\u201d by naming its negation as erotic play, so that the  pleasures, passions, and desires in games could not be confused with sexual  pleasures and erotic desires.31 In the 1990s and early 2000s, game studies scholars would go even further in the enclosure of games by naming video games as a particularly novel and exceptional media unlike games found in poetry, parlors, stagecraft, and sports (all games that Huizinga and Caillois wrote about). In turn, scholars focusing on the social impacts of games (Lisa Nakamura, Henry Jenkins, and  others)  were over-shadowed by an insular debate within game studies itself, known  today as the narratology\/ludology debate, which centered on the underwhelming binary question \u201cAre video games more narrative (like books, films,  television), or more ludic (like games and sports)?\u201d However, the greatest impact of the nar-ratology\/ludology debates was not in their disagreements about what games are (narratives vs. games), or how to study them (humanities vs. social sci-ences), but in their implicit agreements about the importance of the debates itself: that deciding what video games are is of paramount importance, that games in themselves are exceptional  either  because they give \u201cplayer agency\u201d (says narratology) or  because they offer virtual spaces outside politics and identity (says ludology). Seen as the founding discursive argument of game studies, the narratology\/ludology debate can be characterized as a binary rivalry that calcified the insular inquiries of game studies while also obscuring this insularity through the appearance of competing sides.In the 2010s, game studies began a second life, where its discourses turned  toward a critical cultural studies mode that spotlighted difference in the field while revealing how game studies texts had featured a consistent reinscription of a default whiteness, straightness, and maleness as ideal players, characters, and creative designers.32 Many of  these thinkers\u2019 works became spotlighted during and  after the #GamerGate scandals in 2014, when feminist game journal-ists  were attacked, harassed, and doxed by self- identified gamers in response to a perceived contamination of video games by feminists and other \u201csocial justice warriors.\u201d As Soraya Murray has argued, #GamerGate was a \u201cparadig-matic irruption\u201d of the hidden identity politics within gaming (as the territory of men).33 The afterlife of #GamerGate has, though, for good reason, drawn many game studies discourses further inward in attempts to understand how the toxicity of #GamerGate drew on dominant academic discourses of games as exceptional media outside the \u201cpetty politics\u201d of identity, repre sen ta tion, 12 Fickle and Pattersoncolonialism, and feminism.34 Our previous work has contributed to this con-versation by joining other scholars in focusing on the prob lem(atic)s of the field, and in demonstrating the forms of ahistoricity that the field perpetuates by theorizing play as a universal and transhistorical phenomenon.35At the time of writing, many anthologies and books have made fantastic headway in terms of critical cultural studies (Gaming at the Edge, On Video Games), racial and social justice (Gaming Repre sen ta tion, Woke Gaming), queerness (Queer Game Studies, Video Games Have Always Been Queer), and eco- criticism (Playing Nature). Despite  these boundary- breaking texts, game studies has yet to be recognized as a theoretically generative field that can offer new frameworks for understanding trenchant and urgent issues like the carceral state, refugee migrations, settler colonial logics, or permanent war, and the study of games rarely appears in texts situated in media studies, ethnic studies, or other interdisciplinary fields.36 Though we can partially blame this absence on the stigmatization of games as violent and adolescent objects, we also find that defensive positions and insular debates in games studies have kept the study of video games far more concerned with the game industry and gaming cultures than in understanding the incredible and often unseen impact of games across the globe.37 The fact that the narratology\/ludology debate has been so field- defining for game studies and that nearly all our colleagues outside game studies have never even heard of this debate should be all the impetus we need to reimagine how we study games, why we do it, and who our studies are for.On Practice: InteractionIf game studies is a field itself defined by a medium so closely tied to Asia in its innovations, player base, and manufacturing, then any collection spotlighting  these relations must not only refuse the calls  toward formal,  political, and geo graph i cal bound aries, but, like Kirby sucking in a bad guy, must be able to create something new with  every encounter, must be able to reform and expand, must allow new forms of interaction. In curating and  organizing this collection, we thus sought to answer the inescapable questions \u201cWhat is a video game?\u201d or \u201cWhat is play?\u201d not with universalizing definitions (or what Eve Sedgwick might call \u201cstrong theories\u201d) but through the insistence on an editorial practice that invites interaction. While terms like collaboration and co ali tion are usually associated with building desired outcomes ( political move- Introduction 13ments, communities), we find ourselves attracted to interaction as a curatorial and editorial practice due to its ambiguity and ambivalence concerning exactly what we make together. Like the excitement and hesitancy we might feel when starting up a new video game, interaction as praxis can feel ambigu-ous and ambivalent, creative and curious, voyaging and wayward. As a form of making rather than building, interaction ventures into risk and anarchy rather than preplanned blueprints or algorithms (to use micha c\u00e1rdenas\u2019s sense of algorithmic analysis as a  political artistic practice).38 Put simply, this collection takes up the challenge of no longer using games to write about games but to instead seek out what games make, to explore how game mak-ing is also world making.Our use of interaction is inspired by video games as a form of interactive media that, according to Adrienne Shaw, can stage communal, enjoyable, and even intimate activities that also \u201c[do] not necessitate identification.\u201d39 Interaction is not about seeing  others as  political allies or as tools for a par tic-u lar and timely issue (as useful and impor tant as this is) but about feeling the responsibility of being in relation with  others. In games, interaction is less about the end results and more about the (pedagogical) experience: it is the chime noise we make when we approach another player in Journey; it is the attack we make on a dungeon with three random teammates (any of whom could rush in early or suddenly go afk [away from keyboard]); it is getting cornered by an opponent and not knowing  whether they  will shoot you, spare you, squat you, or break out in dance. It is in  these gamic senses of curious play that we see the interactions of our proj ect as ultimately a crucial form of acting with and on the world. In interaction,  political aims, analytic methods, and key-word definitions are not methodically controlled, but invoke unforeseeable frictions and generate new frameworks for our gathering, thereby inviting multiple publics into the world we make together. As Dorinne Kondo writes of the theater, interactivity can be world making through the copresence of \u201caffecting and being affected by each other,\u201d though it can also lead to the uncertain outcomes of \u201cforming temporary communities\u201d or \u201cexclusion-ary affective vio lence.\u201d40 Through its ambiguity, interactivity challenges the normative approaches of identity, empathy, or deference, which risk, as the poet Solmaz Sharif eloquently puts it, \u201cthe absolute and unhindered continu-ance of what is.\u201d41 Instead, interactivity risks the possibility of change: the strengthening, dismantling, and transitioning into something new.During the four years we worked on this collection (2019\u201323), we sought to practice interaction in our roles as writers, editors, curators, and  organizers. 14 Fickle and PattersonFirst, we wrote the call for papers in a way that refused the insular looping back to well- trodden and often orientalist theorizations of play by asking our potential contributors to explore more relational inquiries, such as:\u00bb  How do games combat facile discussions of racial and other forms of diversity, discourses that are key to justifying and sustaining forms of  inequality that radiate beyond the domestic to the global, and that hence are also questions of empire?\u00bb  How do we make arguments about games that expose imperial networks and build on antiracist proj ects without merely demand-ing more repre sen ta tion\/inclusion from game companies who have historically and continually participated in networks of empire and racialization?\u00bb  How do we see meritocratic myths of gaming as anonymous level playing fields within what C.\u00a0L.\u00a0R. James called the historical bound-aries and lines of colonial and radical sportsmanship?42\u00bb  How might the lines that limn the experimental play of magic circles reframe our understanding of academic (discip)lines, cultural line(age)s, and, of course, color lines?We have anchored  these inquiries through traditions in critical race and ethnic studies that draw attention to racial difference in forms of repre sen-ta tion as well as in the formal resemblances of race, as ludic qualities of racial form,43 or as \u201cAsiatic\u201d and \u201cvirtual other.\u201d44 Indeed, we seek to center Asia\/America in this study not by dividing race in games from the fetishizations of code, algorithm, and platform but by allowing  these ideas to change our work so we can better understand formal, mechanical, and other resemblances of difference at work in games.Second, during our feedback and editorial sessions, we challenged our con-tributors not to follow the conventions of an individual scholarly chapter with long essays that sought to capture a subfield for new readers. Instead, we ad-vocated for short chapters (less than six thousand words) to allow space for a greater diversity of ideas and contexts. We then encouraged contributors to read each other\u2019s work so that chapters built on each other and also provided comparisons to better distinguish their diversity of theoretical standpoints, their positions within academia (as gradu ate students, and as  junior, midcareer, and  senior scholars), their types of game analyses, and their disciplinary con-ventions (almost none of them come from an Asian American studies or game studies department). We also encouraged contributors not to envision their  Introduction 15chapters as necessarily academic in the sense of emphasizing an argument and providing proof for it. Instead, we encouraged playful experimentation and argumentative shifts, yielding essays like Edmond\u00a0Y. Chang\u2019s \u201cGam-ing while Asian\u201d (chapter\u00a01), a chapter that merges academic writing with auto- theory within a \u201cchoose your own adventure\u201d interactive story. We also sought to disrupt our own positions of authority as the collection\u2019s edi-tors by asking for feedback from our contributors for this very introduction, while this collection\u2019s coda was not even planned in the first full draft but was inspired by our readings of the chapters and particularly by roundtable 5. In a sense, our editorial efforts attempted to produce this book as interaction manifest.Third, we sought to disrupt the insularity of game studies by inviting a di-verse array of game makers into the collection who identified as Asian\/North American and as marginalized (as neurodiverse, queer, transgender, or nonbinary; as Indigenous, mixed white, Latinx, and Arab; as lacking for-mal education; as non\u2013 Native  English\u2013 speaking; and as living outside North Amer i ca). We hosted five roundtables of four game makers each, and sought to understand the textured, global understandings of race depicted in many of their games. We conducted  these roundtables over Zoom in the spring of 2021, during a global pandemic, when the playful space of games provided op-portunities to reflect on the increasingly serious (and increasingly anti- Asian) world punctuated by unexpected moments of connection and community, in many cases facilitated by video games. When finished, we de cided not to bunch  these roundtables into a separate section of the book but instead to use them as framing devices to begin each section, as we hoped to break the reader out of a consistent disciplinary context by hearing the experiences of game makers whose own contexts vary widely (Tokyo, New York, Hawai\u2018i, Hong Kong, Toronto, Shanghai, Manila, Houston). The roundtables thus operate less as guided interviews and more as spaces of interactive play, seen by Ian Bogost as a space that \u201cguarantees neither meaningful expression nor meaningful persuasion, but it sets the stage for both.\u201d45 By introducing each set of chapters,  these roundtables blur the lines between guest and host, interviewer and interviewee, researcher and participant, game scholar and game maker (many of our contributors, like us, are both), and set the stage for our understanding of games through interactive conversations among Asian\/American  peoples.Fi nally, we have attempted to practice deep, critical interactions by  organizing and hosting an ongoing panel series at the annual Association 16 Fickle and Pattersonof Asian American Studies conference (AAAS), an enriching critical ethnic studies space that has unfortunately had  little concern for gaming as a medium. In 2018, we hosted the first- ever panel focused on game studies at AAAS, which featured one editor (Chris) alongside three of the contributors to this volume (Takeo Rivera, Miyoko Conley, Edmond Chang). We had a very small audience, yet  those who came expressed gratitude to us for hosting such a rarely explored theme in Asian American studies. We followed this up year  after year, interacting with more scholars featured in this collection (Rachael Hutchinson, Haneul Lee, Huan He, Gerald\u00a0A. Voorhees, Anthony Domin-guez), as well as game makers (Robert Yang, Marina Kittaka). By bringing together  these scholars and game makers year  after year, we  were able to deepen our engagement with them and with each other, offering discussions, feedback, and collaborative plans to create a collection that can span and expand what an edited collection can do. The results  were not only in this col-lection, but in events outside academia, such as the 2021 #StopAsianHateJam Game Jam  organized on itch.io by Chris and the contributors Mike Ren Yi, Pamela Punzalan, and Melos Han Tani.Our decision to build an anthology on the concept of Asian\/American gaming was a daunting endeavor, as we hoped to avoid merely providing a synthesis of the fields of Asian American studies and game studies, but rather to reflect the multiple interests, disciplines, and publics that our contributors bring to this work. Often this meant disagreements about what games are or what they do, or what Asian Americans are or what they do. Together,  these chapters  don\u2019t represent a par tic u lar set of racialized bodies or an \u201cau-then tic\u201d or stable \u201cAsian American gamer\u201d subjectivity, or even a common set of game definitions, analytics, or play practices. Rather, the interactions that form this book reveal what Kandice Chuh might call the necessary trac-ing of pro cesses of racialization, where Asia\/America marks not an identity within the American empowerment empire but a historically contested and dynamic site that can offer vari ous interactive, co ali tional, and collaborative gestures.46 By signaling an unconstrained, nonregulated form of diversity, interaction acknowledges our reliance on  others not as objects of study but as contaminants that change our own views. As Anna Tsing writes, such contamination can signal not death or degradation, but a \u201ctransformation through encounter\u201d that threatens the impulses to remain \u201cself- contained.\u201d47 Chandan Reddy similarly argues that analyses of race can bring a \u201cgenuine openness\u201d to traditional methods of producing knowledge, and can refuse nationalist and institutional racial discourses through an ambiguity that is  Introduction 17also \u201can effect of being contaminated.\u201d48 We thus see interaction as a form of ambiguous contamination that can keep fields like game studies critical, animated, broad, and impactful.Without interaction, discourses tend to become self- contained. Influenced by critical thinkers of race and empire, this book seeks not to close off lanes of identity or borders of nationality, but to leave ourselves open to encounter, to embrace the receptivity of our Asian\/American positions, and to become contaminated by the intimacies, frictions, turbulences, and erotics of work-ing through and beside difference. In other words, rather than attempt to restabilize studies of games with solid ground, this collection embraces the upside- down quirkiness of games that can overturn our everyday categories of race, nation, queerness, and Asia Amer i ca itself.Overview of ChaptersThe experience we call a game is created by the interaction between dif fer ent rules, but the rules themselves  aren\u2019t the game, the interaction is!\u2014 Anna Anthropy, Rise of the Video Game ZinestersOur interactive approach to editing this collection has led us to understand games as contested sites where meanings of Asia and Amer i ca are negotiated and produced, a view that scholars in our anthology develop from the inter-disciplinary foundations of Asian American studies, Asian studies, transpa-cific studies, gender studies, cinema studies, and postcolonial studies. In this gamelike setup, the conventions of  these fields provide the rules that stage our interactions. Each chapter not only considers games and Asia\/America but also pushes at the very bound aries and definitions of both by focusing on how games reimagine otherness through examples of personal relations to games (Chang), Blerd (Black and nerd) cultures (Dominguez), the human- animal ontologies of visual novels (Conley), the biracial repre sen ta tions of empire (Moore), the forms of ludic protests  under pandemic (Lee), and many more.Part 1, \u201cGaming Orientalism,\u201d works to enhance and expand the frame-works of Asian American studies and game studies to produce new theoretical variations, focusing on forms of (techno-)orientalism (Chang), \u201cAsiatic\u201d queerness (Patterson), and \u201cModel Minority Mediation\u201d (Rivera). The sec-tion opens with an eclectic roundtable featuring Minh Le, the creator of 18 Fickle and PattersonCounter- Strike; the games writer Matthew Seiji Burns; the fighting game champion Patrick Miller; and the indie game maker Emperatriz Ung. Our discussion asks how games, despite their lack of Asian American repre sen-ta tion, operate as hybrid Asian\/American aesthetic and mechanical products that allow Asian Americans themselves to feel at home in gaming. In the proceeding chapter, \u201cGaming while Asian,\u201d Edmond Chang revisits  these points through a \u201cchoose your own adventure\u201d style, welcoming the reader to game the chapter itself as a way to \u201cinhabit the pos si ble and imagine the impossible.\u201d Christopher\u00a0B. Patterson\u2019s \u201cThe Asiatic and the Anti- Asian Pandemic: On Paradise Killer\u201d considers the meanings and impacts of his previously coined term \u201cthe Asiatic\u201d during the COVId-19 pandemic, when discourses of Asian  people  were becoming far more serious than playful and anti- Asian vio lence had risen in some contexts to seemingly unpre ce dented levels. The section ends with Takeo Rivera\u2019s \u201cAsian, Adjacent: Utopian Long-ing and Model Minority Mediation in Disco Elysium,\u201d which focuses on the character Kim Kitsuragi, who, as \u201cAsian, adjacent,\u201d does not represent a par tic u lar ethnic background but performs as a \u201cmodel minority superego to a whiteness characterized principally by failure and ruin.\u201dPart 2, \u201cPlayable Bodies,\u201d follows the first section of theoretical fram-ing with a focus on queered experiences of bodies within video games, within game making, and in the pro cesses of manufacture. It begins with a  roundtable that features the game makers Naomi Clark (creator of Consen-tacle), Sisi Jiang (creator of lionkiller), Domini Gee (creator of Camera Anima), and Toby \u0110\u1ed7 (creator of Grass Mud  Horse), who discuss racial repre sen ta tion in games from the perspective of the North American indus-try, noting how pernicious racist  stereotypes of Asians as \u201cbelow- the- line\u201d rather than \u201ccreative\u201d workers get exacerbated by racist presumptions of Asian American designers\u2019 perpetual foreignness and their connection to a monolithic Asian \u201cmothership.\u201d The chapters follow this conversation by considering how bodies appear in games and games discourses as geopo liti cal entities. Keita Moore\u2019s chapter, \u201cPlayable Deniability: Biracial Repre sen ta tion and the Politics of Play in Metal Gear Solid,\u201d considers how the biracialism of Metal Gear Solid\u2019s \u201cSolid Snake\u201d provides an Asian American repre sen-ta tion that blunts critiques of global militarism by depicting Japan as a space entirely set apart \u201cfrom the conflicts of the Cold War and Pax Americana.\u201d Thereafter, Yasheng She\u2019s \u201cDesigning the Global Body: Japan\u2019s Postwar Modernity in Death Stranding,\u201d considers the white body of Sam in the 2019 game Death Stranding as it moves through sublime postapocalyptic (and  Introduction 19ostensibly American) atmospheres, as well as its \u201cfidgety movements\u201d that, through the Asiatic medium of this Japanese- designed game, objectifies the American white body \u201cas a mechanical marvel.\u201d Fi nally, Prabhash Ranjan Tripathy\u2019s \u201cThe Trophy called \u2018Asian Hands\u2019: On the Mythical Proficiency of Asian Gamers\u201d follows the discourse of \u201cAsian hands\u201d as it circulates within fighting game communities as \u201ctrophies, something to be possessed only via defeating,\u201d and as codifying the (white) Western player not as mere \u201chands\u201d but as creative force.Part 3, \u201cLocalizing Empire,\u201d widens the issues of the body to consider space and regional histories, exploring how games, as an entertainment media that emerged during the Cold War,  were made pos si ble by manufac-turing routes that include extractive mining in Africa, pro cessing factories in Malaysia and southern China, and innovations in Japan. The section be-gins with a conversation among designers who work and\/or focus on \u201cnon- American\u201d contexts: Joe Yizhou Xu in Shanghai, Paraluman (Luna) Javier in Manila, Christian Kealoha Miller in Hilo, Hawai\u2018i, and Lien\u00a0B. Tran, who develops games aimed at audiences in the Global South. The chapters that follow ask how games can be reread to reveal how empire, capitalism, and racialization operate in seemingly \u201codorless\u201d or apo liti cal games. Rachael Hutchinson\u2019s \u201cColonial Moments in  Japanese Video Games: A Multidirec-tional Perspective\u201d insists that theories and histories of Japan are crucial to understanding games, not only  because the country is a central producer\/creator but also  because of its \u201cdouble colonial legacy\u201d as a colonial power in Asia and as a neocolony (or a subempire) of the United States  after World War II. Similarly, Souvik Mukherjee\u2019s \u201cThe Video Game Version of the Indian Subcontinent: The Exotic and the Colonized\u201d asks how \u201clocal\u201d South Asian games from India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka have responded to categories of \u201cGlobal South\u201d and \u201cThird World\u201d even as they have gone \u201clargely unheeded in the global discourses on videogames.\u201d Fi nally, Gerald Voorhees and Mat-thew Jungsuk Howard\u2019s \u201cHigh- Tech Orientalism in Play: Performing South Koreanness in Esports\u201d refocuses theories of techno- orientalism from China and Japan to South  Korea to explore how South Korean Asian masculinity has been reconceived as a fetishized object, one that emanates from the neoliberal masculinities of esports.Part 4, \u201cInhabiting the Asiatic,\u201d responds to many of the previous sec-tions\u2019 critiques by considering the ways players and game makers inhabit Asiatic medias to transform, parody, and queer the traditional and imperial conventions of games and dominant gaming cultures. It opens with the game 20 Fickle and Pattersonmakers 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), who reflect on games as opportunities to simulate, or alternately render \u201cunplayable,\u201d experiences of disorientation, alienation, and marginalization, especially in regard to racial, queer, and trans ele ments of play. The chapters that follow continue  these inquiries of proximity to and reinhabitations of Asianness. Huan He\u2019s \u201cChinese\/Cheating: Procedural Racism in  Battle Royale Shooters\u201d traces the racial associations between video game hacking and Chineseness as \u201cpart of a longer sociohistorical legacy of Asiatic hacking.\u201d Rather than reject cheating as a form of play (or nonplay), He considers \u201cChinese cheat-ing\u201d as an analytic to understand how cheaters are figured as players unable \u201cto be contained by the virtual borders of any specific game or genre.\u201d The next two chapters explore the genre of visual novels, which are ineluctably tethered to aesthetics of anime and are read as  Japanese cultural products. Miyoko Conley\u2019s \u201cRomancing the Night Away: Queering Animate Hierarchies in Hatoful Boyfriend and Tusks,\u201d considers English- language dating simula-tions as a parodic form of queer game design to \u201cillustrate how tightly woven race, sexuality, and repre sen ta tions of non- humans are in determining which lives are considered more valuable.\u201d Similarly, Sarah Christina Ganzon\u2019s \u201cThe Fujoshi Trophy and Ridiculously Hot Men: Otome Games and Postfeminist Sensibilities,\u201d focuses on romantic visual novels (otome games) by exploring how their creators and their fandoms repurpose (\u201clocalize,\u201d \u201cdeterritorialize,\u201d or \u201ctranscreate\u201d)  these games to create and contain \u201cpostfeminist sensibili-ties unique to the cultural contexts of their places of origin.\u201dThe final section\u2014 part 5, \u201cMobilizing Machines\u201d\u2014 continues to under-stand the Asia\/America spectrum within its implicit  political and historical separations rooted in histories of militarism, tech, and artistry, and attempts to cata logue the ways that games have not only sought to understand our world, but to make new worlds. The opening roundtable brings together game makers who discuss the social and  political impacts of games centered on par tic u lar geopo liti cal and racialized frictions, especially in local acts of protest and community- building. It features Mike Ren Yi (creator of Yellow Face), Melos Han- Tani (creator of All Our Asias), Yuxin Gao (creator of Out for Delivery), and Pamela Punzalan (creator of Asian  Acceptance). Anthony Dominguez\u2019s \u201cHip- Hop and Fighting Games: Locating the Blerd between New York and Japan\u201d documents the historical rise of Team Spooky, a game stream group who cultivated Blerd (Black and nerd) cultures through community  Introduction 21tournament gatherings of  Japanese fighting games within Manhattan\u2019s  Chinatown Fair Arcade. In so  doing, Team Spooky highlights the synthesis of New York City\u2019s hip- hop culture,  Japanese otaku culture, and the spaces of Chinatown, made pos si ble through \u201cthe fusion of physical and digital spaces.\u201d Fi nally, moving from New York to Hong Kong, Haneul Lee\u2019s \u201c \u2018This Is What We Do\u2019: Hong Kong Protests in Animal Crossing: New Horizons\u201d cata logues the use of the game Animal Crossing: New Horizons by Hong Kong protestors during the 2020 COVId-19 outbreak. As Hong Kong media often portrayed protestors as specters of vio lence, the kawaii styles and group settings of Animal Crossing allowed protestors to reinvent online space \u201cto perform vari ous modes of protest sheltering from real- life clashes with the Hong Kong riot police,\u201d where \u201cantistate activities can exist unsuppressed.\u201d Our coda, \u201cRole \/ Play \\ Race,\u201d concludes the book by speculating on the world- making potentials of games in providing new ways of understanding race\u2014 not just race in games, but in our  everyday. We thus conclude the collection by making a case for the study of games based not on the massive economic potential of the industry or the similarly boundless potential of the medium but on un-derstanding games as an inherently  political site where race, alongside other configurations of difference and power, is made and remade through play.This collection\u2019s conception began with conversations that, like much of our previously published work, focused on the construction of identities like \u201cAsian American\u201d or \u201cgamer\u201d within a ludic logic of \u201cgames of repre sen ta-tion\u201d (following on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and Mark Chiang). In our original call for papers for this collection, we asked writers to show how games could expose the way Asian American identity often names something inessential, rather than a par tic u lar au then tic or stable subject. However, we soon found that this argument was already of no surprise to Asian American game studies scholars or game makers, and merely provided a reliable rule- set for our interactive engagements to produce ever- expansive ideas about how race and identity are not merely revealed by games but are made anew and push the ways we imagine ourselves. Games make such imag-ining pos si ble through the affordances of their  imagined magic circles\u2014 a contested term that for us describes not how games help us escape from \u201creal ity\u201d but, rather, how games help us challenge \u201cthe real\u201d itself as a magic circle where logics of race and space are taken for granted as real. Rather, the real games of race and repre sen ta tion, like the real games of colonization and empire- building (remember that a key stage of British and  Russian empire- building in Asia was referred to as the  Great Game), do not take place only 22 Fickle and Pattersonwhen one is \u201caway from keyboard\u201d; they are embedded in all our practices of interactive play. Thus, too, can \u201cthe real\u201d be transformed through such play practices. Games trace the social and  political anx i eties hidden within our play\u2014 and so allow us to understand, and work to transform, the racializa-tions of our times.Notes 1 Saturday Night Live, \u201cE- Sports Reporter\u2014 SNL.\u201d 2 For more on sports and race, we recommend James, Beyond a Boundary; Guttmann, Games and Empires; and Uperesa, Gridiron Capital. 3 Danico and Vo, \u201c \u2018No Lattes  Here.\u2019 \u201d 4 Palumbo- Liu, Asian\/American, 1. 5 Kondo, Worldmaking, 54. 6 Ruberg, The Queer Games Avant- Garde, 25. 7 Roh, Huang, and Niu, \u201cTechnologizing Orientalism,\u201d 2. Although only one chapter of the 2015 influential Techno- Orientalism anthology focused on games\u2014 Choe and Kim\u2019s influential \u201cNever Stop Playing\u201d\u2014 the editors recog-nized that techno- orientalism was especially resonant in games and other \u201cnew media\u201d where \u201cthe Asian subject is perceived to be, si mul ta neously, producer (as cheapened  labor), designer (as innovators), and fluent consumer (as sub-jects that are \u201cone\u201d with the apparatus)\u201d (14). 8 See Nakamura, \u201cRace in\/for Cyberspace\u201d; and Goto- Jones, \u201cPlaying with Being in Digital Asia.\u201d 9 Chun, Control and Freedom, 18; Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization. 10 Fickle, The Race Card, 3. 11 Patterson, Open World Empire, 58. 12 We have chosen not to capitalize orientalism  because the capitalization suggests a par tic u lar culture, region, nation, or state. 13 Nakamura, \u201cRace in\/for Cyberspace.\u201d 14 Roh, Huang, and Niu, \u201cTechnologizing Orientalism,\u201d 3. 15 For more on this proximity to whiteness, see Tuan, Forever Foreigners or Honorary Whites? 16 The yellow peril  stereotype, which first emerged in the mid- nineteenth  century as a response to Asian (specifically Chinese)  labor immigration, character-ized Asians as a menacing, consuming, hyperefficient horde. The model minority  stereotype, most often associated with the post\u2013 World War II years, reworked this logic of unparalleled economic success as attributive of cultural and even ge ne tic traits such as work ethic, meekness, frugality, an affinity for math,  etc. 17 Chin and Chan, \u201cRacist Love.\u201d 18 Bow, Racist Love, 7. Introduction 23 19 D. Chan, \u201cBeing Played.\u201d 20 Duggan, \u201cPublic Debates about Gaming and Gamers.\u201d 21 Nielsen, \u201cHow Diverse Are Video Gamers,\u201d states, \u201cAsian- Americans are even more likely to game (81%), leading all other races and ethnicities; African- Americans are the next most likely (71%).\u201d 22 \u201cVideo Game Industry Statistics.\u201d 23 Shaw, Gaming at the Edge. 24 T.\u00a0H. Nguyen, A View from the Bottom, 3. 25 Iwabuchi defines \u201codorless\u201d or mukokuseki as \u201cliterally meaning \u2018some-thing or someone lacking any nationality,\u2019 but also implying the erasure of racial or ethnic characteristics or a context\u201d (Recentering Globalization, 28). 26 K.- H. Chen\u2019s Asia as Method, for example, critiques Western theory for seeing Asian scholars as informers rather than theorists. 27 In their 2014 anthology, Gaming Cultures and Place in Asia- Pacific, Larissa Hjorth and Dean Chan emphasize that, like Asia\/America, \u201cAsia- Pacific\u201d functions as a \u201cgeo- political and economic construct\u201d that has the potential to carve out sufficient imaginative space, and thus \u201cany nuanced study of Asia- Pacific game cultures has the capacity to also disrupt and serve as a critique of the residual Techno- Orientalism in many Western approaches\u201d (1). 28 Shibusawa, \u201cWhere Is the Reciprocity?,\u201d 270. 29 c\u00e1rdenas, Poetic Operations, 16. 30 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 10. Though both Huizinga\u2019s and Caillois\u2019s texts themselves did not seem opposed to readings of games as impactful on social and  political life, game studies discourses have often interpreted them as such. As Fickle writes in The Race Card, both Huizinga and Caillois considered the value and novelty of their work \u201cin their assertion that play served a \u2018cultural\u2019 function\u201d (114). 31 Suits, The Grasshopper, 42. For more on this critique of Suits, see Pat-terson, Open World Empire, 14. 32 In 2010, Adrienne Shaw criticized games studies for its lack of critical engagement and argued for a \u201ccritical cultural study of games\u201d that compelled game scholars to adopt cultural studies modes of critical engagement and reflex-ivity. See Shaw, \u201cWhat Is Video Game Culture?\u201d 33 S. Murray, On Video Games, 39. 34 Jodi Byrd has argued that game studies has unwittingly contributed to cultural events like #GamerGate in its separations between the \u201cdomain of seri-ous and legitimate scholars as opposed to the low theory cultural dabblers who read games as texts\u201d (\u201cBeast of Amer i ca,\u201d 606). 35 See Fickle, The Race Card, chap. 4. 36 While works by Mc Ken zie Wark, Alexander Galloway, Colin Milburn, Alenda Chang, and  others have attempted to break theoretical ground well outside game studies, their (as well as our own) work on games rarely seems to circulate outside games studies discourses.24 Fickle and Patterson 37 As Penix- Tadsen (bringing together voices of Thomas Apperley and Chakrabarti et\u00a0al.) notes, much game scholarship has remained \u201cblind to its own cultural biases,\u201d which has led to repeating \u201c \u2018global\u2019 histories\u201d that \u201cmostly omit the global south from consideration\u201d (Video Games and the Global South, 9). 38 c\u00e1rdenas sees \u201calgorithmic analy sis\u201d as a way \u201cto identify the compo-nents and operations that make up the  process we are analyzing\u2014to understand them better, where a  process can be an artwork, an identity, or a moment of vio-lence\u201d (Poetic Operations, 3). 39 Shaw, Gaming at the Edge, 86. 40 Kondo, Worldmaking, 26. 41 Sharif and Naimon, \u201cBetween the Covers Solmaz Sharif Interview.\u201d 42 James, Beyond a Boundary. 43 See Fickle, The Race Card. 44 See Patterson, Open World Empire. 45 Bogost, Persuasive Games, 15. 46 Chuh, The Difference Aesthetics Makes, 126. 47 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 8. 48 Reddy, Freedom with Vio lence, 47.Gaming  OrientalismPart 1This page intentionally left blankMixed ConnectionsDesigner Roundtable #1FEATURING:Emperatriz Ung, a Chinese Colom-bian writer, game designer, and edu-cator from the American Southwest who earned her MFA in game design from the Tisch School of the Arts. Ung has worked as a narrative designer for mobile games and has been awarded fellowships, scholarships, and residences from the Asian American Writers\u2019 Workshop, Millay Arts, the Acad emy of Interactive Arts & Sci-ences Foundation, and Kundiman.Patrick Miller, who teaches  people to play fighting games, and whose personal works include From Masher to Master (2014), a book that introduces fighting game fundamentals, and Bruce Lee Is Your Roommate (2016), a short Twine story collaboration with Irene Koh.Minh Le, the co- creator of Counter- Strike (1999) who has worked on such titles as Day of Defeat (2003), Rust (2003), Tactical Intervention (2013), Plan 8 (in development), and numer-ous mobile game proj ects.Matthew Seiji Burns, who created Eliza (2019), a visual novel about an AI- assisted therapy tool, and wrote for Zachtronics games EXAPUNKS (2018), Opus Magnum (2017), SHENZHEN I\/O (2016), and other titles. With Tom Bissell, he wrote The Writer  Will Do Something (2015), a Twine game about being a writer on an AAA game (a game from a major publishing com pany).28 Designer Roundtable 1Minh Le: I got into the game industry at a very young age; I started playing games when I was eight years old. My dad was  really into computers\u2014he bought the early IBM computers. I grew up in Vancouver\u2014 I came to Canada when I was two\u2014 and Vancouver is a very, I guess, it\u2019s a very multicultural city. The  people that I played with  were very diverse. I  didn\u2019t  really feel Asian  because  there  were a lot of Asians in Vancouver, but we  were all, you know, we all identified as Canadians. Even though I am an Asian developer, myself, that never  really came into my mindset. I  didn\u2019t see a lot of Asian developers in my early stages.  These days, it\u2019s changed quite a bit.Emperatriz Ung: Similarly, a lot of my  family members  were computer en-gineers, so  there  were always computers around, and I was introduced to that at an early age, and it was an escape. That was how I spent a year and a half when I dropped out of high school. When I was a teen parent, I was in high school and  didn\u2019t have time or resources to afford a new PS3 or Xbox 360. What kept me connected  were actually browser games, flash games. They  were short, it was something I could play while my son was down for a nap. And it  really opened my mind up to how  things could be, but  there  wasn\u2019t a community at the time in New Mexico for any kind of game design or game development.  Either you  were an artist, or you  were a programmer; anything in between,  there  wasn\u2019t  really a space for it. It  wasn\u2019t  until I was  doing my master\u2019s on the East Coast that I came into contact with the New York City  Independent Games community, especially the Game Developers of Color Expo, and that was what encouraged me to dive in.Matthew Seiji Burns: To be honest, I  wasn\u2019t attracted to games and comput-ers the first time I saw them. I  didn\u2019t see what was cool about games  until the fidelity got a  little bit better. Friends of mine had Nintendos, but I  wasn\u2019t engaged  until I could start to see and hear  these other worlds\u2014 like in Myst (1993), you can hear the wind blowing, and you can see  these trees.But I think like every one  else, I strug gled to find a place to start  because you just have ideas, and you  don\u2019t  really know how to make them real. So I literally just showed up at Activision and applied for a job as a tester. I started from the ground floor, as they say.Patrick Miller: I mean, I was born in 1985. I grew up with Ninja Turtles, Ka-rate Kid, Power Rangers, like hand- to- hand combat. So when I was a kid, I assumed I had learn how to fight  people in case some ninjas, like roll up on  Mixed Connections 29you, right? Then when I played Street Fighter (1987), I remember thinking anyone could just fight each other, right? Suddenly, when Street Fighter II (1991) blew up,  there  were arcade cabs all over the place. I\u2019d go down to the 7\u201311 on Clemente Street and play an arcade cabinet and rumble with  people, and then again two blocks away in a laundromat. So to me, games  were always about the collisions you could have with other  people and being able to see other  people around you. Oh, I see that person, six foot tall, prob ably about thirty years old, but they got a hell of a Zangief. And having fighting games as a medium to communicate and learn about other  people has always fascinated me.Minh Le: It\u2019s in ter est ing that you [Patrick] mention Street Fighter  because even though I\u2019m into first- person shooter (FPS) games, Street Fighter was a global phenomenon for me as well. Growing up, I played it in the arcades, and pretty much  every type of genre. But when Doom (1993) came out, it changed the industry and pretty much every one I knew was playing Doom. I gravitated  toward FPS games  because of their immersion  factor. It was the one genre that made me feel I could  really put myself in a dif fer ent world. That was my main attraction for making Counter- Strike.  People always ask me, \u201cWhy did you make Counter- Strike? Do you like terrorism?\u201d No, that\u2019s not the case at all. The reason I made Counter- Strike was  because I was born in \u201977, and I grew up watching movies like Rambo, and all  these \u201980s action movies, and some of the movies that  really influenced me  were Hong Kong action movies, like the ones with Chow Yun- Fat, like Hard Boiled. And I felt that style of action was similar to FPS games.Tara Fickle: Your comments seem to highlight a central limitation of a proj-ect like this, in bringing you all together with the one similarity you all have, right, is that  you\u2019re Asian. But what  we\u2019re  really excited to hear from you is the very nuanced ways your backgrounds come to  matter or not  matter in your gaming practices.Emperatriz Ung: I was  really surprised that, coming into games from the literary world,  there  were no Asian\/American groups,  really. Microsoft now has an internal group, formed less than two years ago. Whereas in lit er a ture we have  organizations like the Asian American Writers Workshop, which is thirty years old now. Walking into the games industry, I saw that  there  wasn\u2019t the space for  these groups, and  people  were actually kind of weird about it. 30 Designer Roundtable 1Some  people said they  didn\u2019t feel the need to be represented. Part of me was like, well, I  don\u2019t think it\u2019s exactly about repre sen ta tion, but about community and supporting each other.Matthew Seiji Burns: That tracks with my experience too. I never  really thought about Asian and Asian American identity when I was youn ger, partly  because I could afford to not think about it, and I had a certain amount of privilege growing up in LA. And while working at a game com pany, I  didn\u2019t feel like I was treated in any  really dif fer ent ways, maybe  because  there\u2019s a lot of game industry in Japan. A lot of developers are  really into  Japanese games and grew up playing them. And eventually they worked in the game industry and went to Japan and worked in Japan for a while. So during one of my first jobs I met someone who had just returned from Japan, who had married a  Japanese  woman while he was  there. It came up that I was half  Japanese, on my  mother\u2019s side. And he just had this weird smile on his face. And he looked at me in this, you know, looking past me kind of  thing. Maybe he was looking forward to his own  children. I might be reading a  little bit into it. But that was the moment where I first thought about being half  Japanese in the game industry.Tara Fickle: It\u2019s notable to me that both Patrick and Minh talked about the  people they played games with growing up as being quite diverse. The fight-ing game community is one of the more diverse genres and communities.Minh Le: Yeah, the FPS players are generally more toxic than other genres. When I played RTS (real- time strategy) games like StarCraft (1998), the player\u00a0base was much more friendly and easier to connect with outside of gaming. But with the FPS genre, the games are way more competitive and emotional. And it skews  toward a youn ger age as well. When I was youn ger, I was, admittedly, prob ably more toxic. I played the game to beat  others, not to connect with  others.Patrick Miller: When it comes to fighting games,  there have been all kinds of attempts to explain how the player community around the world grew into what it is, and especially in North Amer i ca, how it became significantly more racially diverse, though still mostly dudes. In arcades, anyone can quarter up and play, right? So the barrier to entry starts out pretty low. And then you have Street Fighter, which launches with eight characters from around the world.  Mixed Connections 31Chun Li is prob ably the most recognizable female video game character, and  there is prob ably more media about her than any other female character in a video game. You have Balrog, who\u2019s this dated Mike Tyson  stereotype but is also one of the first Black characters in a mainstream video game. And so for fighting games in general,  there\u2019s rich opportunity for character fantasies  here. And  because  these games  were predominantly made by  Japanese studios, they could get away with a shit ton of super racist character designs that do not register in a way that Americans are used to.Matthew Seiji Burns: I remember seeing an early study about racial repre-sen ta tion in games that concluded that Asians  were overrepresented in games. They  didn\u2019t say why, but, well, it\u2019s  because they counted games made in Japan. But that  doesn\u2019t mean Asian repre sen ta tion is good in games; it just means that a lot of games made in Japan happen to have  Japanese characters.  There\u2019s a lot of room to explore forms of Asianness that  haven\u2019t even been thought of in games, though games seem very Asian friendly.Patrick Miller: And we  don\u2019t have an Angry Asian Man or some other pop- culture group to  really start looking at what an Asian American video game experience or community might look like. Plus, when you look at video games at scale, North American studios are trying to make inroads into the Chinese audience. Every one who\u2019s thinking about video game earnings in terms of billions of dollars is aiming at China, right? And so they  will adopt as much as they can,  whether it\u2019s art styles, character design, aesthetics, marketing. And the other  thing is, if you think about it, fighting games are essentially the video game version of kung fu movies, right? And hand- to- hand combat,  either in sports or in media, can create venues for  resistance against\u00a0white supremacy. You got Ali, you got Bruce Lee, you got all kinds of stories being told in the tradition of martial arts movies. So when, you know, a pro Hearthstone player rolls up and is like, hey, \u201c Free Hong Kong,\u201d obviously, that\u2019s  going to create a lot of prob lems for Blizzard. And that is part of this incredibly rich history of using sports to give  people a soapbox to stand on.Matthew Seiji Burns: When I was working at Microsoft,  there was a  whole division called \u201cGeopo liti cal Review.\u201d They check  every Microsoft product for any kind of potential prob lem across any region. So anything that could 32 Designer Roundtable 1be considered religious is forbidden. Anything that could be seen as taking a side in any ongoing geopo liti cal conflict. Anything having to do with China and Taiwan. And, I\u2019m sure, anything having to do with China and Hong Kong now. All of  those kinds of  things have to be completely removed.Chris Patterson: I do want to follow up on the topic of mixed race, as many of us  here, including Tara and I, identify as mixed race. And I\u2019ve always wondered if that mattered when it came to playing games and writing about games. Tara and I have both asked each other about this during interviews, and we both  can\u2019t  really come up with satisfactory answers. As a literary scholar or fiction writer, if I pre sent myself as Filipino, or white, or mixed race,  people have a very hard time reading me or knowing what to do with my work, whereas when I write about games, I  don\u2019t feel urged to put myself in a kind of box that\u2019s instantly recognizable.Emperatriz Ung: When I was in writing workshops and lit er a ture, being mixed race\u2014 half Latina, half Asian\u2014 I was called out early in my creative work by my peers and teachers, before I had a chance to enter any industry. And any bilingual work was automatically shut down. A peer of mine was like, I  don\u2019t understand how your  father is Chinese, but you have a grand mother who speaks Spanish, which is like not a critique at all, or even a comment  really, but they spent a  whole half page. It was development spaces like \u201cLatinx in Gaming\u201d that saved me. Then again, I\u2019ve been on a development team once, where they knew I was mixed race and spoke Spanish and some Mandarin, and if they needed Spanish, instead of writing it themselves, I became the resident expert on totally dif fer ent cultures.Chris Patterson: In other conversations with Asian diasporic designers,  we\u2019ve talked about how being mixed\u2014 particularly mixed Asian\u2014 signifies a kind of bridge that makes us more useful to the industries, more trust-worthy as writers and designers, and also more comfortable. For me, I rarely cared about self- representation in games  until I played Soulcalibur II (2002), and first played as Talim, one of the first Filipina characters in a game. Suddenly, it was impor tant to me that I was playing this character from the Philippines. But before that, I would have said repre sen ta tion in games  didn\u2019t do much for me personally. So, too, Eliza is one of  those games where seeing mixed- race repre sen ta tion became unexpectedly meaningful. Mixed Connections 33Matthew Seiji Burns: I absolutely wanted the main character in Eliza to be mixed race for that reason. I just  hadn\u2019t seen it very often. Prior to Eliza, the only game I could think of where mixed race is explic itly stated is this old PS2 game, Ring of Red (2001). The main character is half  Japanese and half German, and throughout the game,  they\u2019re using that to tease him, like, \u201cWhat do you think of that, halfbreed?\u201d And in Assassin\u2019s Creed Liberation (2012),  there\u2019s a side story, where the character can pass in dif fer ent con-texts  because she\u2019s mixed race. So the game uses the \u201cstealth mechanics\u201d of being mixed, and she can enter into dif fer ent situations based on how she pre sents.Patrick Miller: In my experience, most game dev teams are not operating off a strong model of creative direction. When I\u2019ve seen mixed- race repre-sen ta tion in video games, it\u2019s usually coming from fighting games, usually a part- Japanese character. Ken from Street Fighter is technically a quarter  Japanese. Laura and Shawn Matsuda in Street Fighter III (1997) and Street Fighter V (2016) are  Japanese Brazilian, and  there\u2019s some fascinating dia-sporic stories  there. Like, when I did a research fellowship in Japan, I was training Brazilian jiu jitsu with  Japanese Brazilian immigrants who worked in factories. And it was super cool to see how the character design had paid some homage to the sport. But a lot of times when I see mixed- race char-acters, it\u2019s about being between two dif fer ent national or racial borders. And it\u2019s executed without much nuance or sensitivity.Matthew Seiji Burns: In games coming from Japan, I feel mixed race is often used in a slightly exotic, fetishistic way. In anime, you might see a girl who\u2019s half  Russian or something like that, and it\u2019s used to give her blond hair. It\u2019s very much a kind of a visual typing. But a lot of this gets lost in the localization  process, when products from Japan, which might have dodgy racial repre sen ta tions, are \u201cfixed,\u201d and are turned into something a  little bit less awful by the US branches. It happens to a lot of  Japanese games, where racial repre sen ta tion is dialed back or made more appropriate for a global or Western audience. It reminds me a lot of food, food as imperialism, food as being an ambassador to a new culture.Patrick Miller: If I could offer a tip for the academics reading this, if  you\u2019re ever wondering why video games are the way they are, the place that I would 34 Designer Roundtable 1start is economics.  Because video games are expensive as hell to make. And this is a hits- driven industry. So that means the more you increase your pos-sibility for scale, in general, the higher your risk, and so  you\u2019re  going to have to make the game more broadly appealing to try and minimize risk. In other words, we do not have a healthy ecosystem as other industries might. If you want to make a film that  isn\u2019t meant to be a Hollywood blockbuster, you can get academic funding, you can get grants, you might be able to just shoot it on your own and shoestring it. But when you look at the prospect of trying to do in ter est ing, personal, smaller- scale games, usually the prob lem  you\u2019re  going to run into is that the  people who have the skills that you need to satisfy the vision you want are  going to be too expensive to justify taking that risk.Tara Fickle: Which is in ter est ing,  because  there\u2019s the industry assumption that whiteness is the most cost- effective repre sen ta tion, which goes back to what Minh was saying about making players feel comfortable. Whiteness is this  thing that helps you inhabit this character fantasy, right?Minh Le: That\u2019s true. When I play games, even though I\u2019m  Vietnamese, I feel more comfortable picking a Caucasian character. And I put my mindset in that as well. That guy\u2019s cool. He does all the cool stuff. To me, he\u2019s always been the hero.Gaming while AsianTo\u00a0E. Tang1. Forebears\u201cI know something about labyrinths,\u201d says the narrator of Jorge Luis Borges\u2019s famous story \u201cThe Garden of Forking Paths.\u201d He contin-ues, \u201cI am the great- grandson of Ts\u2019ui Pen. He was Governor of Yunnan and gave up temporal power to write a novel . . . to create a maze in which all men would lose themselves . . . His novel had no sense to it and nobody ever found his labyrinth.\u201d1 First published in 1941 and translated from Spanish into  English in 1948, the short story has become an ur- text for early digital culture, electronic lit er a ture, and game studies and continues to wend and wind its way through digital technologies that evince branching narratives, unusual temporalities, puzzles, and playfulness, qualities Espen Aarseth la-bels \u201cergodic,\u201d a text where the reader and player are \u201cconstantly reminded of inaccessible strategies and paths not taken, voices not heard. Each decision  will make some parts of the text more, and  others less, accessible, and what you may never know the exact results of your choices.\u201d2 According to Mou- Lan Wong, \u201cThe Garden of Forking Paths\u201d is an \u201cintertextual hub,\u201d and it Edmond\u00a0Y. Chang136  Edmond\u00a0Y. Changcollects, connects, and \u201canticipates vari ous interactive pop- culture narratives from printed texts to digital and cinematic media.\u201d3 Borges\u2019s exotic mytholo-gizing and playful inscrutability has become foundational to technocultural design, narratives, and worlds such that \u201cThe Garden\u201d \u2019s techno- orientalist logics have become deeply entangled, naturalized in the way we imagine, in-teract with, and play games.4As the story unfurls, the narrator learns from a British sinologist named Stephen Albert of the truth of the narrator\u2019s ancestor and the textual, spa-tial, and temporal mysteries of the \u201cGarden.\u201d The narrator describes the labyrinth, saying, \u201cI  imagined it infinite, made not only of eight- sided pavil-ions and of twisting paths but also of rivers, provinces and kingdoms. . . . I thought of a maze of mazes, of a sinuous, ever growing maze which would take in both past and  future and would somehow involve the stars.\u201d5 The  metaphor of unending twisting and sinuous (and sino- ous) paths would be forever imprinted, embedded, and enacted by digital technologies and games with no purer expression than the emblematic phrase, \u201cYou are in a maze of twisty  little passages,\u201d from  Will Crowther\u2019s 1970s Colossal Cave Adventure.This story, this mystery adventure of an unwitting Asian spy during World War I wanting to prove that \u201ca yellow man could save [Germany\u2019s] armies\u201d lays bare the metonymic ways Asianness is narrated and encoded into the experi-ences, discourses, and analyses of games;6 the inscrutability of the story vis- \u00e0- vis the inscrutability of the labyrinth vis- \u00e0- vis the inscrutability of the narrator condenses into what Tara Fickle names \u201cludo- Orientalism\u201d or the \u201cdesign, marketing, and rhe toric of games shapes how Asians as well as East- West relations are  imagined and where notions of foreignness and racial hier-archies get reinforced.\u201d7 The narrator of \u201cThe Garden of Forking Paths\u201d not only plays the games of espionage and fugitive, functioning as a literal pawn of war, he must also play the game of repre sen ta tion, of being multiply othered, of si mul ta neously being \u201cunreal and unimportant\u201d yet \u201cinfinitely vis i ble and vulnerable\u201d as an outsider, a foreigner, a racialized body.8 It takes a Western perspective to make legible the secrets of the labyrinth and of the narrator; Albert is the one to solve Ts\u2019ui Pen\u2019s puzzle: the book and labyrinth are one and the same even as Asianness and the game are mapped onto one another. How might this power ful \u201cconceptual technology\u201d construct the binaristic opposition of West versus East, US games versus non- US games, hardcore versus casual, competition versus cooperation, even as it evacuates game spaces by ostensibly rendering them neutral, level, and difference- blind?9 How might this othering and orientalist logic be absorbed, encoded into the  Gaming while Asian 37bedrock of play, game design? Better yet, how might the gates and switches of who gets included or  imagined narratively, repre sen ta tionally, and ludically be critiqued and challenged? In other words, what might it mean to suffer, survive, even surpass the \u201cinfinite penitence and sickness of the heart\u201d of gaming while Asian?10If you want answers, go to 3.If you want to play a game, go to 8.If you want to get some pizza instead, go to the next section.2. Teen NightI met my friends for \u201cteen night\u201d at the local Chuck\u00a0E. Cheese. For a flat fee, we got all- you- can- eat pizza, fountain soda, and, of course, never- ending tokens for Skee- Ball and video games. It was the \u201980s. I was in  middle school, and I remember it was a big deal that they played Michael Jackson\u2019s Thriller video on the big screen, which MTV could only air  after nine  o\u2019clock  because it was too scary for  children. I also remember the arcade got a new game: Dragon\u2019s Lair. It was the first coin- operated video game to cost fifty cents to play.Dragon\u2019s Lair (1983) was an interactive LaserDisc video game developed by Rick Dyer and Don Bluth. The game was basically a library of animated sequences or cutscenes that followed predetermined paths. The player \u201ccon-trolled\u201d the protagonist Dirk the Daring by using the joystick to select a direc-tion or by pressing an action button whenever the game flashed a cue; reflexes and timing  were more impor tant than the player\u2019s choices given that each track was scripted. Eventually, you could figure out the right path, the right script. In a sense, it looked like a movie, it played like a movie, and at the time, it was a very big deal.I was terrible at the game. I was not living up to my Asian arcade expec-tations. The game also presented a diff er ent challenge, that of identification. Dragon\u2019s Lair\u2019s teaser voice- over proclaimed the game was the \u201cfantasy adven-ture where you become a valiant knight, on a quest to rescue the fair princess from the clutches of an evil dragon. You control the actions of a daring ad-venturer. . . . Lead on, adventurer. Your quest awaits!\u201d Even at that tender age, I knew I was never  going to be Dirk the Daring, especially since I could not get past the first handful of screens. If his quest was my quest, if his adventure was my adventure, what did it mean that I could not (or did not want to) rescue the princess? Dirk was the tall, dark- haired, square- jawed, 38  Edmond\u00a0Y. Changbroad- shouldered, well- muscled fantasy hero. He was every thing that I could never be not  because I could not spend a fortune trying to master  every jump, dodge, and action but  because games\u2014 then and now\u2014 were not made for me. Since repre sen ta tion was not open to me, I was left with the second- class experience of identification. And if I could not identify, then I had to resign, be excluded from the fantasy.If you decide to play a diff er ent game, go to 5.If you go home to watch cartoons, go to 10.3. PlayersSometime in 2016, a gaming meme circulated the highways and byways of the internet: an image in the style of motivational posters featuring a rectangular matrix of  faces, of leading men from video games with the text \u201cVideo Game Protagonists: Kids Love Brown- Haired 30- Something White Males\u201d on a black background. The disconnect between the demographics of gamers and the  limited palette of playable characters is wide and telling. For instance, Dean Chan reveals, \u201cAsian American gamers are, paradoxically, both hypervisible and out of sight,\u201d ste reo typed as players of prowess or underexamined as a population.11 With the rise of competitive video gaming and esports, Asian and Asian American players are being held up as poster  children, even fetishized, becoming celebrities for their computer and console skills.  These players take on and are mapped with a \u201cludic identity,\u201d as Christopher Patterson argues, that \u201creiterates techno- Orientalist racism . . . well suited for the programming and engineering  labor of information technology\u201d and thereby making \u201cAsians appear magically fit for both e- sport success and model minority success.\u201d12Meanwhile, a 2015 Nielsen study found that Asian Americans are \u201clikely to feel video game characters are not inclusive. Almost half of  these gamers believe all races  aren\u2019t well represented in gaming character options, while less than a quarter think they are. On the other hand, Hispanics, African- Americans and non- Hispanic whites are much more positive about race repre sen ta tion.\u201d13 In the same report, though Asian Americans are underrepresented in terms of char-acters, a majority are game players: \u201cAsian- Americans are even more likely to game (81%), leading all other races and ethnicities: African- Americans are the next most likely (71%), followed by non- Hispanic whites (61%) and Hispanics (55%).\u201d14 What  these statistics reveal is that the game of repre-sen ta tion cannot be won by numbers alone, that inclusion in one arena often  Gaming while Asian 39means exclusion in another while si mul ta neously reinforcing dominant norms,  stereotypes, and roles. But  there is play in this contention, potential for rupture and  resistance in the paradox. As Lisa Nakamura argues, \u201cIf gamers are themselves the source of some of the most virulent racist, sexist, and homophobic messages in videogames, they are also the source of some of the most ingenious and potent campaigns against them.\u201d15If you want to compete, go to 6.If you want to collaborate, go to 10.4. Magic CirclesThe \u201cmagic circle\u201d of play, a too- often- cited concept from  philosopher Johan Huizinga\u2019s Homo Ludens (1938), is the idea that games are not the same as and separate from real life, from the real world. Unfortunately, the magic circle (or its more vernacular invocation, \u201cIt\u2019s just a game!\u201d) has regularly been raised like a shield or force field to deflect or ignore analy sis and critique, particularly from feminist, queer, and antiracist perspectives, and to perpetuate the com-monsense dictums that games are only play, just for fun, and color- , gender- , queer- , and other differences\u2013 blind.16 Video games, gaming, and playing are neither level nor neutral. As Mia Consalvo argues, \u201cPlayers never play a new game or fail to bring outside knowledge about games and gameplay into their gaming situations. The event is \u2018tainted\u2019 perhaps by prior knowledge.  There is no innocent gaming.\u201d17 Understanding that games are not insulated or marked off from the real world and that the magic circle is permeable, imperfectly protecting some while leaving  others out in the open, makes plain that \u201cmuch of the  pleasure of videogames comes at the expense of  women and  people of colour, both literally and figuratively.\u201d18 In fact, the very foundations of Hui-zinga\u2019s ludic philosophy (among  others) is predicated on what Tara Fickle calls \u201cludo- Orientalist\u201d understandings; the magic circle takes \u201call the well- worn  stereotypes of the Orientalist imaginary, seemingly emptied of both racial content and national context, being redeployed instead as formal qualities of the imaginative  process called play.\u201d19 The only \u201cinnocent\u201d players and games are  those who already benefit from power, privilege, who inhabit the ideal citizen gamer subject\u2014 one that is  imagined as straight, white, male, mas-culine, affluent, and able- bodied, and whose identities, bodies, and worlds are not so easily appropriated or consumed as exotic, ethnic, alien, or other.The End.40  Edmond\u00a0Y. Chang5. Yellow WizardOne arcade game I enjoyed growing up was Atari\u2019s Gauntlet (1985), a fantasy dungeon crawler game that allowed up to four  people to play at once. It was one of the first cooperative arcade games I had ever played. Players could pick one of four characters: Thor the warrior, Thyra the Valkyrie, Questor the Elf, and Merlin the wizard. I always played the wizard, preferring fight-ing at range and possessing the most power ful magic. The game\u2019s narrator would exclaim, \u201cWarrior needs food\u201d or \u201cElf shot the food\u201d or \u201cValkyrie is about to die.\u201d In the game, each avatar was assigned a color: red for Thor, blue for Thyra, green for Questor, and yellow for Merlin. The irony of me play-ing a yellow wizard as an Asian man never escaped me, nor did the negative connotations of the color: cowardice, sickness,  mental illness, excess. The physically weak magic user, standing in the back, reliant on mystical powers, overlaps too neatly with the  stereotypical and yellow peril characterization of Asian bodies and identities as foreign, diseased, feminized, yet si mul ta-neously dangerous and power ful. So ingrained and internalized are  these connections, intentional or inadvertent, that I misremember the game nar-ration as marking color and character: \u201cYellow wizard needs food, badly!\u201d or \u201cYellow wizard shot the food\u201d or \u201cYellow wizard is about to die.\u201dIf you decide to play a diff er ent game, go to 8.If you try to escape, go to 9.If you want to hunt a yeti, go to the next section.6. Choice Every Choose Your Own Adventure book begins with the same preface: \u201cBE-wArE and wArNING! This book is diff er ent from other books. You and yOu ALONE are in charge of what happens in this story.\u201d  Popular in the \u201980s and published by then Bantam Books,  these compact \u201cgamebooks\u201d offered young readers the opportunity to take on the role of the protagonist. The books\u2019 second- person format hailed the reader to make a choice  every few pages that would shuffle them to another page, another part of the story, another set of choices  until they reached one of the many pos si ble endings. When hit-ting a dead end or an undesirable ending, \u201creader- players\u201d could backtrack, climb back up the narrative decision tree and take a diff er ent path down a diff er ent set of page numbers. Of course, the rhe toric and novelty of choice  Gaming while Asian 41would quickly lose their luster, given that while \u201cthe reader was indeed of-fered unpre ce dented interactive control by making a series of choices which determined the multiple endings he or she would reach, all the pos si ble paths he or she could go down had been carefully chosen, designed and planned out by authors.\u201d20 The interactive fallacy of the novels\u2014 which would be reme-diated into other mediums, particularly video games\u2014 promises reader and player the power to make decisions and affect outcomes, the authority of active exchange, even authorship (instead of passive consumption), even as that agency is a fantasy already constrained and contained by the top- down designs and structures of the text. This fantasy of choice belies what Eli Cook calls \u201ca kind of neoliberal \u2018ground zero\u2019 \u201d wherein Choose Your Own Adventure books were \u201cone of the first impor tant instances in which gamified notions of  free, individual choice first came to shape mass culture in the United States.\u201d21Of course, who is  imagined and able to choose, even in a  limited manner, often defaults to the cultural ideal and norm; as with video games, the  imagined reader- player is young, white, straight, and male. According to R.\u00a0A. Montgomery, one of the series  founders and writers, \u201cFrom the outset, we wanted Choose Your Own Adventure books to be non- gender specific. . . . It was a conscious deci-sion.\u201d22 However, the publisher would foil this decision by featuring cover and interior art that feature mostly boys as the protagonists. While the creators desired the books to be gender- neutral, the narratives relied on and continued other problematic definitions and tropes, particularly for adventure stories that perpetuated genre conventions that included \u201cexotic\u201d locales, Indigenous \u201csavages,\u201d and non- Western culture. For example, starting in 2005, Chooseco reran and added to the Choose Your Own Adventure line with The Abominable Snowman by R.\u00a0A. Montgomery as its number one volume. The prologue states, \u201cYou and your best friend Carlos have travelled to Nepal in search of the fabled Yeti or abominable snowman. Last year while the two of you  were mountain climbing in South Amer i ca, a guide told you about the legendary creature and you  haven\u2019t  stopped thinking about the Yeti since.\u201d23 The plot of the novel begins with Carlos  going missing. The reader- player must find him and the mysterious yeti. The book drips with orientalist imagery including drawings featuring pagodas, men and  women with slanted eyes, Bud dhas, and Bengal tigers. Down one of the narrative paths, the reader is taken to a mountain monastery where they are told, \u201c Those who share the secret knowledge of the Yeti are pledged to reveal this knowledge only to appointed  people. You, and you alone, are one of the appointed. It has been seen in the stars; it has been read in your hand.\u201d24 The reader- player, making the right decision, then meets 42  Edmond\u00a0Y. Changa monk who dispenses sage advice, saying, \u201cListen well with heart, head, and body. Listen with eyes more than ears. Heed the cry of the Yeti.\u201d25 One can hear the bamboo flute and erhu as the words are solemnly spoken. (Chooseco\u2019s com pany logo is for some reason a Chinese dragon in silhouette.)Choice becomes the mechanism through which readers (and players) inhabit diff er ent possibilities, yet too often it becomes the game mechanic of what Lisa Nakamura calls \u201cidentity tourism.\u201d26 In the case of The Abominable Snowman, mostly white readers get to \u201cappropriate an Asian racial identity without any of the risks associated with being a racial minority in real life.\u201d27 The power and privilege to choose is not evenly distributed even, or perhaps especially, in  these gamebooks and games more generally. Moreover, who is represented and designed to be able to choose continues to reveal the ludo- orientalist history and \u201cinfrastructure of gaming itself as a raced proj ect.\u201d28 Ironically, in the quoted scene from The Abominable Snowman, the narrative itself reveals that the interactive fallacy constrains even the ideal citizen reader- player as the protagonist is told that they are chosen, that they can choose, yet all of this has been destined by signs and stars. In other words,  there is no choice.If you think you  don\u2019t have a choice, go to the next section.If you  really think you do have a choice, go to 4.If you  don\u2019t know what to do, go to 12.7. Menu100 REM Character Se lection105 PRINT \u201cWhich do you want to play?\u201d110 PRINT115 PRINT \u201c(M)onk\u201d120 PRINT \u201cNin(J)a\u201d125 PRINT \u201c(K)ung Fu Master\u201d130 PRINT \u201c(G)eisha\u201d135 PRINT \u201c(D)ragon Lady\u201d140 PRINT \u201cComputer (P)rogrammer\u201d145 PRINT \u201c(S)py\u201d150 PRINT \u201c(E)xchange Student\u201d155 PRINT \u201c(F)ortune Cookie\u201d160 PRINT \u201c(Y)ellow Fever\u201d165 PRINT \u201c(N)o MSG\u201d Gaming while Asian 43170 PRINT \u201c(O)ther\u201d175 PRINT \u201cAdditional (C)hoices\u201d180 PRINT185 INPUT \u201cSelect from above:\u201d; BadChoice$190 IF BadChoice$=\u201cM\u201d THEN GOTO 8195 IF BadChoice$=\u201cJ\u201d THEN GOTO 3200 IF BadChoice$=\u201cK\u201d THEN GOTO 8205 IF BadChoice$=\u201cG\u201d THEN GOTO 8210 IF BadChoice$=\u201cD\u201d THEN GOTO 3215 IF BadChoice$=\u201cP\u201d THEN GOTO 8220 IF BadChoice$=\u201cS\u201d THEN GOTO 13225 IF BadChoice$=\u201cE\u201d THEN GOTO 2230 IF BadChoice$=\u201cF\u201d THEN GOTO 12235 IF BadChoice$=\u201cY\u201d THEN GOTO 5240 IF BadChoice$=\u201cN\u201d THEN GOTO 9245 IF BadChoice$=\u201cO\u201d THEN GOTO 4250 REM Please Select Again255 PRINT \u201cThat choice is not available to you. Please select again.\u201d260 GOTO 1008. Yellow FaceYellow Face is a text game by Mike Ren Yi released for the web and mobile devices in 2019. According to the developer\u2019s notes, it is \u201can interactive game about being Asian in Amer i ca,\u201d based on a true story, and inspired by David Henry Hwang\u2019s play of the same name. The game begins with two facing  faces in profile: the one on the left is white, the one on the right is pale yellow, with text  bubbles, choices, and a curious \u201cAmerican\/Asian\u201d status bar at the top of the screen. The start screen sets the scene: \u201cA college  house party in Amer-i ca, 2009;  music and indistinct chatter spill from the speakers.\u201d Then the first interaction appears as the \u201cWhite Guy\u201d asks, \u201cWhere are you from?\u201d You, as the player- character, have two choices: \u201cNorth Carolina\u201d and \u201cChina.\u201d Click-ing \u201cNorth Carolina\u201d elicits the cringe- worthy follow-up question, \u201cNo I mean where are you  rEALLy from?\u201d The remainder of the game moves through a few other interlocutors including a \u201cWhite Girl\u201d and an Asian girl named \u201cAnna.\u201d Diff er ent conversation paths reveal further racist and orientalist replies, from \u201cChinese culture is so zen\u201d to \u201cDo a karate chop\u201d to \u201cI\u2019m not into Asian guys.\u201d44  Edmond\u00a0Y. ChangThe game dramatizes not only the everyday micro- and macro- aggressions experienced by Asian and other racialized bodies but gestures at the critical potential of games that do more than treat race as a ludic or repre sen ta tional fantasy. What is illuminating about Yellow Face is its weaving of the \u201cWhere are you from?\u201d conversation so often rehearsed by Asian bodies in white spaces with two curious mechanics. The first is the \u201cAmerican\/Asian\u201d status bar (see figure\u00a01.1), which  measures how American (i.e., white) or how Asian (i.e., yellow) your responses are perceived to be. The \u201cAmerican\u201d bar critiques the conflation of nationality and citizenship with whiteness and assimilation, recognizing the discursive and ludic vio lence and impossibility of ever being fully accepted or integrated into normative belonging. Rather than read the mechanic as attempting to quantify \u201cAsianness\u201d (or \u201cAmericanness\u201d) in a real way, I read it as the algorithmic visualization of the \u201cWhere are you from?\u201d game that, as Tara Fickle confirms, \u201cAsian American experience of being made to feel like a \u2018perpetual foreigner\u2019 regardless of birthplace or citizenship\u201d reveals the cultural and procedural logic of Asian American repre sen ta tion as \u201citself a game.\u201d29 Yellow Face shows how the ludic  here becomes a way of \u201crepresenting the problematics of repre sen ta tion in the first place.\u201d30 The second mechanic, bound up with the first, is the way the game takes advan-tage of the constraints of decision trees, limiting the player to scant choices or a complete lack of adequate responses.  There are no good choices, and the player- character ultimately \u201closes\u201d the \u201cWhere are you from?\u201d game trapped 1.1. White and Asian  faces talking. Screenshot of Yellow Face. Gaming while Asian 45in the double- bind and double- consciousness of the gap between Asian and American. Moreover, the \u201cWhere are you from?\u201d game critiques a racist tem-porality and geography that fixes Asian bodies in white spaces only in the past from which they arrived in the United States and forecloses on the pre sent and  future. Both mechanics create the illusion that Yellow Face is a game that can be won, and like the \u201cWhere are you from?\u201d game,  there are no good choices.If you stay at the party, go to 4.If you zone out to the  music, go to 12.If you decide to leave the party and head into the backyard, go to 13.9. Game SpaceGame spaces, the space in games, the space of games, is highly regulated, fraught, and always normed. Game space as open,  free, and po liti cally or ideologically neutral is a fantasy. Mc Ken zie Wark in Gamer Theory (2007) argues, \u201cThe game has not just colonized real ity, it is also the sole re-maining ideal. . . . The reigning ideology imagines the world as a level playing field, upon which all folks are equal before God, the  great game designer. . . . Every thing is evacuated from an empty space and time which now appears natu ral, neutral, and without qualities\u2014 a gamespace.\u201d31 Even gaming spaces themselves, be they at home, at work, in an arcade, around a  table, in a back room, in front of a screen, or on a field, divide, discriminate, and define who is a player, who gets to play, what are the rules, what are the boons, and more importantly, who is not a player, who does not get to play, who makes the rules, and what are the consequences of winning, losing, and breaking the rules. And since job, school,  family, health, leisure, even ro-mance have increasingly become gamified,  these problematic logics perpetu-ate the embedded inequalities and ludic biases already at play in everyday life. Wark continues, \u201cThe real world appears as a video arcadia divided into many and varied games. Work is a rat race. Politics is a  horse race. The economy is a casino. . . .  These games are no joke. When the screen flashes the legend Game over, you are  either dead, or defeated, or at best out of quarters.\u201d32 Even the language of success, sustainability, and survival has been algorithmically and ludically inflected and reveals the near impossibility for marginalized bodies and identities to compete in, much less win, the game of living.The End.46  Edmond\u00a0Y. Chang10. RolesIn the colorful intro to the 1980s cartoon series Dungeons and Dragons, six friends are transported from an amusement park  ride to the fantasy realm of d&d. Each is then given a magical item befitting their role. The Dungeon Master, their guide, names them in a creaky, sagely voice, \u201cFear not, Ranger, Barbarian, Magician, Thief, Cavalier, and Acrobat.\u201d The animated series was my first introduction to Dungeons and Dragons and the idea and  pleasure of character creation, of playing a class, of being a type. The cartoon provided templates for a range of characters but more importantly established an early taxonomy of what characters I might be. Alas, I did not see myself as the blond and brawny Hank the Ranger or Bobby the Barbarian, who was only eight years old. Fabulous  were Sheila the Thief and Diana the Acrobat (notably the only character of color on the show), but they  were not me  either. What did that leave me? The spoiled coward Eric the Cavalier or Presto the bumbling fool of a Magician. I did like Presto the best. Of course, the only main character that actually looked anything like me was Venger the Villain with his vampiric face and slanted eyes. Once again, I could only aspire to whiteness or be de-spised. Once again, the burden of identification fell to the body not shown, the player not seen, recognizing that most of the time one could not play as or like oneself. I learned  these limits of identification early on, often aban-doning them, and found other ways to smuggle myself into the scene and in between the lines. Better yet, I created my own world, my own rules. It would be\u00a0years, many in fact, before I would realize that the one character I at the time never  imagined I could inhabit would be the role I now love best: the Dungeon Master.If you need food badly, go to 5.If you are looking for players to start a new game, go to 3.If you decide you\u2019d rather join an existing game, go to the next section.11. d20On the hardcover front of the handbook:a man in a winged helm, bastard swordaloft, stalwart, muscular, even in armor,astride a  horse in a dun caparison, charging.Even then I could not see myself as he. Gaming while Asian 47Perhaps I was in the back, in the appendices,an apprentice, young, scared, sad, small,hungry, queer, Asian, overweight, hiding,boxed in by burdened, humid homosociality,chainmail bikinis, and dice rolls for dick size.But with the master\u2019s tools I made a placefor myself, found ways to pass, hope, pretend:he was Agicanus, she was named Ayecleare,he was  bitter, sorcerous, ambitious, alone,she was  righteous, wise, glowing, healing.He loved her but like a  brother, partner, teacher.She loved him, though not like a  sister, and knewhe poured himself into his studies, his magicto escape that which he could not know or name.I saw myself as he, as they, waiting, wishing.33If you want to read the rulebook, go to 7.If you want to hide in the closet, go to 4.If you want to make a wish, go to 14.12. MazeYou are in a text of twisty  little paragraphs.If you are lost, go to 9.If you are not lost, go to 12.If you want to be told where to go, go to 7.If you want to decide where to go, go to wherever you\u2019d like.13. Infinite IntimacyRobert Yang\u2019s Intimate, Infinite (2014) is a reimagining of Jorge Luis Borges\u2019s \u201cThe Garden of Forking Paths,\u201d mixing first- person shooter (fpS), walking simulator, puzzle, and role- playing game. The title screen calls Intimate, Infinite a \u201cseries of games,\u201d a set of interconnected minigames \u201cabout gar-dening, chess, history, infinity, and a murder,\u201d which play with time, cause and\u00a0effect, genre, and mechanics. The player is thrust in medias res into 48  Edmond\u00a0Y. Changstory and action finding themselves on a dirt road at night, standing over a dead body and gun, being chased by dogs and assailants. Picking up the gun reveals that it is out of ammunition; the expectation is that the player  will have to look for and find bullets, but this fpS trope ends being a red herring. Instead, the player- character must run down the road to catch a train about to depart. The player is then taken to the countryside where they eventu-ally find the locked gate to a manor  house. The character laments, \u201cI had no key . . . in this life at least.\u201d And then the player is taken back to the start screen where they can choose which game, which path, which fork to play next: find a way through garden labyrinth, engage in a glass of wine and game of chess, or return to the chase. Playing one part changes a diff er ent part; revisiting a section reveals new details, openings, and possibilities. The game takes to heart \u201cThe Garden of Forking Path\u201d \u2019s notion of \u201can infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times.\u201d34 In other words, what is not accomplished in one game, in one life, might be accomplished in another.While not faithful to Borges\u2019s short story, the series of games still imagines a Chinese spy who must send word to the German army by killing a British sinologist. However, Yang\u2019s beautifully rendered and atmospheric cycle of games offers two provocations. First, in the encounter between Wang and Alber (analogs for Borges\u2019s Tsun and Albert), Yang queers the narrative and suggests in one of the lives of the characters they  were lovers, not just enemies. This potential is revealed via a brief text and cutscene where Wang acknowledges the relationship (see figure\u00a01.2). Yang writes, \u201cIt\u2019s also not much of a stretch to read this as a gay relationship between two men arguing about secrecy and shame and possibility. In one of  these infinite realities, they are friends\u2014 and in another, maybe they are lovers . . . I made this gay subtext more obvious in my game, depending on the randomization [of cutscenes] you get when playing.\u201d35 Second, Intimate, Infinite critiques the medium of video games and the interactive fantasy of choice, power, and control. Yang says, \u201c There might be endless dimensions of existence, but as  humans, we only experience one. Each time you read this story, it  will always be the same story with the same ending, no  matter what the ideas promise. The spy  will always shoot the sinologist. I push this interpretation in my game: once you shoot my Alber, he\u2019s dead in the title screen, hub screen, chess section as well.\u201d36 The game reflects on the explanation of the garden in the short story: \u201cIn all fiction, when a  Gaming while Asian 49man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of  others. In the most unfathomable, Ts\u2019ui Pen, he chooses\u2014 si mul ta neously\u2014 all of them. He thus creates vari ous, vari ous times which start  others that  will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times.\u201d37 Yang\u2019s game extends this critique of choice and branching futurities as they intersect with race and nationality commenting on the orientalist relationship between the main character and the sinologist. Yang notes, \u201cIt takes a Magical White Guy . . . to make Tsun interested in his own culture again. . . . This Chinese guy has to murder this British guy to supposedly prove to the Germans that the Chinese are a civilized sophisticated  people capable of resourcefulness and creativity. . . .  There are only two  people who know about the Garden, and by the end of the story, they are both dead.\u201d38 Like the garden, like the game, the orientalist logic becomes a trap, a dead end, or at the very least, a fantasy relationship between a fictive West and East, between normative agency and racialized subordination.If you want to be infinite, go to 1.If you want to be intimate, go to the next section.If you want to end the game, go to 15.1.2. The character of Wang. Screenshot of Intimate, Infinite.50  Edmond\u00a0Y. Chang14. HopeI did not start playing tabletop role- playing games till I was well into tenth grade; I was a gaming late bloomer.39 My first rpG systems are now con-sidered classics: Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (also known as Second Edition), Stormbringer, Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game, Call of Cthulhu, and Champions. In high school, gaming was an escape, a chance to be some-one  else and somewhere  else. I always played healers or mages, characters that stood in the back, provided support, yet  were necessary, even crucial in just the right circumstances. A long weekend\u2019s marathon full of dice rolls, smudged character sheets, and Jolt cola bought me respite from the pains of being a shy, overweight, closeted young man of color; it brought me community, camaraderie, and the first thrill of falling in love with one\u2019s game master (though not for the last time). For many years, I would be the only nonwhite and openly queer player at the  table. In college, gaming became less about escape and more about exploring, about self- expression. College and gradu ate school is when I discovered live- action role- playing games, when I started tinkering with my own game designs, and when I started learning to be comfortable in my own skin. I also realized that I had a talent for game master-ing, for creating and communicating worlds, which dovetailed with my growing aptitude for teaching, for finding confidence at the front of a classroom.Looking back, I can honestly say that gaming was one of the  things that saved my life. It inspired my writing and catalyzed my profession. Gaming is living, loving, learning, and sometimes grieving and coping and escaping. Gaming informs so much of who I am, what I do, and what I believe and fight for. Gaming, in a deep sense then, is practicing utopia and transforming dysto-pia. It is a longing for a world yet to come; it is a hoping for a world better than this one. Gaming allows us to inhabit the pos si ble and imagine the impossible.If you want to watch the credits, go to the next section.Notes 1 Borges, \u201cThe Garden of Forking Paths,\u201d 93. 2 Aarseth, Cybertexts, 3. 3 M.- L. Wong, \u201cThe Garden of Living Paths,\u201d 104, 106. 4 For more on techno- orientalism, see Roh, Huang, and Niu, Techno- Orientalism. 5 Borges, \u201cThe Garden of Forking Paths,\u201d 94. Gaming while Asian 51 6 Borges, \u201cThe Garden of Forking Paths,\u201d 91. 7 Fickle, The Race Card, 3. 8 Borges, \u201cThe Garden of Forking Paths,\u201d 101, 92. 9 Fickle, The Race Card, 14. 10 Borges, \u201cThe Garden of Forking Paths,\u201d 101. 11 D. Chan, \u201cBeing Played,\u201d para. 1. 12 Patterson, Open World Empire, 62, 64. 13 \u201cHow Diverse Are Video Games,\u201d paras. 3\u20134. 14 \u201cHow Diverse Are Video Games,\u201d para. 5. 15 Nakamura, \u201cUser- Generated Media Campaigns,\u201d 11. 16 For more on antifeminist, antiqueer, and racist backlashes in gaming cul-tures, see Quinn, Crash Override; Condis, Gaming Masculinity; Phillips, Gamer Trou ble; and Gray and Leonard, Woke Gaming. 17 Consalvo, \u201c There Is No Magic Circle,\u201d 415. 18 Nakamura, \u201cUser- Generated Media Campaigns,\u201d 9. 19 Fickle, The Race Card, 123. 20 Cook, \u201cRearing  Children of the Market in the \u2018You\u2019  Decade,\u201d 23. 21 Cook, \u201cRearing  Children of the Market in the \u2018You\u2019  Decade,\u201d 17. 22 Hendrix, \u201cChoose Your Own Adventure.\u201d 23 Montgomery, The Abominable Snowman. 24 Montgomery, The Abominable Snowman, 26. 25 Montgomery, The Abominable Snowman, 40. 26 Nakamura, Cybertypes. 27 Nakamura, Cybertypes, 40. 28 Fickle, The Race Card, 3. 29 Fickle, The Race Card, 13. 30 Fickle, The Race Card, 13. 31 Wark, Gamer Theory, 8. 32 Wark, Gamer Theory, 6. 33 This is a stanza from E.\u00a0Y. Chang, \u201cDice.\u201d 34 Borges, \u201cThe Garden of Forking Paths,\u201d 100. 35 Yang, \u201cLiner Notes: Intimate, Infinite (Part 2).\u201d 36 Yang, \u201cLiner Notes: Intimate, Infinite (Part 1).\u201d 37 Borges, \u201cThe Garden of Forking Paths,\u201d 98. 38 Yang, \u201cLiner Notes: Intimate, Infinite (Part 2).\u201d 39 Adapted from E.\u00a0Y. Chang, \u201cPlaying Games, Practicing Utopia.\u201dThe Asiatic and  the Anti- Asian PandemicOn Paradise KillerT  here are moments in the game Paradise Killer when I incidentally rec-ognize pieces of myself. The game\u2019s large public housing architecture places me in the apartment blocks I once occupied in Nanjing, Gimhae, and Hong Kong (see figure\u00a02.1). The game\u2019s City Pop\u2013 inspired musical score moves me from Korean bars to Hong Kong cafes to the lo-fi study beats on YouTube that feature anime- styled students at work. The game\u2019s who-dunit mystery told in an over- the- top visual novel format brings me to the  Japanese games of Danganronpa and Ace Attorney, while its slow and open world movement feels directly inspired by the early \u201cf.r.E.E.\u201d games of Yu Suzuki\u2019s Shenmue (2001) and Suda51\u2019s Flower, Sun and Rain (2001). Yet despite all  these recognitions of my Asian\/American self,  there is not one recognition is the misrecognition you can bear\u2014 Lauren Berlant, Cruel OptimismTHE EGO MUST BE SEEN!  APPLY YOUR MARK TO EVERY THING YOU OWN!\u2014 Paradise Killer\u2019s Starlight ComputerChristopher\u00a0B. Patterson2 The Asiatic and the Anti- Asian Pandemic 53Asian- identified face in Paradise Killer, even though its cast is dizzyingly diverse: the characters\u2019 biographies reveal origins in  England,  Kenya, Turkey, Scotland, and Romania, and some have  Japanese names (e.g., Akiko, Yuri, and Kiwami). The only character with an explic itly Asian background\u2014 the fanatical \u201cWitness to the End\u201d from Persia\u2014 conceals his face  behind a mask and speaks through an echoing ventilation grate. This absence of Asian  faces and histories compels me to, almost uniformly, toss the pieces of myself I\u2019ve found in Paradise Killer up as misrecognitions, though perhaps not mere misrecognitions. Perhaps, I can bear them just about as well as I can bear Asian American identity itself.Paradise Killer is a hard game to explain. On one hand, it combines the already- hybridized genre of open world exploration\/detective adventure game with the already- hybridized genre of visual novels (as combinations of adventure, romance, eroge). As a low- budget indie game spearheaded by a small British com pany with a  Japanese name,1 Paradise Killer features a queer and campy aesthetic that shows its manufacture everywhere, with its two- dimensional character portraits in three- dimensional environments, and with the player\u2019s ability to see multiples of the same recurring character (the demon Shinji) or to happen on major plot points completely at random, some-times far too early or far too late in the game. Like its vapor- wave soundtrack, 2.1. The Asian- inspired Citizen Housing in Paradise Killer. Screenshot by author.54  Christopher\u00a0B. Patterson there is something hazy about Paradise Killer\u2019s ability to be both retro and refreshing, both recognizably Asian in its mood and setting and Western in its characters, designers, and language, both queer in its campy tone and beach sunset color palette, while its narrative focuses sharply on cis- hetero relationships and biological reproduction.  These divisions among categories speak volumes about the categories themselves. As I have argued in  earlier work, games break many rules of lit er a ture and film, where style and con-tent are  imagined as both separable and meant to correlate.2 Paradise Killer, like many games, upsets categories, explodes binaries, and proliferates new frames of experiencing a game, so that all recognition becomes misrecogni-tion. But more to the point, Paradise Killer also makes me ponder to what extent its Asian and queer forms might  either remind players of an other, or as in my own experience, pre sent players with a portal to an open world where they can reminisce upon their many selves.This chapter  will use Paradise Killer as a vehicle to revisit and reshape the word Asiatic, a troubled term that I attempted to reanimate in my 2020 book, Open World Empire, where I used it to characterize games for their \u201cforms, spaces, and personages that many players  will find similar to Asia, but that are never exclusively Asian, or are obscured from any other recognizable racial genre, or are not foreclosed to other given identity tropes.\u201d3 Working through theories of erotics, racial embodiment, and virtual otherness from Anne Cheng, Audre Lorde, Lisa Nakamura, Wendy Chun, and  others, I con-ceived of the Asiatic as \u201ca style rather than substance, a technology rather than an essence,\u201d as well as a po liti cally charged aesthetic that \u201cshapes the interactions in video games as neither Asian nor Asian American, but as an unrepresentable blend.\u201d4Besides the release of Paradise Killer in 2020, other events have compelled me to revisit this term: the unexpected capacity of the term to spread across disciplines; the reemergence of yellow peril anti- Asian racism during the COVId-19 pandemic; the book talks where I was often confronted with ques-tions about the term that  were not well answered within the book itself: Is Asiatic appropriate only to games? How is the term divided from orientalism? Is the Asiatic always queer and\/or nonserious and\/or racist? Paradise Killer offers a sideways gaze into  these inquiries that allows me to explore  these questions lowly, as in, to voice how this term emerged from par tic u lar circum-stances and experiences, and has continued to grow in my current pre sent.Before we begin, one context should be clarified: that \u201cthe Asiatic\u201d as a term came along within a second book proj ect,  after my first book, Transitive  The Asiatic and the Anti- Asian Pandemic 55Cultures\u2014 a book not about games at all, but about the growth of multicul-turalist identities out of Southeast Asian colonial governance\u2014 had brought me into a par tic u lar way of thinking about identity and race. As a mixed- race Filipino\/Chinese\/white American with a Hawai\u2018i- based mixed  family and even more mixed origins, I\u2019ve had an ambivalent relationship to Asian American identity, but one I\u2019ve been able to bear, as I wrote in Transitive Cultures, \u201cthrough active and aggressive imaginative work aimed at reinvigoration, reframing, and remaking.\u201d5 \u201cAsiatic,\u201d then was an attempt to remake and to better understand race as transnational pro cesses of racialization that circulate and localize through par tic u lar forms of media. To speak of race in this way accounts for how racialization pro cesses both seek to include racialized subjects into socioeconomic systems of neoliberal value, and to leave populations at risk and restriction of life chances in zones of border crossings, incarceration, cap i tal ist exploitation, and healthcare restrictions. \u201cAsiatic\u201d thus sees race as relational pro cesses tied to geopo liti cal imaginar-ies, influenced as I am by Kandice Chuh\u2019s epistemic shift from thinking about Asian American identities to asking how we can trace Asian racializations, that is, \u201cthe production of \u2018Asian American\u2019 as a  political and social and racial iden-tity,\u201d particularly as they reference other racial forms of whiteness, Blackness, Indigeneity, Latinx, and  others.6 The Asiatic characteristics of games has come to provide one such gateway to remake race, to see otherness other wise.Rule #1: Show Me Your Truth!The facts and the truth are not the same. They never  were. Perception is real ity. Real ity is tan-gible. Real ity is intangible. Change a life, change the world. Welcome to paradise.\u2014 Paradise Killer marketing bylineFor the most part, Paradise Killer is a trippy open world adventure game based on vaporwave listening, sauntering exploration, and shit- talking gos-sip. That is,  until the player decides to visit \u201cThe Judge\u201d and initiates the ending courtroom scene. In an instant,  after the player has become attuned to the queer and colorful Asiatic world of the game\u2019s paradise island, the game\u2019s mood, tone, and gameplay transform into a courtroom drama that demands their utmost seriousness. The player\u2014as Lady Love Dies\u2014 picks up 56  Christopher\u00a0B. Pattersonher gun, collects her facts, and must consider who they are  going to accuse of a crime. The punishment for any association whatsoever to the \u201ccrime to end all crimes\u201d\u2014 murdering the leaders of the island, \u201cthe council\u201d\u2014 results in execution. Stuck in a room together, the suspects  will likely end up betraying each other, especially once one has been condemned to the gun. If the player has collected enough facts about the case, they can use them to expose con-spiracies and implicate multiple actors, potentially executing  every character in the game. Or the player can select par tic u lar masterminds to execute, spar-ing the low- level criminals. Or the player can just execute  those lackeys. Or the player can choose to go along with the most  convenient story\u2014 that it was all Henry Division, the unfortunate civilian scapegoat.  Whatever decision,  whatever facts, it is up to the player to create the game\u2019s \u201ctruth.\u201dThroughout Open World Empire, I make the case that the Asiatic is a nonserious, campy, and queer space opened up by the aesthetic forms of video games. However, it is also my truth that the overtly serious mood and consequences of Paradise Killer\u2019s trial still exemplifies the Asiatic in the way it conceives of truth itself. Why is this?To answer, let\u2019s turn to the context through which \u201cthe Asiatic\u201d emerged in 2020\u2014 during a very serious global pandemic in which residual racial forma-tions of yellow peril  rose like Goku from the grave for yet another afterlife, and racist attacks on Asian North Americans became too high to reliably establish data (in my own province, British Columbia, racist attacks against Asians  were said to have risen over 700\u00a0 percent).7  These attacks  were but-tressed by scientific discourses of public health that held the appearance of objective truth. As Nayan Shah has pointed out, scientific discourses around public health can create firmly held logics \u201cof normal and aberrant\u201d especially when they correlate with \u201cthe racial logic of superior and inferior and their reconfiguration over time.\u201d8 Indeed, it was during the 2020 moment of public health reconfiguration, soon  after the US president started calling COVId-19 \u201cThe China Flu,\u201d and just before eight  women  were killed in Asian- owned spas\u2014 six of whom  were Asian\u2014by a white man who was reported to be hav-ing \u201ca bad day,\u201d that I gave a series of book talks about how Asiatic forms of race in video games  were \u201cnonserious.\u201d This vastly serious moment of racist consolidations and new interethnic collaborations (alongside the resurgence of Black Lives  Matter) troubled the ground between \u201cthe serious\u201d and \u201cthe nonserious.\u201d Yet the racism around the COVId-19 pandemic did not seem to me at all \u201cAsiatic.\u201d It was, rather, a question of truths. The Asiatic and the Anti- Asian Pandemic 57In Edward Said\u2019s original framing of orientalism, establishing one he-gemonic truth as The Truth was foundational to orientalist racisms. As a discourse given validity by academics, proliferation through capitalism and media, and enforcement through the state, orientalism relies heavi ly on au-thenticity, essence, and expertise, traits that Said himself sought to resist by framing himself (and the organic intellectual) as an amateur who \u201crefus[es] to be tied down to a specialty.\u201d9 Pivoting from Said, in Open World Empire, I describe the Asiatic characters of global games like Street Fighter II, League of Legends, and Overwatch as campy racial depictions that could certainly be called racist and that invoke orientalist tropes but also refuse \u201cthe gaze of mastery, expertise, and certainty.\u201d10  Later, I discuss the power of the virtual other or the \u201cAsiatic blur\u201d to resist the production of work \u201cconstrued as au then tic, objective, backed by pedigree and expertise.\u201d11 Similar to Julietta Singh\u2019s Unthinking Mastery, and Jose Mu\u00f1oz\u2019s and Amber Jamilla Musser\u2019s conceptions of Brownness as an already- obscured presence, the Asiatic es-tablishes and helps us confront the obscured digital forms of race where, as John Cheney- Lippold writes, we often presume the presence of air quotes to \u201cemphasize an ironic untruth.\u201d12Unlike the racism of the COVId-19 pandemic, and like the end- game trial of Paradise Killer, the Asiatic, though often campy and queer, is not en-tirely \u201cnonserious,\u201d though its \u201ctruth\u201d does differ from the truth- telling of scientific, anthropologic, or state and cap i tal ist discourses that rely on authenticity and essence,  whether it is racial or masked through culture or nation. \u201cAsiatic\u201d operates within a realm of divided truths that eludes exper-tise as facts and figures remain unverifiable. As Paradise Killer\u2019s courtroom scene can be triggered at any time during the game, and the all- infallible and objective Judge  will agree with  whatever the player pre sents as \u201cyour truth\u201d (so long as they can make a strong case),  there is always the possibility of \u201cyour truth\u201d becoming \u201cthe truth,\u201d just as  there is always the inevitable case of amateur untruths becoming what Stephen Colbert famously called \u201ctruthi-ness,\u201d a playful art of not- quite- truth- telling that has become all too common in twenty- four- hour news and social news media. Indeed, Paradise Killer\u2019s  acceptance of \u201cyour truth\u201d is an all- too- tempting premise for the player to pre sent truth through their own biases, and to downplay the presence of contradictory facts. In my final playthrough, I chose not to accuse the game\u2019s sympathetic married  couple, Lydia and Sam Day Breaks, whose main motiva-tions to collaborate with the conspirators was their desire to  free themselves 58  Christopher\u00a0B. Pattersonfrom the island. In effect, I hid facts from the Judge, made a conspiracy look like the fault of a single actor, and denied knowledge. It was no truth at all. Yet my truth became, in the eyes of the state and its citizens, the truth. As the game ended  there, I could only ponder the potential long- term effects of showing and honoring my truth.Rule #2: Oh Baby, Worship Me, Baby!Shinji: You guys are the bad guys.Lady Love Dies: What do you mean?Shinji: The syndicate worship  dying gods that want to rule the world and drown it in a sea of war and blood.Lady Love Dies: I  don\u2019t see how that makes us the bad guys.Paradise Killer\u2019s Asiatic realm of multiple truths, unbelievable coincidences, and contradictory facts take place within the insular realm of an island, one masked as a paradise to keep its enslaved citizens happy and forgetful of the \u201creal world.\u201d Indeed, the plot of Paradise Killer clashes with its Asiatic forms, as well as its queer sun- drenched beach aesthetic and over- the- top sexual mystery. To briefly summarize: ancient gods once ruled the world and controlled mankind  until mankind  rose against them. Then, sometime around 1000\u00a0CE, the Syndicate, a group of radicals who still worshipped  these gods, became immortal and, in an effort to entice the gods back to Earth, created islands in an alternative real ity, then kidnapped and enslaved  people from the real world\u2014 \u201ccitizens\u201d\u2014 and forced them into psychic worshipping ritu-als. However, as such worship can invite other super natural forces, one by one, each island was infected by demons, and each had to be ritualistically sacrificed, then replaced by another island. Paradise Killer takes place on Island #24. All of its characters, besides the scapegoated Henry, are part of the evil, lunatic cult of the Syndicate.Slowly unraveling the narrative of Paradise Killer can be jarring, as the player only learns of  these facts as they are inundated with cute and kitschy symbols of heart shapes, phallic \u201cblood crystals\u201d currency, gorgeous half- naked flirts, and nostalgic references to cassettes and flip phones. Despite your freedom of choice and freedom to roam throughout the island, nothing you do can even remotely affect the cycle of kidnapping, enslavement, and  The Asiatic and the Anti- Asian Pandemic 59slaughter. Indeed, the ludological dissonance of the game\u2019s campy gameplay, with its narrative of enslavement and religious  fanaticism, is a revisitation of the cognitive dissonance that classifies Lovecraftian horror, where a person\u2019s state of mind  will also deteriorate into madness when faced with the harsh, indifferent, and incomprehensible cosmos. But Paradise Killer is no horrify-ing experience. In fact, one could argue that its Asiatic attunement allows the game to pre sent real- world horrors in a way that is comprehensible and approachable, without necessarily being domesticated or gentrified into the palatable and the censored. How, we might ask, does the Asiatic allow such a revisioning?When Open World Empire went in print in late 2019,  there was an episode of the Netflix  television show Black Mirror that seemed to encapsulate the Asiatic\u2019s ability to revise the horrors of the world into a queer and approach-able media. The episode, \u201cStriking Vipers,\u201d follows two old friends, Danny and Karl, two masculine, straight, Black men, who reconnect  after eleven years apart by playing a newly released virtual real ity version of Striking Vipers, a fighting game they once played as college roommates. In previous episodes of Black Mirror, virtual and augmented real ity appears as a militaristic technol-ogy symbolizing techno- paranoia. In the episode \u201cPlaytest,\u201d augmented real-ity devices create an  actual horror game that can kill the viewer through signal interference. Similarly, in the 2016 episode \u201cMen against Fire,\u201d augmented real ity technology forces American soldiers to visualize refugees as monstrous terrorists.13 In \u201cStriking Vipers,\u201d though, Vr technology is portrayed through the softer forms of video game play and Asiatic cuteness, as Danny and Karl revisit their childhood through inhabiting the virtual characters Lance and Roxanne (see figure\u00a02.2). The game nevertheless remains a threat, not to refugee lives or to technological breakdown but to heteronormative forms of futurity and  family, as the Asiatic form of the game permits the two friends to act out their erotic desires for each other by having passionate and repeated virtual sex.Even as the game Striking Vipers\u2014 like the real games Street Fighter and Tekken\u2014 features typical racial  stereotypes for the purpose of enacting vio lence, the game\u2019s Asiatic associations with bizarreness, silliness, and Asia itself, allow new erotic relations to emerge. The game\u2019s homoeroticism feels more taboo when seen from the point of view of the episode\u2019s Black male leads, who, since their time apart, have incorporated further into the norms of hetero- patriarchal and cap i tal ist success. As studies have shown, the fight-ing game community is one of the most diverse in gaming, and its players of 60  Christopher\u00a0B. Pattersoncolor often gravitate to Japanese- made fighting games that so often depict racial  stereotypes.14 Indeed, the episode\u2019s poster patterns the same slash ef-fect and bisexual lighting of the Oscar- winning film Moonlight, a text that is also famous for portraying Black male queerness through an Asiatic form, as the film borrows heavi ly from the visual styles and cinematography of the Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar Wai. Through its imperial and Asiatic des-ignation, the fictional Striking Vipers video game provides a space for new erotic practices to emerge not against but through practices of a militarized technology.The Asiatic characteristics in games have often represented an alterna-tive means of approaching new technology that departs from the fears of Western militarism, as well as the techno- orientalist fears of surveillance and control. As Nick Dyer- Witheford and Greig de\u00a0Peuter argued in Games of Em-pire, the shift from American to  Japanese games in the 1980s is often narrated as a  political and historical \u201creclamation\u201d where \u201cvideo games  were rescued not by the military- industrial complex from whence they had sprung but by the victims of its atomic bomb.\u201d15 Indeed, video games as a medium continue to represent the erotic and Asiatic form of the digital as a  whole; where social 2.2. Danny and Karl play as Lance and Roxanne in the fictional game Striking Vipers. Screenshot by author. The Asiatic and the Anti- Asian Pandemic 61media portrays accountable, transparent, exposed, and meticulously drawn selves, games are envisioned as islands, places of digital anonymity with no direct real- world impact. Through the Asiatic forms of games like Striking Vipers and Paradise Killer, the \u201chorrors\u201d of the real world\u2019s asymmetrical power relations are not merely made approachable but are erotically reani-mated into other only- just- imaginable possibilities.Rule #3: Breathe Life Back into Paradise!I grew up without a dad on a synthetic island in a dif fer ent real ity, forced to worship gods that want to rule the world. I needed something to do.\u2014 The citizen Henry Division, when asked about his crimesWhile the Black Mirror episode \u201cStriking Vipers\u201d illustrates the Asiatic in games, I would hesitate to call it, or any episode of the Black Mirror series, Asiatic in the way games like Paradise Killer are,  because it lacks the futur-istic, insular, and islandic space of play and experiment that are so crucial to how the Asiatic appears in games. As Colin Milburn has argued, Huizinga\u2019s \u201cmagic circle\u201d of experiment and play can better be thought of as islandic, a space that for some invokes a tropical paradise (or a home), and for  others the evolutionary insights of Darwin\u2019s Gal\u00e1pagos, and for  others the atomic nu-clear tests of Bikini Atoll. Islands operate as both spaces of queer Asiatic play, \u201ca place for melodrama as much as alien experimentation,\u201d as well as spaces for experimental world making that offer \u201cdiscrete space[s] for prototyping the world of tomorrow: a crucible for futurity.\u201d16 The  performance theorist Dorinne Kondo describes world making as the collaborative and productive pro cesses of race and identity making that \u201cevokes sociopo liti cal transforma-tion and the impossibility of escaping power, history, and culture.\u201d17 Worlds are  imagined through repeated interactions that, in time, establish new norms and conventions, and worlds can be remade so long as they always work with the givenness of language and history. If games are world makers, then  these worlds are responding to and refracting the \u201creal- world\u201d genres of race, class, sexuality, gender, nation, and so on. As Kondo stresses, in a world structured by race, world making as a frame allows us to trace \u201cthe production of race\u2014 racialized structures of  inequality, racialized  labor, the racialized aesthetics of genre, racialized subjectivities, racial affect.\u201d1862  Christopher\u00a0B. PattersonParadise Killer\u2019s making of a queer Asiatic world can seem utopic, an attempt to grasp the queerness on the horizon, as it rejects the militaristic technology and Western cosmologies of the \u201creal world\u201d to envision a  future of racially diverse immortals, welcoming the player as a new inhabitant. But even though it takes place on an island, Paradise Killer is in no way insular; in fact, one might see it as a critique of insularity itself, a bare refusal of the logics of island thinking. A final question: How does Paradise Killer do this?The smoking gun to this riddle is the sole citizen left on Paradise Island #24, Henry Division, an easy scapegoat for the Syndicate, which blames him for \u201cthe crime to end all crimes.\u201d And like many scapegoats, Henry may in fact be the only Asian face around (see figure\u00a02.3). Though Henry\u2019s face ap-pears East Asian, his racial origins are a mystery, one that the player is never asked to investigate. His  father, the immortal councilman Eyes Kiwami, has a  Japanese name and lives in a  house that mimics a  Japanese  temple; never-theless, he is likely not of Asian descent himself, for his other son, Daino-nigate, appears totally white. That leaves Henry\u2019s  mother, the citizen Rina Division, who, despite the Syndicate\u2019s dogmatic surveillance of its citizens, has no photos or rec ords about her racial background. If we take another look at the housing where the citizens lived and the graveyards where their mas-sacred bodies lie, we notice that the Asiatic architecture of the game seems to have been built solely for the citizens themselves, while the immortals live in ornate Greco- Roman palaces. Perhaps our protagonist, Lady Love Dies, 2.3. Paradise Killer\u2019s Henry Division, \u201cPossessed Citizen Accused of Mass Murder.\u201d Screenshot by author. The Asiatic and the Anti- Asian Pandemic 63could interview more citizens to find the truth to the game\u2019s mystery of racial origins, but besides Henry, all the citizens\u2014 men,  women,  children\u2014 were sacrificed to the gods before she returned to the island. Their presence can only be felt in the whispers of ghosts, in left- behind relics like the diary that complains of \u201cdays that go on for months,\u201d the pain pills required by workers who must haul all goods by hand, and in the  children\u2019s stones painted with hopeful wishes for the next life (but, as stated plainly, \u201cCitizens  don\u2019t have a next life\u201d).So  here\u2019s my truth, culled from a se lection of clues: the kidnapped, en-slaved, abused, and then sacrificed citizens of Paradise Killer are Asian. They are kidnapped from East Asian regions and forced into  labor and worship in housing that mimics the lives they  were brutally torn away from so that the queer and diverse \u201cmain characters\u201d can continue to play their  little games of gossip and intrigue. Paradise Killer is thus not a game that seeks to create reparative affects or queer and racial solidarities\u2014 quite the opposite. It is a game that encapsulates the often cutesy, queer, and Asiatic ways that the world around us reproduces yellow peril, techno- orientalism, and anti- Asian racism, particularly in the form of Asian debt- slavery within the industry of Information Technology (what I call the \u201cOpen World Empire\u201d). Rather than a refusal of H.\u00a0P. Lovecraft\u2019s own anti- Asian and xenophobic racism, Paradise Killer\u2019s world is a con temporary reimagining of it, awash in Asiatic pink. To be clear, I am not saying that the game, its developers, or its players are racist\u2014 again, quite the opposite. In simulating anti- Asian racism within a queer Asiatic setting, Paradise Killer allows us to understand how, through the Asiatic itself, we can continue to reproduce racial and imperial vio lences by obscuring or dismissing the cheapened life and  labor of Asian  people, legitimated by their supposed \u201cexcess\u201d population growth. In other words, Paradise Killer is not a cele bration of the queer world- making potential of the Asiatic but a condemnation of it.This truth was admittedly a revelation to me, who wrote an entire book on the Asiatic. Only  after playing Paradise Killer was I able to unpack the ambivalences I felt during 2020 at talks, conferences, and laptop surfaces, as I repeatedly confronted my own discomfort with this term. The message that Paradise Killer allowed me to conceive was this: yes, the Asiatic can offer new possibilities, more erotic, more queer, perhaps more \u201cwoke,\u201d than our current dystopias of real- world militaristic and racist horror. Yet this capacity to make worlds through digital media both requires and helps sus-tain the vast exploitation, precarity, and death of millions of  people, many 64  Christopher\u00a0B. Pattersonof whom are centered within the micropro cessor factories of Southeast Asia, the \u201cfactories of the world\u201d in southern China\u2014 whom Jack Linchuan Qiu calls the \u201ciSlaves\u201d of tech megafactories; who live within an \u201cunfreedom of  labor\u201d19\u2014as well as the low- level designers and coders across the globe experiencing \u201ccrunch.\u201d Like Paradise Killer\u2019s Syndicate, we players and aca-demics tend to stay within the game, treating it as its own isolated island, a futuristic Asiatic wonderland rife for experiment and play, recognizing and misrecognizing pieces of ourselves in it, all the while indifferent to the living and breathing subjects who are pre sent in our real- life worlds but who remain unnamed and unrecognized in our open worlds.The island laboratory is, as Milburn writes, \u201can incubator for the  future,\u201d20 and what has become clearer in the time of Donald Trump, COVId-19, and Paradise Killer is that an Asiatic  future does not bode well for the vast ma-jority of Asian  people or for Asian Americans. Indeed, the prob lem with the Asiatic is less the definitional categories of the term and more the fact that the Asiatic itself is so frequently unrecognized and unnamed and thus remains obscured as a default reference for an alternative to Western militaristic technologies, much like the island utopias of Thomas More and Francis Bacon. Like islands, Asiatic games feel totalizing, isolated, perfect spaces for experimental thinking, while in fact the Asiatic itself helps to fuel the well- oiled machines of capitalism and empire as they continue to operate at full throttle (they are more like the colonized islands of the Pacific, outfitted with both tourist beaches and military bases). Paradise Killer participates in Asiatic world making not as utopia but as warning sign. As we investigate and explore the game\u2019s series of riddles, accusations, and truths, the real injustices remain in all their evil banality. Games, our islands of paradise, allow us to make new worlds where we feel seen. We recognize ourselves in them  because they are built like us: through the logics of capture, control, and death.. . . and may you reach the moon! The Asiatic and the Anti- Asian Pandemic 65Notes 1 Paradise Killer\u2019s UK- based developer is Kaizen Game Works (kaizen is  Japanese for \u201cchange for the better\u201d). 2 See Patterson, Open World Empire, chap. 5. 3 Patterson, Open World Empire, 58. 4 Patterson, Open World Empire, 60. 5 Patterson, Transitive Cultures, 201. 6 Chuh, The Difference Aesthetics Makes, 126. 7 Pearson, \u201cThis Is the Anti- Asian Hate Crime Capital.\u201d 8 Shah, Contagious Divides, 8. 9 Said, Repre sen ta tions of the Intellectual, 76. 10 Patterson, Open World Empire, 70. 11 Patterson, Open World Empire, 233. 12 Cheney- Lippold, We Are Data, 19. See also Singh, Unthinking Mastery; Musser, Sensual Excess; and Mu\u00f1oz, The Sense of Brown. 13 See chapter\u00a04 of Open World Empire for my analy sis of \u201cMen against Fire.\u201d 14 Epps, \u201cBlack Lives Have Always Mattered in the Fighting Game Community.\u201d 15 Dyer- Witheford and de\u00a0Peuter, Games of Empire, 14. 16 Milburn, Mondo Nano, 78, 77. 17 Kondo, Worldmaking, 29. 18 Kondo, Worldmaking, 25. 19 Qiu, Goodbye iSlave, 34. 20 Milburn, Mondo Nano, 77\u201378.Asian, AdjacentUtopian Longing and Model  Minority Mediation in Disco ElysiumThe City on the Edge of HistoryS ince the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the hegemonic attitude of much of the Global North across the  political spectrum has proclaimed the absolute victory of liberal capitalism as both the final stage of economic and social  organization, with any serious challenge to this reigning order rendered futilely quixotic. The truth of the claim notwithstanding, this is the  grand nar-rative best encapsulated by Francis Fukuyama\u2019s celebratory claim of the \u201cend of history,\u201d1 with the lasting effects of liberal capitalism\u2019s hegemonic power lambasted on the left, most famously by Fredric Jameson in Postmodernism (1989) and the British cultural theorist Mark Fisher in Cap i tal ist Realism (2009). Certainly, con temporary global trends  toward reactionary far- right authoritarianism in the late 2010s and early 2020s would forcefully rebuke Fukuyama\u2019s thesis in regard to liberalism, but the cultural domination of capital remains difficult to unseat. As Fisher puts it succinctly, \u201cCapitalism Takeo Rivera3 Asian, Adjacent 67seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable,\u201d erecting both the social and aesthetic limits of the Global North\u2019s metropole.2 Realism has become the aesthetic lingua franca of our age, and the boundary of the thinkable, and with it the truth- claim of capitalism\u2019s inevitability.Fisher\u2019s initial formulations of his solution would appear in his introduc-tion to his sequel proj ect, Acid Communism, unfinished before his tragic suicide in 2017. In this work, Fisher turns to 1960s Anglophone psychedelic counterculture as a critical cultural potentiality to break  free of cap i tal ist malaise. \u201cThe crucial defining feature of the psychedelic,\u201d writes Fisher, \u201cis the question of consciousness, and its relationship to what is experienced as real ity. If the very fundamentals of our experience, such as our sense of space and time, can be altered, does that not mean that the categories by which we live are plastic, mutable?\u201d3 To resuscitate the aims of the coun-terculture, Fisher proposes acid communism, which is \u201cthe convergence of class consciousness, socialist- feminist consciousness- raising and psychedelic consciousness, the fusion of new social movements with a communist proj ect, an unpre ce dented aestheticisation of everyday life.\u201d4The argument of Acid Communism, preliminary and unfinished though it is, is a compelling and organic extension of Fisher\u2019s observations in Cap-i tal ist Realism but relies on a hitherto unacknowledged basis in colonialist orientalism. The countercultural ele ments to which Fisher alludes heavi ly exploited South and East Asian spiritualities in order to produce their af-fects of radical alterity\u2014an alterity relative to cap i tal ist whiteness, but one that has drawn on a logic of commodification by other means. The co- optation of vari ous Asian spiritualities to produce an orientalized mystique for vari ous countercultural forms is so commonplace as to be assumed; for example, as Jane Iwamura has observed, the \u201cBeat Generation and its follow-ers in their own unique interpretation  adopted Buddhism as a way to distin-guish themselves from \u2018middle- class non- identity\u2019 and to guide and justify their own pursuits.\u201d5 Yet, Iwamura continues, \u201cZen became something to \u2018try on\u2019 and \u2018entertain,\u2019 rather than something that directly challenged American values. In fact, Zen as stylized religion covertly consolidated American national identity and its cap i tal ist orientation.\u201d6 Such a similar dynamic played out throughout the next  decades with re spect to multiple Asian religions, with \u201ccounterculture\u201d adopting such two- dimensional, commodified versions of Asianness to satisfy utopian yearning for orien-tal mysticism, including in the tech industry, as elaborated extensively by 68  Takeo RiveraR.\u00a0John Williams.7 This racialized dynamic goes unproblematized in Acid Communism, with the central protagonists of the socialist spirit quest as white artists of the Global North.8I do not reject Fisher\u2019s central dialectic between cap i tal ist realism and acid communism; in fact, his observations of the hegemonic grip of bourgeois realism and the necessity for an aesthetic break from its logics are difficult to deny. As Fredric Jameson writes in Antinomies of Realism, \u201cThe realistic novelist has a vested interest, an ontological stake, in the solidity of social real ity, on the  resistance of bourgeois society to history and to change,\u201d9 so it logically follows that something like \u201cthe psychedelic\u201d offers a disruption of con temporary neoliberal ideology, whose ongoing circumscription of  political imagination remains dauntless. Nevertheless, Fisher\u2019s critique is incomplete without serious attendance to orientalism, coloniality, and race. One can begin with Christopher\u00a0B. Patterson\u2019s recent theorization of the \u201cAsiatic,\u201d a strategy of acknowledged virtual otherness found across Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick that enabled them to achieve considerable breakthroughs out of vari ous hegemonic Western normativi-ties.10 In Patterson\u2019s reparative formulation, the Asiatic is an intentionally fantastical Orient, but one that avoids any presumption of epistemological mastery and becomes a necessary component for rethinking queer relations outside Eurocentric grids of intelligibility.Fisher\u2019s acid communism is thoroughly \u201cAsiatic\u201d in Patterson\u2019s sense, but it also gestures to a par tic u lar kind of  political relationality that I term, to borrow a title from a Margaret Cho song, \u201cAsian adjacency.\u201d11 By \u201cAsian ad-jacency,\u201d I refer to a quality found across varying manifestations of Asiatic racial form that arise in articulating communist futurity,12 a \u201cbesideness\u201d that provincializes white epistemology as a position relative to  either superego model minoritarianism or mystical, exotified won der.13 Rather than the \u201cwhite adjacency\u201d characteristic of model minority ideology, which places the Asian in a complicit positionality within white supremacist racial capi-talism, Asian adjacency instead invokes Asianness as a mediator of utopian  political imagination without actually positioning \u201cAsia\u201d as its utopia, fluc-tuating between idealization, moral comparison, and wonderment, holding together multiple relationalities open for contestation.It is through Asian adjacency that I analyze Disco Elysium, the 2019 indie role- playing game developed by UK- based indie game developer zA\/uM. Written by Estonian novelist Robert Kurvitz, Helen Hindpere, Argo Tuulik,  Asian, Adjacent 69Cash de Cuir, and Olga Moskvina,14 Disco Elysium arrived on the gaming scene to near- unanimous critical fanfare, nominated for several \u201cGame of the Year\u201d awards and winning Best Narrative and Best Role- Playing Game from the 2019 Game Awards. Disco Elysium puts its player in fictional Marti-naise, the district of a cosmopolitan, vaguely  European city called Revachol, which languishes  under foreign occupation by a multinational alliance of liberal- capitalist governments called the Co ali tion, which had suppressed a communist revolution fifty years prior. Assuming the role of a self- loathing, substance- abusing, amnesiac detective named Harrier DuBois, the player is tasked with solving the murder of a right- wing mercenary who had been sent to break a dockworkers\u2019 strike, while si mul ta neously plumbing the depths of the character\u2019s depression and anguish.Moreover, Disco Elysium is a game that embraces, but also supersedes, the  political and aesthetic charge of acid communism, including its relation-ship to race and orientalism. The writers are openly Marxist; during their  acceptance speech for the Fresh Indie Game Award at the Game Awards, writer Helen Hindpere said, \u201cI would like to thank all of the  great  people who came before us . . . Marx and Engels for providing us the  political educa-tion, thank you!\u201d15 Correspondingly, Revachol is the city on the edge of his-tory, inundated with a melancholy for a communism that never actualized, currently governed instead by an ideology of centrist normativity, but its  political yearnings express themselves through the game\u2019s starkly expres-sionist aesthetics, its mind- altering psychedelics, and its forays into magi-cal realism. Moreover, like the psychedelics of Fisher\u2019s acid communism, Disco Elysium necessitates the presence of Asian adjacency to negotiate its  political affects, but does so with considerable, diasporic difference. In actuality, although drug use and hallucination are rampant throughout the game, Disco Elysium\u2019s Asian adjacency lies less in its psychedelics than in its psyche, its ego- ideal, its projections of fantasy, and its inculcation of won der. Correspondingly, this chapter focuses attention on three manifes-tations of Asian adjacency: DuBois\u2019s police partner, an \u201cAsian\u201d diasporic man named Kim Kitsuragi; the racial ambiguity of the Marxian Kras Mazov; and the semimythical Insulindian Phasmid. Although deeply flawed in its ra-cial politics, Disco Elysium nevertheless pre sents a racialized dialectic that yearns for a liberatory, postcapitalist futurity to resolve its stark contradic-tions, utilizing Asianness with and against orientalist clich\u00e9s to generate its  political idealizations.70  Takeo RiveraDifference with a Difference: The Model Minority Ego- IdealUnlike many games in its role- playing genre, Disco Elysium in many re-spects disempowers its player through the avatarial vessel of Harrier Du-Bois, a formerly successful detective in the Revachol Citizens Militia who has, since the departure of his wife, fallen into a bout of self- destructive depression, resulting in a drug- fueled bender just before the start of the game\u2019s action.16 As a consequence of hitting rock bottom, DuBois begins the game with amnesia, prompting the player to effectively reconstruct his personality from the ground up, principally through dialogue choices that allow the player to assume a range of diff er ent positions, from aggressive to apol o getic, feminist to misogynist, empathetic to cruel. The pos si ble permutations of events in Disco Elysium are legion, requiring dozens of playthroughs to fully access  every pos si ble short- term outcome, although intriguingly, the conclusion of the game remains unchanged. The paths may vary widely, and the final debrief reflects the player\u2019s actions, yet the appre-hending of the killer  will occur no  matter how the player arrives at that point. Meanwhile, the world of the game plays out both in the luscious oil- paint art style of the physical world and the thousands of lines of expository text and dialogue that unfolds on the sidebar of the user interface. Stylistically, the game pre sents a visual environment of futurist grays of the streets contrast-ing with the often vibrantly impressionist yellows, reds, greens, and oranges of the clothing, and karaoke and dance halls, visually enacting a dialectic between the whimsy of Mu\u00f1ozian excess and urban- modernist Kafkaesque ennui.17Notably, each of Harrier\u2019s levelable skills occupies a schizophrenic place\u00a0in his mind, talking to his ego- self throughout the game by providing advice and insight, but often also bickering among one another.18 The skills are\u00a0grouped into four general categories: Intellect, which includes skills like Rhe toric, Logic, and Encyclopedia; Psyche, which includes the likes of Empathy, Suggestion, and Authority; Physique, which includes Endurance and Pain Threshold; and Motorics, which includes dexterous abilities such as Hand\/Eye Coordination and Perception. The twenty- four Skills become characters in their own right, each with a distinct, insistent personality vying for influ-ence within Harrier\u2019s mind. Harrier\u2019s propensity for hallucination and internal bickering, not to mention the intense brushstrokes and colors of Aleksander Rostov\u2019s oil- painting environmental overlays and textures, represents a sense  Asian, Adjacent 71of shattered real ity and fractured consciousness reflective of Mark Fisher\u2019s psychedelic, all the more intensified by the implication that mind- altering substances are at least partly responsible for his  mental state. But it is not so much the centrality of  actual psychedelics so much as what they highlight, the psyche itself, that occupies the most verbal presence in the game. The experi-ence of playing through the game, with the twenty- four internal repre sen ta-tions of Harrier\u2019s psyche bickering and occupying an enormous proportion of the game\u2019s CrpG narrative text, has a surrealist acid- trip quality to it, sometimes keeping the player in a haze of competing internal thoughts rather than engaging with the exterior world. But that exterior world is most readily accessible through the figure of Harrier\u2019s partner, Kim Kitsuragi.Shortly  after awakening with amnesia in the wake of his drug- filled, sui-cidal bender, Harrier meets Kim Kitsuragi in the lobby of his  hotel. Kim Kit-suragi is Disco Elysium\u2019s sole Asian- racialized character, but also the only NpC party member (besides Harry\u2019s inner voices) who remains a near- constant presence throughout the game. Kim sports circular teashades, neatly combed short hair, and a wiry build. First described via the in- game text as a \u201cbespec-tacled man in an orange bomber jacket . . . tapping his foot on the floor,\u201d he often keeps his hands folded  behind his back in a formal military \u201cat ease.\u201d As the deuteragonist, Kitsuragi is undoubtedly the most impor tant and pre sent NpC in the game, representing a paragon of competence and princi ple that consistently contrasts with DuBois\u2019s wildness, excess, and inner psychological torment. But most importantly, Kitsuragi\u2019s diasporic Asianness becomes, in fact, a necessary ingredient for DuBois\u2019s inner journey. Kitsuragi is Asian, adjacent: he provides not so much a yellow perilist counterpoint to white interiority as he does a semipermeable sounding board on which the player can gauge DuBois\u2019s emotional pro gress. Kitsuragi is not a techno- orientalist bugaboo but a model minority superego to a whiteness characterized princi-pally by failure and ruin. The developers of Disco Elysium cast white Belgian actor- musician Jullien Champenois in the role in an unfortunate whitewashed casting; however, Champenois notes that the most necessary ethnic marker for Kim\u2019s casting was not Asianness but, rather, a \u201cFrench accent.\u201d19 Aurally, this is the most distinct feature of Kim, whose French accent permeates his deliberative, restrained vocal  performance throughout the game. The effete properness of Kim\u2019s vocal  presentation suggests a layering of model minori-tarian forms, allowing him to assume a hypercivilized position relative to the chaotic Harrier.72  Takeo RiveraAlthough DuBois\u2019s  political ideology can vary widely depending on the player\u2019s dialogue choices, DuBois\u2019s masculine whiteness remains fixed, as does Kitsuragi\u2019s racial otherness relative to it.20 Early on, the player\/Har-rier can choose to tell Kim, \u201cYou  don\u2019t look like other  people around  here.\u201d A dialogue then transpires, and with a high enough Encyclopedia stat, you may learn more about \u201cSeol,\u201d Kim\u2019s ancestral motherland:yOu: You  don\u2019t look like other  people around  here.kIM kITSurAGI: That\u2019s  because I\u2019m half- Seolite. Or quarter. My  father\u2019s  father was from Seol\u2014so was my grand mother, but from my\u00a0 mother\u2019s side. . . . [He shakes his head.] It\u2019s not an in ter est ing topic.yOu: What is Seol?kIM kITSurAGI: It\u2019s a part of the world, officer. A geopo liti cal entity\u2014 *and* a geographic division. I told you it  wouldn\u2019t be in ter est ing.ENCyCLOpEdIA: Seol is a protectionist, isolationist panisiolary state west of the Insulindian isola. Actually, it\u2019s *quite* in ter est ing; some would even say mysterious . . .yOu:  You\u2019re only making it *sound* uninteresting. I still want to know more about Seol.21kIM kITSurAGI:  You\u2019re barking up the wrong tree. I  don\u2019t speak a word of Seolite, I\u2019ve never met  either one of my grandparents. And I\u2019ve never *been* to Seol. [He seems almost proud of  these  things.] I\u2019m a regular Revacholiere.Harrier, racked by amnesia, begins the exchange with a presumably innocent but nevertheless microaggressive observation of Kim\u2019s phenotypic other-ness, followed by Kim providing patient explanation of his Asianness and Harrier\u2019s ongoing questions about Seol, which is something of an analog of  Korea and Japan, which we can infer from the orientalized description of the isolationist nation and the spellings of the names (Seol \u2248 Seoul, Kitsuragi having pseudo- Japanese phonetics). Although Harrier is innocent, the player is not\u2014as an Asian American player, I felt conflicted by the choice of ini-tiating this dialogue, knowing my own irritation at being on the receiving end of such a question, yet  eager to delve further into Kim\u2019s Asian diasporic  Asian, Adjacent 73background\u2014 I sensed that Harrier\u2019s bumbling amnesiac inquiry would be the principal means of learning more. Encyclopedia, which ostensibly represents Harrier\u2019s internalized voice of book knowledge, describes Seol in thoroughly orientalized terms\u2014 protectionist, isolationist, and especially mysterious\u2014 stoking Harrier\u2019s interest more (and thus lending said orientalism epistemic authority). Kim then proudly disavows his ethnic identity, insisting that he is \u201ca regular Revacholiere.\u201dKitsuragi is a racially familiar figure in ethnic studies, who makes a claim to legitimacy through cultural assimilationism. Within an Asian American context, Kim reflects a well- trodden World War II\u2013 era  Japanese American Citizens\u2019 League\u2013 style hyper- Americanness, prideful of his severance from his immigrant background, which the game exoticizes as oriental- barbarous. Kim is, on an individual basis, a model minority, although  there does not ap-pear to be any racewide basis for Seolite- Revacholier model minoritarianism as such, but the articulation of his antiracism is principally through assimi-lationist logics of respectability, a racial strategy that remains prevalent in con temporary continental  Europe.22Correspondingly, throughout Disco Elysium, Kim is the most exemplary law enforcement agent in the game, outstripping DuBois in terms of competence, professionalism, and reputation. Whereas Seol exists in an ambiguous haze of generic orientalized despotism and the authoritarianism that accompanies it, Kim is less authoritarian than authoritative, leading not through command but through example. Although Kim works in a diff er ent precinct, DuBois\u2019s disaffected teammates speak to Kim with deep reverence for his accomplish-ments at the conclusion of the game. Kim does not always comment; rather, he casts a constant, if deliberately understated, judgmental gaze on the range of the player\u2019s actions throughout the game. A common recurrence is Kim raising an eyebrow, which often immediately sends a sense of shame down Harrier\u2019s spine. While Harrier is a chronically depressed, slovenly, pungent drug addict whose face has been eerily frozen into an otherworldly smile, Kim is a beacon of order, duty, and proper procedure.  Here Tara Fickle\u2019s astute reading of model minoritarianism is quite illuminating: in her analy sis of William Petersen\u2019s early articulation of the  Japanese American model minor-ity, Fickle observes that the model minority theory is \u201cultimately less inter-ested in holding up  Japanese Americans as a punitive example for blacks. If anything, he considered the former a far more effective parable for white Americans. . . .  These  were not . . . merely model minorities, but model Ameri-cans.\u201d23 Similarly, Kim is Harrier\u2019s ego- ideal, not only a model minority but a 74  Takeo Riveramodel Revacholier, and part of what animates Kim\u2019s desire to excel is precisely that sense of feeling out of place. This applies equally to Kim\u2019s ethnicity as his sexuality; Kim subtly hints at his own queerness throughout the game when he amusedly reacts to Harrier\u2019s bewilderment at homosexual imagery, and through sufficient dialogue and leveling choices, Kim may reveal that he is gay, although this has no additional bearing on the storyline.24In many re spects, Kim\u2019s competence, detachment, and achievement reflect the type of character most rpG players  will usually assume within the genre, as opposed to the slovenly, excessive Harrier. With the dialectic between Kim and Harrier, Disco Elysium positions whiteness\u2014 often, leftist whiteness\u2014as the position of failure relative to model minority Asianness, inviting the player to take on a complex identification mediated by Asian ad-jacency. Harrier, as the full embodiment of failure, embraces the position of failure even more so by choosing a communist orientation\u2014 when the player asks Rhe toric, \u201cWhat\u2019s this *communism* even about,\u201d Rhe toric responds, \u201cFailure. It\u2019s about failure . . . abject failure. Total, irreversible defeat on all fronts!\u201d but with the hope that, as the comically framed \u201cLast Communist,\u201d the player can somehow have diff er ent fortunes than their  predecessors. Yet regardless of  political orientation, players often find themselves yearn-ing to be, or at least be like, the Asian\/Asiatic Kim, the character most closely aligned to the rpG\u2019s power fantasy\u2014 unless the player wishes to go in the opposite direction and abandon all semblance of success, which is its own tacit acknowl edgment of Kim\u2019s moral and professional superiority.Perhaps the only instance in Disco Elysium in which Kim breaks his gener-ally serene disposition is when he is verbally harassed by a character known only as the \u201cracist lorry driver\u201d (figure\u00a03.1), when the player first initiates dialogue with the driver standing several yards away from the strike:rACIST LOrry drIVEr: \u201cWelcome to Revachol!\u201d announces the rotund man. The remark  isn\u2019t addressed to you. It\u2019s addressed to the Lieutenant . . .kIM kITSurAGI: \u201c Don\u2019t you *Welcome to Revachol* me,\u201d the lieuten-ant fires back. \u201cMy grand father came  here from a three- thousand- year- old racist- isolationist culture, while your ancestors came to this island a mere three hundred years ago.\u201d\u201c Every school of thought and government has failed in this city\u2014 but I love it nonetheless. It belongs to me as much as it belongs to you.\u201d Asian, Adjacent 75The interaction further cements Kim as a figure whose route to antira-cism is through assimilation, and with it an orientalist disavowal of the barbarism from which his ancestors immigrated. In some re spects, Kim\u2019s assimilationist antiracism reflects Homi Bhabha\u2019s oft- cited mimic man, whose assumption of the colonizer\u2019s habitus exposes the constructedness of the colonizer\u2019s racial superiority to begin with.25 However, Kim\u2019s mim-icry\/model minoritarianism leaves orientalism intact\u2014 Seol is once again cast in terms of exoticized barbarism from which Western civilization has rescued Kim\u2019s ancestors. Kim is thus si mul ta neously racially exceptional and avowedly normative, even as he perpetuates exoticism through disavowal. While Kim is the Asian adjacent to Harrier, Kim positions himself adjacent to Asianness. The exotic is external rather than internal to Kim, decidedly antithetical to the iconic, vexed sleuth and purveyor of orientalized wisdom, Charlie Chan (while sharing Chan\u2019s serenity and logical prowess). In this re-spect, Kim resists epistemological mastery, even if Harrier\u2019s internal voice yearns for colonial knowledge. It is through not racial exceptionalism but  exceptional racial mundaneness that Kim aims to distinguish himself, recalling 3.1. The Racist Lorry Driver harasses Kim Kitsuragi, who responds. Screenshot from Disco Elysium taken by author, courtesy of zA\/uM.76  Takeo RiveraJu Yon Kim\u2019s argument that the quotidian is a key domain for Asian diasporic self- fashioning.26In terms of social disruption and normativity, despite Kim\u2019s sexual pref-erence for men, Harrier is the \u201cqueerer\u201d figure relative to insistently lawful Kim.27 While each of Harrier\u2019s personality traits clings to its specific bias, Kim plays the role of deadpan \u201cstraight man\u201d (in the comedic sense, not a sexual sense, yet remaining essentially homonormative), bemused sounding board. His relationship to the player is adjacency, a constant besideness that neither intrudes nor wholly surrenders.Yet what is peculiar about Kim\u2019s Asian adjacency is the juxtaposition of his assimilationist model minoritarianism with his ironic  actual lack of suc-cess in the course of the game. As Chris Breault states, \u201cBefore the player even learns their own name, they learn to rely on Kim\u2019s judgment\u2014he im-mediately outlines a plan, establishes that Harry\u2019s badge is missing, and begins the work of interviewing suspects.\u201d Yet, Breault keenly observes, \u201cit takes a while to see that Kim, the voice of reason, is usually wrong.\u201d28 Indeed, as the mystery of the murder of the strike- breaking mercenary unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that Harrier\u2019s messier, sometimes- nonsensical tangents\u2014as opposed to Kim\u2019s straightforward, commonsensical approaches\u2014 become key to not only solving the murder but also reflect-ing on the thinkability of  political futurity itself. As the final section of this essay  will explore, this is particularly true should the player decide to pursue the Insulindian Phasmid, a cryptid with no apparent bearing to the murder case; the player can choose to complete Phasmid side quests (like laying out and restocking bait traps) out of  pleasure or amusement while Kim repeatedly bemoans the activity as a waste of time. As a consequence, Kim reflects an inverse of Harrier, the paragon of discipline to Harrier\u2019s chaos\u2014 a well- worn police procedural clich\u00e9, to be sure, but his model minority status coupled with the shadow of orientalist exoticism helps mediate a psychedelic utopian consciousness.Acid Communism with Asian CharacteristicsRather than the moral alignment that has become a convention in many North American rpGs,29 Disco Elysium instead deploys a  political alignment system that allows the player character to embrace one or more of the four principal worldviews: Communism, Moralism (essentially centrist liberalism), Fascism,  Asian, Adjacent 77and Ultraliberalism (neoliberal capitalism). The player can choose any of  these alignments through dialogue choices of the game, yet the game\u2019s own storyline ultimately embraces a narrative of communist melancholia. Given the overt  political stance of the developers, I would assert that the communist  political path is the \u201ccanonical\u201d one, and the one that best fits the narrative themes of the larger storyline.Of the four  political alignments, Kim claims neutrality, instead embracing his role, above all  else, as a model officer of the Revachol Citizens\u2019 Militia, though his attempt at apo liti cality tacitly makes him a centrist Moralist.30 Thus, the game\u2019s sole Asian NpC represents a figure of multiple levels of normativity: of idealized police be hav ior, of genre (the detective procedural), of assimilationist culture, and of  political alignment. The ideological descrip-tion of Moralism in the game, as described by the \u201cThought Cabinet\u201d perk \u201cKingdom of Conscience,\u201d is a searing description of  political centrism, which effectively describes Kim\u2019s  political role throughout the game:The Kingdom of Conscience  will be exactly as it is now. Moralists  don\u2019t  really *have* beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child\u2019s toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded. Centrism  isn\u2019t change\u2014 not even incremental change. It is *control*. Over yourself and the world. Exercise it. Look up at the sky, at the dark shapes of Co ali tion airships hanging  there. Ask yourself: is  there something sinister in moralism? And then answer: no. God is in his heaven. Every thing is normal on Earth.Overall, moralism represents the Fukuyamaist position, humanist liberalism as triumphant default, an ideology of normalcy that contrasts with the utopian dream of communism, the misogynist vio lence of fascism, and the unfettered avarice of ultraliberalism (neoliberalism). As model minority, Kim represents realism in its ideological and narratological functions alike, having disavowed the orientalist mystique of wonderment to become its exact opposite. How-ever, this is complicated slightly by the fact that Kim also wears an old orange bomber jacket of the communards\u2019 Revolutionary Air Corps, for reasons that Kim seems uncomfortable to disclose, suggesting that  there is, in fact, a part of him that may have once nostalgically yearned for a left- wing  political fu-turity. Moralism may thus be the position of detached, resigned pragmatism for Kim, as it has been for the post-1990s left at large.31 Kim\u2019s moralism is not so much an enthusiastic passion as psychological management, establishing what Kim has learned to be his horizon of possibility.78  Takeo RiveraPerpetually the moderate, Kim moderates Harrier\u2019s excesses, but in  doing so ironically necessitates that Harrier give  these ideas verbal form. Eventu-ally, Harrier and Kim discover a bust of Kras Mazov in the apartment of a communard. Described in- game as the  founder of scientific socialism and leader of the first major communist revolution, Mazov is an obvious analog for Karl Marx, sporting a wide white mane and thick mustache and beard. Harrier might begin to suspect that he himself is Mazov, to Kim\u2019s  great an-noyance. Gazing on the bust, Harrier insists on his physical resemblance to Mazov, mostly through the excessiveness of the hair. Kim, with a roll of his eyes, points out that Harrier lacks Mazov\u2019s birthmark, but, more importantly, adds: \u201cAlright. But  here\u2019s the big  thing\u2014 Kras Mazov looks Samaran, and you  don\u2019t.\u201d Harrier claims part Samaran ancestry (though we do not have any prior knowledge of this), and the game describes the response to this claim thus: \u201cThe lieutenant closes his eyes. \u2018Okay, you win. Be Kras Mazov then, I  don\u2019t care . . .\u2019 He opens his eyes again, tilting his head in a quiet won der. \u2018Why are you so hell- bent on proving that  you\u2019re Kras Mazov anyway?,\u2019 \u201d to which the player can reply with a choice of responses reflective of the  political ideologies in the game (see figure\u00a03.2).This mention of Mazov\u2019s racial otherness raises a question: What does a Samaran \u201clook like\u201d? The game\u2019s previous elaboration of Seol suggests that most countries in the world of Disco Elysium have real- world analogs, and the island of Samara is no exception\u2014 within the game\u2019s lore, Samara is described as the sole surviving communist nation, the \u201c People\u2019s Republic of Samara.\u201d In another segment of the game, the  People\u2019s Republic of Samara is named as site of manufacture for a set of bootleg speakers. The nonwhite racial otherness, combined with  these other iconographic signifiers, seem to suggest that while Seol is a clear analog for Japan and  Korea, Samara might vaguely represent China, Southeast Asia, or a Rus sian\/Kazakh border region.32 Nevertheless,  there remains the suggestion of orientalist otherness in Mazov, one that Har-rier can claim (albeit quite dubiously, or even facetiously).This comical moment from Disco Elysium represents a moment in which both a socialist futurity and an Asian identity occurs in the space of the whim-sical maybe, the what-if, the temporally adjacent.  Here Asian adjacency plays out twofold. First, the Asian- diasporic (or perhaps, in Patterson\u2019s parlance, Asiatic) Kim Kitsuragi plays the role of deadpan \u201cstraight man\u201d to Harrier\u2019s wild conspiracies, whose skepticism allows Harrier to elaborate on his gran-diose theory, a tragicomic notion that he actually is the Marxian  father pur-ported to have killed himself  decades prior. Kim regulates Harrier (and thus  Asian, Adjacent 79the player) not so much in  political disagreement as in a regular return to \u201creal ity,\u201d trying to maintain a grip of normativity while Harrier constantly fantasizes, hallucinates, and goes off on tangents. Yet Kim very rarely resists Harrier,  either\u2014 enabling Harrier even as he occasionally shames him.33 But the moment in the apartment suggests Asian adjacency with Mazov himself. As an Asian American player, I zoomed as much as I could onto the bust of Mazov, wondering if I could make out phenotypical Asianness in this sole physical repre sen ta tion of the game\u2019s author of scientific socialism. Asian\/America, as David Palumbo- Liu famously contends, \u201cresides in transit, as a point of reference on the horizon that is part of both a \u2018minority\u2019 identity and a \u2018majority\u2019 identity,\u201d which is a description that equally applies to the liminal racial position of Asian Americans in an antiblack racial order as it does to the affective confusion that arises from this nebulous state.34 Within Disco Elysium\u2019s communist imagination, Asianness exists not essentially but spectrally, an acid communism with ambivalently euphemistic Asian characteristics.3.2. Harrier and Kim inspect the communist\u2019s apartment, including the bust of Kras Mazov, which is the only physical depiction of Kras Mazov in the game. Screenshot from Disco Elysium taken by author, courtesy of zA\/uM.80  Takeo RiveraCryptozoology and the Utopian SublimeThe conclusion of Disco Elysium pre sents a compelling transition from Har-rier\u2019s largely  imagined psychedelic interiority to a genuinely magical event that occurs in the material world for even Kim to witness and believe with his own eyes. Harrier and Kim fi nally deduce that the murder was committed via sniper  rifle from an island off the coast of Martinaise, where an old com-munist revolutionary bunker withers in the bleak wilderness.  There they find the murderer, Iosef Lilianovich Dros, an el derly former communard holdout who delivers an extensive, affecting exchange about his traumas, the horrors of anticommunist repression, and his profound melancholy over the failure of the revolution\u2014 but who was largely motivated by a libidinal masculinist jealousy over the mercenary\u2019s coitus with the beautiful Klaasje Amandou, a corporate spy staying in the  hotel. The failure of Iosef \u2019s communism appears to have been wedded to this attachment to heteropatriarchal masculinity, a reactionary blind spot within an other wise dialectical materialist worldview.Eventually,  after this burst of eloquence, Iosef suddenly falls senile, his faculties failing him completely. It is then that Harrier suddenly notices, camouflaged in the reeds  behind them, a three- meter- tall mythical cryptid, the Insulindian Phasmid. Throughout the game, Kim doubts the presence of the Phasmid and, if the player decides to complete side quests in pursuit of it, repeatedly expresses his frustration that  doing so is a waste of time. The revelation of the Phasmid\u2019s  actual existence represents a turning point for Kim in par tic u lar, humbling proof that his authoritative cynicism was wrong all along. In contrast with a game replete in cynicism, broken dreams, and disappointment (including the scene immediately preceding this one), Har-rier and Kim\u2019s encounter with the Phasmid is the sole moment of absolute wonderment, vulnerability, and awe. It is also the only super natural, other-worldly occurrence in the game that Kim actually confirms\u2014it is not one of Harrier\u2019s fantasies, not something that Kim hastily dismisses, but an actually occurring figure of resplendent mystery.As Kim and Harrier are adjacent to one another, so  were the Phasmid and Iosef. The game heavi ly implies that it is the Phasmid\u2019s pheromones that enabled Iosef \u2019s lucidity and  mental youth; Iosef \u2019s adjacency is revealed to be alongside not an Asian but an otherworldly creature. Moreover, the Phasmid establishes a telepathic link with Harrier, communicating and conveying the perseverance of the natu ral world well past the bound aries of coming anthro-pocentric ecological collapse. The miraculous appearance of the Phasmid  Asian, Adjacent 81represents, at the very conclusion of the game, a glimmer of vulnerable hope, disrupting the futility of futurity in exchange for wonderment. And given the Phasmid\u2019s affinity with Iosef, as well as its comedic final advice to Harrier, couched in socialist terms, that he emotionally move on from his lover (\u201cDo it for the working class\u201d), the Phasmid seems to represent a par tic u lar kind of socialist possibility.On Harrier\u2019s cue, Kim takes a photo of the Phasmid, providing material proof of its existence in the world, and with it, the possibility of another world, in more ways than one (see figure\u00a03.3). The nonhuman, magical Phas-mid represents an otherness that far exceeds the orientalist imagination, taking the place of acid communist won der that orientalist mysticism would other wise have occupied.Although the player experiences the discovery of the Phasmid from Har-rier\u2019s perspective, Kim\u2019s self- shattering awe is perhaps more significant than Harrier\u2019s wonderment; the model minority assimilationist, cathected to cen-trist lawfulness and the realist worldview it demands, suddenly has no alter-native but to see, and imagine, other wise. Just as he had disavowed his own 3.3. Kim Kitsuragi takes a photo of the Insulindian Phasmid. Screenshot from Disco Elysium taken by author, courtesy of zA\/uM.82  Takeo Rivera Asianness, Kim had disavowed the possibility of the Phasmid\u2019s existence. In the world of Disco Elysium, Asianness is not countercultural commodity, but the figure of diasporic assimilationist exemplariness, who provides the proof of  political possibility, allowing the world of the imagination to transmute into the realm of the \u201creal.\u201dThus, while for the game more broadly the Phasmid represents an impera-tive to  political audacity, for Kim the model minority moralist it provides permission to embrace alterity, racially, po liti cally, and beyond. Although we experience most of the game from Harrier\u2019s standpoint, it is from Kim\u2019s gaze that we witness the Phasmid in all its glory in the photo graph he takes, Harrier in the foreground, reaching out  toward it like Gatsby  toward the green light (see figure\u00a03.3). Suddenly gone are the logics of normativity that undergird his cathexis to the \u201cregular Revacholier,\u201d allowing the Asian dia-sporic character to experience the totality of strangeness and possibility that had evaded him much of his life.  Either by the chemical whisper of the pheromone, or through the sighing skepticism in camaraderie, adjacency opens the utopian imagination for the player, the NpC, the Asian, and the non- Asian alike.NotesI would like to thank Jayna Huang (a.k.a. Jeffrey\u00a0A. Ow), an early pioneer in Asian American video game studies, for exposing me to Disco Elysium and remarking on its Asianness. Thanks also to the Boston University Center for the Humanities for supporting the development of this piece through a  Junior Faculty Fellowship. And my gratitude to the gradu ate students in Racial Capital-ism and Con temporary Culture, my Fall 2022 seminar at Boston University\u2014 especially Lauren Machado\u2014 whose discussion provided additional perspectives on Disco Elysium and racial capitalism. 1 Fukuyama, \u201cThe End of History?\u201d 2 Fisher, Cap i tal ist Realism, 8. 3 Fisher, \u201cMark Fisher | Acid Communism (Unfinished Introduction).\u201d 4 Fisher, \u201cMark Fisher | Acid Communism (Unfinished Introduction).\u201d 5 Iwamura, Virtual Orientalism, 35. 6 Iwamura, Virtual Orientalism, 36, emphasis in original. 7 J. Williams, \u201cTechne- Zen and the Spiritual Quality of Global Capitalism.\u201d 8 In fact, orientalism goes unproblematized in Fisher\u2019s mention of the Beatles\u2019 \u201cTomorrow Never Knows,\u201d which he says was \u201cminimally adapted from The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.\u201d 9 Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism, 5. Asian, Adjacent 83 10 Patterson, Open World Empire, 235. 11 Cho, \u201cMargaret Cho\u2014 Asian Adjacent.\u201d 12 For \u201cAsiatic racial form,\u201d see Lye, Amer i ca\u2019s Asia. 13 I elaborate on the concept of superego model minoritarianism throughout the chapter, but I  will also note that this represents an inversion my other elabo-ration of the superego in relation to model minoritarianism in Rivera, Model Minority Masochism (2022), an Afro- Asian superego that represents a moral authority in the opposite, anti\u2013 model minority orientation. 14 I should note that, as of this writing in 2023, Kurvitz, Hindpere, and Aleksander Rostov of the original creative team have since departed from zA\/uM, with Kurvitz and Rostov suing the com pany for fraud and illegal takeover. The  legal feud between the original creators of Disco Elysium and zA\/uM remains ongoing at this time. 15 The Game Awards (@thegameawards), \u201cHelen Hindpere is back on #TheGameAwards stage to accept award #2!\u201d 16 Revachol Citizens Militia is the principal law enforcement agency in Revachol. 17 \u201cMu\u00f1ozian excess\u201d refers, of course, to the love of utopian parties and queer dance halls in Mu\u00f1oz, Cruising Utopia. I would moreover argue, however, that the binary between excess\/color and gray utilitarianism in Disco Elysium is reversed from the usual clich\u00e9 associations  we\u2019ve seen in the anticommunist West, wherein grayness is associated with Soviet bleakness and color with demo-cratic freedom. 18 Harrier gains experience points almost entirely through dialogue and internal- mental interactions, rather than the conventional rpG procedure of gaining experience through killing enemies. 19 RShuman, \u201cDisco Elysium.\u201d 20 North American readers may make the immediate association between Harrier DuBois and the  great W.\u00a0E.\u00a0B. Du Bois. When the game was first re-leased, a connection between the two was not immediately evident; Elysium\u2019s DuBois is pronounced in the French manner, is phenotypically white, and char-acterized by unkemptness. However, with the advent of Disco Elysium\u2019s \u201cFinal Cut\u201d in 2021 (authored by Helen Hindpere), all of DuBois\u2019s interior voices are now voiced by Black British musician Lenval Brown, effectively making both DuBois and Kitsuragi\u2019s English- language voice acting racially asymmetrical. 21 For simplicity, I have inserted the dialogue tree branch of one of two options for dialogue in this line, the other of which is \u201cOkay, I guess it\u2019s not in ter-est ing then.\u201d 22 For example, in Robert Kurvitz\u2019s home country of Estonia, the first Black person elected to public office, Abdul Turay, remarked in 2013, \u201cPre-cisely  because  there are no blacks  here, I have no natu ral constituency, nobody to speak to as a black person, I cannot have a message that talks about black 84  Takeo Rivera issues. . . . So race literally  doesn\u2019t  matter\u201d (de Pommereau, \u201cA First for Estonia\u201d). Turay, who was also a columnist, wrote an article explaining his experiences being  stopped for his immigration card, with the principal grievance that as a Black man he is not recognized as the Estonian he is (Turay, \u201cWhat\u2019s Up with the  People\u201d). Kim\u2019s presence as a quasi- Korean Eurasian may also draw from the cultural memory of Soviet rock icon Viktor Tsoi, ethnically Korean but identi-fied staunchly as  Russian (although Tsoi and Kitsuragi, not unlike Harrier and W.\u00a0E.\u00a0B. Du Bois, are dispositional opposites). 23 Fickle, The Race Card, 90. 24 The homoeroticism between DuBois and Kitsuragi is subtextual but pal-pable, inspiring a considerable proliferation of fan art and \u201cslash fics\u201d between the two\u2014 apparently far more than between DuBois and the game\u2019s femme fatale, Klaasje. 25 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 130. 26 J.\u00a0Y. Kim, The Racial Mundane. 27 If the player selects the right \u201cThought Cata log\u201d leveling choice, Harrier can discover that he is sexually queer, being intensely attracted to a mysterious man called the Smoker on the Balcony. However, if the player does not take this leveling route, Kim  will amusedly remark at the game\u2019s conclusion that Harrier has never even heard of homo sexuality\u2014at least, with his amnesia, he lacks the nomenclature for his own desire. 28 Breault, \u201cDick Mullen and the Miracle Plot.\u201d 29 The games of BioWare are perhaps most emblematic of this tendency. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003) features a Light Side to Dark Side spectrum based on player choices; the Mass Effect trilogy (2007, 2010, 2012) features \u201cParagon\u201d and \u201cRenegade\u201d sliders. Other games keep track of such moral scores internally without revealing to the player\u2014 Dishonored (2012) and its sequel (2016) keep track of \u201cchaos\u201d based on the number of voluntary kills the player makes and provide correspondingly diff er ent endings. Game morality is perhaps most spectacularly explored in 2015\u2019s Undertale, in which disciplined, determined pacifism is the only way to acquire the \u201cbest\u201d ending. Usually such alignments are determined through accumulation of points depending on the player\u2019s moral decisions. 30 The player- run Disco Elysium wiki on Gamepedia lists Kim as a Moral-ist, as well, even though it is not a  political identity that he explic itly embraces. See \u201c Political Alignment,\u201d in Disco Elysium: A Detective\u2019s Wiki, at Gamepedia, accessed February\u00a020, 2021, https:\/\/ discoelysium . gamepedia . com \/ Political _ alignment. 31 Thanks to Matt York on the Lefty Paradox Plaza Facebook Group (an on-line leftist gaming community), who pointed this out quite deftly to me on social media. York, \u201cJust one of the details.\u201d 32  There does not appear to be a clear answer for which real- world coun-tries the vari ous nations of Disco Elysium represent or draw clear inspiration  Asian, Adjacent 85from, but a spirited debate on the  matter unfolded on Reddit, with a general consensus that Samara represents some form of East Asian country: see ran-dom_user_1987, \u201cThe real world inspirations of the countries in Disco Elysium?\u201d It is also worth noting that, in the real world, Samara is a city in Rus sia near the border of Kazakhstan, and \u201cMazov\u201d is a  Russian surname. 33 Procedurally, the only action Kim actively prevents Harrier\/the player from  doing is removing combat boots from the bloated corpse\u2019s body for personal use. 34 Palumbo- Liu, Asian\/American, 5.This page intentionally left blankPlayable  BodiesPart 2This page intentionally left blankChoose  Your  MothershipDesigner Roundtable #2FEATURING:Sisi Jiang, a game writer, narrative designer, and games journalist, known for LIONKILLER (2020), a queer post-colonial game that was nominated for the  Independent Games Festival Excellence in Narrative award. They are a recipient of the Game Develop-ers of Color x No More Robots grant, and they occasionally write about Asian games, race, and narrative for outlets such as Kotaku, Vice Games, and Polygon.Domini Gee, a freelancer\/game dev from Edmonton, Alberta, who has done ghostwriting, short stories, articles, and quality assurance testing for both indie and AAA (Dragon Age: Inquisition, Transmogrify). Her work has been featured on the Unraveled- Chat Stories app, in the Journal of the  Japanese Association for Digital Humanities, and on Cracked, and she was selected for the IGDA Velocity Program in 2019. Currently Gee is  doing narrative quality designer work for Keywords Studios and as narrative designer\/colead for her Kickstarted point- and- click game Camera Anima.Toby \u0110\u1ed7, a game designer, film-maker, and gradu ate of the NYU 90 Designer Roundtable 2Game  Center\u2019s MFA in game design. His games include Grass Mud  Horse (2019), Meteor- Strike! (2018), and an upcoming unnamed title about a  Vietnamese  family living in Southern California. His work has been featured in Rock Paper Shotgun, USgamer, and  Giant Bomb. He was an associate producer for the film Hi\u1ebfu, which won the Deuxi\u00e8me Prix award at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, and in 2020 he was selected as a Game Devs of Color Expo GDC Scholar.Naomi Clark, a game designer and faculty member at the NYU Game Center. She has been making games for over two  decades and has worked at LEGO designing online games and creativity tools (Junkbot, LEGO Digital Designer), educational games (Won der City, Josefina\u2019s Market Day) and games for mass- market audi-ences (Miss Management, Dream-land). Clark\u2019s recent works include Consentacle (2018), and contribu-tions to tabletop role- playing games such as Monsterhearts 2 (2021) and Honey and Hot Wax (2020). She\u2019s the coauthor of A Game Design Vocabu-lary with Anna Anthropy (2014), and a founding collective member of the Sylvia Rivera Law Proj ect.Sisi Jiang: I feel like we have to talk about parents in this conversation. Mine  were very antigames, so I played games  under the covers with a flashlight. It was an uphill climb to even be a gamer. My parents would never buy me video games. I would try to compromise and say, \u201cHey, instead of giving me this video game, can you get me the strategy guide?\u201d I  don\u2019t know if that had any effect on how I think about game design. So I\u2019ve prob ably gamed the least despite being interested in games just  because access was a constant prob lem. Sometimes I would manage to get bootleg versions from China, though I  didn\u2019t know they  were bootlegs. I just thought they  were Chinese editions.Naomi Clark: I was an early game pirate, too. My  family had an Apple II around 1982, and I had a lot of games that we obtained illicitly, all American and  European games,  because back then the game industry  hadn\u2019t  really taken off in Japan yet. Then I spent several years in Japan with my mom\u2019s side of the  family, and over  there I  wasn\u2019t allowed to have a Nintendo Fami-com, as my parents  were suspicious of a dedicated game machine. I got into game design in New York, when the internet content industry started getting big in the \u201990s. I convinced my boss that we should make a game, and we made one about adolescent girls bullying each other [SiSSYFiGHT 2000 (2000)]. Every body had to play as a girl, which we felt was a strong statement in the \u201990s game world. Choose Your Mothership 91Domini Gee: I fell in love with gaming once I started playing  things like Final Fantasy. My  sister got Final Fantasy IX [2000], and from then on I was down the RPG rabbit hole. I even wrote a 100,000- word fanfic for Final Fantasy VIII [1999]. So when I graduated with my MA, I  really wanted to get into the game industry, but unfortunately, it\u2019s  really hard. So, I went off and did a lot of freelancing, which gave me the opportunity to work on my own game prototype, Camera Anima.Toby \u00d0\u1ed7: I spent a lot of my childhood playing FPS [first- person shooter] games. I originally wanted to be a game designer growing up, so I went into college studying computer science. But I was so bad at coding. Then I went to grad school at Cal Arts for film directing, and  there I joined a Game Makers club they had started up the semester I came, and I got into making games. I eventually de cided to drop out of the film directing program and apply to game design schools.Sisi Jiang: Design started for me playing Bioware games and feeling like  there  were  things I wanted to change about them. I tried applying  there, but it  didn\u2019t work out, so I gave up for a while. And then I started making LIONKILLER, telling  people it was  going to be my magnum opus, but I was just making it in- between random hourly jobs. And now that being a narra-tive designer is my job, around three- fourths of my paying clients end up being Asian American or Asian Canadian. Why is that? I mean, I  don\u2019t mind it,  because working with them is a good time. But I know something\u2019s  going on. I\u2019m just not exactly sure what it is.Toby \u00d0\u1ed7: In my experiences with film editing, when I had a hard time getting jobs, most of my clients  were Asian as well. So, coming into games, I felt like it would be similar, which is maybe why a lot of my games have  Vietnamese characters in them. And when I post them on itch.io, I\u2019m specifically tagging them with Vietnam and  Vietnamese. I\u2019ve gotten a  couple  people from the  Vietnamese game industry messaging me, but I\u2019m also thinking about the blog posts that Marina Kittaka posted a few months ago about divesting from the games industry.1 I feel like that\u2019s where I am at this point.Sisi Jiang: Yeah, especially when you hear stories about studios refusing to hire  people with hard- to- pronounce names and stuff like that. It\u2019s especially a prob lem for narrative designers\u2014 I can always find one Asian dude in 92 Designer Roundtable 2programming. So it\u2019s just this ongoing feeling of \u201cMaybe they just  don\u2019t want me  here.\u201d When I started out in games, I reached out to a guy, a white guy whose name is actually completely in the mud now. The entire industry hates him for being such an awful person to  women. I tried to ask him for advice. And he told me something that is kind of still with me: \u201cOh, I think you might have pretty okay odds of getting into the industry  because you  don\u2019t look like all the other  people in the industry. That\u2019s  going to give you an advantage.\u201d And I just had that constant thought in my head: he thinks I\u2019m a diversity hire. That\u2019s literally what he said to my face. And this was my first- ever encounter with a prominent designer in the industry. So sometimes I  will just be like, Hmm, I won der if my stuff is  really good. Or if it\u2019s not  really that good.Naomi Clark: That\u2019s real, Sisi. I think  there\u2019s a general prejudice against East Asian creative professionals. Prob ably especially Chinese  people, but also  Japanese and Korean, like, \u201cOh,  you\u2019re prob ably good at program-ming.\u201d And if  you\u2019re Korean, \u201cYou can definitely make artwork, you can do character designs, but  we\u2019re gonna write the character ideas.\u201d As a writer, I think  there\u2019s a bunch of racism just working against you, and then  there are  these diversity and inclusion efforts that sometimes make the assumption that Asians are already overrepresented in the game industry.Sisi Jiang: If  we\u2019re so well represented, then how come I still see Chinese  people depicted with katanas? How come Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) hap-pened? How did Ghost of Tsushima (2020) have exactly zero Asian writers on the team? But sure,  we\u2019re so overrepresented. Then how come  these creative decisions that never include any Asians in character creators just keep happening?Domini Gee: As a player I always have the weirdest sensation when  people say, \u201cIt\u2019s hard for me not to create myself when I have a game with charac-ter creation.\u201d I\u2019ve barely ever had that experience of creating \u201cmyself\u201d with character creators. I think the closest I ever got was when I played Mass Effect Andromeda (2017). They have this system where your parents are auto- generated based on how you design your main character, so it meant that I could take an East Asian head and modify it a  little to what I would consider familiar to myself. Fi nally, I actually got that feeling for once. Choose Your Mothership 93Likewise, with my own game, what I  really want to sneak in are  these features that to me would read that this character is very likely interracial. I\u2019m likely gonna be the only one who cares about it; it\u2019s not intended to be in ter-est ing, I just want it.  Because I know that it\u2019s not likely to be  there other wise.Sisi Jiang: Yeah, Andromeda has the best character creator ever. I had no idea that this is what [other]  people experienced when they played cin-ematic games. Are you kidding me? I am just now experiencing this? It was mind- blowing. I\u2019m a narrative designer, and I  didn\u2019t even realize that  people could have this kind of emotional connection to the character they see on the screen.Toby \u00d0\u1ed7: The first time I played Metal Gear Solid V (2015), I spent like an hour and a half on the character creator. Basically, they give you a pretty detailed character creator, and you can spend a bunch of time in it, then they tell you that you  can\u2019t be that character. And instead you have to play as a white guy, as Snake.Chris Patterson: Thanks to one of our contributors [Keita Moore], I just learned that Snake is actually part  Japanese, though he certainly reads as white.Naomi Clark: Hideo Kojima [creator of the Metal Gear series] loves part- Japanese characters for some reason. It  doesn\u2019t ever  really seem to influ-ence his art direction of what the characters look like, though.  There was an interview where Jonathan Blow [creator of Braid (2008)] described the  Japanese industry as a withered soulless husk, which for me was just such a crystallization of a weird inferiority complex and orientalist imagining of Japan as a sort of Ancient Empire\u2014 like they just keep repeating the same rituals over and over. And then a  whole bunch of  people asked me  whether I was offended by it, as if I have anything to do with  Japanese games!So for the American game industry,  there\u2019s long been this feeling that the  Japanese game industry is somewhat inaccessible, or, one might say, in-scrutable.  Because  Japanese designers and developers have a reputation for being somewhat tight- lipped and not wanting to say anything critical about their peers or colleagues, or do too much digging into their own  process. I  don\u2019t think it\u2019s an entirely fair characterization, but as a result,  there\u2019s a 94 Designer Roundtable 2weird mystique around  Japanese developers. I have gotten this feeling\u2014 and sometimes it\u2019s overt\u2014 from  people that I meet in the game industry, especially when I go to California for events like the Game Developers Conference and they look at me with this double vision.  They\u2019re like, \u201cOh, so  you\u2019re not a  Japanese developer, not part of the  Japanese industry. But  you\u2019re part  Japanese? Do you know anybody in the  Japanese industry?\u201d  They\u2019re like, \u201cSo what\u2019s your relationship to the mothership?\u201d I\u2019ve had to have all  these conversations over the years to try to make the point that  people in the Asian diaspora are not all exactly the same. You  can\u2019t just treat every body as this one  giant ball of wax like, \u201cWell,  we\u2019re not  going to include Asian Americans in our considerations when hiring  because  there are a  whole bunch of Asians already in the global game industry.\u201dSisi Jiang: That\u2019s why I\u2019ve just been hitting  really hard about my entire feud with Ghost of Tsushima. I wrote this long- form article criticizing it like, \u201cY\u2019all  were literally making a game about Japan with American devs, and y\u2019all had no Asian writers at all.\u201d I outline how they proj ect the US- Japan relation-ship onto the story; for example, they  can\u2019t represent any kind of  Japanese sexuality at all, and the dialogue is so jarring\u2014 I was like, Please stop saying honor or I  will go cry in a corner.Domini Gee:  There is a very weird discourse around the response to games like Ghost of Tsushima about white  people writing outside their race. Which, yeah, valid, hire more diverse  people. But then it starts to lead to the idea that you  shouldn\u2019t write outside your race that much at all,  because you  can\u2019t depict the experience properly. So then, if  you\u2019re a minority,  you\u2019re only capable of writing the mothership analogy, which for me would be extremely flawed. I can guarantee my experiences are very dif fer ent from other  people\u2019s. Or you start pigeonholing  people by  going like, \u201cWell, yes, Sisi, you can only work with Asian companies and games,  because that represents your experiences, right?\u201d So it\u2019s a kind of progressive exclu-sionary gesture.Chris Patterson: I\u2019m curious how you all think about genre now, espe-cially  these hybrid genres with blurred bound aries. Like, action or adventure games blurred with visual novels and then being associated with Japan and  Japanese cultural norms. It seems most Western- made games can be blurred as Asian in some way. Choose Your Mothership 95Sisi Jiang: I have so many thoughts about this. Japan has done better at integrating visual novels into prestige games. Pok\u00e9mon is a visual novel if you  really think about it, and so is Persona.  There are so many games with huge  budgets that have portions of the visual novel form. And then meanwhile, in the United States, [visual novels are] seen as kitschy, and I  really do think  there\u2019s a racial component to that\u2014 because it\u2019s associated with \u201c those weird  Japanese games.\u201d  There are games out  there that have basically completely shifted how we think about video game storytelling, like Zero Escape (2009), and then in the United States,  those are lumped in with \u201cbad games.\u201dDomini Gee: In terms of that stigmatization,  there was a game I got asked if I wanted to contract for that was basically a visual novel. And they  were saying that they originally had more anime- like sprites, but they  were thinking about changing them to be 3D models instead  because the game  didn\u2019t do well initially. And I was like, \u201cAre you sure the art is the prob lem?\u201d I thought it was in ter est ing that their thought  process immediately went to the game\u2019s anime art style.Naomi Clark:  There\u2019s this malign theory of game design in the West that I blame on Chris Crawford [1980s American game designer and  founder of the Game Developers Conference]. He introduced the idea that choice is the central most impor tant aspect of any kind of game. So part of what distinguishes a visual novel in the West, what makes it exotic and dif fer ent and this weird suspect category, is that  there are a bunch of stories that are completely linear. One of the oldest and most boring arguments that game designers have, especially when  they\u2019re novices, is \u201cHow can it be a game if  there are no choices?\u201d I\u2019m like, \u201cWhat are you talking about?  You\u2019re still just  running around inside of the  limited set of choices that Chris Avellone [game writer for the Fallout series and other RPGs] or whoever gave you. You just turned it into this ideology of \u2018Western role playing games let you do anything.\u2019 \u201dToby \u00d0\u1ed7: Yeah,  people tell me my games  aren\u2019t games all the time still. Mostly  because  they\u2019re linear.Domini Gee: The only way you can  really have like a completely customized character experience is if it\u2019s a tabletop game and  people are customizing it to you. Which, unfortunately, game designers are not gonna be in your  house.96 Designer Roundtable 2Sisi Jiang: Personally, I\u2019m just so exhausted about having to maintain the illusion. It\u2019s such a waste of time to keep pretending that a game is all founded in player choice.  We\u2019re not giving you a custom experience  every time; I mean, even Bioware is not giving you that custom experience.  Every time it\u2019s what you, your brain, brings into it that is custom. That\u2019s why, personally, the more I make games, the less I think about audience. Appeal is such a nebulous concept\u2014 you  can\u2019t anticipate appeal\u2014 you have to stick to your guns and understand why your game works. They  don\u2019t even have to like it; they just have to understand what you  were trying to do. With LIONKILLER, Asians got what I was  doing.  After that, I was like, I  don\u2019t  really care if white  people get what I\u2019m  doing.Naomi Clark: I think that  there\u2019s something to the idea that players in the West\u2014or, you know, the  people who are drawing  these distinctions between visual novel and game, between CRPGs [computer role- playing games] and JRPGs [ Japanese role- playing games]\u2014have this idea of agency and free will and being able to express themselves as individuals, to be able to make the game their own and feel impor tant as the player, that they somehow sort of imagine that Asia is a place where  people  don\u2019t care about that.Domini Gee: And this goes into how  people get  those assumptions in the first place.  People say, \u201cOh, yeah, in Western games you own your choice. You have to re spect choice.\u201d And then they get angry when a game shows that your choices ultimately go into a  little branch.Sisi Jiang: It\u2019s all fake. I still designed the other path. And if you backtrack, then it\u2019s still linear. It\u2019s a waste of resources and time to keep pretending that it\u2019s free will. When you start off making games, I think  there\u2019s that insecurity about  whether or not something is a game or not. I put puzzles into LION-KILLER  because I thought having a puzzle is what makes a game a game. And I need to maintain the illusion that this is a game. But I\u2019m not a puzzle designer. I  don\u2019t even like puzzles.Toby \u00d0\u1ed7: Meteor Strike [D\u1ed7\u2019s game about esports] and Counter- Strike (1999) came about  because I wanted to make a game where you just press one button the  whole time. So the mechanics sort of came first. But I also had recently read an interview with Minh Le [ Vietnamese Canadian creator of Counter- Strike and a contributor to roundtable 1], and I\u2019d never  really known  Choose Your Mothership 97about Counter- Strike\u2019s origin, so I wanted to make a game that built on my thoughts on that.In my game Grass Mud  Horse, a lot of the Asian themes  didn\u2019t come up  until much  later. It was originally an idea for a class I came up with where the player got to be a cinematographer loosely based on past experiences I\u2019ve had on film sets. When I grouped up with other classmates, we combined all of our backgrounds to flesh out the idea. One of our teammates, Julia Wang, was from Chengdu, so we de cided to make that the setting  because she had never made a game set in China before and our other teammate, Emi Shaufeld, is lesbian and has also worked on film sets so that\u2019s how we came up with the characters.Tara Fickle: Toby,  there\u2019s an in ter est ing Let\u2019s Play video on your itch.io page for Grass Mud  Horse where the player  didn\u2019t  really seem to get the game\u2019s wuxia [Chinese martial arts literary and film genre] ele ments. He seemed startled by the game\u2019s callouts to Asian conventions.Toby \u00d0\u1ed7: The genre of film  you\u2019re making in the game [as the player] is a wuxia Roman Porno film. Roman Pornos  were softcore pornographic  Japanese films from the \u201970s produced by a com pany called Nikkatsu. Basically, they would give directors money, and let them make any movie they want,  under the condition that  there had to be four sex scenes for  every hour of the film. So,  we\u2019re riffing on that a  little bit.  Because of that, Grass Mud  Horse feels more  Japanese than Chinese in a lot of ways even though it looks like a wuxia game on the surface. Samurai films are oftentimes about heroic warriors, but usually within the system, working  under leaders, whereas in wuxia films the main characters are usually outsiders, travelling across the countryside, who then encounter corrupt leaders terrorizing their own  people.  There are parallels in the game, with you playing as a cinematographer working for this annoying, egotistical director. And the director is Asian American, right? So  there\u2019s that conflation of throwing all  these Asian cultures into one monolith, which we  were thinking about, too.Naomi Clark: Back in the 2000s, I was working at a quite diverse studio with a lot of Asian artists. And we got this opportunity to pitch an idea for an East Asian fantasy game. We thought we could put in lots of dif fer ent myths, some Miyazaki influence, anime stuff, mix it all together. But it was a deeply dissatisfying experience.  Because we  were just trying to package 98 Designer Roundtable 2 whatever we liked about Asian my thol ogy into some sort of box for an Ameri-can audience. I think that made me feel like the  actual au then tic  thing to do is to relate to how this stuff has affected you. And if your reaction is ironic, or subversive in some way, then that\u2019s the  actual authenticity. When I made my tentacle porn card game [Consentacle], I was like, \u201cI want this to make  people uncomfortable who think that they can masturbate to it.\u201d Then I got a bunch of reviews that  were like, \u201cThis stuff is terrible to masturbate to,\u201d and I was like, \u201cYes!\u201d Aesthetically, it worked out.  Because it\u2019s not trying to be au then tic. It\u2019s a weird refraction of the anime art style. For me, that was more real than something \u201cauthentically Asian.\u201dNote 1 Marina Kittaka, \u201cDivest from the Video Games Industry!\u201d Medium, June\u00a025, 2020, https:\/\/ even - kei . medium . com \/ divest - from - the - video - games - industry - 814a1381092d. See designer roundtable #4\u00a0in this volume for more on Kittaka\u2019s discussion of game industry divestment.Playable DeniabilityBiracial Repre sen ta tion and the Politics of Play in Metal Gear SolidThe Metal Gear Solid series (Konami, 1998\u20132015), which follows several covert agents as they infiltrate terrorist bases and active war zones, has received much praise in both academic and  popular outlets for its storytelling and clever gameplay. Anglophone game studies has commended the fran-chise\u2019s sophisticated antiwar and anti\u2013 nuclear weapon pronouncements\u2014 a welcome antidote to American games bound to the military- industrial com-plex.1 Derek Noon and Nick Dyer- Witheford, for instance, have read the se-ries\u2019 contrast with American military shooters as director Kojima Hideo\u2019s reflection on the nuclear bombings of Japan and a \u201ccritique of imperial power from within mainstream gaming\u2019s culture of \u2018militarized masculinity.\u2019 \u201d2Anglophone work has also looked favorably on the core stealth mechanics: gameplay that involves circumventing confrontation by guiding the player character through diff er ent natu ral or urban terrains, avoiding  enemy pa-trols, and staying out of sight. Although  these mechanics foreground non-violent engagement with the  enemy, Noon and Dyer- Witheford note that Keita Moore 4100  Keita MooreMetal Gear Solid (hereafter mgs) does not practice  simple didacticism: it allows for lethal actions.3 Indeed, \u201cmuch of the challenge . . . depends on the tension between the availability of an arsenal of deadly weaponry and the rewards for a \u2018no- kill\u2019 completion\u201d that has been pos si ble from mgs2: Sons of Liberty (Konami, 2001) onward.4 For this reason, Miguel Sicart has seen mgs3: Snake Eater (Konami, 2004) as a paragon of gamic media\u2019s unique ethical potential. Sicart argues that the provision of player choice, alongside the experience of consequences, enables critical reflection on lethal play at the level of choice in gameplay.5While the Anglophone lit er a ture has examined the antimilitary politics of the franchise and Kojima\u2019s \u201cantiwar, antinuclear\u201d message, the question of race in the games has received  little attention.6 Noon and Dyer- Witheford\u2019s view is paradigmatic: \u201cThe game is played from a position of \u2018hegemonic white masculinity.\u2019 \u201d7 I argue against this view for two reasons. First, Solid Snake (hereafter Snake), the protagonist\/player character for Metal Gear Solid (Konami, 1998), the introductory section of mgs2, and mgs4: Guns of the Patriots (Konami, 2008)\u2014 the three games that form the core of this analy sis\u2014is not white: he is biracial, half white and half  Japanese.8 This char-acter thus differs from the protagonists of mgs3 and mgs5: The Phantom Pain (Konami: 2015), who are the Caucasian Big Boss and his doppelg\u00e4nger Venom Snake, respectively.Second, Snake has largely \u201cpassed\u201d as white in the American academic context despite his racialization in the franchise\u2019s narrative, in part due to An-glophone game studies\u2019 initial inattention to national contexts (see Hutchin-son, this volume). This disregard risks replicating the \u201cpostracial\u201d rhe toric that attends American repre sen ta tions of mixed- race Asian bodies. LeiLani Nishime argues that the inability to see  these bodies in their sociohistorical specificity extends the logic of the Asian American racial formation as \u201cdisap-pearing\u201d (assimilating) along lines that naturalize existing hierarchies of race in the United States. To combat this tendency, she suggests that \u201cgrounding con temporary multiracial Asian American visual repre sen ta tions in history and at the intersection of identity categories lays bare the social negotiations that  organize our ability to racialize the bodies we see.\u201d9By following Nishime\u2019s methodological example, this chapter considers Snake\u2019s biraciality in the context of Japan, and in terms of discourses around Japa neseness. I argue that Snake\u2019s racialization in  Japanese  political context(s) constitutes a means of engaging with the digital world for the implied  Japanese player, a mode of premediating the games\u2019 antiwar and antinuclear message  Playable Deniability 101in ways that absent Japan itself from the critique. In so  doing, I develop the concept of \u201cplayable deniability\u201d to describe the pro cesses that allow play to appear  free from the politics around militaristic vio lence in Japan.  Here I am indebted to Tara Fickle\u2019s observation of \u201can impor tant and overlooked symmetry between the racial logic that undergirds the spatialized systems of oppression and exploitation and the ludic logic crucial to securing our per-ception of games as games.\u201d10 I point to a similar symmetry in mgs, one that preserves the primacy of play\u2014 the  political inconsequentiality of action\u2014 via a racial logic mediating play.Paul Martin\u2019s work captures the intertwined  political problematics arising in the  Japanese industry that I am concerned with  here: the fraught domes-tic and intraregional dynamics of war memory in Japan, and the status of playable war in a state that has lacked the constitutional ability to possess an offensive army since 1945, at least on paper.11 Analyzing Resident Evil 5 (Capcom, 2009), a game whose narrative draws on \u201cdark continent\u201d colonial tropes, Martin shows how the repre sen ta tion of white and Black bodies allows the  Japanese player a racialized power fantasy: the game allows \u201cthe non- White- male player to experience being a White- male subjectivity exercising control over Black and female bodies . . . [and] also opens up a space for this player to experience\u2014 from a non- White subject position\u2014 control over the White- male body of Chris [the player character].\u201d12 From this nationalized position, the implied  Japanese player can perform militarized, white, and  neocolonial intervention. This maneuver not only elides Japan\u2019s history of imperialism in Asia but also bypasses Japan\u2019s postwar \u201cpeace\u201d constitution by making military intervention non- Japanese.The deployment of race in mgs echoes Martin\u2019s point that racialization externalizes certain questions of war from Japan. Unlike Resident Evil 5\u2019s con-servative conflation of military capacity with \u201cnormal\u201d nationhood, however, mgs wears its progressive antiwar politics on its sleeve. Rachael Hutchinson has shown that Kojima\u2019s critical engagement with war proceeds from an \u201cob-server position [that] preserves the myth of Japan as an uninvolved outsider.\u201d13 mgs upholds an exceptionalism where Japan can pass moral judgment on  others\u2019 wars by means of its exteriority to global conflict\u2014an exceptional-ity based on \u201cpostmilitary\u201d understandings of Japa neseness that obfuscate Japan\u2019s own colonialism in the Asia- Pacific. The series thus replicates a  political doxa around historical memory that articulates the war through a narrative of  Japanese civilian suffering rather than one of imperialist aggres-sion.14 If mgs \u201chas not overcome the \u2018Japan as victim\u2019 stance so problematic 102  Keita Moorefor mainstream\/dominant war narratives in Japan\u2014 rather, it utilizes this stance as a basis from which to put forward a broader critique of war and vio-lence which is rare in videogames,\u201d then I argue that this critique has never earnestly engaged with domestic  political debates around war,  whether in terms of commemoration or Japan\u2019s (defensive) military capability.15Situating SnakeSnake\u2019s identity disengages the game from  these politics by turning to a prob-lematic conception of Japa neseness, one that Yuko Kawai describes as un-moored from its colonial history as both race and ethnicity. Just as ethnicity in the postwar period \u201chas been used primarily to describe ethnic conflicts outside Japan,\u201d so too does \u201crace\u201d exist elsewhere to a Japa neseness that is defined as singular.16 In the context of this homogenized Japa neseness, Snake\u2019s biraciality creates a semantic matrix to glide over the politics of play-able war, to transform play\u2019s  political potential into something deniable.17  Because biraciality manifests in mgs not only as repre sen ta tion or narra-tive, but also as gameplay, I align myself with Jennifer Malkowski and Trea-Andrea\u00a0M. Russworm\u2019s call to consider racialization in the space between visuality and procedurality, between repre sen ta tion and the core systems of gameplay.18 If, as Sicart has neatly summed up, Ian Bogost\u2019s influential no-tion of proceduralism \u201cclaim[s] that players, by reconstructing the meaning embedded in the rules, are persuaded by virtue of games\u2019 procedural nature,\u201d then Malkowski and Russworm argue that race enters strongly into how rules and play create meaning.19The matrix where play becomes deniable for the implied  Japanese player depends on the mass- mediatic bifurcation of masculine biraciality into two par tic u lar figures. One is the konketsuji, or \u201cmixed- blood child\u201d who resulted from the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945\u201352) and who emerges historically in society as a maligned domestic minority. The second image is that of h\u0101fu, a term that has appeared since the 1970s to connote  Japanese international-ism and multiculturalism. Scholars in Asian American studies have shown the contiguity, rather than linear development, of racialized  stereotypes; likewise, I would submit that  these twin figures of  Japanese biraciality run together.20 In mgs, the contiguity emerges on the axis of lethal\/nonlethal play as a  matter of player choice. If the implied  Japanese player chooses the lethally aggressive option, their actions are captured within the semiotic  Playable Deniability 103matrix of konketsuji that naturalizes violent physicality as a biraciality that is aberrant to Japa neseness. Conversely, players who elect a nonlethal strategy imbue Snake with an ability to represent Japan as h\u0101fu in juxtaposition to the hegemonic militarized whiteness of the West.Snake\u2019s racialization maintains a formal choice between lethal and non-lethal action, all while avoiding  political problematics. The balancing act hangs on the specificity of biraciality in Japan: whereas a fully  Japanese avatar might summon past conflicts and divulge the politics of playable war, a stealthy white avatar could challenge the  Japanese civilian excep-tionalism of mgs\u2019s antimilitary and antinuclear message. Konketsuji and h\u0101fu, as ludo- representational modalities, absent Japan as an object of critical contemplation, maintaining playable deniability. Both lethal and nonlethal styles converge on a singular Japa neseness that finds coherency in play at the moment that Snake\u2019s racial difference becomes evident to the implied  Japanese player.Before proceeding, a brief biography of Solid Snake is in order. Snake\u2019s story, communicated through cutscenes in mgs1 and mgs4, runs thus: Snake is a clone, born from experiments known as \u201cLes Enfants Terribles\u201d that  were aimed at re- creating and perfecting Big Boss (a Caucasian man)\u2014 the world\u2019s foremost super- soldier. To do so, scientists used Big Boss\u2019s dNA and the do-nated eggs of a  Japanese  woman and grew Snake and his twin, Liquid Snake, to term in the womb of Eva, an Anglo- American  woman.21 Snake was raised in the United States, eventually joining the military and making his way into the special force unit Foxhound. By the time of mgs1, Snake has retired to Alaska  after establishing himself as a capable solo operative with a checkered  legal past. He is called back to duty when Foxhound,  under Liquid Snake, goes rogue and takes over a fa cil i ty in Alaska that transpires to be a weapons lab for the development of Metal Gears, bipedal nuclear- warhead- equipped tanks. It is during this first game that Vulcan Raven, an Inuit member of Foxhound, identifies Snake as biracial: \u201cAsian blood flows in your veins.\u201d22  After successfully stopping the terrorist plot, Snake goes on to establish the antinuclear  organization Philanthropy, having departed the  service of the American military. While investigating the continued US development of Metal Gears during mgs2, Snake stumbles onto a sinister plot of the Patriots, a shadow  organization seeking to control world governments. In mgs4, he learns that the Patriots are now artificial intelligences that are  running a newly developed \u201cwar economy,\u201d and he fights through premature aging to disable the AIs and end the strug gle \u201cbetween a dominant, quasi- fascist 104  Keita Moorefaction and a dissident libertarian group.\u201d23 The series ends with Snake, having contemplated suicide, deciding to live out his remaining days.Biraciality as Repre sen ta tionAs this story implies, Snake never organically inhabits spaces where his ap-pearance would allow him to pass unnoticed. In fact, stealth in mgs games entails managing Snake\u2019s visibility through controlling his physical move-ments. This visibility manifests differently between the two basic stages of gameplay. In the relatively open areas that pit Snake against rank- and- file nonplayer characters (NpCs), the player can choose between concealing Snake from  enemy eyes, or directly engaging them. Boss stages, however, lock Snake into  limited arenas, reducing the player\u2019s ability to conceal the character. The player progresses through mgs1, 2, and 4 by moving between digital spaces where Snake is always vis i ble and always out of place.While the series explains this visibility in terms of infiltrating hostile terri-tory, Snake\u2019s perpetual liminality resonates with the situation of mixed- race  people in a nation that has considered itself predominantly mono- ethnic since the end of the Asia Pacific War (1945). On the one hand,  Japanese \u201cblood re-mains an  organizing  metaphor for profoundly significant, fundamental, and perduring assumptions about Japa neseness and otherness both within and outside of Japan.\u201d24 On the other hand, to \u201cqualify\u201d as  Japanese requires the simultaneous overlap of \u201cnationality, ancestry, language competence, birth-place, current residence, level of cultural literacy, and subjective identity.\u201d25 Biraciality in Japan, then, is ambiguous  because many such  people born  there meet all of  these criteria except pure-bloodedness\u2014 a point evident in the travails of the multiracial  children (konketsuji) who resulted from the Allied Occupation (1945\u201352). The con temporary term h\u0101fu, which came to\u00a0par tic u-lar prominence in the 1990s, has attempted to suture biraciality to the nation through associating it with  Japanese internationalism and multiculturalism.26 Nevertheless, visual difference remains a kind of spectacle, as the large num-ber of biracial individuals working as on- screen talent in the mass media sug-gests. The oscillation of (multi)culturalized proximity to Japa neseness and racialized distance, frequently signified as \u201cforeignness,\u201d makes the question of  whether h\u0101fu can represent Japan a vexed one. For example, debates raged around  whether Ariana Miyamoto, a mixed- race person of  Japanese and Black  Playable Deniability 105heritage, should stand for the nation when she was elected as Miss Japan in 2015 during the Sixty- Fourth Miss Universe Pageant.27Though mgs1 was released in 1998, Snake does not visually or biographi-cally correspond to the mass- mediated image of h\u0101fu. Rather,  there is an ambiguity to his physical appearance, as can be seen in figure\u00a04.1. This ambiguity is particularly vis i ble when he meets his Caucasian \u201c father,\u201d Big Boss, at the end of mgs4 (see figure\u00a04.2).28 Not coincidentally, this game also fleshes out the  earlier invocation of Snake\u2019s \u201cAsian blood\u201d in mgs1. In one of mgs4\u2019s longer cutscene sequences, Eva reveals the source of his  Japanese her-itage: \u201cIn the successful artificial semination, the eggs of a healthy  Japanese  woman\u2014 the doctor\u2019s assistant\u2014 were used.\u201d29 The subsequent line, a ver-batim repetition of Raven\u2019s mgs1 pronouncement, confirms Snake\u2019s biracial-ity.30 The experimental nature of Snake\u2019s birth renders him an orphan. Big Boss was unaware of the cloning, and his \u201c mother,\u201d who appears only during this line of dialogue, seems to have had no interest in Snake.31This diegetic depiction makes Snake\u2019s closest analog the mediatic image of the konketsuji, who resulted from the  union of  Japanese  women with white and Black soldiers during the Allied occupation. As symbols of Japan\u2019s defeat, this group of  children often found themselves orphaned and effectively state-less.  Legal barriers stood on  either side of parentage,  whether this was the  Japanese patrilineal passage of citizenship, or Allied command\u2019s discourage-ment of soldiers\u2019 \u201clocal\u201d fraternization. Even when they  were inclined to claim paternity, GI  fathers faced steep challenges in a bevy of anti- Asian exclusion acts, which allowed  little migration even  after the laws  were repealed.32 Japan\u2019s first large- scale population of biracial  people entered the public consciousness in both nations as a \u201cprob lem\u201d trapped between American anti- Asian racism and  Japanese discourses of ethnic purity.33 Carrying forward prewar views of biracial  people as more prone to deviant be hav ior (\u201chybrid degeneracy\u201d) and as a source of discord within  Japanese society,  these latter beliefs marked konketsuji as racially diff er ent, leading to their marginalization and stigma-tization relative to pure- blooded  Japanese  children.34 Si mul ta neously, their societal spectacularization coincided with the postwar shift from multiethnic empire to mono- ethnic nation, a shift pivoting on a perceived loss of  Japanese national self- determinism at Allied hands.35While Snake\u2019s biography aligns with konketsuji, the science fictional na-ture of his conception also obscures this history within the game\u2019s narra-tive. Snake\u2019s diegetic situation as akin to konketsuji is most significant to 106  Keita Mooregameplay, where his racialization serves as a de facto explanation for his violent physical capabilities. Examining this association in con temporary media, Yamamoto Atsuhisa has viewed konketsuji not as a historical figure per se but as a con temporary modality of representing and policing biraci-ality. Yamamoto argues that con temporary media constructs an aberrant biracial masculinity exemplified by \u201can excess of physicality and be hav ior that anticipates vio lence, criminality, and aggression.\u201d36 As social figures, the konketsuji became disciplinary objects of public discourse and more or less formal discrimination, spectralizing biracial difference in  service of a \u201chomogeneous\u201d Japan. By designating biracial  people as aberrant, defined 4.2. Snake (left) meeting Big Boss (right) in mgs4. Image courtesy of Miru mgs, YouTube.4.1. The appearance of Solid Snake throughout mgs. Image courtesy of Miru mgs, YouTube.Metal Gear Solid 4:Guns of the Patriots (2008)Metal Gear Solid(1998)Metal Gear Solid 2:Sons of Liberty (2001) Playable Deniability 107in part by a historical association with war and loss, this mode continues to exert a disciplinary effect on mixed- race individuals within mediatic repre sen-ta tion. The modality\u2014 which I term the konketsuji modality, for the sake of clarity\u2014 also circumvents questions of  Japanese  wartime culpability, since it unmarks the implicitly full- Japanese subject and grants them the exceptional power to see, or, in this case, to play.This function helps explain Snake\u2019s biraciality, as it allows for a disarticu-lation of militaristic vio lence and Japa neseness. To demonstrate this point, I turn to the original moment and context of Snake\u2019s in- game racialization: the cutscene where he meets Vulcan Raven in mgs1, and the ensuing boss fight. Raven, an Inuit man, traps Snake in a subterranean frost- filled ware house. Unlike other boss encounters to this point, the fight against Raven has no narrative rationale beyond making pro gress. While Snake is a figure of exces-sive physicality, with developed musculature, the ability to withstand extreme environments, and a trained capacity for lethal vio lence, Raven visibly and procedurally dwarfs Snake in all of  these aspects. The native Alaskan towers over the player character in stature, and his massive machine gun can make short work of Snake\u2019s body and weaponry. The fight itself unfolds among rows of shipping containers that divide the space into long, thin corridors. Raven  will fire indiscriminately down  these passages, requiring the player to avoid his line of sight. In practice,  there are two strategies for winning: the player can fire missiles at Raven\u2019s back and risk the boss noticing and shooting their ordnance down, or rig explosives along Raven\u2019s path. In  either case, the player\u2019s ability to avoid a head-on conflict ensures their victory.Diegetically, Raven situates the encounter in terms of survival of the fittest, a deadly competition that pits the Indigenous man against Snake. Snake\u2019s triumph, which results in fatally injuring Raven, thus gestures to a supplemental quality of the player character over and above Raven\u2019s physical-ity. Raven\u2019s final words condemn this quality as an excessive ability to kill, one that he locates in the artificiality of Snake\u2019s body: \u201cIn the natu ral world,  there is no such  thing as boundless slaughter.  There is always an end to it. But you are diff er ent. . . . The path you walk on has no end. Each step you take is paved with the corpses of your enemies. . . . Their souls  will haunt you forever. . . . You  shall have no peace.\u201d37 Not only do  these lines associate Snake with a ceaseless militarism; they also speak to the konketsuji modality of aberrance marking Snake\u2019s physicality and aggression. That boss encounters in mgs1 are fatal ( there is no nonlethal way to defeat Raven) links aberrancy to the embodied capacity for a military form of vio lence\u2014 a capacity that, 108  Keita Moorethrough Snake\u2019s racialization, is externalized from Japa neseness as the object of a disciplining  Japanese gaze.At first glance, the player\u2019s skills in strategizing, dodging, and managing Snake\u2019s visibility appear to be another source of Snake\u2019s supplemental quality. However, this ability is premediated by the konketsuji modality: the moment of revealing Snake\u2019s biraciality interferes with the immediacy of the implied player\u2019s identifications with their actions. Instead, their choices throughout the boss encounter reinscribe the alterity of Japa neseness to the scene of the fight, enacting aberrance to reify its violent difference to \u201cpure\u201d Japa-neseness. For this reason, the player\u2019s acts are rendered deniable, contained and  shaped within the semiotic matrix of konketsuji at the moment that Snake\u2019s racial difference becomes vis i ble through lethal martial vio lence.In mgs1, Snake\u2019s \u201cbiracial\u201d persona aids in the constitution of a Japa-neseness that can consume Kojima\u2019s \u201c political\u201d message and engage in mili-taristic play without a sense of contradiction. The konketsuji modality not only naturalizes the player\u2019s vio lence but also further enables the game\u2019s moralizing diegetic message by absenting Japan and transforming it into a disciplining presence beyond the game itself. Raven\u2019s ominous valediction becomes less a condemnation of the player\u2019s actions than an authentication of the konketsuji modality, ensuring ludo- narrative consonance\u2014 the align-ment of play and narrative structures\u2014 around the biracial figure of Snake. This consonance extends to the relation of the implied  Japanese player and their actions, suturing the gap through a figure that cannot represent Japan even as his \u201c Japanese blood\u201d is confirmed. Thus, the konketsuji modality si-mul ta neously nullifies questions of  Japanese military vio lence and unmarks Japa neseness while retaining the  Japanese player\u2019s exceptional power over and above biraciality.Biraciality as ChoiceIf the lack of player choice in mgs1\u2014 the inevitability of Raven\u2019s death\u2014 thus naturalizes player vio lence as that of the other, how do we understand the shift from mgs2 onward, where the games facilitate nonlethal play? Yama-moto\u2019s view of the fluidity of mediatic repre sen ta tions of biraciality is key to answering this question: both konketsuji and h\u0101fu, as images coined by and within the mass media, can be imposed on multiracial bodies ex post facto.38 In other words, any biracial person can shift from a position of relative  Playable Deniability 109prestige into deviancy that inherits the semiotic matrix of aberrant be hav-ior, without ever being termed konketsuji. While h\u0101fu ideologically displaces konketsuji along a cosmopolitan narrative of historical development, the two are contemporaneous in practice.39 To play as h\u0101fu, then, requires not only sublating konketsuji\u2019s aberrant vio lence but also demonstrating similitude with a disciplining Japa neseness defined in terms of antimilitary nonviolence.In mgs2, Snake can approach h\u0101fu\u2014 and therefore stand in for a kind of Japaneseness\u2014in the interplay of  Japanese difference to militaristic Euro- American whiteness. The game\u2019s opening section makes this point by situ-ating racial difference alongside the introduction of player choice between lethal and nonlethal play. Set several years  after the events of mgs1, the second entry in the series is split into two sections: the brief \u201ctanker chapter,\u201d which features Snake as the player character; and the \u201cplant chapter,\u201d which introduces a new avatar.40 The former sees Snake infiltrating a US Marine vessel masquerading as a civilian tanker in New York harbor. At this point, Snake has effectively left the  service of the US military; he now works for an anti\u2013 Metal Gear NGO, Philanthropy, not unlike an antinuclear NGO. His mission aboard this tanker is to find photographic evidence of a new Metal Gear, and Snake\u2019s compatriot stresses the importance of  going undetected and avoiding lethal action  toward  enemy NpCs. For this objective, Snake is given a tranquilizer gun, which serves as one of the main vehicles for nonle-thal play throughout subsequent titles.Snake must use this weapon in the game\u2019s first boss encounter with Olga Gurlukovich, a  Russian mercenary whose squad storms the tanker to steal the new Metal Gear from the Marines. Olga, who is Caucasian, fights on a stage where she is divided from Snake by an uncrossable wall of boxes. Cru-cially, the encounter sees a quantitative difference in the use of force. Whereas Olga fights using a live- ammunition pistol, Snake can only use the silenced tranquilizer gun. When the player hits Olga with a dart, a small purple bar  under her green \u201clife\u201d bar diminishes; upon reaching zero, Olga slumps over, defeated and asleep.41 Snake walks away with her lethal gun in hand. In short, the encounter proceduralizes the division between lethal and nonlethal play, and the latter option has the subsequent benefit of incurring lesser penalties even when the player is discovered.42Although this fight lacks the explicit verbal racialization of Raven\u2019s, Snake refuses Olga\u2019s identification as an \u201cAmerican,\u201d instead calling himself state-less.43  Here Snake\u2019s meeting with Olga amounts to an encounter with mili-tarized whiteness as deadly force. This connotation to whiteness draws on 110  Keita Moorea long history of  Japanese repre sen ta tions of Western aggression that took their most overt depiction in World War II propaganda. Such repre sen ta tions have lasted into the pre sent, recalling the threat of American military pres-sure against a victimized Japan.44 In contrast to Olga, the procedural  bearer of  these significations, Snake comes into legibility as h\u0101fu, as representing a Japa neseness that transcends this \u201cWestern\u201d belligerence. This legibility builds on the course of action unique to Snake in mgs2, which combines the stealth mechanics of the previous game with the possibility of absolute nonlethality.This possibility reconfigures Snake\u2019s supplemental quality from Raven\u2019s fight, shifting it from player ability to player choice. By relieving Olga of her pistol following the fight, Snake and the player symbolically inherit the ca-pacity for lethal force. Henceforth, it is the player\u2019s decision  whether or not to use it. The logic of inheritance is paramount  here: should the player use the deadly weapon, their actions amount to the mimicry of Olga\u2019s militarized whiteness, lapsing back into the konketsuji modality. The encounter thus sets a pre ce dent by suggesting that Japa neseness becomes aberrant insofar as it copies militarized whiteness. In fact, the allure of deadly force beckons the player via Snake, who can approach h\u0101fu only insofar as he withstands this enticement. The pursuit of the \u201cethical\u201d path inscribes  Japanese dif-ference to militarized whiteness as a form of moral refusal, suggesting that Snake\u2019s unique ability to succeed through abstaining from lethality wins the day. As a play style, then, Snake as h\u0101fu underscores alterity along the axis of nonlethality, implicitly encoded as  resistance to the gameplay temptation of using lethal vio lence.However, even as h\u0101fu, Snake is only ever an incomplete representative of Japan. In this capacity, he premediates player action and vouchsafes player choice within the complex politics of war memory. A violent fully  Japanese character, for instance, risks invoking the much- demonized figure of the Imperial  Japanese soldier. A stealthy or nonlethal white character, con-versely, risks undercutting the exceptionality of Japan\u2019s antimilitarism within MGS; that is, the supposed uniqueness of its response to, and experience of, war. Biraciality solves both of  these issues at the level of choice. Snake as konketsuji is \u201cnaturally\u201d violent and diff er ent to full Japa neseness, while Snake as h\u0101fu can represent  Japanese difference without implicating Japan as such. Moreover, the contiguity of  these two mediatic modalities allows for containing the meanings of lethal or nonlethal play from one moment to the next. Should the player choose to step off the path of nonlethality, the kon- Playable Deniability 111ketsuji modality premediates questions around why. Player choice never need rise to a higher level of moral or critical questioning  because  these actions are deniable as play. Snake\u2019s racialization reaffirms  Japanese exceptionality in  matters of war without shining a light on the larger geopo liti cal conditions of possibility for that exceptionality. Precisely  because Snake\u2019s actions can be disavowed racially, his biraciality nullifies questions around Japan\u2019s place within con temporary and historical global conflicts.ConclusionTo conclude, I return to Hutchinson\u2019s point that Japan as a national actor is always apart from the world of mgs\u2014 that it never enters the games as an object of contemplation beyond the tamest conceptions of victimhood and externality to global conflict. As I have argued, Japan attains coher-ence through play, defined in action sometimes  counter to, and sometimes through, Snake\u2019s racialization. The mainline games deploy Snake\u2019s biraci-ality not in its own conflicted terms but, rather, in terms of a singular and unexamined Japaneseness\u2014 a point that echoes Nishime\u2019s argument that \u201cin  popular film, multiracial  people often act as a bridge between cultures, representing racial difference without having to address racial issues at any point in the script.\u201d45 The  grand irony of Snake\u2019s biraciality is its singularizing effect on Japa neseness. By representing what Japan is not, in a sense, Snake flattens the real politics of Japan\u2019s (historical) place in global conflict just as it transforms politicized questions of war memory into a unidimensional and abstract refrain of \u201cantiwar, anti\u2013 nuclear weapons.\u201d Paradoxically, the cost of playable deniability is the undeniability of race as a distancing mechanism, a line dividing play from politics and Japan from a more complex history of war.Yet Soraya Murray has also shown how games can engage with the spec-ificities of mixed- raced individuals in ways that do invoke larger  political questions. Murray analyzes how mixed- race blackness functions to con-join gameplay and narrative in Assassin\u2019s Creed: Liberation (Ubisoft, 2012) around the creole player character, Aveline. As the player navigates New Orleans between 1765 and 1777, they have the option to change Aveline\u2019s clothing in a way that foregrounds her multiple racial legibilities.  These dif-fer ent \u201cpersonas,\u201d in turn, can heighten persuasiveness, mobility, and combat strength. Murray argues this ability to alter Aveline\u2019s hybridized racializa-tion foregrounds \u201clarger themes of passing, contingency, the rejection of 112  Keita Moorebinaries and the function of context for identity.\u201d46 From this perspective, biraciality\u2014 Snake\u2019s included\u2014 can open new zones of inquiry around the re-lation of play and politics  because racialization opens itself to critical thought as a  process in gamic media. Indeed, mgs\u2019s chief failing is its dependence on unified and mutually exclusive categories of identity: konketsuji or \u201cfull\u201d  Japanese, h\u0101fu or \u201cforeign.\u201d This reliance denies the power of play as a hybrid territory, a zone that is, as noted in the introduction to this volume, undeniably  political. If play practices can blur bound aries and multiraciality can reconfigure racial meaning, then closer attention to the intersection of the two can generate more penetrating critiques of  Japanese and American military entertainment and racial formations through analytical and ludic epistemologies of hybridity, rather than mutual exclusion.Notes 1 Huntemann and Payne, Joystick Soldiers. 2 Noon and Dyer- Witheford, \u201cSneaking Mission,\u201d 92. See also Whaley, \u201cBeyond 8- Bit.\u201d 3 For clarity\u2019s sake, I  will refer to the series as mgs, and individual titles by their number. 4 Noon and Dyer- Witheford, \u201cSneaking Mission,\u201d 78\u201379. 5 Sicart, The Ethics of Computer Games, 107\u20139. 6 In  Japanese scholarship, the series generally features in historical ac-counts of cinematic games in the 1990s more than textual analy sis. See Na-kagawa, Gendai g\u0113mu zenshi, 295\u201398. 7 Noon and Dyer- Witheford, \u201cSneaking Mission,\u201d 91. 8 While Snake and Big Boss appear in the original Metal Gear (Konami, 1987) and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (Konami, 1990), Snake\u2019s appearance in the 3d Metal Gear Solid 1 (1998) precedes the 3d rendering of Big Boss in mgs3 (2005). Consequently, the visual similarities between the two constitute a curious case of the \u201cson\u201d prefiguring the \u201c father\u2019s\u201d appearance. 9 Nishime, Undercover Asian, 18. 10 Fickle, The Race Card, 7. 11 While article 9 of Japan\u2019s constitution forbids the use of military force, the creation of Japan\u2019s Self- Defense Forces in the 1950s has made the legitimacy and scope of national \u201cdefensive\u201d capability an ongoing  political issue. See Fr\u00fch-st\u00fcck, Uneasy Warriors. 12 Martin, \u201cRace, Colonial History and National Identity,\u201d 577\u201378. 13 Hutchinson,  Japanese Culture through Videogames, 216. 14 For more on Japan\u2019s narratives of civilian victimhood, see Orr, The Victim as Hero; and Seaton, Japan\u2019s Contested War Memories. Playable Deniability 113 15 Hutchinson,  Japanese Culture through Videogames, 229. 16 Kawai, \u201cDeracialised Race,\u201d 37. 17  Needless to say, Japa neseness is always plural and is homogenized only at the expense of its internal diversity. Goodman\u2019s \u201cMaking Majority Culture\u201d provides a useful overview of this point. 18 Malkowski and Russworm, \u201cIntroduction,\u201d 3\u20134. 19 Sicart, \u201cAgainst Procedurality,\u201d para. 13. 20 See Lye, Amer i ca\u2019s Asia, 3, for the contiguity between Asian American \u201cyellow peril\u201d and \u201cmodel minority\u201d  stereotypes. 21  Unless other wise noted, quoted in- game text is my own translation of the Japanese- language editions of the games. 22 Although the revelation of this information in game occurs first in mgs1, metagame materials from as early as Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (Konami, 1990) have suggested Snake\u2019s biraciality, leaving it unclear  whether Snake himself is aware. 23 Noon and Dyer- Witheford, \u201cSneaking Mission,\u201d 81. The same section provide an excellent overview of the series. 24 Robertson, \u201cBlood Talks,\u201d 191. See also Fr\u00fchst\u00fcck, Colonizing Sex. 25 Yamashiro, \u201cThe Social Construction of Race and Minorities in Japan,\u201d 151. 26 Iwabuchi, \u201cIntroduction,\u201d 623\u201325. See also Iwabuchi, H\u0101fu to wa dare ka. 27 Kimura, \u201cVoices of In\/Visible Minority,\u201d 1\u20132. 28 \u201cHalfness\u201d is sometimes ascribed through narrative within  Japanese visual culture. See J.\u00a0G. Russell, \u201cReplicating the White Self.\u201d 29 \u201cSeik\u014d shita jink\u014d jyusei niwa hakase no jyoshu de atta kenk\u014d na nihonjin jyosei no ranshi ga tsukawareta.\u201d 30 The game implies that, rather than being an exact duplicate of Big Boss, Snake\u2019s cloning used embryo splitting to ensure the conjoined passage of mater-nal and paternal ge ne tics. 31 Snake\u2019s exceptional birth also bypasses narratives of  Japanese American-ness in Japan. See Yamashiro, \u201cRacialized National Identity Construction.\u201d 32 Kovner, Occupying Power, 71\u201372. 33 Koshiro, \u201cRace as International Identity?\u201d See also Arudou, \u201cJapan\u2019s Under- researched Vis i ble Minorities,\u201d 720. 34 Horiguchi and Imoto, \u201cMikkusu r\u0113su wa.\u201d 35 Kawai, \u201cDeracialised Race,\u201d 36. 36 Yamamoto, \u201c \u2018H\u0101fu\u2019 no shintai,\u201d 136. 37 This is the official North American translation. 38 Yamamoto, \u201c \u2018H\u0101fu\u2019 no shintai,\u201d 135. 39 Iwabuchi, \u201cIntroduction,\u201d 624. 40 For more on this Caucasian avatar, Raiden, see Youngblood, \u201c \u2018I  Wouldn\u2019t Even Know the Real Me Myself.\u2019 \u201d114  Keita Moore 41 For  later narrative reasons, it is impossible to kill Olga  here. 42 Roth, Thought- Provoking Play, 161. 43 Snake says, \u201cOre nimo kuni wa nai,\u201d literally \u201cI too have no country.\u201d 44 See Dower, Japan in War and Peace and War without Mercy. 45 Nishime, Undercover Asian, 7. 46 S. Murray, On Video Games, 70.Designing the Global BodyJapan\u2019s Postwar Modernity in Death StrandingT he impact of Asian culture and  labor on the global gaming industry is immea sur able, yet repre sen ta tions of Asian bodies are not as prevalent as the vari ous  labor forces  behind the scenes. This chapter expands on this dissonance between Asian  labor and the Asian body through a close read of Hideo Kojima\u2019s Death Stranding (2019), a game produced by  Japanese  labor but with a mostly white cast and set in a fictional United States. My close read-ing sheds light on its racial doublespeaks, where  those who are familiar with the context can easily spot the hidden  Japanese discourse and find some level of catharsis while  others can enjoy the game for its more universal and hope-ful message about finding comfort in unity when facing  future precarity. Fur-thermore, I  will interrogate this practice of embodying and conveying Asian discourse and argue that it stunts the pro gress of direct repre sen ta tions. After his decade- long tenure at the world- renowned game publisher Ko-nami,  Japanese video game designer Hideo Kojima departed from his beloved Metal Gear (1987\u20132018) series to create Death Stranding (2019), a game with spectacular cinematics and a Hollywood cast. Set in the postapocalyptic Yasheng She5116  Yasheng SheUnited States, Death Stranding follows a courier named Sam Porter Bridges (Norman Reedus), who is tasked with transcontinental unification of the broken United States by delivering parcels to surviving communities and reconnecting them via a wireless communications network known as the Chiral Network.Unlike the Metal Gear series, combat and stealth missions are not part of the major gameplay loop (the repetitive activities that a player engages in games) of Death Stranding. Instead, players spend most of their time mapping the desolate landscape. Regardless of  whether the design choice is intentional, the in- game task of transcontinental unification parallels Chi-nese mi grant workers building the American transcontinental railroad in the  middle of the nineteenth  century. Sam\u2019s white body and Asian coded  labor perfectly demonstrate the dissonance between Asian  labor and Asian body. Moreover, the game\u2019s engagements with nuclear bombs, sublime ruins, and postdisaster bodies resonate with Japan\u2019s postwar identity. By representing the United States with an uncanny landscape and removing American cultural signifiers, Death Stranding empties the United States to overlay narratives about crisis, trauma, and identity anchored in Japan\u2019s postwar discourse. This strategic overlay begins with the prologue, Porter, outlining the game\u2019s cen-tral theme through the juxtaposition between a voice- over narration written by Kojima and a printed quote from Abe Kobo\u2019s Nawa (The Rope): \u201c \u2018The Rope\u2019 and \u2018The Stick,\u2019 together, are one of humankind\u2019s oldest \u2018tools.\u2019 \u2018The Stick\u2019 is for keeping evil away; \u2018The Rope\u2019 is for pulling good  toward us;  these are the first friends the  human race in ven ted. Wherever you find  humans, \u2018The Rope\u2019 and \u2018The Stick\u2019 also exist.\u201d Instead of valorizing the stick as a repellent of evil, Death Stranding warns of its danger via a monologue about explosions that appears at the beginning as well as the end of the prologue:Once  there was an explosion, a bang which gave birth to time and space. Once  there was an explosion, a bang which set a planet spinning in that space. Once  there was an explosion, a bang which gave rise to life as we know it. And then, came the next explosion . . . an explosion that  will be our last.1This sentiment  toward the stick resonates with Yoshikuni Igarashi\u2019s \u201cfoun-dational narrative\u201d in which postwar Japan sees its  wartime trauma, namely the atomic bombings, as inevitable and necessary for the birth of a new Japan, a complicated sentiment manifested into feelings of isolation and despair.2 Death Stranding echoes this sentiment and pre sents the rope as the solu-tion to the prob lems left by the stick by asking its players to stitch isolated  Designing the Global Body 117communities of the broken nation back together. Transposing this discourse onto the emptied- out American landscape, Death Stranding works through its ambivalence  toward the necessity of the bombs in the foundational nar-rative while serving an ounce of catharsis for the shattered nation: not Japan but the United States.It is then imperative to ask, How do white bodies help tell a story about Ja-pan\u2019s postwar modernity on the global stage? I  will elaborate further through an intimate yet uncanny moment of the game, which takes place in the lava-tory of the private rooms. The player can discover private rooms in large cities and  later fabricate them in the open world, which all share the same interior layout: a bed, a  table, a sink, an interactable map, a glass cabinet, and a lavatory. Setting Sam as the pivot point, the camera in the Private Room rotates around him to reveal a variety of interactable actions. Assuming the position of the camera, the player shares the space with Sam, who some-times breaks the fourth wall by winking or smiling directly at the camera\/player (figure\u00a05.1).3 Norman Reedus shared that Kojima noticed his fidgety 5.1. Sam, played by Norman Reedus, winking at the player in the Private Room in\u00a0Death Stranding.118  Yasheng Shemovements in between motion capture and de cided to rec ord them.4 Reedus explained that Kojima incorporated  these movements to add authenticity to Sam with the hope of inciting an intimate relationship between the player and Sam. By having Sam acknowledge the player\u2019s gaze, the game forces the player to be aware of their positionality as Sam\u2019s controller.Whenever the player guides Sam to use the lavatory, the player\/camera follows him, which triggers an intimate shower sequence. Multiple instances of the sequence exist, but the camera always employs a voy eur is tic gaze that moves across Sam\u2019s body. The camera first reveals the red bruises on Sam\u2019s shoulder and feet, which are visualized evidence of his hard  labor. It then moves down to Sam\u2019s buttocks and lingers on the ghostly handprints tat-tooed on his smooth, muscular, and masculine body.  These handprints testify to Sam\u2019s past trauma: he gains a handprint  every time he returns to life, or repatriates. Repatriation is Sam\u2019s unique ability to resurrect himself when-ever he dies in the game. Sam, like most video game characters, can die from a variety of  causes. However, thanks to his special ability, the player can resurrect Sam by guiding his soul back to his body. This mechanic makes in- game deaths diegetic, while enhancing the relationship between Sam and the player (figure\u00a05.2).5The shower sequence accentuates the red bruises and the ghostly hand-prints, evidence of hard  labor and trauma, which efficiently frames Sam\u2019s body as a site of discourse. The body is further complicated through another dimension of objectification. The game encourages the player to trigger  these provocative cutscenes by giving them valuable items called Ex Grenades that can be used to repel enemies.  These grenades are manufactured with Sam\u2019s sweat, urine, and feces, collected when Sam uses the lavatory. This function objectifies Sam\u2019s body as a mechanical marvel in addition to the psychosexual nature of the camera.In this chapter, I  will situate Sam\u2019s body as a site of postwar discourse. The  Japanese body as a site of postwar discourse is at the heart of Yoshi-kuni Igarashi\u2019s Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar  Japanese Culture, 1945\u20131970. Bodies of Memory explores Japan\u2019s postwar nation-hood through  Japanese  popular culture, in which Igarashi maintains that the postwar  Japanese bodies \u201cnot only  were the site of Japan\u2019s reinvention\u201d but also created a gendered relationship that reflected the power dynamic between the United States and Japan.6 Igarashi notes that Japan assumed the dominant masculine role in its relations to its colonies during  wartime.  Designing the Global Body 119However, Japan\u2019s  later defeat and occupation recast the postwar Japan in the feminine role, with the United States as the power ful masculine role.7 Igarashi expands on this  imagined masculine ideal through his analy sis of Akiyuki Nosaka\u2019s novel American Hijiki (1967). He highlights the power dynamic that the  Japanese protagonist, Toshio, perceives between him and an American soldier. When gazing on the muscular physique of the American soldier, Toshio links Japan\u2019s defeat to the overwhelming power demonstrated by the GI\u2019s body.8 In his narration, Toshio defines civiliza-tion through the white soldier\u2019s muscular arms, big hips, wide chest, and impressive buttocks, while finding himself in the smaller Asian bodies sur-rounding the GI. Igarashi dwells on this homoerotic gaze to frame the white masculine body as the \u201cmaterial evidence of civilization\u201d in the eyes of the postwar  Japanese subject.9 Aesthetically, the white masculine body is to be feared and desired. The white man\u2019s muscle as a  metaphor for civilization can be traced back to the early days of Hollywood. Richard Dyer employs films 5.2. Sam steps into the shower in Death Stranding, and the camera follows.120  Yasheng Shesuch as La Battaglia di Maratona (1959) to identify the built white body as a product of discipline.10 Dyer maintains that the white male body mirrors the imperial\/colonial enterprise that frames the colonized bodies as inferior and in need of discipline.11 Here I  will highlight the similarity between the camera in Death Strand-ing\u2019s shower sequence and Toshio\u2019s homoerotic gaze. The difference  here is that Death Stranding complicates the white masculine body by texturing it with allegorical  Japanese historic trauma and asks the player to si mul-ta neously identify with and objectify the body. Sam\u2019s body is meta phorical  because it represents an \u201celevated\u201d or \u201capo liti cal\u201d  Japanese body, exorcised of Asian characteristics but bearing the discourse of postwar Japan. It is also strategic to use a white body as the vehicle of Asian discourse so that it ap-pears innocuous to the world yet feels somewhat cathartic to  those who are still working through the legacy of white supremacy. This strategy is a form of selective self- erasure in which the Asian body is deracialized so the story can remain compelling and universal. I want to contemplate this affordance of the white body and further ponder the lack of Asian repre sen ta tion in games by first establishing the unquestionable Japa nese\/Asian discourse in Death Stranding and then proposing the unintended consequence of such as a practice.Asian  Labor and the White BodyThe story of Death Stranding progresses as Sam conducts transcontinental unification. Besides delivering parcels, Sam can also fabricate tools, ve-hicles, and infrastructure. Through  these mundane acts of transportation, delivery, and construction, Death Stranding provides unity as the salvation to alienation and despair. I interpret this as the game\u2019s response to postwar Japan\u2019s complex feelings  toward the foundational narrative of Japan. By re-claiming control over the hazardous environment through building infra-structure and the constant self- discipline and maintenance of Sam\u2019s body, the game pre sents a productive and caring masculine figure as the ideal subject, which mirrors the gentle and caring postwar  Japanese masculine subject.Sam as the conduit of the rope is demonstrated through the interrogation of his body as a cyborg. The game establishes this ele ment in the prologue through Sam\u2019s interaction with a baby in a yellow container, which remains one of the most compelling moments. In the cutscene, the camera zooms in  Designing the Global Body 121on the device to reveal its contents: a floating fetus whose altered umbilical cord is attached to the operator (figure\u00a05.3).12The baby in the yellow container, called a Bridge Baby or simply b.b., is the foremost uncanny ele ment of the game, which has been heavi ly featured in Death Stranding\u2019s promotional materials. B.B. as a tool is well established in the prologue, where Sam\u2019s caravan is attacked by ghostly beings known as the Beached  Things or b.t.s, deceased  people whose souls have found their way back into the world of the living. B.T.s can trigger a devastating explo-sion known as a Voidout that leaves nothing but a crater  behind. They are invisible to the naked  human eyes, and their existence can only be deduced by the presence of the toxic rain known as Timefall, which rapidly deterio-rates anything it contacts. To  counter B.T.s, scientists create B.B.s through  human experiments. By attaching themselves to a B.B., the operator can see the B.T.s around them and navigate the world with ease.The shot of the B.B. suspended in the container establishes the game\u2019s critical entanglement with the body as a site of discourse. The eerie fetus 5.3. The reveal of B.B. in Death Stranding\u2019s prologue.122  Yasheng Shefloating in the pod, objectified as a tool, is linked to another  human via a half- mechanical and half- organic umbilical cord. This motif evokes Donna Haraway\u2019s cyborg, \u201ca hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social real ity as well as a creature of fiction.\u201d13 Haraway is concerned with socialist feminism when she conceptualizes the meta phoric function of the cyborg, and  here we see a man performing the conventional feminine duty, but the baby is framed as a useful object, and childcare is situated as equipment mainte-nance. Thus, I want to employ the cyborg  metaphor to pinpoint the social real ity allegorically re- created in Death Stranding. In this vein, this chapter considers how the game makes use of the body\u2019s materiality,  labor, and aes-thetics to interrogate ele ments of Japan\u2019s postwar modernity while focusing on the interplay between Asian  labor and white bodies. Since Death Stranding features a Hollywood cast, characters of the games are modeled  after well- known actors such as Norman Reedus, Lindsay Wagner, Mads Mikkelsen, and L\u00e9a Seydoux. Directors Kojima admires, such as Guillermo Del Toro and Nicolas Winding Refn, also make special appearances. It is easy to see that with such a cast, this  Japanese video game neither reserves many speak-ing roles for Asian actors nor features Asian characters in prominent ways. That said, it does remind the audience of the Asian  labor  behind the scenes through credits. Credits of  Japanese names appear during the prologue and epilogue, where they fade in and out alongside the gameplay. The  Japanese names appearing alongside the Hollywood cast elicits a sense of uncanniness at the racial dimension and raises the question, Why does a  Japanese game decide to tell a story about Amer i ca?To answer this, we must visit the intersection between Asian  labor, Asian identity, and Asian bodies. Lisa Nakamura examines racial discourse sur-rounding Asian identity in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMO) World of Warcraft by thinking through the anti- Asian senti-ment against Chinese \u201cfarmers,\u201d whom she calls the player workers.14 Naka-mura frames the anti- Asian rhe toric as racism rather than players\u2019 justified concern over player workers manipulating the in- game market, and points out that once an Asian player\u2019s racial identity is identified by a white player, their play is immediately framed as  labor and a threat to the white player\u2019s leisure.15 Though Death Stranding does have a multiplayer aspect where random players\u2019 fabrications can be seen and used by other players, they do not have any direct means to interact with  others.  Because players\u2019 racial identities are not vis i ble to  others, their  labor (fabrications) is not racial-ized. Even so, Death Stranding encodes Sam, the player\u2019s in- game avatar,  Designing the Global Body 123with Asian discourse through his  labor of constructing a transcontinental network from the East to the West, which parallels Chinese mi grant workers connecting Amer i ca in the nineteenth  century. Asian bodies, remembered for their  labor and for yellow peril racism in American history,16 are rela-tional to the more civilized power of whiteness, a relation that has become techno- orientalist in the  popular imagination of the West as Asia\u2019s technol-ogy growth has become a concern.17 In  these techno- orientalist fantasies, Asian bodies are  imagined as automatons that mindlessly carry out tasks. The game turns this techno- oriental fantasy on the United States by designating a white body to carry out the seemingly mechanical  labor of transcontinen-tal unification. Unlike the techno- orientalist approach to Asian bodies, the game persuades the player to see Sam as more than a machine, despite the constant disciplining and management of his body. The player comes to understand the importance of  human connections through Sam\u2019s  labor, a subversion of the techno- orientalist trope where Asian bodies are treated as emotionless automatons. Death Stranding\u2019s strategic employment of the body as a persuading agent can also be found in Kojima\u2019s  earlier works. Noting the racially ambiguous design of the mgs series\u2019 protagonist Snake, Hutchinson argues that the white- passing body welcomes Western players to empathize with its message.18 Keita\u00a0C. Moore, on the other hand, argues that Snake\u2019s racial ambiguity, what he calls his biraciality, allows Kojima to flatten \u201cthe real politics of Japan\u2019s place in and apart from global conflict\u201d and to abstract a generalized and unidimensional message about \u201cantiwar, anti\u2013 nuclear weapons\u201d from Japan\u2019s postwar metabolizations of war memories.19 Thinking through Hutchinson\u2019s and Moore\u2019s perspectives, we could argue that Kojima\u2019s strategy of using racial ambiguity to cater to both the  Japanese and the Western audience permits him to embody Japa neseness without any historical baggage.A similar argument about Death Stranding is that the game is produced with a double awareness of the internal (  Japanese) and external (US) gazes. Kojima shared on Twitter that his initial script was translated into  English for facial and motion capture.20 Then, for the  Japanese release, Kojima had the translated  English script modified so that the  Japanese voice actors could lip- sync with the American actors. Bodies are used interchangeably as well. A promotional trailer shows the early concept of the scene where one of the  woman protagonists, Fragile, meets Sam: Kojima Productions\u2019  Japanese staff acted out the scene, and all the ele ments in the previsualizations  were then translated into the game with white bodies.21 The strategic replacement of 124  Yasheng SheAsian bodies with white bodies underscores what the game thinks is more globally acceptable.Koichi Iwabuchi suggests that the lack of  Japanese signifiers in  Japanese  popular media is an intentional strategy. Iwabuchi famously coins the phrase \u201ccultural odor\u201d to describe the acute awareness of one\u2019s cultural origin and the desire to disassociate from it.22 Such an odor is \u201cclosely associated with ra-cial and bodily images of a country of origin.\u201d23 Reading  these design choices through Iwabuchi\u2019s odorlessness, it would appear that the game erased the cultural odor of the Asian body so that the white canvas (body) can remain convincing and persuasive. That said, the  Japanese names of the production team remind the audience of the Asian  labor. The mixture of Asian  labor and white bodies creates an ambiguous racial and  political awareness. Tzarina Prater and Catherine Fung argue that for the Asian body\u2019s  labor to be recog-nized, it must be converted from \u201cthe foreign threat to the assimilated model minority.\u201d24 Though the model minority discourse and the postwar  Japanese discourse have diff er ent ontologies, they share a common complicity in uphold-ing whiteness as the standard. The universalizing effect of whiteness helps Death Stranding bring  Japanese discourse to the global stage without histori-cal baggage. In contrast, the very same whiteness becomes a totalizing agent that dictates the desired mode of storytelling in the Asian American context.In 2017,  Japanese animation director Oshii Mamoru\u2019s Ghost in the Shell was adapted into an American live- action film. When Scarlett Johansson was revealed as Hollywood\u2019s choice to play the role of Major Kusanagi Motoko, the casting of the US adaptation quickly attracted criticism for its whitewash-ing.25 When confronted with the concern of repre sen ta tion in an interview, Oshii rejected the whitewashing allegation by insisting that the film cast the best actors for the job.26 Stating that he held no  political agenda, Oshii first underscored his desire to create art  free of politics to distance himself from the racial discourse.27 He further defended the casting decision by adding that since Ghost in the Shell\u2019s protagonist is a cyborg, she can be represented without racial concern.28 In the same interview, however, Oshii stated his disappointment in not being a part of the Hollywood adaptation.29 Hollywood interpreted what Oshii  imagined as a neutral body as a white body and then stripped Asian bodies and  labor from its primary cast and production team. What happened to Ghost in the Shell outlines the core issue of Asian repre sen-ta tion: the dissonance between Asian repre sen ta tion and the globalization of Asian culture. Oshii\u2019s desire to create \u201capo liti cal\u201d art using racially ambiguous or empty characters highlights the danger of self- erasure. Designing the Global Body 125Oshii sees the cyborg as an entity  free from racial politics, but Donna Ha-raway\u2019s cyborg repudiates such an assumed apo liti cal nature. Death Strand-ing\u2019s Sam is a cyborg whose body is mobilized to reflect the social realities of postwar Japan. Yet whose body gets to bear whose stories and how they are interpreted are two questions at the heart of repre sen ta tion.Hidden  Japanese Discourse and Mukokuseki Amer i caThough  Japanese  popular media, especially video games such as Pok\u00e9mon, are well received globally, it seems that not many of them feature obvious  Japanese signifiers.  There seems to be an unspoken agreement about what makes a body globally acceptable. I suggest viewing \u201cthe global\u201d as a stage where a subject becomes intensely aware of their body as a medium of their  performance and a  bearer of external gazes. What makes the  performance compelling relies on the body, and what makes a body globally acceptable hinges on the negotiation between the internal and external gazes. In short, the global body is a construct that is persuasive, without distraction, and spectacular. Considering Japan\u2019s double positions as both the victim and vic-timizer during and  after World War II, it is easy to see how the desire for a new Japan that can rise (and be divorced) from the ashes of  wartime trauma helped to shape Japan\u2019s postwar media. In the case of media production, the erasure of  Japanese cultural odor helps to make them globally acceptable, a  process Iwabuchi labels mukokuseki.30 Christine Yano builds on Iwabu-chi\u2019s work and thinks through what she calls the commodity \u201cwhiteface\u201d of Hello Kitty.31 Remarking on  Japanese companies\u2019 desires to create globally compatible consumer products in the 1970s by mimicking Euro- American standards, Yano underscores the ambiguity of the international appeal of Hello Kitty, especially her cute white face.32 Yano links mukokuseki to mo-dernity, whiteness, and global  acceptance and adeptly points out the  Japanese companies\u2019 willingness to self- erase for the sake of global marketability.33That said, it is vital not to see  Japanese media as a monolith or treat any media artifact that engages mukokuseki as a manifestation of  Japanese postwar anxiety. Mukokuseki should only work as a framework for contex-tualizing neutral seeming artifacts. Rachael Hutchinson proposes under-standing  Japanese video games\u2019 transnational and global influence through a postcolonial perspective in her  Japanese Culture through Videogames, where she frames games as a medium through which historic trauma is represented 126  Yasheng Sheand metabolized. This is most evident in her analy sis of the nuclear discourse in the Final Fantasy series and the Metal Gear Solid (mgs) series. By examin-ing allegories of ethical and environmental concerns over nuclear energy in the Final Fantasy series, Hutchinson links the nuclear discourse to Japan\u2019s postwar modernity.34 Notably, she highlights that Kojima delivers his antiwar message through gameplay mechanics.35 For instance, while the player can craft nuclear weapons in the online multiplayer spinoff of the mgs series Metal Gear Online, nuclear weapons can be used only for deterrence.  Kojima even openly engaged players with the \u201cDisarmament Event\u201d in 2015 by ask-ing them to disarm their in- game nuclear weapons, which led to a sharp decrease of in- game nuclear arms in a short period.36  These mechanics allow the players from all over the world to critically engage with real- life nuclear discourse, which is at the crux of Japan\u2019s postwar modernity.37Igarashi identifies the \u201cfoundational narrative\u201d that rationalized Japan\u2019s  wartime and postwar trauma as the foundation of the new Japan.38 What crystallized this narrative are the numerous retellings of August\u00a01945, which frame the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as inevitable and necessary.39 The foundational narrative, which frames trauma as the onset of identity, is reflected and problematized in the game\u2019s prologue, which opens with shots of landscapes that evoke a sensibility that exists between magical realism and uncanniness: open fields with floating objects, raining clouds over an upside- down rainbow, and mossy planes with sprouting hand- shaped crystals. The sublime landscape warns of the danger lurking under neath the beauty. Theorizing the landscape in mgs: The Phantom Pain, Soraya Murray highlights Kojima\u2019s configuring of  Afghanistan \u201cin need of inter-vention, through its affective connection to repre sen ta tions of  actual events and settings.\u201d40 Murray emphasizes the persuasiveness of the game space to highlight the ideology of the game world and the designer.41 Death Stranding moves away from historical realism to prioritize a diff er ent relationship be-tween the player and the game world. Though the game uses US geography as the blueprint for the fictional landscape, it removes all obvious American cul-tural signifiers\u2014or, in other words, renders the United States mukokuseki.Death Stranding textures this emptied- out Amer i ca with explosions, ruins, and craters\u2014 sublime spectacles that seek to overwhelm and over-awe the beholder\u2019s senses. Calum Lister Matheson identifies the sublime as \u201cwhat beckons beyond our unreliable means of mediation to a Real we cannot translate perfectly.\u201d42 Motifs such as radioactive waste and nuclear craters are sublime  because they \u201cdecenter humanity and disrupt the subject by revealing  Designing the Global Body 127the vastness of the inhuman.\u201d43 Michael\u00a0J. Shapiro expands on the  political and affective affordance of sublimity by detailing how the sublime resists of-ficial event- closing narrativization of collective trauma.44 The sublime serves to \u201ccreate conditions of possibility for the divided modes of  political com-prehension that emerge from oppositional communities of sense.\u201d45 Putting Matheson\u2019s framework and Shapiro\u2019s argument together and applying them to the  Japanese context, I argue that Death Stranding mobilizes the sublime to visualize Japan\u2019s postwar condition and meditate on the postwar trauma or the consequences of the war or the stick. The game imprints reminders of  wartime trauma using ruins and craters to illustrate the destructive and corrupting power of the stick. Overlays of historic trauma find their way into the game, making the sublime more overwhelming  because they allude to real historical atrocities.In Death Stranding, Kojima illustrates all explosions as a white screen, which can be interpreted as a means to deny the allure of the mushroom cloud and to avoid reencountering  wartime trauma. Instead, Kojima works more closely with the sublime aftermath of the explosion. He establishes this through the traumatized body and landscape of the game and specifi-cally through a fictional depiction of atomic bombings in the postapocalyptic United States. When Sam arrives at the biggest map of the game, Central Amer i ca, the player learns the history of the thermonuclear bombings. Death Stranding\u2019s main antagonist, Higgs Monaghan (Troy Baker), smuggles a thermonuclear bomb into  Middle Knot City via a private delivery com pany known as Fragile Express. The bomb kills most residents, and their dead bod-ies attract B.T.s. Upon consuming the corpses, B.T.s trigger numerous Void-outs that effectively wipe out the remaining population. The ruins of  Middle Knot City remain as a reminder of the attack and its lingering effect. The ruin is constantly showered in Timefall, which renders the space hazardous for the parcel- delivering player. While the player can fabricate tools to make their environment less dangerous, they cannot reclaim the ruins or create an infrastructure that would obscure them. As unmetabolized reminders of the past,  these sublime ruins lay siege to any unifying narrative of the collective trauma. Identifying the sublime in images surrounding earthquake ruins in Japan, Gennifer Weisenfeld argues that \u201creconstruction would wipe away the conflicted memories embodied in ruins and replace them with a coherent com-memorative narrative of the tragedy.\u201d46 Similarly, Death Stranding treats the traumatic landscape of the ruins as a productive site for alternative memories that also destabilizes the foundational narrative of postwar Japan, where 128  Yasheng Shethe bomb is the precursor of modernity. Instead, the game transposes  these reflections of Japan\u2019s postwar modernity onto the American landscape. This practice, I argue, serves both as a form of catharsis (of inflicting pain onto the victimizer) and an avoidance  toward a direct articulation of painful history.The game furthers its contemplation of the nuclear bomb through the story of the  owner of Fragile Express (played by L\u00e9a Seydoux), one of the game\u2019s main nonplayable characters. Fragile\u2019s backstory is a trauma narrative. Real-izing Higgs\u2019s plan, Fragile decides to prevent the next attack by taking the bomb far away from the next target\u2014 South Knot City. Fragile\u2019s unique ability allows her to teleport. Familiar with Fragile\u2019s ability and her plan to save the city, Higgs captures Fragile and offers her a choice: she can  either teleport to safety alone or throw the bomb into a black tar pit to save the city. Higgs strips Fragile to her underwear and tells her that she must run in the toxic rain. Determined to save the city, Fragile cradles the thermonuclear bomb and begins to run. A series of shots follow Fragile  running and falling to the ground as her body deteriorates in the rain. The last frame freezes on her determined eyes as she stands up to resume  running (figure\u00a05.4).47In this sequence, Fragile\u2019s body becomes a site of nuclear discourse. Her rapidly aged body caused by the rain becomes visual evidence of trauma. Instead of letting the second nuclear explosion occur, her body becomes the stand-in for the symbolic second atomic bombing in August\u00a01945. The last freeze- frame on her eyes uncannily utters the feminized postwar Japan\u2019s virtue\u2014 rebuilding through endurance and perseverance. Fragile\u2019s deterio-rated body functions similarly to the sublime ruins as a vehicle of postwar discourse. Fragile\u2019s body, covered with bruises and a helmet, is the perfect example of the global body where a deracialized body is employed to elevate a racially and culturally coded story.Death Stranding is a work of complex contemplations of collective mem-ory, trauma, and identity, which engender antihegemonic narratives about collective trauma, all woven into a story about a traumatized white man re-building the broken United States. While the work is effective in its critical engagement with postwar trauma, the unfortunate and uncomfortable truth is that the hidden  Japanese discourse might serve to tell stories of white na-tionalism. This is also where the danger of postwar  Japanese discourse and model minority mindset intersects\u2014 complicity  toward whiteness. In an age where video games are increasingly becoming vehicles of cultural dis-course, it is vital to think about the racial aspect of the Asian discourse. Keita Moore also thinks through this question in his essay in this volume, 5.4. Fragile\u2019s body deteriorates in the rain as she tries to save the city in Death\u00a0Stranding.130  Yasheng She\u201cPlayable Deniability: Biracial Repre sen ta tion and the Politics of Play in Metal Gear Solid,\u201d where he notes that biraciality in video games \u201ccan open new zones of inquiry around the relation of play and politics  because racialization opens itself to critical thought as a  process in gamic media.\u201d48 What Asian artists perceive as a globally acceptable body must be interrogated. Only in this way can the Asian body be racialized and visualized to destabilize the default whiteness of the global body.Notes 1 Kojima, Death Stranding. 2 Igarashi, Bodies of Memory, 48. 3 Kojima, Death Stranding. Screen capture by Yasheng She. 4 Team Coco, \u201cNorman Reedus and Conan.\u201d 5 Kojima, Death Stranding, 2019. Screen capture by Yasheng She. 6 Igarashi, Bodies of Memory, 14. 7 Igarashi, Bodies of Memory, 36. 8 Igarashi, Bodies of Memory, 171. 9 Igarashi, Bodies of Memory, 171. 10 Dyer, White, 164. 11 Dyer, White, 165. 12 Santosx07, \u201cDeath Stranding\u2014 Prologue All Cutscenes.\u201d 13 Haraway, \u201cA Cyborg Manifesto,\u201d 5. 14 Nakamura, \u201c Don\u2019t Hate the Player,\u201d 130. 15 Nakamura, \u201c Don\u2019t Hate the Player,\u201d 130. 16 Roh, Huang, and Niu, Techno- Orientalism, 11. 17 Roh, Huang, and Niu, Techno- Orientalism, 198. 18 Roh, Huang, and Niu, Techno- Orientalism, 214. 19 Moore, \u201cPlayable Deniability,\u201d this volume. 20 Garrett, \u201cHideo Kojima.\u201d 21 NeoGamer, \u201c Behind the Scenes.\u201d 22 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 28. 23 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 28. 24 Roh, Huang, and Niu, Techno- Orientalism, 199. 25 Berman, \u201cA Comprehensive Guide.\u201d 26 Osborn, \u201cAn Interview with Dir. Mamoru Oshii.\u201d 27 Osborn, \u201cAn Interview with Dir. Mamoru Oshii.\u201d 28 Osborn, \u201cAn Interview with Dir. Mamoru Oshii.\u201d 29 Osborn, \u201cAn Interview with Dir. Mamoru Oshii.\u201d 30 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 28. 31 Yano, Pink Globalization, 15\u201316. Designing the Global Body 131 32 Yano, Pink Globalization, 16. 33 Yano, Pink Globalization, 16. 34 Hutchinson,  Japanese Culture through Videogames, 132. 35 Hutchinson,  Japanese Culture through Videogames, 229. 36 Hutchinson,  Japanese Culture through Videogames, 227. 37 Hutchinson,  Japanese Culture through Videogames, 229. 38 Igarashi, Bodies of Memory, 14. 39 Igarashi, Bodies of Memory, 48. 40 S. Murray, \u201cLandscapes of Empire,\u201d 194. 41 S. Murray, \u201cLandscapes of Empire,\u201d 198. 42 Matheson, Desiring the Bomb, 19. 43 Matheson, Desiring the Bomb, 20. 44 Shapiro, The  Political Sublime, 172. 45 Shapiro, The  Political Sublime, 172. 46 Weisenfeld, Imaging Disaster, 159. 47 Kojima, Death Stranding. Screen capture by Yasheng She. 48 Moore, \u201cPlayable Deniability,\u201d this volume.The Trophy Called  \u201cAsian Hands\u201dOn the Mythical Proficiency of Asian GamersIntroduction: The Death of the Fighting Game CommunityIn March\u00a02021, Sony Interactive Entertainment and Endeavour (rTS) pur-chased the Evolution Championship Series (EVO), the largest and old-est fighting game tournament  organized by the Fighting Game Community (fGC). The fGC had been  organizing EVO since the late 1990s as a community event, depending solely on volunteer  labor, with an aim to reduce corporate influence on the community. Though the fGC had actively resisted corporate influence for more than a  decade, it was faced with an unpre ce dented crisis in July\u00a02020: the online EVO event was canceled in the wake of vari ous allega-tions of sexual misconduct, including pedophilia, by EVO CEO and cofounder Joey Culler, a.k.a. \u201cMr.\u00a0Wizard.\u201d1 The accusations against Mr.\u00a0Wizard started a series of confessions regarding the prevalence of sexual and racial abuse in the fGC. This led to extreme unrest within the community, so much so that many members declared this \u201cthe death of fGC,\u201d while  others welcomed it as a moment of reckoning and called for speculation and self- interrogation. Prabhash Ranjan Tripathy6 The Trophy Called \u201cAsian Hands\u201d 133Discussions started across Twitch.tv, YouTube, and other platforms around topics such as the  future of fGC, where the fGC had gone wrong, pos si ble ways to prevent such events from happening in the  future, and so on. It is impor tant to note  here that the fGC has a long history of misogyny, homophobia, and racism: in June during the same year, amid the Black Lives  Matter (BLM) protests, the lead designer of Skullgirls (2012), Mike Zaimont, made an \u201cI  can\u2019t breathe\u201d reference while commentating on a match.2 A week  later, in the same month, the Marvel\/Capcom EVO champion Ryan \u201cFChamp\u201d Ramirez received a lifetime ban for posting a picture of a watermelon with the tag \u201c#Water-melonLivesMatter.\u201d3 The month of April was no diff er ent: two streamers and community leaders, \u201cLowTierGod\u201d and \u201cCeroBlast,\u201d  were banned for using homophobic, transphobic, and racial slurs during their live- streams.Recognizing that  these issues  were a community- wide prob lem, two long-time members of the fGC, David \u201cUltradavid\u201d Graham and James \u201cjchensor\u201d Chen, dedicated a series of episodes on their channel UltraChenTV to address the issues of racial and sexual abuse in fGC; and in one of  those shows, an episode titled \u201cThe Worst (Most Impor tant?) Week in fGC History,\u201d David and James speculated about the historical  causes that might have led to  these events. The current chapter engages in a similar speculation. Via a close ex-amination of the notion of \u201cAsian hands\u201d within the fGC, the chapter attempts to both demonstrate and provide a theoretical\/historical explanation for the coexistence of and interplay between racial discrimination and meritocracy.The chapter is divided into four sections. The first discusses the orientalist notion of \u201cAsian hands\u201d and the  political function it fulfills within the fGC; the second looks at the construction of fGC as a meritocracy, including its masculinity and subsequent color- blind ideology; the third elaborates on the imperial roots of the association between meritocracy and games that one finds in fGC and examines how games, as a meritocracy, have historically facilitated the  process of racial profiling and race making and continue to do so by classifying certain forms of play as prerational. The fourth and final section tries to understand the prerational in the play of Asian hands.Asian HandsThe expression \u201cAsian hands\u201d is used in the fGC to signify the superior skill set of the Asian players (male): that is, quick reflexes, short reaction time, dexterity, and a sense of timing.  These attributes are largely understood in 134  Prabhash Ranjan Tripathy either biological terms (small and more dexterous hands) or cultural terms (Asian countries have more vibrant and competitive gaming cultures).4 Todd Harper and Chris Goto- Jones, who have worked extensively with the fighting game community, have encountered and offered their speculations on the expression \u201cAsian hands.\u201d Harper encountered the expression \u201cAsian hands\u201d for the first time while interviewing an American player named Jeff during an EVO event. In analyzing the interview, Harper sees the existence of such a racialized expression within the fighting game community as a contradic-tion to the claims of meritocracy upheld by the fGC.5 Given that meritocracy, competitiveness, internationalism, and hypermasculinity are central to the racial color- blind ideology that one observes in fGC, the existence of a no-tion like \u201cAsian hands\u201d does more than simply contrast with the meritocratic ideal; rather, it reveals how racial discrimination and meritocracy coexist, how meritocracy is deployed as an excuse not to acknowledge the historical socioeconomic construction of race. Yet the role of the ideals of meritocracy, competitiveness, internationalism, hypermasculinity, and color- blindness in the formation of ludic communities has a long history that predates the fGC. The same ideals  were evoked to form the modern Olympic Games in the late nineteenth  century and continue to fulfill the same function, and the most recent example is the ufC. Goto- Jones, in his essay \u201cPlaying with Being Digital Asia: Gamic Orientalism and the Virtual Dojo\u201d (2015), informed by the works of Naoki Sakai and Stephen Hong Sohn, introduces the notion of \u201cgamic orientalism\u201d as a new experimental form of techno- orientalism wherein a Western player can experience the \u201cOrient.\u201d He explains gamic orientalism as the ideological appropriation of flow states in games as Asian.6 The expression \u201cAsian hands\u201d within the fGC serves an aspirational function, as Asian hands are seen as embodying the flow state. However, Goto- Jones views this aspirational quality as something positive and uses it to develop the \u201cVirtual Ninja Code,\u201d a martial arts\u2013 inspired mode of playing fighting games.7 This chapter, while indebted to  these observations, studies the opera-tion of \u201cAsian hands\u201d as an orientalist notion (even in its aspirational form) within the meritocratic, competitive, and color- blind fGC to understand the politics of its function and how it helps the liberal Western subject maintain its positional superiority.Harper\u2019s interview with Jeff and Goto- Jones\u2019s interview with Ap0ca1yp-t1c0 provide a better starting point than any definition would,  because even in their brevity the excerpts capture both the evocation of the expression \u201cAsian hands\u201d and the context in which the expression is evoked within the  The Trophy Called \u201cAsian Hands\u201d 135fGC. In  doing so, the interviews provide a sneak peek into the moment of utterance. The excerpts provide a sense of what explanations and mean-ings the expression \u201cAsian hands\u201d offers to the community. The first is from Goto- Jones\u2019s interview with Ap0ca1ypt1c0 on February\u00a01, 2015: \u201cWe just got no chance when they hit us with that next- level, otaku, Brucie shit.  They\u2019re like into it, you know? It\u2019s like a  whole \u2019nother level.\u201d8 Similarly, Harper\u2019s interview with Jeff during EVO 2009 includes this exchange:TOdd: Like I just  don\u2019t have the experience playing, I  don\u2019t have the reflexes  either, but that\u2019s neither  here nor  there. But like . . .jEff: You  don\u2019t have Asian hands?TOdd: Ha! Is that a . . .jEff: You  don\u2019t have Asian hands.TOdd: Is that a common way of saying it?jEff: Oh yeah. I  didn\u2019t . . . I\u2019ve certainly been upset that I\u2019m not Asian at certain points, when I just  can\u2019t, when I  can\u2019t hit a move, I\u2019ll throw up my hands and go \u201cAhh! If only I could have Asian hands!\u201d and I\u2019ve heard other  people say it too,  because you just see, like the Korean players and the  Japanese players,  they\u2019re just like \u201c Whatever! Got it first try!\u201d and it\u2019s like, \u201cAaaah! Give me your fin gers!\u201d9Ap0ca1ypt1c0\u2019 s response not only captures the way the Asian other is perceived and how its gameplay is understood\u2014as exotic, \u201cotaku, Brucie shit\u201d\u2014 but also how the category of \u201cwe\u201d is established and placed in an antagonistic relationship with the exotic other, a point I  will discuss further below. The exchange between Harper and Jeff can be read as a discussion between a novice gamer and an experienced gamer, around the themes of aspiration and frustration with\/in the game. Interestingly, both aspiration and frustration as notions and experiences belong to the realm of achieve-ment. While aspiration denotes the hope of achieving something, frustration denotes the feeling corresponding to the inability to achieve something. So we may ask: What purpose does the idea of Asian hands serve in this rather brief discourse on achievement? It would not be farfetched to say that the idea of Asian hands is extended to the novice gamer as a therapy\/theory, as a pearl of wisdom, in the expectation that novice gamers can both make sense of and 136  Prabhash Ranjan Tripathycome to terms with their frustrations. The notion of Asian hands fulfills three primary functions. First, it establishes a bond between the two non- Asian gamers, as they share the same fate: as gamers devoid of Asian hands, they are left with no choice but to \u201cembrace the grind,\u201d or work hard. Second, it establishes the Asian gamer as a biologically\/culturally privileged other and thereby also explains why Asian gamers dominate the fighting game scene. Third, it provides a direction to the aspirations of the novice by subtly sug-gesting that to be good at fighting games means to be able to defeat Asian gamers. It is impor tant to note that this strategy of privileging and then estab-lishing an antagonistic relationship with the other is one of the central features of orientalism, as it helps maintain the West\u2019s status as the hero: an agent of enlightenment rationality and liberal values, deemed the hallmarks of pro gress and civilization. In orientalist discourse, the privileging of the other in one realm usually comes at the cost of explaining the other\u2019s deficits in another realm. Sports historian John Hoberman provides an account of the creation of the athletic savage in the scientific discourses of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The athletic advantage of the savage was explained as a result of his or her weak intellect, civilizational inferiority, technological backwardness, the existence of primitive instincts, and so on.10In a 2004 thread titled \u201cAsians and Fighting Games: Exploring the Myth\/Ste reo type\u201d on shoryuken . com (the oldest website dedicated to fighting games), one of the discussants, Murakumo, pre sents a similar pseudo- scientific explanation: he argues that an electric charge travels faster be-tween nerve cells in shorter arms of the Asians, which might provide them with a slight\/minimal advantage at games.11 Steve Choe and Se Young Kim, in their discussion on Western reactions to gamer death in Taiwan  Korea and China, observe the continuation of similar orientalist tendencies in video game journalism: death by overplaying is understood in terms of an imbal-anced existence of the other, in contrast to the balanced existence of the Western subject.12Much like the Black athlete in many American sports, the Asian gamer is portrayed in esports as embodying a biological\/cultural advantage as a re-sult of an imbalance. Within this purview, the skills of the Asian gamer have been boosted by an already existing and overwhelming chance\u2014 a chance embodied by an entire race. Thus, the contest is to test the chances of skill alone against a skill boosted by chance. Further, this desire for victory of \u201cpure skill\u201d over \u201cskill boosted by chance,\u201d although gaming is an individual undertaking, should be understood as a communal act directed at saving the  The Trophy Called \u201cAsian Hands\u201d 137\u201cgame\u201d itself or at least upholding the version of the game where pure skill forms the basis of the ideal of meritocracy \u201cinherent\u201d in the game.The Color- Blind, Meritocratic,  Masculine Composition of\u00a0the FGCThe fGC has  imagined and presented itself as a meritocracy and openly sported a color- blind ideology. As revealed by a study in 2018, the fGC has always considered itself highly misunderstood, especially by the media and also to certain extent by academia.13 This skepticism has led the fGC to take control of its own pr rather than depending on a third party. Vari ous docu-mentary films celebrating the arcade past, meritocracy, and color- blind ideology have emerged from within the community. In one such documen-tary film, The Rise of fgc, one of the featured gamers explains that fGC includes anyone, anywhere in the world who plays fighting games,  whether a well- known title or an obscure one, and irrespective of race or gender.14 fGC has historized itself in  popular discourse as emerging from the local arcade scenes in the 1990s: dedicated players (males) would travel locally to diff er ent arcades seeking competition, and eventually the desire to com-pete went global. The fighting game community, apart from being one of the oldest game communities, is without doubt a unique collective of gamers in many ways. The community centers not on a par tic u lar game but on a loosely defined genre. With its internationalist aspirations, the fGC represents a congregation of gaming communities from around the world, formed around a certain list of video games. However, the local gaming communities formed around individual games might have no recognition of this global community or fighting games as a category, as was revealed in my MPhil fieldwork in India (New Delhi and Mussoorie), where the interviewed gamers affiliated themselves to a single game and insisted that one game was completely dif-fer ent from any other.15The fGC has no central governing body or institution. It is an  imagined international community held together by lore regarding origins, legends about heroes, and stories from the undocumented under ground past. Todd Harper identifies \u201cArcade Ideal,\u201d competitiveness, and meritocracy as central features that define the fGC.16 The ideals of arcade, meritocracy, and com-petitiveness are  political, as they have long enabled the fGC to construct its own identity as a color- blind meritocracy and have also given the fGC power 138  Prabhash Ranjan Tripathyto define fighting games as a genre. On the one hand,  these ideals help the fGC to distinguish itself from esports, which many community members regard as too refined, commercial, and phony compared to the rugged, under-ground, tough fGC.17 On the other hand, they give the fGC sovereignty over classifications of games as fighting games, as it often separates itself from combat sports simulations like ea Sports ufc (2014) series and platform fighters like Super Smash Bros (2018) and Rivals of Aether (2015). Over the years, the fGC has aggressively chased  these ideals and shown its capacity to put an enormous amount of influence on the industry, so much so that it can determine the success or failure of a title. For example, in 2020 the fGC was consulted by the developers of Samurai Showdown (2020) during its development phase. This inclusion, involvement, and approval of the fGC was one reason  behind the title\u2019s huge success.18Mitch Bowman, in \u201cWhy the Fighting Game Community Is Color- Blind\u201d (2014), lists its  humble arcade beginnings, meritocratic princi ples, and com-petitiveness as features that have helped the fGC to become \u201ccolor- blind.\u201d19 The argument of the article is a classic case of racial color- blind ideology, but it is not a false repre sen ta tion of the beliefs held up by fGC. fGC is racially more diverse than other gaming communities, but that is not due to an ab-sence of racism; rather, it may stem from the affordability and availability of fighting games during the early phases.Besides its color- blind ideology, fGC is notoriously masculine and homo-phobic and was known for repeated sexual misconduct even prior to 2021. In 2012, Aris Bakhtanians harassed his teammate Miranda Pakozdi and eventu-ally forced her to drop out of the Cross Assault event. He  later defended his actions by declaring that \u201csexual harassment is part of the culture, and if you remove that from the fGC, it\u2019s not fGC anymore.\u201d20 The actions  were highly criticized by the fGC, and vari ous articulations of \u201cfew bad apples\u201d  were duly put forward by game journalists and players.  Needless to say,  there is more than a grain of truth in Aris\u2019s statement.A glance at the subreddit r\/Kappa provides insights into the prevalence of masculinity and exclusivity in the fGC; the group defines itself as \u201cfGC revolution, fight gentrification with shitposts and anime titties.\u201d The group description declares, \u201cE- sports is not a part of fGC.\u201d By distinguishing fight-ing games from esports, the community aspires to break fGC masculinity away from the nerd, techno- savvy image of the gamer and appeal to a more traditional trash- talking, tough- guy image or that of the  silent stoic martial artist. Goto- Jones observes (and  later encourages) the widespread use of  The Trophy Called \u201cAsian Hands\u201d 139bushido philosophy in the fGC and how the gamers imagine themselves as virtual martial artists.21 It should be noted, however, that while the use of Asian martial arts philosophy is prevalent in the fGC, the notion of a martial arts philosophy is subordinated to the ethos of competition. While competi-tion does form a part of the martial arts training, competition for the \u201cVirtual Ninja\u201d is the sole site of training, being, and becoming. The martial arts phi-losophy,  metaphors, and images are appropriated and subjected to a princi ple of competition within the fGC.22The Prerational Play of the Asian HandsThe discriminatory aspect of meritocracy in games has been explored by vari ous scholars across disciplines. Christopher A. Paul argues that merit is a \u201ckey part of the code within the games,\u201d as it becomes the ideology that governs gameplay. While games are celebrated as pure meritocratic spaces, this cele bration comes at the cost of ignoring all structural inequalities. Paul identifies video games as a site where the ideals of meritocracy are \u201cactual-ized and solidified\u201d and propagated.23 Games thus become pedagogical sites where a meritocratic worldview can be learned, practiced, and assessed. Lisa Nakamura warns against the dangers of the meritocratic way of thinking about social justice prevalent in gaming communities and game scholar-ship. She argues that a meritocratic way of thinking may hinder the strug-gle against racial and gender discrimination by making social justice seem like a privilege and not a right.24 However, the imagination of the ludic as a purely meritocratic space that one encounters in game communities like fGC predates the advent of video games. The genesis of this imagination can be found in the creation of modern sports.Jo Littler, in her study on meritocracy, finds the early echoes of meritocracy in the self- help traditions of Victorian  England, best represented by Samuel Smiles\u2019s best- selling book Self- Help (1859).25 Interestingly, sports historians and sociologists alike, including J.\u00a0A. Mangan, Allen Guttmann, Eric Dun-ning, Norbert Elias, John Hargreaves, and John\u00a0M. Hoberman, have identified sports as a modern phenomenon\/institution that emerged from the larger philosophical movement of \u201cMuscular Chris tian ity\u201d in late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Victorian  England. Charles Tennyson celebrates this Victorian achievement in his essay \u201cThey Taught the World to Play\u201d (1959). Both the self- help tradition and Muscular Chris tian ity  were movements 140  Prabhash Ranjan Tripathydedicated to prescribing moral and physical practices to working- class men, to help them adjust to, cope with, and fight against the changes brought about by industrialization. While the self- help tradition taught the lesson of \u201cpulling oneself up by one\u2019s bootstraps\u201d and thrift as a way for social mobil-ity, Muscular Chris tian ity taught discipline, hard work, amateurism, and manliness. The values from both traditions get embodied in modern sports. Unsurprisingly, Littler observes the importance and continuation of ludic  metaphors in the discourse of meritocracy, such as \u201clevel playing field\u201d and \u201csocial ladder\u201d (which she explains through the imperial appropriation of the Indian game of \u201csnakes and ladders\u201d). Sports could accommodate multiple concerns of Victorian society: it could incorporate the meritocratic ideal as a liberal solution to the plight of the working class and could also address the appeal of physical strength against the threat of technological advancement and its discontents and propagate a new form of masculinity. According to Tara Magdalinski,  under Muscular Chris tian ity sports was initially  imagined as a reaction against industrialization, urbanization, and migration and pro-posed as an activity essential for physical and moral well- being.26 Sports was thought of as a carrier of certain values (the games ethic or sports ideal) that  were deemed essential to the formation of modern liberal subject.27 The values learned via sports  were expected to translate and govern the be hav ior of an individual in everyday life. In this period, one also observes a rigor-ous reworking and standardization of the rules of vari ous sports; vari ous international sports governing bodies  were established to host sports  under unified rules. Sportisization of the ludic also had a pedagogical dimension, which explains the inclusion of sports in the  English education system early on.28 The question of  whether Victorians taught the world to play might be debatable, but they certainly taught the world through play, as, sports  were spread across the empire as a pedagogical tool to educate or tame the child, barbarian, native, savage\u2014 not to teach the savage how to play. The natives of course had their own games, but  those games  were diff er ent from sports: they  were neither meritocratic nor separated from the realm of work. The proj ect of sportisization involved both establishing the ludic space as distinct from the workspace and constructing it as a level playing field governed by the meritocratic ideal. The meritocratic ideal that one observes in gaming communities like fGC needs to be understood within the larger and more complex historical connections between the ludic and the meritocratic imagi-naries. Ludic space as a meritocracy is a modern  European phenomenon, and it actively distinguishes itself from its historical and geo graph i cal other. The Trophy Called \u201cAsian Hands\u201d 141Allen Guttmann explains how modern sports differ from the games found in ancient society. He ascribes seven distinct features (two values and five pro cesses) to modern sports that distinguish it from ancient games: secu-larism, equality, specialization, rationalization, bureaucratization, quan-tification, and rec ord. Within this schema, the five modernizing pro cesses  were deployed to preserve and uphold the modern values of secularism and equality. By secularism, he meant that modern sports, unlike ancient games, are not performed to please or appease some divine, transcendental force; rather, modern sports \u201care activities partly pursued for their own sake or for other ends which are equally secular.\u201d He further explains that \u201cwe [moderns]  don\u2019t run in order that the earth be more fertile. We till the earth or work in factories and offices, so that we can have time to play.\u201d Secularism in Gutt-mann\u2019s analy sis indicates an idea of games dissociated from both the divine and work. By \u201cequality\u201d he means that \u201cevery one should, theoretically, have an opportunity to compete\u201d and the \u201cconditions of competition should be same for all contestants.\u201d One can observe that this is a meritocratic defini-tion of equality.29 The five pro cesses identified by Guttmann work together to create a meritocracy; sustain and propagate it; and chronicle the merit of contestants.Norbert Elias, in his collaborative work with Eric Dunning, Quest for Ex-citement (1986), extends his theory of the civilization  process in the West to the realm of the ludic. He observes that the folk games played in  Europe dur-ing the  Middle Ages underwent a transformation of sentiment and conduct  toward vio lence that was similar to the changes he had observed in other aspects of Western society. In the case of games, the  process included the gradual development of stricter rules to sanitize spaces of playful contests, and the purpose of rules was to exclude vio lence from the space of competition.30 The civilization of games is marked by an increasing rationalization, making the game space more meritocratic and less violent. Mihai\u00a0I. Spariosu, in his discourse analy sis of the \u201cplay concept\u201d in Western scientific and philosophi-cal tradition, provides a complementary analy sis to that of Elias when he observes the existence of two forms or ideas of play in discourse (Western): prerational and rational. The prerational play is pre- Socratic, aristocratic, and heroic, embracing the vio lence that comes with agon. By contrast, ac-cording to Spariosu, rational play is Socratic,  middle class, and subject to reason. The rational mentality focuses on the productive and nonviolent side of competition and suppresses the vio lence and destructiveness in it.31 The rational notions of play attempt to si mul ta neously suppress and glorify 142  Prabhash Ranjan Tripathythe prerational by treating it as a  thing of the past, but the prerational can never be completely suppressed and keeps resurfacing in vari ous discourses. Spariosu and Elias do not see rationalization as a permanent transformation of play. For Elias, the civilizing  process he observes in the West is a constant attempt to control and curb what it considers barbaric; similarly, Spariosu posits that the prerational is always in a feud with the rational. It is impor-tant to note that both  these studies locate themselves in the West and can be accused of overlooking the imperial dimension of the West and how Western subject, society, and civilization  were constructed not only against its histori-cal self but also against the geo graph i cal other. The prerational (uncivilized) of the historical past found concrete, physical existence in the colony, the \u201cOrient,\u201d the East.If sports  were peddled across the empire to educate the natives to increase their productivity and to teach them to work rather than play, then the dif-fusion of the games ethic or sports ideal also becomes an occasion where the rationalized, meritocratic ludic space of sports encounters the prerational play of the native. In this context, sports becomes both a tool of tutelage and an experimental site to study the native or to produce racialized scientific knowledge, where natives\u2019 physiology is recorded, analyzed, and compared with that of whites. The natives then are invited or admitted into the merito-cratic space of the ludic, neither as an equal nor to prove their equality but to establish their difference. In notions like \u201cAsian hands,\u201d one can observe the continuation of this practice: while the fGC is open to the Asian, his or her play (good or bad) establishes his or her difference. The ludic meritocracy continues to produce racialized, pseudoscientific knowledge and remains an active site for race making.The admiration shown  toward the play of the Asian in gaming communi-ties or for the Black athletes in sports should be seen not as a sign of inclusion but, rather, as emerging from a nostalgia for the prerational, a lost state. Asian hands become appealing only when they are seen as the embodiment of a flow state, just as Goto- Jones argues. The flow state is desirable  because it is believed to operate outside the constraints of rationality, a primordial state where actions precede thinking. Asian hands are desirable and feared  because they are machinic and nonthinking. They represent the automata.Moreover, despite the admiration of the play of Asian gamers or Black athletes, their prerational play remains a threat to the meritocratic, rational-ized ludic space of the fighting game and sports. Prerational play exposes the inability of the game space to minimize the ele ment of chance or to provide a  The Trophy Called \u201cAsian Hands\u201d 143level playing field for competition; within the rationalized, meritocratic ver-sion of the ludic, prerational play assumes the role of a natu ral adversary and needs to be suppressed via expulsion or defeat. Only the defeat of prerational play ensures the restoration of the ludic as a meritocratic, rational space. The next section explores the perceived threat of prerational play in the discourse regarding play and games.Locating the Threat of Prerational PlayThe prerational play of the other is not located in the other\u2019s incapacity to\u00a0play or create games; the other is deemed capable of both. The locus of the prerational is, rather, in the purposes of and values expressed by the other\u2019s play and game creation. Tara Fickle, in her deconstructive reading of Roger Caillois and Huizinga, demonstrates how the orientalist imagination acts as \u201cthe formal logic\u201d guiding the hegemonic ludic theories.32 In her reading of Caillois\u2019s paidia\/Ludus distinction, she explains how \u201cLudus,\u201d or \u201cthe taste for gratuitous difficulty,\u201d which is ascribed with positive attributes including a \u201ccivilizing quality,\u201d is ultimately thought of as a Western mode of \u201cdisci-plining paidia.\u201d33 Caillois explains that the path from paidia to Ludus is not the \u201conly conceivable metamorphosis\u201d; cultures that are not driven by the \u201cspirit of enterprise and need for pro gress\u201d might not develop the same pure and excellent games as Western civilization does but might instead pave a diff er ent destiny for themselves. Caillois ends the chapter with a warning that a culture\u2019s choice regarding how to channel paidia\u2014 toward invention (Western ludus) or  toward (idle) contemplation (Chinese wan)\u2014is a fun-damental choice that determines the destiny of said culture.34 Informed by Fickle\u2019s analy sis, one might say that the prerational play of the other resides both in the universally shared paidia and in the inability to choose Ludus. The prerational of paidia is understood as a shared heritage of all human-ity; it lies in the realm of the biological and can therefore lead to a nostalgic admiration. However, the prerational emerging from the inability to choose Ludus is a cultural\/  political decision, a decision to channelize paidia inward (to feed its own desires) rather than outward (to foster pro gress, civiliza-tion, innovation, enterprise, and so on). Within this view, the other is held responsible for remaining a savage, not  because they are unable to play or create games or teach via games but  because they are unable to teach the right values via games.144  Prabhash Ranjan TripathyPrerational play arises from the way games are used in\/for pedagogy. Uday Singh Mehta reminds us how colonization was essentially a pedagogical ex-periment to remedy the civilizational infantilism of the native even if that task required imperial despotism.35 I have already mentioned the role sports played in this pedagogical experiment. The question of why prerational play is a threat lies in its pedagogy:  because the prerational play\/pedagogy of the other neither distinguishes the world of play from the world of work nor as-sumes that play is subordinate to or an escape from work, this pedagogy cre-ates deviant subjectivities, imbalanced beings. Eugen Fink, in his reflection on play, defines it as \u201can oasis of happiness\u201d where players can lose themselves and retrieve knowledge; however, this losing oneself into the game needs to happen at a par tic u lar intensity, where one can still distinguish between appearance and actuality. A player who plays at this intensity can enter the oasis of happiness and retrieve knowledge (sensual and philosophical), but  those playing at a diff er ent intensity\u2014 for example, lunatics\u2014 can lose them-selves in the oasis of happiness but without the possibility of return.36 The distinction between the lunatic and the player proper is another example of how an instrumental view of play operates in the Western discourse on the ludic. The view that play or game is the site from which knowledge can be extracted assumes a subject that inhabits a world divided between work and play. The other is seen as inhabiting another undivided, inefficient world; the prerational play of the other is pathological, lunatic.To no surprise, then, the \u201cgamer death\u201d in Asia is still understood within this pathological- racial framework. The work ethic of the Asian gamer in the fGC is also understood as a culture\u2019s pathological, obsessive play. The Asian gamer is seen as raised in an overtly competitive, obsessive, unforgiv-ing, and violent gaming scene\/environment that encourages obsessive play or game addiction. The Asian gaming culture, as a pedagogical site, is seen as encouraging addiction and allowing the gamers (youth) to venture into the game perhaps never to return; \u201cAsian hands\u201d are forged in a culture that permits the youth to take such dangerous risks, like playing till death or play-ing video games for a living. The Western gamer might aspire to have Asian hands, visit the arcades of Japan and  Korea, read the Book of Five Rings, practice the Virtual Ninja Code, but that Western gamer would always return from the oasis of happiness.Asian gamers playing along in mythologizing their own hands or gaming ethic is also an extremely common phenomenon. While this is sometimes discussed and celebrated as a radical display of agency and subversion, this  The Trophy Called \u201cAsian Hands\u201d 145chapter shares the skepticism of Lisa Nakamura, Toshiya Ueno, and Masa-nori Oda, for I believe that participation in this racial mythos propagates misconceptions and further contributes to racism.37 In the realm of games this participation becomes even more dangerous,  because while games have functioned as experimental sites to generate racial knowledge, they have also served as a zone of containment or segregation.38 The belief that one is es-sentially good at playing video games or sports can discourage a  people from exploring other ave nues of life or experiencing life as a  whole. By accepting and  going along with notions like \u201cAsian hands,\u201d the gamer by default also accepts the prerationality of his or her play, the ontology of an imbalanced being, the  stereotype of the automata and the addict.Conclusion\/Epilogue: The Defeat of Asian HandsIn 2019, an unknown player from Pakistan, Arslan \u201cArslanAsh\u201d Siddique, defeated the Korean champion Jae- Min \u201cKnee\u201d Bae in the EVO Tekken 7  finals. The initial rise of Arslan in the tournament was greeted by the trend-ing hashtag #flukestan, but as he made pro gress, his \u201cclaw style\u201d (the way he holds the  handle) became a subject of discussion. On live- streams, when players realized that Arslan is a Muslim, \u201cHold my beer\u201d jokes  were promptly converted into \u201cHold my biryani\/kebab\u201d jokes, which soon transformed into \u201cHold my bomb\u201d jokes.39 This is another recent example of how the meritoc-racy of fGC  doesn\u2019t safeguard it from rampant racism or stop it from manu-facturing another hunting trophy in \u201cPakistani\/Arab hands.\u201dNotes 1 Hall, \u201cEvo Online Canceled Following Accusations of Sexual Abuse against CEO.\u201d The offline EVO event was canceled  because of the COVId-19 pan-demic; the  organizers de cided to hold the event online. 2 Todd, \u201cSkullgirls Lead Designer Makes \u2018I  Can\u2019t Breathe\u2019 Joke.\u201d 3 I. Walker, \u201cFormer Evo Champion Banned.\u201d 4 Goto- Jones, \u201cIs Street Fighter a Martial Art?\u201d 5 Harper, The Culture of Digital Fighting Games. 6 Goto- Jones, \u201cPlaying with Being in Digital Asia.\u201d 7 Goto- Jones declares that even though he understands that  doing so might itself be a form of orientalism, he believes that the ethical success of the proj ect depends on  whether the proj ect can positively contribute to the society.146  Prabhash Ranjan Tripathy 8 Goto- Jones, \u201cIs Street Fighter a Martial Art?,\u201d 191\u201392. 9 Harper, \u201c \u2018Asian Hands\u2019 and  Women\u2019s Invitationals,\u201d 113. 10 Hoberman, Mortal Engines, 54\u201355. 11 \u201cAsians and Fighting Games.\u201d 12 Choe and Kim, \u201cNever Stop Playing.\u201d 13 Steltenpohl, Reed, and Keys, \u201cDo  Others Understand Us?\u201d 14 Martinez, fgc: Rise of the Fighting Game Community. 15 Tripathy, \u201cPlaying Cyborg.\u201d 16 Harper, The Culture of Digital Fighting Games. \u201cArcade ideal\u201d refers to the insistence of fGC to remain true to the arcade past, i.e., to play offline (face- to- face) on arcade sticks (not gamepads). 17 Groen, \u201cWhy fGC Hates the Word Esports.\u201d 18 theScore eSports, What Is the fgc? 19 Bowman, \u201cWhy the Fighting Game Community Is Color Blind.\u201d 20 Crossassaultharass, \u201cDay 1: Sexual Harassment on Cross Assault.\u201d 21 Goto- Jones, \u201cIs Street Fighter a Martial Art?\u201d 22 This is similar to the way martial arts is appropriated in cage fighting. 23 Paul, The Toxic Meritocracy of Videogames, 10\u201311. 24 Nakamura, \u201cAfterword,\u201d 246\u201347. 25 Littler, Against Meritocracy, 26\u201327. 26 Magdalinski, Sport, Technology and Body, 17\u201318. 27 Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism. 28 Mangan, A Sport- Loving Society. 29 Guttmann, From Ritual to Rec ord. 30 Elias and Dunning, Quest for Excitement, 20\u201322. 31 Spariosu, Dionysus Reborn, 12\u201313. 32 Fickle, The Race Card, 117\u201318. 33 Fickle, The Race Card, 128\u201329. 34 Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, 27\u201335. 35 Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 34\u201335. 36 Fink, Play as Symbol of the World, 25\u201326. 37 See Ueno, \u201cTechno- Orientalism and Media Tribalism.\u201d 38 Hoberman, Darwin\u2019s Athletes. 39 TheMainManSWE, \u201cKnee Mauled 6\u20130 by Pakistani Player.\u201dLocalizing  EmpirePart 3This page intentionally left blankDe- Cultural Imitation GamesDesigner Roundtable #3FEATURING:Joe Yizhou Xu, an assistant professor of media industries at Old Domin-ion University, who researches the mobile tech industry in China. Yizhou has worked as a documentarian and broadcast journalist based in Beijing, and as part of his dissertation, he worked for over fifteen months as a localizer for several Chinese mo-bile game companies based out of Guangzhou and Shanghai. His work has been published in Social Media + Society and Communication and the Public. His feature- length documen-tary The  People\u2019s Republic of Love (2016) is available for streaming.Lien\u00a0B. Tran, an assistant professor of games and design at the DePaul University\u2019s School of Design in the College of Computing and Digital Media. She is director of  Matters at Play, a lab applying human- centered and iterative design practices for interactive solutions for social impact and player transformation. She is an award- winning designer whose port-folio includes online and game- based tools for  organizations such as Open Society Foundations, the World Bank, and the United Nations.Christian Kealoha Miller (a.k.a. \u201cSilver Spook\u201d), a Native Hawaiian activist and  founder of Silver Spook Games, the worker- owned cooperative studio  behind the cyberpunk adventure game Neofeud (2017). For several years Chris was a social worker and STEM teacher for underserved and at- risk 150 Designer Roundtable 3youth in Honolulu; his clients and students consisted disproportionately of impoverished Native Hawaiians, Asians, and Pacific Islanders. The art, stories, and gameplay of Neofeud are largely a reflection of his experi-ences. Chris has spoken at a variety of conferences including the North American Science Fiction Convention and imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, on the \u201cNight of the Indig-enous Devs\u201d panel.Paraluman (Luna) Javier, the creative director and cofounder of Altitude Games, the Manila- based studio  behind the free- to- play mobile games Kung Fu Clicker (2018), Dream De-fense (2017), and Run Run Super V (2016). She started as a game writer in 2002 as part of the pioneer team that released the first Filipino- made game. She has taught game design at De La Salle University, Manila, and is a  Women in Games Ambassador.Luna Javier: You know, I  wasn\u2019t even sure that I should be on this roundtable,  because even though I\u2019ve been working in the Philippine game industry for a long time, most of our games are still Western or at least global at launch. The reason we do that is  because a lot of  people  here [the Philippines] are still living  under the poverty line. But every body has a phone. So the big mobile game companies, they do their soft- launch testing in the Philippines,  because we love to play games, but we just  won\u2019t pay for it. So they use the Philippines to  measure playing be hav ior like retention, engagement, but they  don\u2019t use it to  measure monetization. That\u2019s one prob lem that I\u2019ve seen  here with  people who keep making games that are obviously Filipino. It  doesn\u2019t make it a good game, just kind of Filipino- looking. What we try to do is let every one abroad know that the Philippines can make games. When I was with Anino Entertainment, we  were the first team that made a computer game out of the Philippines back in 2002, Anito: Defend a Land Enraged. And when we started  going to conferences, nobody knew that the Philippines had a game industry. So we had to deal with the usual \u201cOh, you speak  English? I\u2019m so amazed.\u201d And then, \u201cI  didn\u2019t know that Filipinos made games.\u201d And  we\u2019re like, \u201cOkay, to be fair, no one had before.\u201d But then that kept on for years.Joe Xu: In China, many developers marketing to the West mask Chineseness through the localization  process, hiding the fact that this is a Chinese game. And they do that  because of the long- standing issues of  people equating China with low- quality or inferior products. If you look up some of the [Chi-nese game] companies, they would never put their location as China. They would put it as Los Angeles or something like that\u2014 again, as a way of mask-ing their  actual location. I think they do it to avoid stigmatization. So when  De- Cultural Imitation Games 151we localize games, that  process is to reskin the game in a way that it  doesn\u2019t trace back to the original. And I\u2019m the guy who makes sure the vari ous teams\u2019 localizations are good enough to pass off as a polished Western game. The games I make are mostly imitation games, which populate much of the app store. It\u2019s a massive industry, and  these games are extremely lucrative. You could say it\u2019s kind of noncreative in that sense, but I think in a way, as an industrial tactic, it is creative in terms of extracting money from  these markets.Chris Patterson:  Were you ever able to say, \u201cThat image that  you\u2019re putting in the game looks racist\u201d? Or when you talk about making sure the localiza-tions are \u201cgood,\u201d does that mean po liti cally correct?Joe Xu: Yeah, in industry that\u2019s called culturalization. For example, we have a lot of  Middle Eastern audiences in markets like Turkey and Saudi Arabia. So whenever a game deals with drinking alcohol or certain  things that might be offensive to  those regions, we have a person  there to be a kind of gatekeeper to make sure nothing offensive goes through. But for a small or midsized developer where  there\u2019s only, like, a  couple hundred  people,  things might get overlooked and slip out. That can cause major issues down the line.A good example is this Wild West game that I worked on [while working in China].  There\u2019s a mechanic in the game where you can basically beat up an NPC [nonplayer character], and one of the NPCs can be Native American. And I told them, \u201c Don\u2019t do that. That\u2019s  really problematic.\u201d But then the designer basically told me that this is already hard- coded, we  don\u2019t have time, we need to push this out in a  couple of weeks, and it just goes out. So even when we try to convince  people not to do certain  things, I think  either they  don\u2019t think it\u2019s a good use of their time, or  they\u2019re  really pressured during crunch time.Christian Kealoha Miller: Some of the best reviews for my game Neofeud  were in China. The game deals with extreme poverty and ghettoization in one of the most beautiful and expensive places in the world to live [Hawai\u2018i] and was inspired by Brazilian favelas, the worst parts of Mexico City, apartheid Africa, the Indian Mumbai shadow cities, and my experiences in Honolulu favelas. A lot of my games deal specifically with economic,  political, social  inequality, the military-industrial complex, all that kind of fun stuff\u2014 empire specifically. But I  didn\u2019t do any translation; I  couldn\u2019t afford it. And in the game, I  don\u2019t come out and say, \u201cThis is a  political diatribe. This is Silver Spook ranting in C# code.\u201d I just say, \u201cThis is a cyberpunk adventure game.\u201d 152 Designer Roundtable 3But this Chinese reviewer was like, \u201cI see that Amer i ca has gone down this unfortunate path where their country has been eaten by some of the unfet-tered, ultracapitalist individuals. And I hope that my country  doesn\u2019t collapse in this direction.\u201d I had  Russian reviewers, too. I was surprised how many around the world played it, even with no translation.Lien Tran: Thinking about localization, as a designer, I think of context as the  people, place, environment, as well as the inputs and outputs that are  going to stem from your experience. In comparing the social impact games I make to games made strictly for entertainment, I won der, \u201cIs the point to be au then tic to a culture so  people learn about that culture, or is it about meeting the expectations of what  people think that culture is about?\u201d Kind of like the tourist effect. For example, I created a game [Toma El Paso \/ Make a Move (2014)] for unaccompanied immigrant minors.  They\u2019re brought into the custody of the US government. And  they\u2019re in\u2014 there are worse words\u2014 but  we\u2019ll call them shelters. And  they\u2019re in removal proceedings, meaning the government is trying to determine  whether or not they should be removed from the country. So localization is impor tant in a social impact context, and you have to be very careful,  because it\u2019s based in part on real ity. So local-ization for me in that context means making sure  you\u2019re au then tic and not accidentally sending the wrong message.In game design, many of us talk about abstraction. A lot of games are about war, but their game systems abstract the idea of combat and war in a very simplified mechanic. I always think about how  we\u2019re faithfully abstracting the real- world system, but not to the point where  we\u2019re misinforming, or misleading. And, you know, I\u2019ve had some backlash where  people say, \u201cThis  isn\u2019t real, your game  isn\u2019t about real ity.\u201d And it\u2019s like, no, this is based on research. It\u2019s not the entire world, but it\u2019s very representative. That\u2019s my spin on localization from a social impact stance. It\u2019s not about what  will [the audience] understand, but about being faithful to the message or the content.Joe Xu: And  there\u2019s no such  thing as a global game, to some extent, right? You always have to localize. Even within the language, you might localize it to certain regions.Tara Fickle: What about the role of  Japanese games specifically in this local- global context? Is  there a connection between  Japanese imperialism and Japan\u2019s historical dominance in the games industry? De- Cultural Imitation Games 153Luna Javier: With the mobile games we make, we kind of accept that our games can easily be published in the US, Australia,  Europe. That\u2019s the mon-etizing side. The territory of China, Japan, and  Korea, we call that CJK. If we wanted to publish in CJK, we would actually need to\u2014 and Joe would know this\u2014 pair up with a publisher from that area and localize or cultural-ize.  Because even if our games  were made available in Japan or in  Korea, it would just be so dif fer ent from what\u2019s  popular  there. So even if we have games published in China working with a Chinese publisher, in Japan  there\u2019s a completely dif fer ent gaming mindset. The UI [user interface] is dif fer ent, the attention to detail, the complexity of mechanics and controls are dif fer ent. We would have to understand that to even be able to compete in it. So  we\u2019ve kept ourselves separate from making games that specifically appeal to the CJK market. However, a lot of Filipinos are heavi ly influenced by Japan and identify with Japan, even though we  were occupied by Japan briefly.Joe Xu: In terms of history and Japan\u2019s role as colonial empire in Asia, Japan and China always had a bad relationship po liti cally. Yet culturally, Japan is heavi ly influential in terms of manga, anime, and pop culture among Chinese consumers. Take for example Genshin Impact (2020), a Chinese game that pays homage to a lot of  Japanese games and made a lot of money last year, more than a lot of triple- A studios. And China does a lot of that industrial- level work by recruiting  Japanese designers. For Genshin Impact, a lot of their voice actors are directly recruited from Japan. And Tencent [a Chinese holding com pany that owns Riot Games and other entertainment companies] recently bought something like three hundred anime titles for exclusive IP rights in China, so now they can basically make any anime game they want. I think Tencent is even making a Pok\u00e9mon game now; Nintendo licensed the Switch to them  because of China\u2019s massive market potential. So I think  we\u2019re seeing a bit of a transition in terms of empire in the  political sense, to thinking about Japan as a cultural empire. The  Japanese industry  isn\u2019t neces-sarily declining culturally\u2014 Japan still has such a prestigious position in the game industry\u2014 but  they\u2019re declining in terms of revenues. Companies like Konami  haven\u2019t been  doing very well, and a lot of their workforce has been crossing over to China.Christian Kealoha Miller: I just had a conference with a bunch of Indigenous cyberpunk creators. And  we\u2019re like, \u201cWhat is an empire?\u201d To me, the differ-ence between what defines an empire, in the context of Japan, the United 154 Designer Roundtable 3States, and all  these other powers, is Indigeneity. When you think of Indi-geneity,  people think, \u201cNative Hawaiians, that\u2019s like being in a grass shack dancing around with the headdress on.\u201d But actually, Hawai\u2018i had the most advanced, technologically sophisticated society on the planet.  There was a higher literacy rate in the 1850s in Hawai\u2018i than in any country in  Europe, by the  Europeans\u2019 own admission.  There  were electric lights in the capital of Iolani Palace before the White  House had electricity. But  there\u2019s also mutual coexistence, not beggaring thy neighbor, right? Which is nowhere in the history of  these empires. But I\u2019m a quarter  Japanese, and it\u2019s a very deep and difficult question even for me. What is an imperial relationship, and what is a cultural exchange? To what extent does Japan  really dominate when clearly Western planetary and American planetary domination has such a huge impact?Lien Tran:  Going back to this idea of design, and how  people use games as an outlet to express themselves, to share their stories and identities, that\u2019s definitely big, especially in the indie scene and depending on your intersec-tionality and so forth. For me,  because I consider myself a designer first with games as one of my mediums, I feel you have to know your context. And you may be designing for an audience that you would not necessarily identify as. So it is also impor tant to think about the idea of codesign, right? Like, I have expertise in design, and game design or systems design. But I  don\u2019t know about the social safety net, I  don\u2019t necessarily know about how citizen farmers [in Tanzania] understand or try to make decisions. I have to learn all that. And so as a designer, I see myself as a sponge to understand the local context for which I am completely an outsider.Luna Javier: In terms of making games to share our stories, we tried  doing that for Anito: Defend a Land Enraged (2003), which was based on the Philippines in precolonial times. We set it in a fictional land and every body was brown, fighting a fictional race that was obviously the Spanish. And we thought we  were the bee\u2019s knees, having Filipino weapons and creatures and all that. Looking back at it, it was not well made, and we  didn\u2019t know what we  were  doing. We thought, \u201c We\u2019re introducing the Philippines to the world,\u201d but we did it very poorly. So we  were  really disappointed. It  didn\u2019t help that I was female as well. One of my first experiences with selling the game  here in the Philippines was at a local all- boys school.  These high school kids came up to me, and they  couldn\u2019t believe that I had made it  because  there was a  De- Cultural Imitation Games 155perception twenty years ago that  women  didn\u2019t make games. Technically, I\u2019m the first female game developer in the country. And what that meant was I got to set a lot of rules moving forward. Like, you have to normalize the fact that you can be Asian, you can be Filipino, you can be female and working on  these games.Joe Xu: In my experience working in China, the racial dynamics  were al-most reversed. They saw me as a privileged Chinese American. Their racial conception was very dif fer ent in the sense that Chinese companies want Westerners in the com pany. A lot of their hiring practices directly target foreigners. They want to be seen as international and cosmopolitan, so they often recruit tokenized foreigners in the com pany just for looks and to have their images on their com pany page. I find this in ter est ing  because the  labor is outsourced to China and Asia, but the way they want to be defined as a game com pany is still predicated on this White Male Game Designer trope. They hire a bunch of  people who look like your typical game designer, but  they\u2019re not  really that experienced. It\u2019s just to bring social capital to the com pany.Lien Tran:  Going through this practice right now as a designer, often you design for other  people. We talk about knowing your audience\u2014 you\u2019re not designing for yourself. I think I\u2019ve gotten used to being the outsider. I\u2019ve defi-nitely had microaggressions and collaborations where I felt I got pushed out and  people  didn\u2019t properly acknowledge that I worked on a game. It  didn\u2019t work out so well for my  mental well- being. And  there  were lots of strug gles around how to properly credit  things. As we  don\u2019t sign off on  every  little rule and aspect of the game, what does authorship mean? What does it mean when  you\u2019re in academia, where \u201cpublication\u201d and \u201cauthorship\u201d mean one  thing, but in games  we\u2019re talking about something that is inherently collaborative?Christian Kealoha Miller: For me, I grew up in the part of Hawai\u2018i that\u2019s the not- so- nice side of the coconut tree, the part where you die at the age of thirty- nine from diabetes, where  water comes out with chromium-6 and lead in it, where  people live sixteen to a  house. I\u2019ve worked with so many, unfor-tunately, human- trafficked Filipinos, as a social worker and STEM teacher. But then when Silicon Valley billionaires have a midlife crisis, they move to Hawai\u2018i, start a game com pany, eat pizza with twenty- two- year- olds, hang out and play Call of Duty or \u201cCall of Colonialism,\u201d Counter- Strike, or  whatever 156 Designer Roundtable 3the cool game is, and make a bunch of games. Or Mark Zuckerberg, who\u2019s currently colonizing Hawai\u2018i on seven hundred acres, who sued the state of Hawai\u2018i to kick Native Hawaiians off the land that he would like to not have them harvesting their food and medicine from. So Hawai\u2018i is ultra- American in that way, and  those experiences  shaped every thing when I entered the game industry, working for  these billionaires.When I brought  these opinions into the game industry, they basically said, \u201cNo,  you\u2019re gonna make Flappy Bird clone number seventy- six. And  you\u2019re gonna make us billions of dollars,  doing nothing impor tant for forty years of your life.\u201d And then I said, \u201cMaybe I should go, I\u2019m not making enough money to survive in Honolulu.\u201d So I made Neofeud, and having some amount of agency, sovereignty, being able to at least have some kind of organic control over the way that  you\u2019re making the games, the community\u2014 all that\u2019s been  really impor tant. And I experience a lot less racism.For me, it\u2019s specifically working on  these large teams that seems like the prob lem. Not  really the size of the team, but the economic structure, the  political structure. I would call the colonial structure of the team \u201cthe digital planta-tion.\u201d It\u2019s like, \u201c Here, churn it out.\u201d You know, I made a lot of fun of Cyberpunk 2077 (2020)  because you spend all this time crunching your  little neofeudal peasants\u2014 digital artists, programmers, writers, and musicians\u2014 and you  couldn\u2019t even finish a game that  didn\u2019t nuke every one\u2019s PS4. So the large teams, and particularly structures that are very dictatorial, that have  little or no demo cratic oversight,  were terrible. American teams: terrible. Every one was fired at one of the teams I worked on. And they  were all replaced by rich white Los Angeles ass holes. They said, \u201cOh, good.  You\u2019ve got a nice  little startup with Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders and Asian journalists.  We\u2019re  going to take over now: EA is taking you.  We\u2019re eating you.\u201dLuna Javier: So, gaming was one of the few industries that boomed during COVID,  because you had all  these  people who  weren\u2019t gamers stuck at home. A bunch of  people who  weren\u2019t gamers suddenly got converted into gaming. And  there was a specific genre of games called hypercasual games that  really boomed.  You\u2019ve prob ably seen ads for this kind of game  because  they\u2019re super- aggressive with ads:  you\u2019re cutting  people\u2019s hair,  you\u2019re clipping toenails,  you\u2019re like, sorting boxes, it\u2019s  really mundane tasks. Not games the way a typical gamer understands them.  There\u2019s not even a big  mental chal-lenge, like all the levels are meant to be snacked on in less than a minute, it\u2019s something that you can play with one hand while watching Netflix. This  De- Cultural Imitation Games 157type of game was already a hit before, but  there are studies of just how this went through the charts.So in terms of mobile gaming, it\u2019s been good for engagement, sad to say,  because  people kind of wanted something to do at home. I would be inter-ested to see if  people want COVID in their games,  because  they\u2019re playing games to escape, right?Lien Tran: I\u2019m just thinking about what Luna said. What if we apply a pan-demic layer to  these everyday, hypercasual games?Christian Kealoha Miller: I mean, the xenophobia in particularly the last year against China, right, the Wuhan flu, COVID is this\u2014Lien Tran:\u2014 \u201cAsian\u201d  thing.  Because it\u2019s monolithic, right?Christian Kealoha Miller: Yeah. And then Indigenous  people are getting punched on in Canada,  because they look like they might be [Chinese]. It\u2019s ongoing: the yellow peril, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the historical, ongoing racism, that\u2019s definitely being played up and has been played up to this day.  Every time the New York Times says, \u201cOh,  there might be a bioterror lab com-ing out of China,\u201d it impacts all of us, right? I mean, even Joe is like, I have to like \u201cde- Chinese\u201d all my games so we can even sell anything.Lien Tran: What if we  were to brainstorm a game in this current moment? You know,  these anti- Asian attacks that are happening one  after another right now. What voice can we raise, what if we  were to make a game to bring attention to  these issues and have a message: What would that be?Christian Kealoha Miller: It\u2019s  really hard for games to explore that  because [AAA game companies] got all the money, all the power; they can talk, they can squash you, often delete you off of Twitter or YouTube. It\u2019s \u201ctoo  political.\u201d Now  you\u2019re demonetized or we  can\u2019t publish it. But I do think that\u2019s something that has to, as best as you can manage it,  really be explored.This page intentionally left blankColonial Moments in  Japanese Video GamesA Multidirectional PerspectiveDynamics of Asian racialization in video games take a specific turn when the development com pany is itself based in Asia, the production context generating par tic u lar narrative frames. Games from Japan carry a double colonial legacy\u2014 that of the oppressor in the Asia- Pacific, and that of the oppressed,  under Western imperialism in Asia and the Allied Occupation  after World War II. As mentioned in the introduction to this volume, game studies scholars tend to treat region- specific games from a formalist or ma-terial perspective, focusing on in- game mechanics or global exports rather than historical perspectives. At the same time, postcolonial scholars tend to use British and French imperialism as their yardstick, analyzing  Japanese colonialism in Asia through a singular lens of one- sided oppression. Both ap-proaches indicate a Eurocentric blind spot in the scholarly lit er a ture, eliding the doubled realities of  Japanese history.1 What happens when we confront that blind spot head-on?Following critiques of postcolonial theory by Monika Albrecht and Dwayne Donald, I argue that the  Japanese colonial case demands a more relational Rachael Hutchinson7160  Rachael Hutchinsonway of thinking, proposing that  Japanese video games offer decolonial mo-ments that read against problematic postcolonial understandings.2  After outlining Japan\u2019s historical experience as colonizer and colonized, I compare early and  later readings of the Street Fighter (1987\u2013) series to show the benefit of multidirectional analy sis. I then explore the double coloniality of Japan through the SoulCalibur (1995\u2013) fighting game series before turn-ing to longer narrative games in the Final Fantasy (1987\u2013) and Metal Gear (1987\u2013) series to see how colonial complexities can function in role- playing and action genres.When we take Japan\u2019s doubled coloniality into account, certain themes, motifs, and imagery in the games come into focus as key points of nego-tiation with the past. Colonial legacies coalesce in the visual and narrative repre sen ta tions of player characters and nonplayer characters (NpCs) alike, illuminating their diegetic motivation as well as the extradiegetic reasoning for their character design, racialized in specific ways and pointing to spe-cific ideologies of identity, belonging, and owner ship of place. Focusing on repre sen ta tion entails understanding games as narrative frames that fore-ground some ele ments while eliding  others. For this reason I  will not analyze gameplay dynamics experienced through player- character actions; rather, I  will look at interstitial moments where we glimpse colonial effects,  whether through character design,  battle dialogue, game maps, or localization strate-gies. Through this kind of close reading, colonial power dynamics emerge not only between Japan and Asia or Japan and the West but also between Japan and its own Indigenous populations.Japan\u2019s Colonial LegaciesThe history of Japan- as- colonizer includes the forced migration of Ainu  people northward into Hokkaid\u014d, particularly in the 1800s settler programs of the Tokugawa and Meiji periods.3 It includes the 1879 annexation of the Ry\u016bky\u016b Islands and their conversion into Okinawa prefecture and, in the twentieth  century, the annexation of the Korean peninsula, incursions into the Chinese mainland, and southward advance through Micronesia and the Philippines.4 Due to a combination of market  factors, collective cultural trauma, and taboos of historical memory,  Japanese game designers avoid the direct repre sen ta tion of  Japanese colonialism in action, although many games are clearly informed by colonialist thinking in their depiction of places,  Colonial Moments in  Japanese Video Games 161 people, and historical events.5 In contrast, countless video game series from Western studios explore colonialism from the perspective of  European im-perialist powers, including Sid Meier\u2019s Civilization (1991\u2013), Age of Empires (1997\u2013), Assassin\u2019s Creed (2007\u2013), and  others. Call of Duty (2003\u2013) similarly shows Amer i ca\u2019s involvement in foreign wars, invited or other wise.6 Echoing orientalist  European writing and painting in the eigh teenth and nineteenth centuries, Western game companies can depict imperialism this way  because they are situated in places that historically held power over other places. This kind of game making is sustained by the continued dominance of Western imperialist capitalism, as Nick Dyer- Witheford and Greig de Peuter argue in Games of Empire. On the opposite side of this self\/other binary,  Japanese game companies occupy a very diff er ent position.The history of Japan- as- colonized includes early encounters with  European imperialist forces in Asia and the ideological threat of Portuguese Jesuit mis-sionaries in the sixteenth  century. Real fears  were engendered by the Opium Wars between China, Britain, and France in the 1800s, while unequal trea-ties with Japan favored Western nations in the 1860s.  These power relations informed depictions of Japan by Rudyard Kipling, Oscar Wilde, Gilbert and  Sullivan, and other  European artists who traveled to Japan and saw it as an \u201cOrient.\u201d The artistic collecting trend of Japonisme showed not only an ad-miration for  Japanese artistic styles in calligraphy, woodblock printing, and ceramics but also a sense of owner ship and domination over quaint oriental artefacts.7 This discourse on Japan as Orient continued through and  after World War II, with the internment of  Japanese civilians on American soil and the Allied Occupation of Japan  after 1945. Films such as Tea house of the August Moon (1956) presented an exotic, sexualized Japan, followed by \u201ctechno- orientalism,\u201d with Japan as the futuristic, dystopian inspiration for Blade Runner (1982), Snow Crash (1992), and numerous other works.8 Japan continues to flourish as an Orient in the con temporary Western imagination, with kimono featuring heavi ly in the pop cultural appropriations of Kim Kar-dashian and Nicki Minaj, and the  popular Victoria & Albert Museum exhibi-tion Kimono: From Kyoto to Catwalk (2019\u201320).9  Japanese game companies have certainly capitalized on this image, packaging Japan as a marketable commodity open to Western consumption and touristic practice.10 In this context of Japan as colonizer and colonized, the treatment of  Japanese video games in game studies and postcolonial studies illuminates how scholars think of Japan and its history, minimizing the significance of the double co-loniality expressed in the  Japanese arts.162  Rachael HutchinsonDisciplinary ElisionsIt is now accepted that formalist scholars in game studies have analyzed video games as universal media, erasing cultural content and the context of production. Video games from Japan are frequently aligned with  those from North Amer i ca and  Europe, part of the Global North and a dominant site of industry production.11 When origins are discussed,  Japanese games are often treated as mere export products, analyzed for how they mitigate cultural content for smoother global distribution.12 Tara Fickle ascribes this to \u201centrenched assumptions about game theories (and games) as inherently disinterested, universal intellectual inquiries having nothing at all to do with race and culture.\u201d13 Paul Martin\u2019s analy sis of Resident Evil 5 (2009) as a spe-cifically  Japanese artistic product, carry ing its own ideological burden of race and racialized history, is an outlier in this regard.14A subsection of game studies that does focus on the cultural and historical context of  Japanese games takes a postcolonial approach. Scholars consider-ing  Japanese fighting games often place their racial repre sen ta tions within a  European orientalist rhetorical structure. Street Fighter is the series most mentioned by scholars focusing on visual repre sen ta tions, partly due to its extremes of  stereotype construction.15 In this analy sis,  Japanese designers represent India and Africa in essentialized ways that follow the Western imagery and rhetorical structures described in Edward Said\u2019s Orientalism, discounting Japan\u2019s own positionality in structures of empire. Monika Al-brecht criticizes postcolonial scholarship as \u201cunidirectional,\u201d arguing that essentialization, othering, and exoticization can be understood as rhetorical strategies stemming from any place (not just  Europe).16 Albrecht uses the example of the Ottoman Empire as a non- Christian, non- European imperial-ism to show how postcolonial theory can be expanded and re imagined. Japan provides a useful case study to challenge and expand existing theoretical structures.Returning to Street Fighter, Kishonna\u00a0L. Gray argues that the game re-inscribes \u201chegemonic structures\u201d of \u201cthe default racial setting,\u201d seen most obviously in the repre sen ta tion of \u201csecond- and third- world characters.\u201d17 The game does not simplistically replicate orientalism but situates Japan in a default superior position defined against Asia and other non- European places. Christopher Patterson observes that Street Fighter conveys \u201cpower structures across the transpacific, where the desire to equalize Japan as a \u2018nor-mal country\u2019 means balancing  Japanese characters alongside other  political  Colonial Moments in  Japanese Video Games 163powers and thus situating  Japanese racial constructs closer to American and  European power.\u201d18  These formulations read ste reo typed and default char-acters in terms of real- world power relations. Adding the doubled colonial experience of Japan to this analy sis, and extending it to include other fighting games like the SoulCalibur series (1995\u2013), we see characters from  Korea, China, Okinawa, and the Philippines in terms of their othered status in the  Japanese creative imagination.19 Japan is positioned as equal to Amer i ca, but superior to former colonies, perpetuating the legacy of empire.On the other hand, Japan- as- colonized is examined by Soraya Murray, who situates Kojima Hideo\u2019s Metal Gear Solid: The Phantom Pain (2015) in terms of Japan- US power dynamics, understanding the 1980s  Afghanistan setting \u201cas an extension of the modern proj ect of US empire.\u201d20 Situating games in their specific historical, economic, and sociopo liti cal context allows us to understand the narrative content, cultural significance, and thematic con-cerns of the game text. While the idea of Japan- as- colonized appears in  these studies through the specter of the Allied Occupation and postwar US- Japan relations, the ideas of Japan- as- colonizer in Asia and Japan- as- colonized in the 1800s have not attracted the same kind of attention.Dwayne Donald points out historical and institutional reasons for uni-directional postcolonial analy sis. First, a  great deal of English- language scholarship applies postcolonial frameworks to India, Africa, and Latin Amer i ca, thanks largely to the entrenched colonial structures of English- language education and the mobility of artists from colonizing powers who produced vast amounts of material to study.21 China and Japan attract less attention in this structure than locations in South Asia, as the experience of Western imperialism was vastly diff er ent. Second, much  Japanese critical theory is written in  Japanese and thus less accessible to Western scholars.22 But the translated works of \u014ctsuka Eiji, Karatani K\u014djin, and Eiji Oguma pro-vide thoughtful interrogations of Japan\u2019s colonial history and how it rever-berates in  popular culture  today. Ultimately, the biggest stumbling block is that highlighted by Fickle, who observes that the foundational texts of game studies, written by Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois,  were premised on orientalist  European perspectives:We overlook  these ludo- Orientalist resonances at our own peril, for  doing so produces a series of blind spots in our own analyses that unwittingly reproduce some of the original theories\u2019 most problematic ethnocentric assumptions. When we fail to acknowledge the East\/West distinction as 164  Rachael Hutchinsonboth the foundation for and a stumbling block in Huizinga\u2019s and Caillois\u2019s own binaristic conceptions of play and seriousness, magic circle and or-dinary life, competition and chance, and so on, the limitations of their theories become our own.23To combat  these effects, we can ask what kinds of discourses are being echoed, replicated, challenged, or problematized in the game text. Just as Paul Martin revealed multifaceted racial structures in Resident Evil 5, Ryan Scheiding shows complex counter- discourses at work in  Japanese and Ameri-can game repre sen ta tions of atomic bombs.24 Fickle\u2019s The Race Card analyzes geopo liti cal power dynamics under lying Pok\u00e9mon go (2016), connecting con temporary digital map augmentation to imperial  Japanese mapping of the Asia- Pacific, while Patterson\u2019s Open World Empire investigates the digitized Pacific Ocean, showing how Google Earth Vr and The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker (2002) mimic conquering modes of ocean- crossing and island discov-ery.  These readings open more nuanced postcolonial frameworks applied to the  Japanese case. In the remainder of this essay, I consider some additional case studies that offer entry points into decolonial ways of thinking about  Japanese games, attempting to read against \u201cunidirectional\u201d postcolonial frameworks.Imperial Threats in SoulCaliburWhereas Western strategy games reproduce the conquering logics of  European powers across the globe,  Japanese strategy games play out within the islands of Japan. The focus of the long- running series Nobunaga\u2019s Ambition (1983\u2013) is not on outward expansion but on inner territorial strug gle, with regional warlords pitted against each other in the sixteenth  century. The genre of \u201creal- time strategy\u201d differs greatly between the  Japanese and Western game industries, a difference based on geopo liti cal actualities in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Critics of the notion that Japan felt colonized by  European powers in the Tokugawa period (1603\u20131868) argue that Britain and France never established settlements in Japan the same way they did in the Chinese concessions, let alone the established bureaucracies of India and African nations. But it is easy to underestimate the feeling of threat engendered by Japan\u2019s close neighbor China falling to Western imperialism. The effects of Western imperialism in Japan are clearly seen in historical  Colonial Moments in  Japanese Video Games 165strategy games set in the feudal and warring states periods, evidenced by the  European weaponry used by troops as well as in the spread of Chris tian ity, memorably portrayed through Lord Akashi and Lady Hosokawa Gracia in Kessen (2000).25 In fighting games, an in ter est ing case study is the SoulCali-bur series, also set in the sixteenth  century. The narrative framing of colonial dynamics is clear in SoulCalibur II (2002), a breakout hit on the PlayStation 2  after the arcade blockbuster Soul Edge (1995) and the first SoulCalibur (1998) title on the Sega Dreamcast.The threat of Western imperialism is shown vividly in the opening cine-matics, as we see samurai swordsman Mitsurugi Heishir\u014d facing off against Western soldiers. Dodging arrows as he runs across moored wooden boats, Mitsurugi confronts a line of bowmen with a lone rifleman in the center. The soldier fires his  rifle, and Mitsurugi deflects the shot with his katana. Reach-ing the soldiers, Mitsurugi leaps high in the air with sword raised (figure\u00a07.1). The gunman raises his  rifle horizontally to fend off the attack, but Mitsurugi strikes and splits the gun in two as the stirring  music reaches a crescendo.Mitsurugi\u2019s face- off with uniformed  European soldiers lasts only a few moments on- screen but carries with it a deep binary ideology of Japan versus the West. In the narrative, Mitsurugi hails from Bizen, home of swordmaking and  later allied with the Satsuma and Ch\u014dsh\u016b domains in southern Japan, both of which used  European  rifles, ships, and artillery for their troops. The Tokugawa years saw the emergence of the shishi, or \u201cmen of high purpose,\u201d fighting for the emperor and older  Japanese values in the face of encroaching Western powers. As SoulCalibur is set  earlier, Mitsurugi may be understood as a symbolic precursor to the shishi, living the creed sonno- j\u014di, \u201cRevere the Emperor and Expel the Barbarians.\u201d26 The anachronistic conflation of 1600s action with 1800s ideology fits the emphasis on timelessness in the series, making Mitsurugi\u2019s  resistance applicable to all time periods up to the pre-sent.27 This kind of  Japanese nationalism is not prominent in the narrative or game dynamics but underlies visual repre sen ta tions of characters as well as the privileging of samurai archetype Mitsurugi in the character select screen and user interface.28 By placing Mitsurugi\u2019s act of defiance so prominently in the opening cinematics, the image of Japan- as- colonized is maintained.On this point, Mitsurugi Heishir\u014d also illuminates the portability of  Japanese ideology overseas. Soul Edge and the SoulCalibur series did not sell well in Asia compared to arcade hits like Street Fighter or King of Fight-ers (1994\u2013), which attracted large followings.29 Unlike the weapons- based Soul series,  these titles featured bare- handed martial arts fighters.  Japanese 166  Rachael Hutchinsoncharacters in Street Fighter, Virtua Fighter (1993), and Tekken (1994) usu-ally appeared dressed in relatable karate or judo gear (except the sumo wres-tler caricature, Street Fighter II\u2019s E.\u00a0Honda). The original King of Fighters featured two  Japanese school students, Kyo Kusanagi and Benimaru Nikaido, dressed in modern streetwear rather than fighting attire. Although Kyo\u2019s backstory evoked traditional  Japanese myths of slaying the serpent Orochi in the distant past, he presented visually as an unthreatening and relatable char-acter. In contrast, Mitsurugi\u2019s entire visual makeup emphasized his samurai status, an unacceptable and abhorrent figure for the mainland Asian market, recalling banzai charges of  Japanese imperial troops in the recent past.For  these reasons, Mitsurugi\u2019s character in SoulCalibur II was changed to \u201cArthur\u201d for export to Asia; he retained his physical stature and sword- wielding prowess but acquired blond hair and beard plus an eyepatch, pro-viding some concealment.30 The art was not well enough developed in sc II to denote changes in eye shape based on racial difference, and Mitsurugi\u2019s skin tone did not change, as lighter color palettes  were used to represent the skin of Asian and Caucasian figures alike. The samurai colonizer of Asia was thus reconfigured into  European knight (and, by implication, subduer of non- European  peoples through history). It is notable that Arthur\u2019s  clothing retained distinctly  Japanese ele ments such as tabi socks and straw sandals, and 7.1. Mitsurugi leaps high to cut the  rifle in two with his katana in SoulCalibur II. Colonial Moments in  Japanese Video Games 167his sword is recognizably a katana, bound with ito braiding with a tsuba guard on the hilt. What interests me about the revised artwork is that  Japanese and  European imperialism are morphed together, and Japan retains its position of dominance over Asia. This equation of Japan with the West echoes theoretical positionings of Japan as part of the Global North, but the fact that this image was made for export to Japan\u2019s previous colonies for the express purpose of erasing Japan\u2019s colonial presence in the region and making money from the result points to a more complicated relationship. Mitsurugi Heishir\u014d, si mul ta-neously configured as \u201cman of high purpose\u201d and  European knight, provides an opportunity to rethink imperial power dynamics from a multidirectional perspective, as Albrecht proposed.Imperial Subjects in Final FantasyMoving from fighting games to the fantasy role- playing genre, the use of  European high- fantasy settings in many ways replicates Western imperial rhe torics of mapping, conquering, exploring, saving native inhabitants, an exploiting land for resources\u2014 all hallmarks of the adventure game.31 But this shell acts as a surface container for Japan- specific ideologies, at which the Final Fantasy series (1987\u2013) excels. Although each Final Fantasy title is a self- contained story, certain items, spells, monsters, and characters recur from game to game, ensuring consistent gameplay. The recurrent character Cid has attracted attention for imperialist connotations. Taking diff er ent surnames in each story, Cid is always connected to technology in some way, providing the questing party with rockets and airships or tampering with natu ral forces to create weapons. Patterson sees Cid as \u201can allegory for Amer-i ca\u2019s role in giving Japan the \u2018gift of flight\u2019 into the modern age and overseeing its ascent from Amer i ca\u2019s own firebombs and atomic warfare into a cultural and economic  giant. . . . We can also understand Cid as a critique of the \u2018mad-ness\u2019 of American technological power.\u201d32 Cid is also closely connected to mined resources, energy extraction, and nuclear energy. In Final Fantasy XII (2006), Cid is a power- mad user of manufactured nethicite\u2014an engineered version of a naturally occurring crystal much like Magicite in  earlier titles. Cid\u2019s misuse of  these crystals led to destruction and chaos in  earlier games, so his narrative asks a moral question:  whether to use or abuse technology, and to what ends. Final Fantasy XII joins the rest of the series in forming part of Japan\u2019s nuclear discourse, stemming from the US bombing of Hiroshima and 168  Rachael HutchinsonNagasaki.33 Decolonial thinking allows us to view Cid not only as a symbol of Japan\u2019s unease with technology in general and nuclear power in par tic u lar but also as a conduit for that Western technology in an Occidentalist critique.Japan- as- colonizer also plays a large role in the narrative tension of Final Fantasy XII. If the player secures the nethicite, party member Ashe may take it and use it against the Archadian Empire, subduing neighboring kingdoms and providing the region with what she sees as benevolent leadership. Japan\u2019s Greater East Asia (Dai T\u014d- A) ideology resonates through Ashe\u2019s ambition, the player increasingly uneasy with their own complicity in the plan.  Earlier in the series, Final Fantasy VII is tied more directly to colonial expansion through the depiction of Shinra Corporation as a military- industrial complex. Cid creates a massive rocket for Shinra\u2019s space exploration program, pushing the imperial expansion beyond the confines of the planet. Yuffie Kisaragi and her backstory demonstrate the imperial expansion of Shinra to the end of the world map. The evils of empire appear constantly in Final Fantasy, critiqu-ing American and  Japanese imperial power alike. Our understanding of the series is diminished if we focus on only one of  these aspects.A closer examination of Yuffie Kisaragi also reveals complex intersections of Japan, China, and an amorphous notion of \u201cAsia.\u201d Yuffie\u2019s homeland is the 7.2. The main town of Wutai, in Final Fantasy VII. Colonial Moments in  Japanese Video Games 169Wutai area (\u016atai eria), which sounds Chinese but is written in the katakana script for foreign words rather than in Chinese characters.34 As seen in fig-ure\u00a07.2, the town\u2019s architecture is reminiscent of Chinese style, perhaps  after the mode of the Tokugawa dynasty at Nikk\u014d\u2014 red- painted wooden pillars and balustrades, a five- tiered pagoda, high pointed roofs with kawara tiles, abun-dant gold leaf and calligraphy. Not pictured  here are picturesque canals and bridges crisscrossing the village.The town\u2019s past glory is evident in dialogue, looking back to the \u201cgood old days\u201d before Shinra annexed the area. Yuffie describes its trajectory: \u201cBe-fore I was born, Wutai was a lot more crowded and more impor tant. . . . You saw what it looks like now, right? . . . juST a resort town.\u201d35 In the Paradise Bar, Reno describes the town as \u201cthe  middle of nowhere.\u201d Outside, a villa ger relates: \u201cLegend has it that the village has been protected by Da- chao, the  Water God, and the Five Mighty Gods. But in the last  battle, we  didn\u2019t fare so well. . . . I guess our beliefs  were based on nothing more than legends.\u201d Wutai is a remnant, defeated in war and looking to the past.From a gameplay perspective, Wutai is difficult to reach, far out in the corner of the map. A major fight takes place on the sacred Da- chao mountain, a dangerous area for the player without easy recourse to a save point. Yuffie herself is an optional character in the party, marginalized not only from the central plot but also from the player\u2019s mission objectives. As a ninja thief, Yuffie obstructs the player\u2019s pro gress, stealing the party\u2019s items (although  these are  later returned). She enjoys hiding in shadows, so the player must expend effort to find her in vari ous places. But it is Yuffie who most vocally opposes Shinra and laments Wutai\u2019s diminished position. Defeating her  father in the pagoda, Yuffie admonishes: \u201cYou turned Wutai into a cheesy resort town peddling to tourists. . . . How dare you!?\u201d He apologizes, but Wutai re-mains  under Shinra\u2019s dominion, and the town\u2019s  future is unclear when we leave the area.A final note on Wutai shows the complexity of Japan\u2019s colonial history, as three bosses in the pagoda have  Russian names. The player must defeat Gorky, Shake, Chekov, Staniv, and Godo in turn, prompting some discussion online as to the strangeness of  Russian characters in this other wise ste reo-typically \u201cAsian\u201d town. The addition makes sense if we consider Wutai in a historical colonial perspective. The northernmost islands of the  Japanese archipelago border Rus sia and are sites of contested owner ship. Wutai is in the top northwest corner of the Final Fantasy VII map, echoing the placement of Sakhalin and Kuril Islands in relation to Japan. Wutai is thus an agglomeration 170  Rachael Hutchinsonof China, Japan, Rus sia, and nameless resort towns. Mechanics, dialogue, boss  battles, and the world map thus join with the visual and linguistic depic-tion of Wutai as a marginal, contested place, a colony. These instances of colonial commentary in the Final Fantasy series are in ter est ing in the ways they emerge in the role- playing genre. Each discrete narrative in the Final Fantasy series provides a thematic focus for a clearly unfolding story. Compared to the reliance on visuals and fractured narratives in long- running fighting game series, this can deliver a sociopo liti cal critique more immediately understandable to the player. On the other hand, char-acter designs point to racialized understandings of colonizer and colonized, with Cid consistently drawn as a bearded, light- skinned man with glasses and Western- style clothing, and Yuffie drawn as an archetypal ninja, with black hair, large dark eyes, and massive shuriken weapon. Visually, Yuffie pre sents as a  Japanese nationalist symbol, but her backstory positions her as an oppressed colonial subject. Perhaps this clash of visual and narrative repre sen ta tion points to the disjunctions of Japan\u2019s colonial history, a need for reckoning with the past.Imperial Elisions in Metal Gear SolidThe most obvious place to explore issues of colonialism, imperial expansion, and hostile invasion is the war genre. The longest- running  Japanese game series set in the arena of modern war and imperial power is the Metal Gear series (Konami, 1987\u2013). The games are set in real- world locations including the United States, Soviet Rus sia, Costa Rica,  Afghanistan, Cyprus, and Cuba, plus fictional locales like Zanzibar Land. The series is often analyzed in rela-tion to empire, masculinity, vio lence, and in- game mechanics, but what is missing in the majority of this scholarship is the  Japanese origin of the game and what that means for repre sen ta tions of imperialism in the franchise. Analy sis of empire in the series tends to focus on American power in a US- Japan hierarchy, and Kojima\u2019s self- professed anti- American, anti- imperialist stance.36 But analyzing the series merely in terms of a US\/Japan binary privi-leges  Japanese victimhood in the postwar years at the expense of recognizing Japan- as- colonizer, not to mention overdetermining the Allied Occupation as purely American. Outside the US\/Japan binary,  there remain in ter est ing questions of Indigeneity, the conflation of British and US empires, and the colonial status of Okinawa. Colonial Moments in  Japanese Video Games 171Indigeneity is first employed in the series to highlight Snake\u2019s own racial lineage, revealed by the Inuit warrior Vulcan Raven.37 With a large raven tattoo covering his forehead, Vulcan Raven is surrounded by ravens in the game environment and calls them his \u201cfriends,\u201d emphasizing his spiritual connection to animals and totems. Vulcan Raven claims a shared heritage with the player- character Snake: \u201cBlood from the East flows through your veins. Ah . . . your ancestors too  were raised on the barren plains of Mongolia. Inuit and  Japanese are cousins to each other. . . . We share many ancestors, you and I . . .\u201d38 Vulcan Raven appeals to Snake as a fellow pawn in games of global powers, sharing a sense of subjugation by white  European and North American forces. Their supposed common place of origin, Mongolia, is an an-cient civilization now subsumed into modern China. The veneration of ances-tors is key to the shaman spirituality Vulcan Raven professes, but modern Japan has shunned its ancestors, spirits, and connections to Asia in  favor of American technology and modern science\u2014 a system that Vulcan Raven \u201cdoes not wish to know.\u201d Ancient Japan had its own shamanistic practice, now vanished but for the female yuta of Okinawa.39 Vulcan Raven\u2019s dialogue posits this premodern spiritual Japan against the military- industrial complex of global empire. In this brief scenario, we see Indigenous  peoples treated as an \u201cother\u201d by both Japan and Amer i ca, with Japan occupying an uneasy position as both colonizer (of the shaman- led  peoples) and colonized (by modern forces of  Europe, China, and the United States). However, it is no-table that the recognized Indigenous  people of the  Japanese islands, the Ainu, are completely absent from the conversation. In this elision, Japan emerges as a settler- colonial state\u2014 although Metal Gear Solid was released in 1998, the Ainu would not be formally recognized by the  Japanese government as Indigenous  people of the archipelago  until 2019.Although imperialism is a clear theme of Metal Gear Solid, specificities of empire are often collapsed or conflated, as we see in the backstory of sci-entist Naomi Hunter, orphaned and raised in Rhodesia. We do not know the scientist\u2019s real name, since she took identity papers from a \u201cNaomi Hunter\u201d to pursue life in Amer i ca. No information is given about her parents, although in the script she won ders  whether she might have Indian ancestry due to her skin tone. \u201cRhodesia\u201d functions as shorthand for a site of empire, without any commentary on the cap i tal ist  labor exploitation by Cecil Rhodes, the short- lived nation of Southern Rhodesia ( later Zimbabwe), or its continuing racial inequities. Naomi Hunter could have come from any African state, as the specific country has no bearing on the plot. The arbitrary choice glosses over 172  Rachael Hutchinsonindividuating ele ments of national histories in Africa, as if to say one country in Africa provides the same imperial- shorthand function as any other. Africa and India also merge together as an uncertain place of origin, suggesting the ubiquity and transferability of the British Empire.Similarly, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2015) makes claims about the global linguistic dominance of  English without explicating the his-torical conditions that led to that dominance. The villain Skull Face plots to wipe out the  English language with a vocal parasite, but this is represented as  resistance to American linguistic dominance without reference to British expansion and the use of language in bureaucracies and schools across the British Empire. In the logic of Metal Gear Solid, Snake, Naomi Hunter and Vulcan Raven are positioned equally as pawns in a bigger global game of bio-engineering and military- industrial power, subject to a vague sense of empire unmoored from historical real ity. Kojima\u2019s Japan positions itself uneasily as part of the technological and scientific advancements of the Global North but also as a victim of  those very constructs. The  Japanese state is eerily absent from the series, although it does appear in moments such as the treatment of Okinawa.Okinawa is barely mentioned in Metal Gear Solid, although it stands at the nexus of con temporary US- Japan relations. The Allied occupation of Okinawa officially ended in 1972 but continues through the dominance of US military installations on the islands as well as US commercial and security interests in the region. The Metal Gear Wiki states: \u201cThe  Japanese version of Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops Plus (MpO+) features 47 local soldiers based on the prefectures of Japan. . . . Each prefecture soldier has the name of the prefec-ture written in kanji on the front, a map of the prefecture on the back, and are colored based on the region the prefecture is located.\u201d40 The Okinawan soldier appears in the list of Kyushu prefectures and wears their color cloth-ing, mislocating the Ry\u016bky\u016b island chain as part of the southernmost island of the main  Japanese archipelago. Okinawa is thus subsumed into the \u201cmain-land\u201d  Japanese governing structure, denying local realities of differences in language, physique, climate, diet, religious practice, and so forth. The overall elision of the  Japanese state from one of the most imperialism- focused games made by a  Japanese studio points the way back to the original prob lem: Japan is elided from scholarship applying postcolonial frameworks to video games, partly  because its double colonial status is messy and complicated, but also partly  because the games themselves work  toward an elision of Japan from their colonial repre sen ta tions. Colonial Moments in  Japanese Video Games 173ConclusionIn this essay I have considered games of diff er ent genres, which offer some entry points into thinking about  Japanese video games in terms of doubled coloniality. I hope to have shown that  Japanese games, and their treatment in the scholarly lit er a ture, can tell us much about Western understandings of colonial structures, primarily indicating a blind spot at the intersection of postcolonial studies and game studies, which remains fundamentally Euro-centric. Discussing colonialism and empire in games requires discussion of the Asian experience. The \u201ccolonial moments\u201d analyzed  here show Asia as a complex construction, with the  Japanese nation- state as a focal point for intersections with China, Mongolia,  Korea, the Ry\u016bky\u016b Islands, and the In-digenous Ainu as well as  Europe and North Amer i ca.  Needless to say, games from Chinese, Korean, or Indigenous designers would offer diff er ent visions of Japan- as- colonizer for analy sis.The figures I have chosen to spotlight\u2014 Mitsurugi, Cid, Yuffie, Vulcan Raven, Naomi Hunter, and the nameless soldier from Okinawa\u2014 offer use-ful sites of inquiry into colonial structures in  Japanese games, although it is notable that they are not main characters. The colonial moments considered  here do not form the main plot of the games in which they appear; rather, they exist as interstitial entry ways into mainstream ideologies. But it is clear that Japan- as- colonizer and Japan- as- colonized are concepts that reverber-ate through blockbuster video games from major  Japanese studios and offer in ter est ing ways to think about real- world power dynamics and repre sen ta-tions.  These examples (and many  others like them) can expand the scope of game studies and further expand the mission of postcolonial studies from a unidirectional to a multidirectional analytic framework.Notes 1 On Eurocentric treatments of Japan across vari ous disciplines, see essays by Kaori Okano, Eiji Oguma, and Yoshio Sugimoto in Okano and Sugimoto, Re-thinking  Japanese Studies. 2 Albrecht, \u201cUnthinking Postcolonialism\u201d; Donald, \u201cIndigenous M\u00e9tissage.\u201d 3 B.\u00a0L. Walker, The Conquest of Ainu Lands. 4 Myers and Peattie, The  Japanese Colonial Empire. 5 See Hutchinson,  Japanese Culture through Videogames, 189\u201393; Moore, \u201cThe Game\u2019s the  Thing,\u201d 22\u201327.174  Rachael Hutchinson 6 Patterson observes that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare critiques American hegemony and imperialism (Open World Empire, 104\u201311). 7 Napier, From Impressionism to Anime. 8 Morley and Robins, Spaces of Identity. 9 Alleyne, \u201cWhat the Kimono\u2019s Wide- Reaching Influence Tells Us.\u201d 10 Katamari Damacy, \u014ckami, and Persona 5 are examined as examples in Hutchinson,  Japanese Culture through Videogames, 21\u201369. 11 Dyer- Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire; Penix- Tadsen, Video Games and the Global South, 10. 12 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization; Kelts, Japanamerica; Tobin, Pika-chu\u2019s Global Adventure. 13 Fickle, The Race Card, 25. 14 Martin, \u201cRace, Colonial History and National Identity.\u201d 15 The Indian character Dhalsim is analyzed in an orientalist structure in Mukherjee, Videogames and Postcolonialism, 57\u201358. 16 Albrecht, \u201cUnthinking Postcolonialism.\u201d 17 Gray, Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live, 26. 18 Patterson, Open World Empire, 55. 19 Hutchinson, \u201cVirtual Colonialism.\u201d On colonial legacies in  Japanese games see Hutchinson,  Japanese Culture through Videogames, chap. 9. 20 S. Murray, \u201cLandscapes of Empire,\u201d 170. 21 Donald, \u201cIndigenous M\u00e9tissage,\u201d 538\u201339. 22 Picard and Pelletier- Gagnon, \u201cGeemu, Media Mix.\u201d 23 Fickle, The Race Card, 118. 24 Scheiding, \u201cZombies, Vaults and Vio lence.\u201d 25 Fears of Chris tian ity\u2019s ideological impact led to the crucifixions, forced apostasy and hidden Chris tian ity (kakure- Kurishitan) of the premodern period, resonating in the postwar  Japanese imagination through the lit er a ture of End\u014d Sh\u016bsaku. Martin Scorsese made a film adaptation of End\u014d\u2019s 1966 novel Silence (Chinmoku) in 2016. 26 The term sonno- j\u014di has been used since Confucian times to defend the Chinese imperial city from invaders.  Japanese nativists pop u lar ized the slogan in the 1800s to drive out  Europeans from the trading ports and equalize the treaties of the 1860s. 27 On timelessness and the Japan\/West binary in the series, see Hutchinson, \u201cVirtual Colonialism.\u201d 28 On character design see Hutchinson, \u201cVirtual Colonialism\u201d; on  Japanese privilege in the fighting games interface see Hutchinson,  Japanese Culture through Videogames, 85\u201387. 29 Ng, \u201cStreet Fighter and The King of Fighters in Hong Kong.\u201d 30 Character art may be seen at https:\/\/ soulcalibur . fandom . com \/ wiki \/ Arthur. Colonial Moments in  Japanese Video Games 175 31 Harrer, \u201cCasual Empire.\u201d 32 Patterson, Open World Empire, 118. 33 Hutchinson,  Japanese Culture through Videogames, chap. 5. 34  There is a real- world Holy Mountain of Wutai in China, generally trans-lated as \u201cFive Plateaus,\u201d that echoes the five- tiered pagoda and five gods of the game town. 35 All script quotes are from https:\/\/ finalfantasy . fandom . com \/ wiki \/ Final _ Fantasy _ VII _ script#Homecoming _ of _ a _ Miserable _ Daughter. 36 Keita Moore unpacks this stance to show gaping holes in Kojima\u2019s logic\u2014 see \u201cThe Game\u2019s the  Thing\u201d and his chapter in this volume. See also S. Murray, \u201cLandscapes of Empire\u201d; Dyer- Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire; and Parkin, \u201cHideo Kojima.\u201d 37 Moore\u2019s chapter in this volume analyzes Snake\u2019s racial heritage in depth. 38 Greco, \u201cMetal Gear Solid Game Script.\u201d 39 Blacker, The Catalpa Bow. 40 See https:\/\/ metalgear . fandom . com \/ wiki \/ Metal _ Gear _ Wiki. This version of the game is available only in Japan.The Video Game Version  of the Indian SubcontinentThe Exotic and the ColonizedIntroduction: The Indian Subcontinent Vis- \u00e0- vis Asian  StereotypesThe  earlier version of the cover art of Ubisoft\u2019s Far Cry 4 video game, set in Nepal, ran into some controversy when critics called it out as racist. It seemingly depicted a blond- haired and fair- skinned man wearing a lavish pink suit using what might be a religious statue as a throne while his hand rested on the head of a man of color who is shown kneeling passively, clutch-ing a grenade in his hands.1 Ubisoft\u2019s creative director was quick to point out that the blond- haired man was \u201cnot white\u201d and that  people had used an incorrect criterion to level criticism; nevertheless, the man of color was soon removed from the cover. The new cover shows only the protagonist with his hands joined in a semi- namaste, or the Indian greeting; the way he sits on a broken statue of a Hindu or Buddhist god (the mudra, or fin ger positions, are indicative), with its head beneath his feet and its arms outstretched, makes him look like a four- armed god. One of his legs rests on the other, and a rocket Souvik Mukherjee8 Video Game Version of the Indian Subcontinent 177launcher and an assault  rifle rest on each side of the statue and the protago-nist.  Behind him are the Hi ma la yas, Buddhist prayer flags, misty valleys, and half- hidden settlements. The designers may have attempted to erase the racist overtones that offended the critics, but they have taken care to retain the misty (and mystical) notions of the Orient that have been presented in Western accounts of the region since the earliest contact of the  Europeans with the Indian subcontinent. The protagonist, Pagan Min (who shares his name with a Burmese king deposed by the British East India Com pany), is originally from Hong Kong and is purportedly modeled on the Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, thus showing a pan- Asian connection. Speaking of the original controversial image, a commentator on the video game website Kotaku . com observes that \u201cthe image and the context surrounding it\u2014or lack thereof\u2014is complicated,  people\u2019s reactions equal parts bemused and confused\u201d and that \u201cthe image itself is a hand grenade that\u2019s already  going off in slow motion.\u201d It is this confusion that makes both the old and new Far Cry 4 cover images, arguably, an apt  metaphor for the repre sen ta tion of the Indian subcontinent in video games and also helps in viewing such portrayals in the context of how Asia is seen from the North American and  European perspectives. This chapter aims to situate the repre sen ta tion of the Indian subcontinent in connection with larger discussions of \u201cAsian\u201d video games, especially in terms of the exoticization and sweeping generalizations used to characterize this region.Although it is one of the most populous regions of the world and is certainly an impor tant part of Asia, the Indian subcontinent is often not immediately associated with the adjective Asian, especially in North Amer i ca, when it comes to cultures and cuisines. As Colleen Lye observes in her Amer i ca\u2019s Asia, the \u201cOrient of the American  century . . . has predominantly tended to mean East Asia rather than the  Middle East.\u201d2 Lye echoes Edward Said when, in Orientalism, he observes that the scenario is of course somewhat diff er ent in  Europe, where the colonial history of  European nations has enabled a diff er ent understanding of Asia and wherein the subcontinent figures importantly. For Said, orientalism connotes a \u201cWestern style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient.\u201d Following this thinking, Lye observes that \u201cwhere a  European Orientalism had disclosed the discursivity of nineteenth- century, territorial- based colonialism, Amer i ca\u2019s Asia thus reflected the dis-cursivity of a  neocolonialism that installed the East as a Western proxy rather than antipode.\u201d3 In such a scenario, Lye argues that the cultural production of the Asian American functioned as a geostrategic necessity for maintaining American hegemony and was rooted in the \u201cmaterial history of U.S. relations 178  Souvik Mukherjeein East Asia.\u201d As far as video game cultures and game studies are concerned,  there is a construction of Asia that constructs  Japanese video games as the sole repre sen ta tions of Asian video games. Christopher Patterson, in Open World Empire, points out how Japan and East Asia \u201cresemble an Asiatic space\u201d where video games,4 especially  those with a certain kind of game art (such as the kawaii, or \u201ccute\u201d) have become a \u201cmedium of Digital Asia.\u201d5This chapter aims to address the not- so- well- known narrative of how video games in the Indian subcontinent fare in global perceptions of the culture and industry of video games in Asia. As a rather new arena for studying the games industry and gaming culture(s), the Indian subcontinent illustrates more clearly the othering, the orientalism, and the  stereotypes in the way that gaming in the Global North constructs its \u201cAsia.\u201d6 In  doing so, it also helps extend and enlarge the idea of Asia and the Asiatic as it applies to the video game industry and culture. The chapter also opens up further possibilities of researching hitherto neglected games culture(s) in diff er-ent geographies or sections of society that have been subjected to obscurity, silence, and misrepre sen ta tion.Global Flows, Local Cultures, Odorlessness, and Ludo- racismThe Indian subcontinent has attracted international game developers, espe-cially big names in the games  process outsourcing (GpO) industry such as Ubi-soft, Rockstar, and Zynga, all of which have offices in India. Indian companies such as Dhru va (now a part of Rockstar) and Lakshya Digital also have major clients and have been involved in designing sections of major triple- A video games such as Red Dead Redemption 2 and Borderlands 3. Of course, India is well- known as the BpO (business  process outsourcing) hub of the world, and the successes of the Indian software  giants such as Tata Consultancy  Services, Infosys, and Wipro are also being emulated by much newer game companies such as the ones mentioned. Describing a similar  process at work in the games  process outsourcing, Anando Banerjee of Lakshya Digital comments:The growth potential of GpO industry is much similar to the BpO indus-try in India, and owes much to the availability of a large trained talent pool in the country at competitive rates.  There are additional reasons like familiarity with the  English language, inherent cultural flexibility  Video Game Version of the Indian Subcontinent 179of Indians and their ability to quickly absorb and engage with  people of other cultures.7The CEO of Dhru va Interactive, Rajesh Rao, has been celebrated by Thomas Friedman as a major figure in his notion of the \u201cflat\u201d world where  people are connected and globalized in unthought-of ways, since Dhru va, though based in Bangalore, was poised to become a global player in the video game industry.8 Of course, in tandem with the global flows and connectivity, one must remember that the global connections are continually deterritorial-ized:9 in Arjun Appadurai\u2019s words, \u201cGlobal cultural flows,  whether religious,  political or market produced, have entered into the manufacture of local subjectivities, thus changing both the machineries for the manufacture of local meaning and the materials that are pro cessed by  these machineries.\u201d10 Global flows also shape gaming culture in the Indian subcontinent and are increasingly affecting local play cultures and also, indeed, the broader cultural spectrum of the region.How \u201cAsia\u201d is understood in the video game industry is impor tant in terms of the global flows and as a point of comparison with the scenario in the sub-continent. The  Japanese theorist Koichi Iwabuchi suggests the concept of \u201codorlessness,\u201d wherein the object loses its national \u201codor\u201d and is rendered palatable in a global scenario. Commentators on  Japanese games such as Mia Consalvo and Rachael Hutchinson both comment on the cultural odorlessness that pervades some of the games made in Japan.11 Unlike Western orientalism, which makes a claim  toward understanding Japan, according to Iwabuchi, \u201ctransnational indifference suggests that \u2018they\u2019 do not even try to understand \u2018us\u2019 \u201d (546). Patterson points to how games  today \u201creflect  Japanese cultural aesthetics that . . . deodorize nationalist symbols in order to appear global, while also deploying \u2018fragrant\u2019 racial symbols.\u201d12 Tara Fickle also cautions against such ludo- racial portrayals in The Race Card:Framed as both the hardest of workers and the most hardcore of players, play for the archetypal Asian is never \u201cjust\u201d play: they practice violin  until their fin gers swell; play StarCraft  until they drop dead in the  middle of the internet cafe; consistently take home the gold, silver, and bronze at  every eSports (professional video gaming) championship\u2014 and sometimes at the Olympics, too. Indeed,  these ludo- racial dualities get at the very heart of what it means to be Asian in Amer i ca, to be at once yellow peril and model minority, to be constantly misread through  stereotypes of \u201call Asians looking alike.\u201d13180  Souvik MukherjeeThe concepts of global flows, flatness, and odorlessness necessarily come with problematic concomitant  stereotypes that are often connected to race.14 It ignores the huge diversity of Asian  people and their cultures and is thereby also responsible for some sweeping generalizations and  stereotypes of the Indian subcontinent and its culture(s). In the complex ways that Appadurai suggests, it is the  stereotypes from  these global flows that are challenged by local influences, which this chapter  will focus on, that prevent the homog-enization of the Indian subcontinent; si mul ta neously, however, the local is also reshaped by the global.Global Perceptions and  Stereotypes from the Indian SubcontinentIn 1991, when Street Fighter 2 was released on the NES and the Amiga and Atari, very few  people in the Indian subcontinent had played the game, as  these consoles and computers  were not easily available in the country. In 1994, when the Streetfighter movie was released in Indian movie theaters, most Indian viewers (including me) did not make the connection with the video game. The film has an Indian scientist, Dhalsim, played by the British Indian actor Roshan Seth who looks completely unlike the original character in the game but nevertheless conforms to  stereotypes about Indians as being geeky and bookish. In the game, Dhalsim is depicted with pupil- less eyes and wears saffron shorts and a necklace of skulls, perhaps hinting at being a Tan-tric. Noting the racial stereotyping, Patterson describes him as an \u201cegregious  stereotype of an Indian yogi [who] can be recognized not as an \u2018odourless\u2019  Japanese aesthetic but as a queer exaggeration whose offensive traits signal not realism but a play style, with his ability to strike players from a distance using stretchable arms and legs, as well as his magical ability to incinerate enemies up close by shouting \u2018Yoga fire!\u2019 and spitting out a stream of flame.\u201d15 Both portrayals of Dhalsim, in the film and in the original game, are based on  stereotypes that perhaps correspond to the yellow peril and model minority descriptions that have been highlighted both by Lye and by Fickle. In the game, Dhalsim is the rather terrifying- looking yogi (or kapalika monk); in the film, he is the rather docile model scientist. Streetfighter 2 is, however, made in Japan by the com pany Capcom, and the character of Dhalsim was designed in Asia and rather unimaginatively named  after two food items from Indian cuisine, dal (lentils) and shim (broad beans). Dhalsim has a wife  Video Game Version of the Indian Subcontinent 181who is called Sari (in the game),  after the garment worn by  women in the Indian subcontinent. While Dhalsim forms a typical member of the global crew of Streetfighter 2, in his case the global flow is characteristically based on Western  stereotypes that have been perpetuated in Asia.Many other such examples abound. Then again, some portrayals may not seem  stereotypical, such as the \u201cnuclear Gandhi\u201d in the Civilization series, which although not yet the topic of much discussion in India, could be con-strued as deeply offensive and even racist at many levels. Game designer Jon Shafer seems to have found it funny to make Gandhi a nuclear warmonger in Civilization V. Sid Meier, the maker of the original Civilization game, writes in his recently released memoirs:It is true that Gandhi would\u2014 eventually\u2014 use nukes when India was at war, just like any civilization in the game, and at the time this did strike a lot of players as odd. The real Abraham Lincoln prob ably  wouldn\u2019t have nuked anyone  either, but the idea was that  every leader draws a line in the sand somewhere. It\u2019s also true that Gandhi would frequently threaten the player,  because one of his primary traits was to avoid war, and deter-rence through mutually assured destruction was an effective way to go about that.16Why representing a globally recognized figure of world peace from the Indian subcontinent as a nuclear warmonger can be considered a joke is something that I am unsure about. It is also an open question  whether it is tenable to compare Abraham Lincoln (who presided over the  Union forces) with Gandhi, whose philosophy is closer to Henry David Thoreau\u2019s. Meier goes on to say that \u201cthe Indian  political leader Jawaharlal Nehru might have been a more au then tic choice, but without Gandhi, the game  wouldn\u2019t have been nearly as memorable, or as fun.\u201d17 Even Nehru had expressly declared in the Indian Parliament that \u201cwe are not interested in making atom bombs, even if we have the capacity to do so,\u201d and India\u2019s two nuclear bomb tests came long  after, in 1974 and 1998.18 If making Gandhi a nuclear- warmonger is a joke, then it is a cruel one, and one won ders  whether the Civ developers would have felt the same way about a personage from any other region. If one is to read an appeal to procedural logic (wherein the AI is responsible for the \u201cglitch\u201d) in Meier\u2019s explanation, then the fact that such a glitch is not rectified is an indication of the game\u2019s implicit racism. Although their Gandhi seemingly runs  counter to the usual  stereotype, the Civ games, as I argue elsewhere, actually perpetuate an older colonial  stereotype and fear, as embodied in 182  Souvik MukherjeeWinston Churchill\u2019s deep- seated resentment against Gandhian civil disobedi-ence.19 Again, echoing the  earlier parallel with the model minority and the yellow peril, Gandhi is seen is both as a model figure of world peace and also, paradoxically, as a threat. Such an idea is not new but is itself a  stereotype harking back to colonialism.Other prominent examples of repre sen ta tions of the subcontinent that are based on uninformed generalizations and  stereotypes range from the portrayal of Nepal \/ Kyrat as a backward and superstitious war- torn country in the Far Cry 4 example mentioned in the opening paragraph or of an exotic parkour location for Lara Croft in Tomb Raider, or a nameless Indian city in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 as a mere setting for a  battle between the United States and Rus sia, with not a single Indian pre sent.20 Patterson astutely ob-serves that \u201cas with previous instalments, Far Cry 4\u2019s third- world backdrops take advantage of the \u2018Asiatic\u2019 fantasy formed by video games to facilitate a drifting, easy  pleasure.\u201d21 Empire is perceived as  pleasure. In a similar vein, Samya Brata Roy has recently pointed out how Hitman 2 pre sents an extreme orientalist setting and hopes that the game\u2019s use of India is satire  because, if taken literally, such a portrayal, he feels, \u201cis utterly stupid, borderline offen-sive.\u201d22 Siddhartha Chakrabarti made a similar comment on an  earlier Hitman game\u2019s portrayal of the Sikh shrine, the Golden  Temple in Amritsar.23  Whether it is Lahore, Pakistan, in Call of Duty: Black Ops II or Chittagong in Bangla-desh in Splinter Cell: Blacklist, the setting is almost alike in that the players  either do not encounter any of the local population or merely shoot through the environment, ostensibly to save the world, in another enactment of the \u201cwhite man\u2019s burden,\u201d as it was described  under colonial rule. The pSp game, Tom Clancy\u2019s Ghost Recon Predator, shows the US Army intervening in Sri Lanka\u2019s civil war and again shouldering the burden of \u201crescuing\u201d the island nation from terrorism; the real ity is more complex, however, and  there have been some requests by Sri Lankans to Ubisoft to change the game\u2019s location.Besides  these instances,  there are also cases of  stereotypes that ignore the diversity of culture(s) in the region. For example, in the portrayal of Indians in the Age of Empires 3: The Asian Dynasties, considerations of class, historical milieu, religion, and caste (which is common in Hindu communities and also the subject of deeply fraught controversies) are not taken into account. To start with the portrayal of architecture in the game, most of the buildings look like scrunched- down versions of the Taj Mahal, and the very rich diversity of architecture is reduced to one building  stereotype that the West identifies with the region. In Far Cry 4, besides the other orientalist imagery and the  Video Game Version of the Indian Subcontinent 183repetition of the \u201cwhite man\u2019s burden,\u201d  there are some even more overt in-stances of orientalism\u2014 perhaps none more so than the Shangri-La myth as it is experienced by the protagonist  under the influence of psychedelic drugs.Local Histories: Deterritorializing the  StereotypesIt is in such cases that the  stereotypes of the global flows are deterritorialized by the local. As Grieve observes, \u201cThe fantasy of Shangri- La challenges Nepal game designers, but this myth of isolation has nothing to do with real ity,\u201d as Nepal has a very high number of  people entering from outside the country.24 In India, as Adrienne Shaw rightly observes, gaming has had a Westernness about it in terms of \u201chistory, access and culture\u201d and has been external to Indian media culture, unlike other media industries, but it has been a marker of global pro gress. Indeed, as she notes,  there is no separate word for \u201cgamer\u201d in Hindi (or Punjabi, Gujarati, or Marathi), and this marks out gaming as a very Western and new activity. Nevertheless, with over two centuries of  European colonization\u2014 mainly British but also French, Portuguese, and Dutch in pockets\u2014 much of Indian culture is deeply connected to the West, so it is hard to separate out Western influence. At the same time (and Shaw comes to a similar conclusion), the Indian game industry and markets are quite diff er ent and have unique local characteristics: \u201cDiversity was much more central to Indianness than some  imagined national community could ever encompass,\u201d and mobile gaming markets are of crucial importance in the region.25 As Appadurai states, the localities themselves may emerge out of the negotiation of globally circulating forms, but I also argue  here that they re- form and disrupt  these global forms to offset former colonial  stereotypes and the very notion of the \u201cglobal.\u201dThe games made in the subcontinent also reflect this deterritorialization of global flows. This section  will focus on three representative games from India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka to examine how local game development in the subcontinent works as a countercurrent to the  stereotypes regarding the subcontinent that have been perpetuated in the global (mostly Western) constructions of the region in video games that often perpetuate  earlier co-lonial  stereotypes of race, class, and empowerment. Some other games from the region  will also be mentioned but in less detail for the sake of brevity.During the lockdown that was imposed in India in 2020, the local games industry was able to boast one major success\u2014 the release of the video game 184  Souvik MukherjeeRaji, which incorporates art from India\u2019s rich  temple architecture, Indian clas-sical  music, and a story with ele ments from Hindu my thol ogy. In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Todd Martens writes,Its tale of a young  woman rescuing her  brother from forces of the under-world can be told with many backdrops across numerous cultures. But \u201cRaji: An Ancient Epic,\u201d a  labor of love that was often a strug gle to get made by its small team, has a rather specific design intent. Beyond ask-ing players to tackle its demon- like monsters with acrobatic fight moves, the game seeks to highlight a place\u2014 ancient India\u2014 and the culture it birthed.26In another review, Akhil Arora writes that the game is \u201cproof of what India can contribute to the games industry from its vast culture\u2014 with the right eye\u201d and commends the game for having a female protagonist in a \u201cheavi ly patriarchal society where religion is often twisted to serve misogyny.\u201d27 Nev-ertheless, the game has been criticized as being a spin- off of a  popular console game called God of War\u2014 Adesh Thapliyal calls it Goddess of War.28 Critics also complain that in trying to make the game accessible to global audiences, the game has lost out on its local appeal (it uses  English as its main language and has no Indian- language subtitles), and it also pre sents an oversimplified version of Hindu my thol ogy, again with global audiences in mind. Fi nally, Thapliyal faults it for being representative of a  political and a Hindu- centric religious bias and \u201crevealing how far conservatism has penetrated the nation\u2019s sense of itself.\u201d29 Raji nevertheless pre sents an intriguing case of the global versus the local in the way it pre sents a local narrative that draws on Indian my thol ogy and yet creates a fiction that relies on conventions of Western  popular culture. Of course, among other prominent games from India that address complex social issues regarding caste and religion, Flying Robot Studios\u2019 Missing: Game for a Cause (2016) and Studio Oleomingus\u2019s Some-where (2015) are notable mentions. Missing tackles the rather complex and traumatic issue of sex trafficking in eastern India and Nepal; it is prob ably the only video game from the region that has received international recognition  under the \u201cserious game\u201d category. Somewhere and its sequels are a rather surreal graphic experience that encompasses subalternity and postcolonial thinking, raising questions regarding how far the voices of the marginal-ized can be articulated. The Indian diaspora has also inspired games such as Venba, which is about southern Indian cuisine but is connected to a sense of loss, memory, and nostalgia.  These games, however, are all in the indie genre  Video Game Version of the Indian Subcontinent 185and have been developed by small studios or groups of  people, and  there is as yet no major triple- A game produced entirely in India at the time of writing.Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have also been developing video games that concentrate on their local histories and mythologies. Bangladesh\u2019s strug gle for  independence in 1971 forms the theme of two of its  popular games, Heroes of \u201971 and Arunodoyer Agnishikha (or The Flame of Sunrise). The mechanics is that of traditional first- person shooter games such as Unreal Tournament, but the backdrop is that of Bangladesh; the difference with the Call of Duty and Splinter Cell games is that the setting is very relevant to the history of the Bangladeshi  people. The Sri Lankan game, Kanchayudha, draws on Sri Lankan my thol ogy, and the upcoming Threta advertises itself as \u201ca narra-tive driven fantasy, adventure AAA game which is inspired by Asian & Sri Lankan mythologies and historical characters.\u201d30 In time, with the growth of the video game industries in the region, local cultures  will likely have more of an impact on the video games from the Indian subcontinent. Whereas video games from Japan, China, and South  Korea are being increasingly discussed in video game research, the games being developed in the Indian subcontinent do not find a place in  these global discussions of Asian video games. This  will prompt a rethinking of how \u201cAsian\u201d may need to need to be recontextualized in research on the video game industry and player cultures.The Context of Asia:  Floating Signifiers and Identity PoliticsThe games from the subcontinent occupy a position of an apparent dichot-omy, but in the starker terms of the outsourcing practices, where sections of games from the Global North are outsourced to studios in the subcontinent, as opposed to the games with local content that highlight issues neglected by mainstream triple- A games made in the Global North and also local dis-courses that resist the sense of \u201cflatness\u201d by identifying the (often colonial)  stereotypes and forcible constructions of identity about the regions in the sub-continent.31 The geopo liti cal and socioeconomic concerns of the region also play an impor tant role in the gaming culture(s) and industry in the subcon-tinent. Regarding the complex of the global and the local, the questions that have been seen as relevant for what have hitherto been considered \u201cAsian\u201d video games (or games from Japan and the Asia Pacific) are also applicable once the definition of Asia is extended to include the Indian subcontinent.186  Souvik MukherjeeOf course, the definite bound aries of Asia have remained contested since the classical past when Herodotus questioned where the borders of  Europe  were; in recent times, Asia has been described as a \u201c free floating signifier\u2014 a term whose exact meaning has not been settled.\u201d32 Roland Barthes, for ex-ample, sees Japan \u201cas an  immense reservoir of empty signs,\u201d and Trinh\u00a0T. Minh-ha describes it thus: \u201cWe read the author reading Asia. He writes, not  because he has \u2018photographed\u2019 Japan, but  because \u2018Le Japon l\u2019a etoile d\u2019eclairs multiples\u2019 and has placed him in the \u2018situation of writing.\u2019 The unknown he confronts is neither Japan nor China but his own language, and, through it, all of the West.\u201d33 The Orient can only illuminate the Westerner\u2019s own truth. In his attempt to address the question of \u201cAsianish games, styles and practices,\u201d Patterson has already masterfully shown how such notions of Asia as the void or the excessive are best described as \u201cthe virtual other\u201d or the \u201cother produced through recognizing obscurity, silence, and misrecognition.\u201d34 This concept  will be invoked further in this section in connection to the Indian subcontinent. Before that, however, it is impor tant to identify the prob lems of the Western perceptions of the \u201cAsiatic\u201d as Patterson does  here:As I find in Barthes, Foucault, and Sedgwick, this sense of Asiatic as a placeholder for plurality comes from the desire not to classify  others but to understand without knowing, to realize without being certain, to dis-mantle the self. The Asiatic . . . is rather about the inherent instability of naming, the blurriness of racial thinking, and our experiences within that blur. For this reason, the Asiatic does not translate well into identity politics.35This is, however, only one side of the story, albeit one that is most often in global circulation, especially in the Global North.In Asian countries, particularly Japan, India, and China,  there have been several attempts to establish a sense of Asian identity. Anthony Milner de-scribes some of the early attempts:\u201cAsia is one,\u201d announced the  Japanese art historian Okakura Tenshin (1862\u20131913). . . . On the other side of \u201cAsia,\u201d the Bengali religious leader Vivekananda (1863\u20131902) was insisting that \u201con the material plane,  Europe has mainly been the basis during modern times,\u201d but on the \u201cspiri-tual plane, Asia has been the basis throughout the history of the world.\u201d36The Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore from India and Sun- Yat- Sen from China also spoke of the \u201cAsiatic mind.\u201d In recent times,  organizations such as  Video Game Version of the Indian Subcontinent 187ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) and SAArC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) have been formed to represent the interest of Asian nations; they have all made their  independent claims for identity as part of Asia. As such, on moving away from the Global North\u2019s orientalism or its tendency to view Asia as a void and look from the local perspectives of the Asian countries, the identity of Asia that is seen as being effaced through the Western gaze and through the  metaphors of the \u201cflat-tening\u201d of the world due to globalization is one that persists and keeps chal-lenging the Western  stereotypes.In Conclusion: The Virtual Other and  the Games Culture(s) of the SubcontinentIt is now necessary to return to the concept of the \u201cvirtual other.\u201d The othering that arises through obscurity, silences, and misrecognition has been charac-teristic of the repre sen ta tions of the Indian subcontinent,  whether through the figure of Dhalsim (a Western misrepre sen ta tion of India that is perpetuated by a  Japanese studio), the politics in the Kyrat of Far Cry 4, or how Gandhi is portrayed in Civilization V. It is a similar  process that results in the ignoring of the subcontinent as anything more than a market for mobile games and the site for outsourcing game art and software. The rendering obscure of the Indian subcontinent in the context of \u201cAsia\u201d as it is perceived by the games culture(s) of the Global North is, arguably, also virtual othering. As commen-tators have already said, though, even Asia as it is perceived by the Global North (in this case, Japan mainly and now to a lesser extent China and Asia Pacific) is also the virtual other. When viewed only as a function of the global flows, the local \u201codor\u201d is rendered obscure, and much of the local culture is left to be  silent or is reshaped in acceptable Western terms and misrecognized, just like the Far Cry 4 cover art with which this article began\u2014 whether it is the old cover or the new, Asia in its  peoples and landscapes is shown as subordinate, exotic, and orientalist. The global and local exist in complex, intertwined ways that need to be studied further and that keep deterritorial-izing the  stereotypes of orientalism, racism, and exoticization.In this light, reading the games culture(s) of the Indian subcontinent into the \u201cAsia\u201d of video games makes for a big change in perception wherein a much more diverse cultural milieu emerges in games research and, at the same time, the remixing of colonial  stereotypes and the reinforcing of a virtual 188  Souvik Mukherjeeotherness is revealed. The virtual othering of the subcontinent is accompa-nied by a deterritorialization of the narratives of \u201cflatness\u201d and global flows. The virtual othering of the subcontinent resembles that of other parts of Asia; it also attempts to connect with  these other regions of the continent as part of its diverse cultural heritage.Notes 1 Grayson, \u201cThe Prob lem with Far Cry 4\u2019s Box Art.\u201d 2 Lye, Amer i ca\u2019s Asia, 3. 3 Lye, Amer i ca\u2019s Asia, 10. 4 Patterson, Open World Empire, 51. 5 Goto- Jones, \u201cPlaying with Being in Digital Asia,\u201d 39. 6 The term Indian subcontinent usually refers to the physiogeo graph i cal region comprising the countries of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. 7 Mondal, \u201cGurugram, Bangalore and Pune Have the Potential to Become a GpO Hub.\u201d 8 T.\u00a0L. Friedman, The World Is Flat. 9 Deterritorialization is a concept taken from Gilles Deleuze and F\u00e9lix Guattari\u2019s work, where they indicate that the pro cesses of codification are often disrupted to become something that is the opposite of the  whole being created. As Claire Colebrook (Understanding Deleuze, xii) comments, \u201cEvery thing, from bodies to socie ties, is a form of territorialisation, or the connection of forces to produce distinct  wholes. But alongside  every territorialisation  there is also the power of deterritorialisation. . . . The very connective forces that allow any form of life to become what it is (territorialise) can also allow it to become what it is not (deterritorialise).\u201d 10 Appadurai, \u201cHow Histories Make Geographies.\u201d 11 Consalvo (Atari to Zelda, 4) points out two trends regarding  Japanese video games\u2014 there is  either the trend of downplaying the local influence and erasing \u201cunpleasant cultural odours\u201d or the opposite trend of highlighting the \u201cJapa neseness\u201d as a selling point. Hutchinson ( Japanese Culture through Vid-eogames, 214) observes how Metal Gear Solid makes its characters look more Caucasian so as to emphasize the odorlessness. Both of  these scholars point at a complexity in viewing video games from Japan and their observations tie into Patterson\u2019s comment on racism. 12 Patterson, Open World Empire, 53. 13 Fickle, The Race Card. 14 In this context, Lisa Nakamura\u2019s pioneering work Cybertypes is particu-larly relevant. Rachael Hutchinson\u2019s ( Japanese Culture through Videogames,  Video Game Version of the Indian Subcontinent 189235\u201336) detailed analy sis of the lack of Korean characters in the early  Tekken and Virtua Fighter games as well as the portrayal of Korean characters in  SoulCalibur as objects of sexual exoticization provide in ter est ing comparisons for such  stereotypes in  Japanese games and would indeed be an intriguing point of comparison. 15 Patterson, Open World Empire, 54. 16 Meier, Sid Meier\u2019s Memoir! 17 Hendrick, \u201cThe Influence of Thoreau\u2019s \u2018Civil Disobedience\u2019 on Gandhi\u2019s Satyagraha.\u201d 18 US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Documents on Disarma-ment, 338. 19 Mukherjee, Videogames and Postcolonialism, 79. 20 Mukherjee, Videogames and Postcolonialism, 79. 21 Patterson, Open World Empire, 223. 22 Roy, Games Studies India Adda Talk #7. 23 Chakrabarti, \u201cFrom Destination to Nation and Back.\u201d 24 Grieve, \u201cAn Ethnoludography of the Game Design Industry in Kath-mandu, Nepal.\u201d 25 Shaw, \u201cHow Do You Say Gamer in Hindi?\u201d 26 Martens, \u201cDiscover the Joy of a Game That Transports You.\u201d 27 Arora, \u201cReview: Made- in- India Raji Is a Feminist Fable and a Strong Debut.\u201d 28 Thapliyal, \u201cHow \u2018Raji: An Ancient Epic\u2019 Falls into the Indian Far- Right\u2019s Trap.\u201d 29 Thapliyal, \u201cHow \u2018Raji: An Ancient Epic\u2019 Falls into the Indian Far- Right\u2019s Trap.\u201d 30 \u201cSouth Asia\u2019s First Triple- A Game.\u201d 31 It is understood  here that the Global North also includes certain Asian countries such as Japan and Singapore; video games from  these nations often perpetuate similar  stereotypes as  European and North American nations, how-ever, as mentioned in connection to cultural odorlessness and, even more so, in the character of Dhalsim, as described above. 32 Milner and Johnson, \u201cThe Idea of Asia.\u201d 33 Minh- Ha, \u201cThe Plural Void.\u201d 34 Patterson, Open World Empire, 235. 35 Patterson, Open World Empire, 235. 36 Milner and Johnson, \u201cThe Idea of Asia.\u201dHigh- Tech Orientalism  in PlayPerforming South Koreanness in EsportsThis chapter looks to esports as a critical site where hegemonic North American cultures engage in techno- orientalist fantasies that con-flate conceptions of Asianness with neoliberal rationalities to render Asian- presenting bodies legible and subservient. A global phenomenon with roots in the South Korean gaming scene, esports\u2014 the competitive play of digital games\u2014is a dynamic industry with vari ous leagues, each  organized around diff er ent games and each with their own financial arrangements. But esports are more than an industry; they are a significant ele ment in con temporary game cultures, and they represent a highly stylized form of engagement with games, one that is aspirational and therefore emulated by players broadly. Massive, webbed ecosystems entangling hobby and  career, the esports indus-try brings together professional players, team  owners, coaches, journalists, commentators, translators, production teams, and game developers, among  others, in physical and digital spaces.1By and large, esports discourses fetishize the Asiatic\u2014 specifically Asian players, play practices, and infrastructures\u2014as signifiers of machinic Gerald VoorheesMatthew Jungsuk Howard9 High- Tech Orientalism in Play 191 precision, skilled  labor, and economic capacity. This fantasy is grounded, in part, on the role of StarCraft\u2019s (Blizzard, 1998) Korean professional leagues bringing Western attention to esports, particularly through high- profile events like the government- sponsored 2000 World Cyber Games, and en-trenched by nearly a  decade of South Korean dominance in League of Legends (Riot Games, 2009). Like other configurations of the model minority, the Asian player is useful enough to be included but si mul ta neously a yellow peril whose ge ne tics and\/or cultural background threaten white hetero- patriarchy\u2019s privileged status as the primary agents and beneficiaries of the neoliberal world system.Throughout this chapter, we argue that Asian esports professionals\u2019 prominence and visibility enables players from around the world to partake in high- tech orientalism and play the techniques of Asian racialization. Our analy sis focuses on how North American esports teams tried to adopt South Korean team management, gaming  houses (communal housing for profes-sional players and team personnel), play styles, and even players as technolo-gies to subvert South Korean competitive dominance and the already- realized fantasy of a Yellow  Future, the  future  imagined by techno- orientalist rhe-torics in which Asians and Asian technologies dominate the West. In our analy sis, when performing Asianness fails to materialize expected outcomes, the fantasy is both fulfilled (in that racist otherings are affirmed) and ru-ined (to the extent that winning remains out of reach). While taking place in the context of techno- orientalist discourses and aesthetics, this high- tech orientalism is made pos si ble by the infrastructure and media apparatus of esports, which segregate players by regions and enable the quantification of Asian play, as well as the material and  organizational practices developed by North American teams.We start by mapping esports\u2019 racialization logics entanglements and continuities with Western techno- orientalist fantasies about the Asian other. First, we explain how techno- orientalism is both a continuation and permutation of Western fantasies of the other, and the role of high- tech orientalism in this fantasy. In the context of esports, which are premised in neoliberal rationality, this techno- orientalism is also imbricated with ludo- orientalism. We then turn to how the practices of North American players and teams took shape in the discursive context of the Western gaming press\u2019s coverage of South Korean StarCraft and  later League of Legends professional players, and the material context of the infrastructures and institutions of esports that reterritorialize and segregate online players. While we focus on 192  Voorhees and Howardgaming  houses to illustrate how North American players enact high- tech orientalism, we also discuss efforts to \u201cimport\u201d foreign players to show how  these practices are entangled in a larger assemblage of techno- orientalist thinking. Throughout, we connect this discursive and material formulation of racialized anxiety to the social and economic anx i eties of neoliberal capital-ism. Our approach aligns with Andr\u00e9 Brock\u2019s critical technocultural discourse analy sis to explain the significance of the relations between the affordances of a technology, the forms of activity emerging from users, and the rhe toric and discourse engaged by  those communities of practice.2 For this analy sis, we work through critical technocultural discourse analy sis to consider both how esports as a media technology\u2014 a massive physical- social- aesthetic- economic network\u2014 enables high- tech orientalist cultural  performances, and how members of the community culturally construct  those  performances as best practices.From Techno- Orientalism to High- Tech Orientalism: Race as TechnologyWhile the Western imperial gaze historically  imagined the Orient as an an-cient, mystical, and mysterious world that inevitably recedes as the West seizes the mantle of history, more recently the Orient is  imagined not as the past that  will yield to white power but as the  future that must be avoided to maintain white supremacy.3 In the twenty- first  century, China is conceived as the existential threat to Western hegemony and has replaced Japan as the primary figure of techno- orientalist discourse. This is facilitated by the complementary role that Japan and China play in the North American social imaginary, where Japan creates technology but China is the technology.4While the figuring of Asians as machine is far from unique to this mo-ment,5 the \u201cRobotic Asian\u201d figure takes on novel dimensions when theorized in conjunction with Wendy Chun\u2019s conception of race as technology.6 In this formulation, race is conceived from the ground up as a  process, a technique of identification and differentiation\u2014in short, a technology of social man-agement. Chun expands Morley and Robins\u2019s sketch of cyberpunk to empha-size how the genre thematizes  these conjunctions of race and technology in high- tech Asian  futures. On a repre sen ta tional level, techno- orientalism\u2019s linkage of Asian with technology is made explicit in cyberpunk. As Chun observes, \u201cThe  human is constantly created through the jettisoning of the  High- Tech Orientalism in Play 193Asian\/Asian American other as robotic, as machine- like and not quite  human, as not quite lived.\u201d7 But on the level of the corporeal  performance of identity, Chun\u2019s account of cyberpunk turns to high- tech orientalism to explain a sort of disembodied \u201cpassing\u201d by means of global networks of information and communication.8 This is how cyberpunk thematizes not only the repre sen ta-tion of race but the very techniques of constructing, inhabiting, and disturb-ing racial categories. And critical to this analy sis, the high- tech orientalism of cyberpunk also produces a figure of the Western subject that is a victim, one that  doesn\u2019t seek to overturn the Asian  future but, rather, needs it to stage the fantasy of the \u201cconsole cowboy,\u201d the masculinized  performance of antihero, or rebel.9 This is accomplished by pi loting racialized  people as vehicles to traverse a  future hostile to whiteness.We argue that high- tech orientalism is happening in the North American esports scene and that players and teams are attempting to play well by play-ing at being South Korean. And while the  labor is generative, its payoff is realizing not the sweet success promised by the fantasy but the  bitter truth that adopting racialized  performance  doesn\u2019t mean access to the inner world of the raced other. Of course, this failure of high- tech orientalism could enable critical reflection on the part of white North American players, but it is far more likely to embitter them by reinforcing techno- orientalist constructions of Asians as  either magically or biologically diff er ent.It should not be surprising that the North American techno- orientalist gaze largely overlooks the particularities of South  Korea, with digital games and gaming a notable exception. Though South Korean  popular  music and culture is increasingly common in North Amer i ca, South  Korea has featured prominently in only a few pieces of North American media. And while films like Tykwer, Wachowski, and Wachowski\u2019s Cloud Atlas may offer a vivid fan-tasy of an authoritarian, corporate- controlled Seoul of the  future,10 it is sig-nificant that in contrast to the threat constructed of the  People\u2019s Republic of China\u2019s response to COVId-19, South  Korea\u2019s policy to contain COVId-19 using similar social and digital technologies has been widely praised in the West.11 But in looking at the myriad cultural discourses circulating around digital games, the techno- orientalist fantasy of South  Korea comes into focus.12 Indeed, it is in the context of gaming and esports, particularly StarCraft II and League of Legends, that South  Korea is made to stand in for all of Asia as the new, universalized, techno- orientalist imaginary.13  Here South  Korea is figured as both the inventor and maker of a form of technology increasingly vital to the global operation of capitalism: management technologies.194  Voorhees and HowardLudo- Orientalism: Esports and the Racialization of  LaborWhile  there has been no small amount of critical attention to the construction and  performance of gender norms and roles in esports,14 comparatively  little has focused on how esports is racialized. Outside the competitive fighting game scene, North American esports is almost exclusively a white and Asian space.15 Even though they are saturated with Asian players and signifiers of Asian cultures, in North Amer i ca esports are immune to neither the white su-premacist culture in which they are situated nor the othering of Asian players.The Western association of games with Asia predates the digital and can be traced through a long history of \u201cludo- orientalist\u201d discourses that con-struct the Orient through the  metaphors, logics, and pro cesses associated with games.16 This is aptly demonstrated in Fickle\u2019s analy sis encompassing nineteenth- century parlor games, twentieth- century gambling, and the ori-entalist anthropology at the foundation of game studies. The ludo- orientalism that associates the other with games is strengthened in the context of digital games. This is  because digital games are Asiatic; they are suffused with signi-fiers of Asia, with the \u201cforms, spaces, and personages that many players  will find similar to Asia but are never exclusively Asian.\u201d17Another vital aspect of this discourse formation lies in the fact that digital games trou ble any clear break between gameplay and cap i tal ist production. As Joyce Goggin explains in her survey of the  labor of play, game studies considers how play does work, how play and work intertwine, and even how some forms of play have been entirely refigured as work.18 \u201cGrinding\u201d forms, like gold farming, mark prominent examples of distinctions between work and play so muddied as to lose meaning in most analyses, but gold farming is also a site of racialization. Fickle positions its history as a prehistory of esports\u2019 racial capitalism, where Chinese and Southeast Asian players\u2014 \u201cthe dispossessed subjects of synthetic worlds\u201d19\u2014 had their  labor racially essentialized, tying work\/play to raced bodies.20Esports take this further; they are premised on the rationalization of the practices involved in gameplay, the turning of play into instrumentality.21 As a game is institutionalized as a sport, the experimental and exploratory char-acter of play is truncated and calcifies around the most rationalized, efficient patterns of action. The players\u2019 mastery of their gaming technology and their encyclopedic knowledge of the game, which facilitate skilled improvisation, is critical to this instrumentalized  performance; they are also critical ave nues for the  performance of masculinity in  these spaces.22 To play like a man is to  High- Tech Orientalism in Play 195have masterful and precise control of both one\u2019s body and technology, a junc-ture that\u2019s indexed with metrics like ApM (actions per minute) that perpetu-ate economic and military logics of automation and \u201cnoise\u201d reduction within that biotechnical assemblage.23 Following this thread, roles ste reo typically associated with more intensive biotechnical attunements become viewed as more masculine, whereas  others are subordinated and effeminized.24 In this way, the association between economic rationality and a hybrid, sportive, and technological masculinity is sedimented to address neoliberal crises in North American hegemonic masculinity.25The introduction of professional StarCraft leagues to North American audiences in the early 2000s through  popular press, gaming publications, and online discussion forums provided a site where this othering rhe toric would sediment into several tropes about professional Asian players. This discourse imagines South  Korea as a locus where a feminized \u201ccute culture\u201d comes together with the high- tech masculinity of competitive esports.26 Conflating casual games with intensely complicated games such as StarCraft enables the fantasy of South  Korea\u2014 and thereby Asia as a  whole\u2014as si mul ta neously a weird, unintelligible place and a technological wonderland. This is epitomized in Western news coverage that constructs gaming caf\u00e9s as dark and seedy places of ill repute, characterized by sloth and excess, which do the symbolic work of reimaging and updating the imagery of the opium den.27 That image is complemented by generalizations about Korean culture as nurturing \u201cpro-ductive obsessions,\u201d where this par tic u lar phrase can emphasize both the machinic devotion to the task and its contribution to cap i tal ist enterprise.28In short, most North Americans came to know esports through the techno- orientalist framing of it as a particularly Korean obsession, one that is si mul-ta neously an absurd joke and a threat to Western hegemony.29 This duality not only emerged from the ludo- orientalist discourse of games; it also enabled a specific form of techno- orientalism in the North American esports leagues and communities that emerged in the 2000s and 2010s.High- Tech Orientalism: Performing Neoliberal AcumenThe techno- orientalism circulating in esports makes it an apparatus for widespread participation in high- tech orientalism\u2014 the practices that figure racialized play as the techniques of racial  performance. This is most clearly expressed through Western players and teams adopting team building and 196  Voorhees and Howardmanagement practices associated with Korean esports success. Esports are both media technologies and racial technologies, and the emulation of these practices by North American players and  organizations illustrates how  esports is used to taxonomize and selectively appropriate racialized forms of play to carve out a space for white protagonists in the impending Yellow  Future.30Our analy sis begins, following Brock\u2019s critical technocultural discourse analy sis, with the affordances and limitations of a technology: professional League of Legends (LoL) esports. Taking a cue from Bolter and Grusin, who explain that \u201cmedia technologies constitute networks[, hence] introducing a new media technology does not mean simply inventing new hardware and software, but rather fashioning . . . a network,\u201d31 we argue that each mo-ment of professional esports play is situated within an entangled network of systems that produce sportified spectacles, experiences for sale more than goods.32 We approach professional LoL as a physical- social- aesthetic- economic network technology composed of professional gamers, team staff, tournament  organizers, broadcast production workers, game developers, and fans, to name some  human components. This technology\u2019s affordances and limitations are the surface on which the Western imagination plays out its drama of Korean racialization.One of the world\u2019s most viewed esports and a flagship arena for the profes-sionalization of esports competition over the last  decade, LoL\u2019s professional esport is built around its World Championship, a yearly tournament where the top- ranked teams from regional leagues compete for a prize pool that totaled $2.225 million in 2020.33 The very architecture of play is intertwined with this structure. Regional leagues and competitive regions are designated based on collections of geo graph i cally adjacent servers  running online play, thus using professional LoL\u2019s technical infrastructure to reborder a globalizing world. Riot Games, LoL\u2019s developer, instituted rules governing regionality and in-ternational player transfers, concretizing  these borders by restricting flows of players between regions.34 The staging of esports play on the surface of discrete geographies with conditionally permeable borders reifies the Asian professional player as Asiatic other by virtue of technical and rules- based distance.Atop this networked technological apparatus, professional League\u2019s affor-dances lend itself to the production of interregional drama and rivalry. The esport\u2019s rebordering of geographies, competitive centralization around the World Championship, and its constant work producing audiences lend its use  High- Tech Orientalism in Play 197to the production of otherness and fierce regionalism. Arguably, the primary narrative over the last several years of League play is the heroic Western quest to defeat East Asia.35 Since the  European team, Fnatic, won the first World Championship in 2011, no team from North Amer i ca or  Europe has won a World title despite intense efforts to compete. In South  Korea\u2019s Worlds debut, Korean team Azubu Frost finished in second place. Teams from the LoL Cham-pions  Korea (LCk) league have since won six world titles from 2012 to 2020, including five consecutively from 2013 to 2017. Thus, the forms of play and the discourse surrounding professional LoL are fraught with not only intense admiration and desire for, but also a  bitter, antagonistic conceptualization of, a techno- oriental other.In a YouTube vlog arguing that Koreans would be essentially competent at any esport that becomes  popular on the peninsula, commentator and journal-ist Duncan \u201cThorin\u201d Shields argues for and helps maintain the fantasy of an essential, Korean difference through recourse to  stereotypes and general-izing Korean work culture in ways that portray Korean workers and gamers as not entirely in control of themselves and thus less  human than Western liberal subjects: \u201cThe players themselves are still incredibly diligent. . . . They have this cultural  thing. . . . It\u2019s good in that it produces  people that are  really successful, but  there\u2019s this degree to which\u2014 unfortunately\u2014 people almost overwork themselves, and they feel this compulsion and duty to the degree that sometimes I think they sometimes ruin their lives.\u201d36 Shields reveals a fetishization of  Korea bound up in speculation and mystery. This construction of Koreanness authorizes North American esports to manufacture ways of identifying, quantifying, and emulating Koreanness, such as  those discussed below, setting the foundation for figuring Korean bodies as technologies that can be reverse engineered domestically or imported from abroad.Spurred by a combination of international embarrassment at LoL\u2019s annual World Championship and the desperate industrial jockeying for shares of audiences and sponsor funding, North American esports teams have vari-ously attempted to adopt, import, and acquire the structures that produced Korean esports\u2019 success. That is, North American esports  organizations stud-ied more than prior matches. By rendering knowable and selectable diff er ent aspects of Koreanness by turning them into data, from embodied practices to institutional structures, North American teams approach esports as a racial technology. Thus engaged, esports also facilitates high- tech orientalism in which playing like a South Korean is a vehicle for empowering white subjects in a hostile yellow  future.198  Voorhees and HowardIn the following sections, we look at two distinct but not wholly separate patterns of activity that enact high- tech orientalism\u2014 gaming  houses and importing players\u2014 and focus on how the community frames  these activities in its discourse. Significantly, each of  these activities is premised on comple-mentary fantasies, and taken together they form a composite picture of South  Korea in the North American techno- orientalist imaginary of esports.Inhabiting the Gaming  HouseGaming  houses are communal housing provided by esports teams where their players, as well as some coaches and support staff, live, eat, and work to-gether. They originated in South Korean Brood War esports, where aspiring professional players banded together to save money and practice intensively.37 However,  these  houses became staples of the Western imagination\u2019s construc-tion of the South Korean esports ecosystem. Games journalists, casters, talk- show commentary, and vlogs sifted through the scouting reports, statistical breakdowns, coaching regimens, and interviews circulating in Western media and repeatedly concluded between 2012 and 2018 that a combination of hi-erarchical thinking, discipline, and efficiency, all of which came together in an institution known as gaming  houses,  were the keys to Korean success. During this period, gaming  houses became an increasingly ubiquitous feature for professional teams in the West, lauded for competitive results and lever-aged for profit via promotional sponsored  house tour videos.38 However, the desired international competitive results never materialized.In North American esports, gaming  houses represented not only commu-nal living space for esports teams but a par tic u lar Koreanness characterized by techno- orientalist conceptualizations of collectivism and regimentation\u2014 the subjugation of ego and individuality via the structured tedium of esports as work. Pundits like Shields emphasized a combination of strict oversight and workplace efficiency in Korean esports practice environments enacted by corporate oversight. However, Shields argues elsewhere that gaming  houses are vehicles for player burnout, effectively construing them\u2014 and their at-tendant Koreanness\u2014as unsustainable and incompatible with Western esports.39 In both cases, he responds to long- running  stereotypes that Western gamers  were unwilling to see LoL esports in the same industrial way that their Korean counter parts did.40 Discussing the strug gles of North American teams with gaming  houses, Shields talks about Korean team management and player attitudes: \u201cTheir coaches want them to accomplish certain goals  High- Tech Orientalism in Play 199and practice certain  things, and the coaches themselves are  organizing the practice, not the players. . . .  They\u2019re  really efficient, essentially.  They\u2019re very dedicated,  they\u2019re very disciplined, and  they\u2019re efficient . . . and  they\u2019re  going full ball without ego, essentially.\u201d41 In this commentary, Shields reveals the anxiety circulating  under the efforts to emulate South Korean esports. He both outlines what is necessary for North American gaming  houses to succeed and preemptively excuses white players for not having the cultural capacity to perform as needed. The gaming  house was simply too Korean.This construction resonates with figures of  Japanese technological innova-tion and Chinese  labor as technology but points to a distinct techno- orientalist fantasy of a Korean  future dominated by  organizational technologies and management pro cesses that result in dehumanization through gamified or playful  labor.42 The gaming  house is a site for the production of esports where the game became work, with workers following the direction of man ag ers in their daily tasks: a highly professionalized, structured work environment of constant practice and competition where the work of professional play is ef-ficiently managed to risk as few spatial or temporal disruptions from  human living as pos si ble.Given this perception, analysts turned to  whether or not Western players and teams  were capable of subordinating themselves in the same lifeways necessary to achieve Korean levels of ludic noise reduction and neoliberal work. And when adopting the racialized techniques of play associated with South  Korea failed both to enable Western players and teams to enjoy success in esports\u2019 neoliberal arena and to assuage anx i eties about the place of the white subject in an Asian  future, the cultural fabric that pundits like Shields see as enabling Koreanness to succeed in gaming  houses became an object of simultaneous desire and disgust: the object of fantasy the West managed to acquire that frustrates rather than satisfies.Importing \u201cAsian Hands\u201dComplementing efforts to replicate Koreanness through gaming  houses, Western teams also acquired Asian players through \u201cimportation,\u201d precipi-tating \u201cthe Korean Exodus\u201d in 2014, when dozens of Korean pros left South  Korea for prolific contracts in other regions. Mirroring the modern neoliberal multiculturalism of skills- based immigration policies, Western teams, players, fans, and pundits used LoL esports to identify desirable and undesirable traits of mi grant laborers, isolating Koreans as some of the most desirable. Per LoL 200  Voorhees and Howardesports\u2019 regionality designations, in the spring of 2013 the North American League of Legends Championship Series\u2019 eight teams fielded one Chinese player (Nyjacky), one Korean (Heartbeat), and one Bulgarian (BloodWater), all of whom  were signed locally in North Amer i ca. In the summer of 2014, the NALCS\u2019s first three international transfer players from South  Korea, Seraph, Helios, and Lustboy, arrived along with the first Korean coach, Locodoco, who previously had played in North Amer i ca. In the spring of 2015, the season fol-lowing the Exodus,  there  were fourteen Koreans on the league\u2019s ten teams.43 By the summer of 2017,  there  were twenty- four Korean transfer players and coaches, versus only six from other regions.44 International transfers between regions  aren\u2019t new in any sport, analog or digital, but the Exodus was notable  because it revealed the Western desire for Korean  labor.The discourse around  these international transfers not only otherizes  these players but also lingers on the failure of Western athletes to properly sync with their Asian teammates. Pundits and fans referred to international transfer players as \u201cimports,\u201d objectifying Korean players but plugging directly into the constructed perception of Korean esports as an ecosystem for the uninterrupted production of players and coaches for international consumption.Stereotyping can provoke an uncanny valley response and raise ques-tions about a ste reo typed person\u2019s humanity;45 imagining Korean  people as \u201cimports\u201d does much the same work. Korean esports  were praised for their efficiency, productivity, and cultural mobilization to turn games into work and  were also described as dehumanizing. Furthermore, outlets like the-Score eSports presented Korean player salaries as disproportionately low,46 characterizing Korean players as supreme talents exploited by corporate sponsors paying them minimal wages.47 Even as many Korean players left for China, the discourse evolved to see Korean players as good neoliberal subjects due to their ease of exploitation by corporate interest. That is, the coveted, fetishized, status of Korean esports professionals comes at the cost of fair pay and proper  labor conditions. Korean bodies, then, became techno- orientalist constructions: expendable technology to be operationalized by Western industry.48However, as with the gaming  houses, importing Korean players did  little to change Western fortunes at Worlds. From 2014 to 2017, North Ameri-can teams topped out at fifth place, and Eu teams peaked at third. Korean teams finished in both first and second in 2015, \u201916, and \u201917. Western teams\u2019 failed attempts to appropriate Korean imports and incorporate them into  High- Tech Orientalism in Play 201local teams and training regimens led some pundits to double down on the dehumanized, disembodied imaginary of South  Korea as an esports factory rather than individual esports players.Notably, commentaries presented Koreans as locally engineered and ma-chinic, meaning they could not be uncritically taken from South  Korea and plugged into North American contexts and still be expected to \u201cwork.\u201d ESpN journalist Tyler Erzberger crystallized this techno- orientalist imaginary of  Korea  after Worlds 2016, arguing that North American team  owners failed to recognize Koreans\u2019 differing machinic qualities from Western players:So many times in the recent past teams have tried to emulate the East. We need to get that South Korean top laner, or we need that South Korean Ad carry. Let\u2019s get a South Korean coach or try to practice as many hours as the South Koreans do. Yet when you try to implement all  those habits and traits, a majority of the time it takes away from the one  thing that makes the South Korean  giants so  great: their ability to work as a single machine working  towards the same goal with five separate pieces moving in perfect unison.49In this commentary, Erzberger claims that Western teams did not under-stand the compatibility between the parts they  were importing into their factories and the players they had domestically. Aside from positioning the Korean other as a technological object to be instrumentalized by Western  organizations, Erzberger directs blame for the situation  toward team coaches and other levels of management.Once again, this exculpatory discourse points to a distinct techno- orientalist fantasy of  Korea as management technology. On first blush, we might think about importing as the return of the fighting game community\u2019s obsession with \u201cAsian hands.\u201d In that community, players often joke about desiring the essentialized capability of the  Japanese gaming body\u2019s \u201cAsian hands,\u201d which stand in for complicated and shifting social and infrastructural conditions.50 And while  there is undoubtedly some biological essentialism at play, even more crucial is how Asian bodies are racialized as a mobile, transient  labor force to be included or excluded at  will, but always according to how cap i tal ist market incentives rework  political borders to manage the flows of  these populations.51 Somehow,  Korea is capable of navigating this esports apparatus and its complex ecosystem of finances,  human resource, and logistics that North American  organizations and leaders are unable to properly replicate.202  Voorhees and HowardOrientalist Fantasies and Neoliberal Anx i etiesUsing critical technocultural discourse analy sis, we have shown that digital games and esports in par tic u lar are premised in a high- tech orientalism that imagines the Western subject willfully seeking contamination and commin-gling with the other, taking up and taking on the Asiatic. This is exactly the case with the North American efforts to field champion League of Legends teams. In esports, Western subjects can and should try on Asian ways of being in the world.52 Like the console cowboys of cyberpunk that Chun writes about, North American professional gamers and  those who aspire to play as they do need to perform Asianness in order to succeed in this neoliberal global order. But in esports, unlike  popular fiction,  there is immediate feedback and the limits of this identity tourism are laid bare: teams can play at Koreanness, but  doing so does not appropriate the subject position of the Asian gamer and satisfy the desire to win. If anything, North American players taste the  bitter limits of race as play by performing Asian but still achieving as white.Relative to existing techno- orientalisms, the fantasy of South Koreanness embedded in North American League practices combines ele ments of how Japan and China are  imagined. If Japan is constructed in response to techno- orientalist anxiety about technological innovation, and China is  imagined as the technology itself,53 then Koreans are figured in esports discourses as both a technology to be exploited and the creative manipulators of management technology that eludes Western domination. Both the means of objectify-ing and dehumanizing, and the dehumanized other, this image from esports resonates with the corporate oligarchy run on the backs of androids depicted in Cloud Atlas and the praise for South Korean use of technology to manage the COVId-19 pandemic response.Thus, despite its Asiatic trappings and fetishization of Asian capability, esports is not an amicable site where North Amer i ca and Asia meet; rather, it exacerbates white anx i eties about being replaced by Asians. As we have shown, esports is premised on a ludo- orientalism that constructs Asian play-ers as other, yet a central conceit of North American esports is that Asian hands are not only attainable but also assimilable: in sum, that ele ments of South Korean technical production and product can be acquired, and the fantasy of performing Koreanness can nominally be fulfilled. However, even though it re- created the  organizational structures and forms of professional-ization pioneered in  Korea, this racialized  performance failed to produce the desired competitive outcomes. In this failure, we can see Western esports\u2019  High- Tech Orientalism in Play 203 bitter desire for Koreanness, in which attaining the object of desire is more frustrating than the desire itself. Obtainable in some ways, but ultimately not fulfilling the orientalist fantasy of professional League of Legends esports, Korean players and Koreanness are not the aspirations projected on them.NotesGerald would like to thank friends and colleagues in the Department of Com-munication Arts and the Canadian Game Studies Association, and my  daughter Quinn Voorhees- Nguyen, who  will inherit  these  futures but make her own. Matt is deeply thankful to his partner, Amalia, who has encouraged him to get to know his own Koreanness better, and his  brother, Chris, who inspired so many of his interests that led him  here. He would also like to thank his friends and mentors in the NCSu Communication and  English Departments who support the CrdM program and his colleagues in the School of Communication at Loyola University Chicago. 1 T.\u00a0L. Taylor, Raising the Stakes. 2 Brock, \u201cCritical Technocultural Discourse Analy sis.\u201d 3 Roh, Huang, and Niu, Techno- Orientalism, 7. 4 Roh, Huang, and Niu, Techno- Orientalism, 4. 5 Day, Alien Capital; Bui, \u201cAsian Roboticism.\u201d 6 Chun, \u201cRace and\/as Technology.\u201d 7 Chun, \u201cRace and\/as Technology,\u201d 51. 8 Chun, \u201cOrienting the  Future,\u201d 177. 9 H. Park, \u201cRepresenting Seoul.\u201d 10 H. Park, \u201cRepresenting Seoul.\u201d The film Cloud Atlas is based on the novel of the same name by David Mitchell. 11 Kang, \u201cThe Media Spectacle of a Techno- City.\u201d 12 Hjorth, \u201cPlaying at Being Mobile\u201d; Choe and Kim, \u201cNever Stop Playing.\u201d 13 Zhu, \u201cMasculinity\u2019s New  Battle Arena in International eSports,\u201d 236\u201337. 14 T.\u00a0L. Taylor, Raising the Stakes; Taylor and Stout, \u201cGender and the Two- Tiered System of Collegiate Esports.\u201d 15 Fletcher, \u201ceSports and the Color Line.\u201d 16 Fickle, The Race Card. 17 Patterson, Open World Empire, 58. 18 Goggin, \u201cPlaybour, Farming and Leisure.\u201d 19 Nakamura, \u201c Don\u2019t Hate the Player.\u201d 20 Fickle, \u201cMade in China.\u201d 21 Voorhees, \u201cNeoliberal Masculinity.\u201d 22 T.\u00a0L. Taylor, Raising the Stakes. 23 Taylor and Elam, \u201c People Are Robots, Too,\u201d 246, 250.204  Voorhees and Howard 24 Howard, \u201cEsport: Professional League of Legends as Cultural History,\u201d 108\u20139. 25 N. Taylor, \u201cKinaesthetic Masculinity and the Prehistory of Esports.\u201d 26 Hjorth, \u201cPlaying at Being Mobile.\u201d 27 Choe and Kim, \u201cNever Stop Playing.\u201d 28 Choe and Kim, \u201cNever Stop Playing.\u201d 29 Howard, \u201cHighway to the Golden Zone(fire).\u201d 30 J.\u00a0C.\u00a0H. Park, Yellow  Future, 24. 31 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 19. 32 Boluk and LeMieux, Metagaming, 242; Borowy and Jin, \u201cMega- Events of the  Future,\u201d 210. 33 \u201cWorlds 2020,\u201d Gamepedia, February\u00a028, 2021, https:\/\/ lol . fandom . com \/ wiki \/ 2020 _ Season _ World _ Championship. 34 Howard, \u201cEsport: Professional League of Legends as Cultural History,\u201d 56; Monique, \u201cRiot Announces New Rules about Regional Movement\u201d; Leslie, \u201cRiot Tighten Interregional Movement Policy for LCS Players.\u201d 35 Zhu, \u201cMasculinity\u2019s New  Battle Arena in International eSports,\u201d 229. 36 Shields, \u201cThe Thorin Treatment.\u201d 37 Bago, \u201cDispelling the Myth of the Korean Gaming  House.\u201d 38 Admin, \u201cTeam  Houses and Why They  Matter.\u201d 39 Shields, \u201cThe Thorin Treatment.\u201d 40 Shields, \u201cThorin\u2019s Thoughts.\u201d 41 Shields, \u201cThorin\u2019s Thoughts.\u201d 42 Roh, Huang, and Niu, Techno- Orientalism, 223. 43 CaliTrlolz8, Dodo8, and KonKwon  were designated North American regionals. 44 Dodo, konkwon, Gate, Xmithie, Cody Sun, Inori, and Biofrost  were all designated North American regionals. 45 Chu, \u201cI,  Stereotype,\u201d 78\u201379. 46 theScore eSports, \u201cThe  Great Korean Exodus.\u201d 47 Deesing, \u201cThe South Korean Exodus to China.\u201d 48 Bui, \u201cAsian Roboticism\u201d; Roh, Huang, and Niu, Techno- Orientalism, 11. 49 Erzberger, \u201cThe Gap Is Not Closing in League of Legends.\u201d 50 Harper, \u201c \u2018Asian Hands\u2019 and  Women\u2019s Invitationals,\u201d 114. 51 Day, Alien Capital, 31. 52 Patterson, Open World Empire, 63. 53 Roh, Huang, and Niu, Techno- Orientalism, 4.Inhabiting  the AsiaticPart 4This page intentionally left blankThe Crumbs of Our Repre sen ta tionDesigner Roundtable #4FEATURING:Robert Yang, who makes surprisingly  popular games about gay culture and intimacy. He is best- known for his historical bathroom sex simulator The Tearoom (2017) and his homoerotic shower sim Rinse and Repeat (2015) and his gay sex triptych Radiator 2 (2016). Previously, he was an assistant arts professor at NYU Game Center. He holds a BA in  English lit er a ture from UC Berkeley and an MFA in design and technology from Parsons School for Design.Dietrich Squinkifer (Squinky), a transgender and neurodivergent new media artist who makes weird video games about feelings while somehow continuing to survive in a late cap i-tal ist cyberpunk dystopia.  After stints in both industry and academia, and gaining recognition for works such as Dominique Pamplemousse (2013) and Coffee: A Misunderstanding (2014), they cofounded Soft Chaos, a worker coop game studio, while at the same time working on a solo  album of short games titled Squinky and the Squinkettes Pre-sent: Second Puberty (2021).Rachel Li, an award- winning game designer and new media artist based in Los Angeles, California. With a background in both game design and fine arts, she constantly challenges the border between technology, art, 208 Designer Roundtable 4and design. Her games Hot Pot for One (2021), Double R. (2019), and  others are autobiographical simulation games inspired by her observations and reflections on  people and the world around her. Her installations and experimental games have been featured in vari ous art exhibitions and major game festivals online and in New York, San Francisco, Chengdu, and Shenzhen.Marina Ayano Kittaka, an art-ist, video game developer, and the cofounder of Analgesic Productions. Kittaka is best- known as the cocre-ator of the Anodyne series (2013\u201319) and Even the Ocean (2016). She also wrote the essay \u201cDivest from the Video Games Industry!\u201d (2020) and created the open- source blogging engine Zonelets.Robert Yang: In my preteens, I got into modding as a design and develop-ment practice. I was first making StarCraft (1998) maps and adventures and stuff\u2014 I wanted to tell stories within StarCraft\u2014 and then I started getting into making Counter- Strike (1999) and Half Life (1998) maps. I wanted to get into the triple- A industry. And early on, that meant I had to be closeted or to compartmentalize certain parts of my identity to be more acceptable and palatable. I was like, okay, I\u2019m gonna make this map where we just shoot  people, and  there\u2019s no gay shit, or Asianness, or any of that stuff to distract an employer from hiring me. And then, as I thankfully started interacting with  people outside of video games more and more, I realized that life was too short to do all that bottling up or trying to make yourself look more respect-able. That\u2019s when I started making games that are more gay or sexual or erotic. And now I\u2019m trying to navigate the consequences of  those decisions. Like, what does that mean for me? Does that mean I\u2019m\u2014no offense\u2014 cursed to be an academic now? Or does that mean I should try to be like some weird indie artist? Does that mean I should try to bring up my East Asianness more? I mean, that\u2019s what this  whole roundtable  thing is about. But yeah, just a lot of questions I\u2019m personally still figuring out. But I do know that I  don\u2019t want to try to fit some ideal version of what a game developer is. I want to try to be au then tic to myself,  whatever that means.Rachel Li: I started to play video games when I got my first PC in high school. I played Skyrim (2011), Minecraft (2011), open world games like that. I just found myself more and more into the idea of telling a story by navigating a 3D space. I want to be part of that. Even though I was born in the US, I grew up in China, so I  don\u2019t speak  English as my first language. I feel more com-fortable speaking Chinese. So one of the challenges in making games is the  The Crumbs of Our Repre sen ta tion 209language, in the way you express humor and some ideas in your games. And I have this tendency of using images and art to replace, or, try to avoid, using writing and text in my games. And  because I have Chinese social media and stuff like Weibo and WeChat,  there  were Chinese game companies reaching out to me, then trying to adapt my games. And when I interviewed as a game designer, they could not understand why I would make a game [Hotpot for One (2020)] about personal experience, and that  isn\u2019t about competition or winning. That  didn\u2019t  really go well.Squinky: In terms of Asianness, I am enough of a mix of  things that I read as definitely not white, but  can\u2019t tell other wise. I\u2019m  Iranian and Filipino, and from both  those sides of the  family  there are mixes of lots of  things like Span-ish, Chinese, Jewish, and, as far as I know, prob ably lots more. So, having spent most of my formative years in very white parts of Canada, the way I have dealt with that is to ignore my race as much as pos si ble, to downplay it and try and act very white. Especially when I started making games on the internet. Nobody  really knew what I looked like. They just saw my writing, and they would assume certain  things about me based on that. And then I would just never correct  those assumptions. Also,  because I was raised as a girl, I had to navigate this very awkward relationship with being not a cis man, and early in my  career I joined a lot of  women in games groups and got  really into feminism. And as I kept making more and more games, I figured out a bunch of stuff around my gender, around my sexuality, around neurodivergence. A big part of the neurodivergent part is that games are, in a way, how I communicate and express myself. Sometimes  things feel a lot easier to say in a game than they do with words. Meanwhile, I became part of this  whole queer games movement, particularly by co- organizing QGCon [Queerness and Games Conference]. So then, bringing it back to race, it\u2019s all intersectional for me. All of my experiences inform how I design games, and they all have  these parallels of trying to pass as white, pass as a  woman or a man or a gender, just pass as an acceptable person within very restrictive categories.Marina Kittaka: Over time, the part of my relationship with games that has only grown stronger is the sense that in a lot of ways, it\u2019s not  really about the games themselves, but the kind of potential that they suggest to me. I  don\u2019t even know what games I like anymore, but I like the idea of games. I  don\u2019t  really consider myself like a big personality, and I  don\u2019t  really notice  people 210 Designer Roundtable 4talking about me, which is how I want it, for the most part. And I feel like a lot of my experiences as an Asian American person have to do with  these kinds of absences. I feel like if I had dif fer ent ways to move through the world, I  wouldn\u2019t have this kind of presumed default divestment from community spaces in the way I feel like I do. Or it might have to do with other aspects of my identity or upbringing. My parents are evangelical Christians. And my siblings and I  were home- schooled. So  there are dif fer ent axes along which I felt divested from the everyday cultural institutions, and I think about that absence.Chris Patterson:  These comments make me think about how we discuss intersectionality in the acad emy, where it\u2019s about race, gender, sexuality, class, but  these are often discussed at a nationalist, English- speaking, clas-sist, and neurotypical  table. As Marina said,  these are the axes that compel us to invest or divest from par tic u lar identities and communities.Marina Kittaka:  Because video games are such a multifaceted form that take a lot of practices from film and animation, they end up uncritically absorbing a lot of the negative aspects of repre sen ta tion in  those artistic forms. So the bar is  really low. As far as  these bigger axes, we have  things like race and gender and sexuality, to the point where it  doesn\u2019t  really feel inspiring to me to try to do some kind of repre sen ta tion of a type of person. I would like to see a lot more change in the games industry in general: the structures in place, the tools available, the culture, the platforms through which we talk about games, all that stuff. I would rather have that change than be thinking about, you know,  whether Nintendo has some character who\u2019s a dif fer ent race or  whatever.Tara Fickle: This is something  we\u2019ve talked about a lot in trying to think be-yond repre sen ta tion or industry diversity, but to think about how we actualize  those intersections. This reminds me of how in games, we talk about the relationship between representing something versus simulating how it works, and in the latter case it  doesn\u2019t even have to look like the  thing anymore.Robert Yang: The word repre sen ta tion has been commercialized and co- opted to the point where it\u2019s not  really meaningful for me anymore. Like, is this Super Smash  Brothers [1999] character gay or something? Wow. Like, oh, fi nally, a gay trans Black General, who  will keep the troops in  Afghanistan.  The Crumbs of Our Repre sen ta tion 211That\u2019s a weird  thing to celebrate for me. I avoid the word repre sen ta tion when I talk about my own work. And when I use the word simulation, instead, I think it\u2019s more sarcastic. I think of the way it\u2019s deployed in games like Goat Simulator [2014], which is not a simulation of what being a goat is like. So I think that\u2019s the case with a lot of so- called simulators, which are usually sarcastic and winky. That\u2019s why I gravitate  toward simulation as a frame, not  because I think simulations offer au then tic truth power or something.  Because  they\u2019re sarcastic,  they\u2019re a more irreverent way of thinking about identity or a body in a way that repre sen ta tion always has to assume the best intentions. Instead,  we\u2019re supposed to be grateful for  these repre sen ta tion crumbs.Squinky: In terms of the cap i tal ist game industry\u2019s ideas of repre sen ta tion, over the last year I\u2019ve been  doing professional diversity consulting. I de cided to do this so that I  wouldn\u2019t have to do it for  free. Or so that  people who work in games understand that this is not work that  people should be  doing for  free. It is work to go through your game and make sure you represented this nonbinary character correctly,  whatever that means. So with clients, I end up asking a lot more questions than I give them answers. I ask why they want to do repre sen ta tion. And, obviously, the answer is so that they can sell games to more categories of  people. I am generally not that interested in  those conversations for their own sake. So if  people are  going to seek my input on representation- related  matters, I\u2019m willing to do it so long as they pay me.Tara Fickle: The curious idea about diversity consulting is it can assume a kind of singular authority or monolith, right? Which of course is impossible but is also another kind of  labor that  they\u2019re expecting of you, I presume. What are you to do other than occupy that position of expertise and authority?Squinky:  There\u2019s a certain thought like, \u201cWhy are you making me the au-thority on this feeling?\u201d But then it\u2019s also like, \u201cHoly crap, I do have way more authority on this.\u201d  Because the game industry is that much  behind the times. So regarding how we move past that, basically the answer, I guess, is to abolish capitalism.  Because  there is something about the world right now that has just become incredibly unworkable. Yeah, all roads lead to abolishing capitalism.Rachel Li: Growing up in China, I was curious when I came to the US and saw this repre sen ta tion focus. I was like, Okay, it\u2019s nice to see dif fer ent groups 212 Designer Roundtable 4of  people being represented, but is that  really the kind of repre sen ta tion we want? Like, take the Asian hands myth. Shenzhen, where I was raised, is the largest southern Chinese city that manufactures computer hardware. Yet when I was an undergrad, nobody knew where Shenzhen was, but suddenly  people started talking about it, mainly  because of its cheap electronics. But, having grown up  there, I was just confused. This is an  actual place, but no one talks about the history of Shenzhen, and every one keeps saying it\u2019s a cultural desert. The  People\u2019s Republic of China says it too. So I started to work on a proj ect about the history of Shenzhen, the city and villages. It made me investigate what it means to be Shenzhener and what kind of  people actu-ally live in Shenzhen. More than the money, the electrical parts, the factory.Robert Yang: Games are a  really messed-up rat\u2019s nest of all  these dif fer ent politics and cultures intertwining. Like, the tradition of gay male sex culture is very white leaning, usually. And so when I\u2019m trying to call back to that culture in my games, it\u2019s hard,  because artists have done so much to eroticize white masculine bodies for centuries, and  there\u2019s not as many eroticized Black bodies, for instance. Or if  there is, it can easily slip into this creepy tokenizing fetishizing kind of mode, right? So part of that is my anxiety trying to work with sexualized bodies. This was an issue when I was making that spanking game called Hurt Me Plenty (2014) where you can ignore your submissive\u2019s bound aries, and basically abuse them. I felt like I had to make the submissive in that game white  because I  didn\u2019t want to make a game where you could abuse Black  people. That seemed  really messed up to me, and then abusing anyone is also  really messed up in the head too. But I feel like it would have been saying something very dif fer ent.Marina Kittaka: I just wrote a blog post that feels related to this, called \u201cTony Hawk\u2019s Pro Skater and Shape- Meaning Resonance,\u201d about how, in action games, characters with certain abilities move about a space and interact with the environment. In my mind,  these games create an in ter est ing  metaphor for the actions of being a person with a body and with certain experiences. And how that not only limits but gives shape to one\u2019s experience with the world. And  these  metaphors are hard to parse from the very straightforward identity- based social narrative. And they often feel almost kind of cheesy in relation. One of the examples I gave was Kirby. Kirby sucks stuff up and shoots it out or eats enemies to gain their powers. What does that mean with regards to race? It seems unserious, and yet, in my opinion, the capacity to  The Crumbs of Our Repre sen ta tion 213inhabit  these absurdist modes of thinking about one\u2019s interactions is a  really special  thing that you can do in games and has a lot to offer. And this is a way for  people who have a dif fer ent perspective on moving through our world to express something vital about that experience in a way that maybe goes beyond surface markers of repre sen ta tion.Chris Patterson: I love this. What if we saw the kind of actions taken by Kirby, or something in the realm of silliness and absurdity, as speaking to how we express race?Tara Fickle: Right. Given two objects colliding or just interacting in any given space, what is the meaning of the act that we ascribe to it? One eats the other, one hits the other, or\u2014 one simply sits by the other, or they bounce off each other? What are the larger politics of  these kind of movements?Robert Yang: I like trying to slow down movement and pay attention to smaller, slower movements and gestures. What mainstream games care about is traversing a  giant landscape but not, like, hugging someone or something. I think that\u2019s a commonality across a lot of our games [on this roundtable]. Rachel\u2019s Hot Pot for One is  really good at slowing down and being in a moment. Paying attention to how we move food around is a  really in ter est ing  thing that games  don\u2019t  really think about usually, and is tricky to do with a video game physics engine, as well. Or Squinky\u2019s Dominique Pamplemousse (2013): the way the characters wait their turn to talk. That\u2019s still a feature that\u2019s, like, living in my head. So I think that\u2019s where  there\u2019s a lot of space in games still. Just pick any gesture or moment and enlarge it. And suddenly you have to design the video game body very differently to try to address that space.Rachel Li: When I first started to work on the controls for Hot Pot for One, I focused more on the experience, not the character. Players can use chop-sticks to pick up food and move it around.When  people play 3D games, they always expect that they  will be able to walk around, but I feel like it  doesn\u2019t  really make sense if your game  doesn\u2019t require that. So I experimented with throwing player movement away, just letting them stand still by the kitchen  table, and that gives me more time to zoom in on the detail related to the core interaction of the game, which is having hotpot. Even though some players  don\u2019t even know what hotpot is, 214 Designer Roundtable 4they understand feeling that kind of loneliness. Hot Pot for One is about me in New York making hot pot alone at home on Christmas night. Even though I\u2019m technically a US citizen, I sometimes identify as an international student, so that game was about me in a foreign country,  because all my  family are in China.I feel like I\u2019d never before had questions about my identity, at least not strong enough to make a game about it. But the reason I started to make my new game [about the history of Shenzhen] is  because as a US citizen I\u2019m not able to enter China,  because they  don\u2019t let foreigners in anymore [ because of the COVID pandemic]. So I  haven\u2019t been allowed to go back home for the past year. I started to have this anxiety: Who am I? What\u2019s my cultural identity? Where do I belong? Games for me are a way to answer  those questions, or share my concerns and  those issues with other  people.Marina Kittaka: This makes me think of an example from my game Anodyne 2 [2019], where  there are  these traditional boss fights  toward the beginning of the game, and then  those mechanics are altered and recontextualized partway through when  you\u2019re  doing a kind of pro wrestling\u2013 style interaction with a friend of yours. You have to pull your punch at the last moment in order to create this  performance of a  battle. And that kind of recontextual-ization plays into the broader themes of learning how to be in community and what it means to have a mission in life or to be fighting for justice. Now I\u2019m thinking of Squinky\u2019s Dominique Pamplemousse and its very abstracted characters, who also read as queer and nonwhite. I think that\u2019s an in ter est ing way of navigating some artistic craft concerns with the complicated ways that  they\u2019re read.Squinky: Bringing the body more into it came a bit  later for me. Dominique Pamplemousse is definitely a reflection of how awkward I have always found it to exist in the world as a body. A lot of my games do feature awkwardness in a big way. Since medically transitioning and kind of rediscovering the re-lationship I have with my body in space\u2014 for the better\u2014 I\u2019m finding myself having more fun with the way that characters physically move in a space and the ways that you get  people to physically do  things with their bodies while playing a game. And as somebody who makes games, I feel it is more impor tant than ever to think about pro cesses and structure. How do we find  little pockets of community where we can practice  these pro cesses and  The Crumbs of Our Repre sen ta tion 215 these alternatives, where we take care of each other, instead of constantly competing with each other for resources? So I am finding myself thinking less about my work as an individual. So how does what I have been  doing all  these years fit into the greater context surrounding us, especially in increas-ingly dystopian, like, every thing?This page intentionally left blankChinese\/CheatingProcedural Racism in  Battle Royale ShootersIn December\u00a02017, the South Korean video game com pany Bluehold released a multiplayer shooter game titled PlayerUnknown\u2019s Battlegrounds (pubg), created by Brendan \u201cPlayerUnknown\u201d Greene. Reworking the familiar genre of shooter games, such as the  popular franchises Halo, Call of Duty, and Gears of War, pubg introduced a new category of multiplayer shooters known as the \u201c battle royale\u201d (Br). Inspired by the  Japanese cult thriller of the same name, the premise of Br games is to be the last player or team standing by collecting combat resources and winning gunfights. Rewarding positioning strategy, quick reflexes, and aim mechanics, Br shooters have dominated the casual, content, and professional gaming scene. Since pubg\u2019s launch, many other video game franchises have produced their own take on the Br genre, includ-ing Fortnite, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Apex Legends, Spellbreak, Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, Hyperscape, and even Tetris 99. As a video game trend,  battle royale (Br) shooters became a cultural phenomenon across the globe. Given the competitive nature of  these multiplayer team- based video games, cheating and hacking became a widespread concern across all skill Huan He10218  Huan Helevels. Common cheat exploits allow for \u201caimbotting,\u201d \u201cspeed- hacking,\u201d or \u201cwallhacking,\u201d granting players godly levels of aim, movement, or  enemy awareness. The rampant presence of cheating has been a frustrating issue for both players and developers.In the global gaming community,  there exists a common belief that the most crude and common cheaters are Chinese. For instance, the anticheat software com pany BattlEye publicly tweeted in 2017 that they  were banning at a rate of six thousand to thirteen thousand accounts a day from pubg, with the \u201cvast majority . . . from China.\u201d1 A quick peruse through Reddit gaming forums yields many threads on the topic of Chinese cheating.  These discus-sions range from attempts to identify an innate cultural reason for cheating, anecdotal accounts of encountering cheaters in games, proposed methods for preventing cheating, and outright racist anger  toward all Chinese players. Video game hacking is often a difficult topic for gamers to discuss, especially in anonymous forums, as it is both a racial issue (many cheaters are believed to be Chinese) and a nonracial one (anybody can cheat). In a  popular gaming subreddit thread titled \u201cWhat makes online cheating so prevalent in China?,\u201d a disclaimer sits in the parent post: \u201cRacist comments  will be flagged appro-priately. Some  people  really want to make this a race issue, so say  whatever and the mods deal with you.\u201d2 Is cheating ( really) a \u201crace issue\u201d? If so, how?This essay examines the racial associations between \u201cChineseness\u201d and cheating, as a recent phenomenon in Br shooters and as part of a lon-ger  sociohistorical legacy of Asiatic hacking. I borrow the term Asiatic from Christopher\u00a0B. Patterson to describe not an identity but a racial form or style. According to Patterson,  there is usually something \u201cAsian- ish\u201d that links Asianness and digital games, ranging from the video game\u2019s content to its designers, consumers, and industry producers.3 In a gaming environment of virtual presence, race is detached from embodied subjects and often recoded in covert ways, embedded into the very structure of play itself. If, as Con-stance Steinkuehler has stated, the designation of \u201cChineseness\u201d is \u201caimed more at one\u2019s style of play than one\u2019s real- world ethnicity,\u201d4 then Chinese hackers in online competitive shooters extend this claim to the technical dimensions of gaming software, sustained by computational code and global media infrastructures. To be clear, this essay is neither a defense of cheat-ers nor a defense of the snitches, and it does not cast judgment on the act of cheating. Rather, I mobilize cheating as an analytic for understanding how racial meaning and power shut tles between the gaming world and the social\u2014or so- called real\u2014 world. Through an examination of  battle royale  Chinese\/Cheating 219shooters, this essay argues that video game hacking functions as an Asiatic procedure that marks the virtual borders of fair play for global server- based online multiplayer gaming. To illustrate the phenomenon of Chinese cheat-ing as an established discourse, I turn to player- generated textual and media sources on Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube.Procedural RacismIn a video posted on March\u00a02019 titled \u201cApex Legends\u2014 Chinese Player Using Aimbot\u00a0\/\u00a0Hack,\u201d we spectate a player named \u201cChina- supre.\u201d5 Along with his fellow teammates in his trio named \u201cchina_shuaidaye,\u201d and \u201catuoleigeltong,\u201d the player is suspected of cheating via a software hack for ensuring perfect headshot accuracy. Posted on YouTube by an embittered user named \u201cKylin,\u201d the video functions to expose the rampant issue of Chinese cheaters in the  popular Br shooter Apex Legends (see figure\u00a010.1). Released by Respawn and Electronic Arts in February\u00a02019 for pC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4, Apex Legends is a first- person shooter in the Br format, where gamers team up in squads to fight to be the last remaining team standing in the Apex games. As the video progresses, the viewer sees the player eviscerate online opponents far off in the distance, almost invisible to the  human eye. Yellow numbers rack up at the gun crosshairs, indicating that \u201cChina- supre\u201d has landed a series of headshot damage on the opponent. In other gunfights shown in the video, we see the player land perfect shots through visual obstacles such as smoke and debris, environmental deterrents that are supposed to momentarily obstruct a player\u2019s view. In the background, we hear the  Vietnamese commentary of the gamers recording China- supre, who are only able to spectate, having been killed by the cheating player. In the video description, Kylin exclaims his frus-tration and a plea for help: \u201cI\u2019m so tired of being killed by  those CN players, 19\/20 games have aimboter [sic] like that.  Will Respawn & EA do something about it?\u201d Reading into the cheater\u2019s racial and national identity through the gamertag \u201cChina- supre,\u201d Kylin presumes this cheater to be Chinese, one of the many Chinese cheaters encountered in the Br shooter. These clips of aimbotters are one of many player- uploaded videos docu-menting the rampant phenomenon of Chinese cheaters in online Br shooters. Not only do  these videos often capture negative emotions such as annoyance or rage  toward cheaters; they also often comment on the high frequency of en-counters with  these cheaters. Like the players in Kylin\u2019s videos, Chinese cheaters 220  Huan Heare often equipped with what Mia Consalvo calls \u201ccode- based cheats,\u201d hidden software that can allow players to aim automatically at  enemy players with inhuman accuracy, detect and see opposing players through walls and natu ral obstacles, or move through the battleground with unnatural speed.6 Software hacks like aimbot cheats are relatively easy for players to access,  either  free or purchased, and come in vari ous forms\u2014 whether as a software that runs alongside the primary game or as \u201cforeign\u201d code injected into the game itself.  These player- generated videos serve to document and circulate evidence of Chinese cheaters who have installed  these software hacks. Often found on public sites such as YouTube or Reddit, they can corroborate other players\u2019 similar encounters or warn unsuspecting  others of the presence of cheaters. Despite the inability to fully confirm a cheating player\u2019s background on the other side of the screen, players often draw from in- game signs to discern identity markers. In Kylin\u2019s upload, the gamertag \u201cChina- supre\u201d invokes a Chinese nationalism that associates the cheater with a sense of Chineseness,  whether racial or national. In the quest to combat cheaters in Br shooters, the line between \u201ccheating\u201d and \u201cChineseness\u201d is often blurred.In the world of digital gaming, the association between Chineseness and cheating is not a clear- cut instance of racism, as one might be tempted to conclude (and consequently dismiss as simply \u201cracist\u201d). Rather, this uneasy 10.1. Apex Legends: Footage of \u201cChinese player using aimbot,\u201d posted on YouTube by user \u201cKylin.\u201d Screenshot by author. Chinese\/Cheating 221conflation exemplifies what I call procedural racism, in which the techni-cal operations of software malfunction converge with cultural signifiers of invasion. Scholars have argued that computational environments are not simply textual, visual, aural, or even multimedial but, rather, procedural. According to Janet\u00a0H. Murray, one of computation\u2019s defining qualities is its \u201cability to execute a series of rules.\u201d7 Unlike other media such as novels and films, the under lying logics and pro cesses are central to how computational media produce and maintain their repre sen ta tional effect and experience. Ian Bogost has extended Murray\u2019s ideas on the computational to describe digital games as a form of \u201cprocedural rhe toric,\u201d where its persuasive force draws from \u201crule- based repre sen ta tions and interactions rather than the spoken word, writing, images, or moving pictures.\u201d8 What Bogost means by \u201crule- based\u201d is not just any defined set of be hav iors or laws but includes the rule- oriented pro cesses of computational and programmatic execution itself that plays a part in shaping user experience. Digital games are procedural in the sense that they are a contraction of code and culture, and analyses of player experi-ences must account for both dimensions.Procedural racism builds from Bogost\u2019s notion of the procedural  because his framework considers the unseen operations of repre sen ta tional effects and, moreover, how process- based media encounters demand new analytics beyond the formal methods for reading text- based, visual, or time- based forms. Procedural racism also describes racialized phenomenon produced by the composite output of multiple  factors, some technical and  others cultural. Add to this the fact that digital spheres for multiplayer gaming are already a site in which legible markers of identity are disordered, or, as Lisa Nakamura has suggested, \u201cdoubly disorienting.\u201d9 Understanding digital games as proce-dural draws attention to how the technical dimensions of online multiplayer gaming\u2014 the computational operations of software, code, server hosting, and so forth\u2014 play a critical role in shaping how social meaning emerges and circulates within online gaming spheres. In online competitive shooters, many other variables influence the experience of gameplay that are outside the agency, control, or purview of the individual gaming subject.  These include  things like latency time (the delay between user input and game response), packet loss (related to how fast data travels from the gaming computer to the data center), server location (which can impact  things like latency time and packet loss), and so forth. Even for many dedicated gamers participat-ing in fast- paced shooters, they must become somewhat technically knowl-edgeable, as amateur computer engineers of sorts, to optimize their gaming 222  Huan He performance. Other wise, even a skilled player playing with high lag may inevitably experience defeat due to computational issues. Especially since both digital games themselves and the code that support them are structured by rule- based repre sen ta tions and executions, procedural racism describes how  these nondiegetic, technical malfunctions or misuse become racialized in the gaming sphere.The association between Chinese players and cheating is a common ex-ample of procedural racism, as this conflation locates a racial sense of \u201cChi-neseness\u201d within the phenomenon of technological hacking. My analy sis of Chinese\/cheating extends Tara Fickle\u2019s notion of \u201cludo- Orientalism, wherein the design, marketing, and rhe toric of games shape how Asians as well as East- West relations are  imagined and where notions of foreignness and racial hierarchies get reinforced.\u201d10 Describing a longer history of how the structure of games and play have framed understandings of Asianness, and vice versa, Fickle\u2019s ludo- orientalism helps us conceptualize ideas such as race, nation, and neoliberal capitalism as rule- bound forms. Not only do  these \u201c imagined fictions [transform] into a social real ity\u201d through their ludic qualities; Fickle suggests that their gamelike attributes also enforce specific formations of social real ity as justified.11 In effect, ludo- orientalism emphasizes how Asian racialization can threaten existing social structures (such as the invasion of cheap Chinese laborers) or validate them (i.e., by making US neoliber-alism appear \u201cfair\u201d vis- \u00e0- vis the model minority myth). In the digital era, ludo- orientalist fantasies and ideologies persist not only through the logic of games but also through the logic of code. Procedural racism, then, brings the rich framework of ludo- orientalism into conversation with the technical dimensions of digital games, the substrata of code, software, hardware, and servers that form the basis of online gaming presence. As the experience and regulation of online multiplayer shooters increasingly accounts for the computational  factors of gameplay, race and racism can become coded into the machinic operations of digital play.Migrating Cheaters Battle royale shooters are \u201cglobal games,\u201d defined by Patterson as \u201cglobal commodities produced by transnational companies that seem, initially, to hold no national sentiments or orientations and thus evade the particularities and \u2018seriousness\u2019 of national racial attitudes.\u201d12 Since  these games are perceived  Chinese\/Cheating 223to be accessible to anyone, anywhere, across the world, they promote a sense of global connection and belonging, where players from Hong Kong can, hy-pothetically, play with someone from Sweden. Despite the virtual fantasies of online gameplay that artificially separate the digital gaming world from the \u201creal world,\u201d online multiplayer shooters rely on computational systems grounded in the geopo liti cal. The idealization of global digital gaming masks over the media infrastructures sustaining gameplay that are, in fact, quite anchored in the real ity of national or regional space. In Apex Legends, for instance, most players  will play with teammates on their preferred regional server to optimize their technical gameplay attributes, such as latency time and framerate. A player based in Los Angeles would most likely play on a West Coast server through one of the Oregon- based data centers. One can opt to play in a more distant server at the risk of increased lag or lower frame-rate. This region- based server logic also allows players to be matched with other teammates who are more likely to share the same language and cultural frameworks (i.e.,  Japanese players in Japan are more likely to be matched with other  Japanese players). Yet since data centers and server regions are based in geopo liti cal real ity, any disruption to the purity of servers also draws from a similar geopo liti cal language. For instance, in Kylin\u2019s video documenting Chinese cheaters in Apex Legends, one YouTube commenter complains about the aimbotters: \u201cNow they are coming to Oceania servers.\u201d13 Resembling the xenophobic rhe toric that has  shaped anti- Asian immigration policies,  these Chinese cheaters are framed as unwanted mi grants who are finding ways to enter other servers outside their designated region\u2014so much so that the player base called for the Apex Legends developers to \u201cregion- lock\u201d China to prevent cheaters from migrating to other regional servers in North Amer-i ca,  Europe, or other parts of East and Southeast Asia.14 This demand repli-cates similar protocol that pubg previously took to curb the overwhelming presence of aimbot hackers from China in October\u00a02018.15 This discussion of region- locking China reveals that what frustrates many players is not simply that Chinese cheaters exist with undefeatable code- based hacks but that they appear to be a common occurrence spreading across server- based borders. Thus,  these discourses codify Chineseness into the procedural dimensions of code- hacking and warn of a potential to multiply and invade servers across the globe.Precisely since  these technical infrastructures are imperceptible to the player yet play a crucial role in maintaining the stability of online gameplay,  these concerns are often discussed and narrated using existing cultural 224  Huan Heterminologies that have formed through social histories. As Margaret Morse reminds us, cybercultures often attempt to find cultural frames to imag-ine the other wise imperceptible dimensions of information technologies.16 Region- locking China and preventing server migration for Chinese players parallels the historical pre ce dent of anti- Chinese immigration legislation enacted by the United States in the era of Chinese Exclusion (1882\u20131943). As more Chinese laborers  were needed to fulfill the settler- capitalist demands of US industrialization, Chinese exclusion legislation concretized a growing anti- Chinese sentiment and marked the first instance of race- based US im-migration laws.17 Although the Chinese Exclusion era legally ended with the Magnuson Act in 1943, which replaced exclusion with a quota- based system for mi grant entry, the atmosphere of anti- Chinese and anti- Asian sentiment continues to be renewed in con temporary contexts, such as the recent wave of anti- Asian hate and vio lence in the age of COVId- 19.The stakes and circumstances are, of course, diff er ent for all  these in-stances of yellow peril, but  there is a common modality subtending  these racial fears. In the case of Chinese exclusion, the rhe toric of yellow peril was largely expressed through the terms of  labor and economics. Kornel Chang describes how white  union laborers  were  organized against Chinese laborers, \u201cvilified as degraders of  labor.\u201d18 Euro- Americans  were able to consolidate their own ethnic identities into an abstracted whiteness against the \u201ccheaper\u201d  labor offered by Chinese mi grants. As financial incentives for entrepreneurs paved room for more Chinese workers, a galvanized sense of whiteness emerged in opposition to Asiatic competition. Perceived as a threat to the honest, integrity- driven ideal of white  labor, Chinese  labor was deemed cor-rosive, degenerative, and cheapening. What I am suggesting  here is that  these economic modalities of racialization could also be considered a type of \u201chacking,\u201d in which yellow peril fears refer not only to Chinese bodies but also to the systemic degradation of Euro- American white  labor at the height of in-dustrialization. Chineseness, in this historical instance, signifies a procedural form of hacking, an anthropomorphic figuration of capitalism\u2019s invisible and negative competitive force.19 By thinking of \u201ccheapening\u201d as akin to \u201ccheat-ing,\u201d as Fickle has suggested regarding the perception of nineteenth- century Chinese gamblers in the United States,20 we can better trace social and ludic phenomenon that require the threat of the Asiatic to consolidate normative ideas of  labor and gaming.Although  there is a difference between the \u201ccheapening\u201d of Chinese man-ual  labor in the nineteenth  century and the \u201ccheating\u201d of Chinese gamers in  Chinese\/Cheating 225the twenty- first, they both signify an unwanted Asiatic procedure that can generate racist responses. The similarities between  these historically situ-ated phenomena mark an analogy between culture and code, revealing how racial meaning coalesces in this convergence through a demarcation of the bound aries of normative work and play. Despite the variety of pro cesses of software hacking and code- based cheats, online gaming communities often default to calls for cure- all  measures that, in effect, categorically inscribe totalizing claims about the presence of cheaters. For example, within two weeks of the Apex Legends launch, Reddit threads appeared in which gamers lambasted the pervasiveness of Chinese cheaters. In one thread, the poster cried: \u201cPlease Ping lock or rEGION LOCk China. Apex is killed by Chinese Cheaters like puBG.\u201d21 Given that this post surfaced in the early hype of game release, the statement comparing Apex Legends to pubg indicated that the previous trend of cheating in pubg became a way to narrate what appeared to be a similar phenomenon in this new game. In this sense, the post echoed a plea to game developers to mitigate the prob lem through technical legislation, such as enforcing a digital \u201cwall\u201d for China- based players. In the thread, commenters affirmed  these sentiments with varying degrees of rac-ist speech. One comment stated, \u201cAs expected of the Chinese. I live in Japan and also play a lot of puBG, I\u2019m all too familiar with Chinese cheaters.\u201d22 Another comment said, \u201cUpvoted. Played against a squad of China hackers last night with douyutv names. . . . Guess they migrated from bfv [Battlefield V].\u201d23 The more extreme comments might be captured by this poster, whose frustrations turn explic itly racist: \u201cChinese is  really killing ApEx. with their stupid ching chong bots. and cheats. bunch of ching chong cancers.\u201d24  These responses quite viscerally demonstrate how the procedure of cheating be-comes coded with racial and racist meaning by figuring \u201cChina hackers\u201d as a proliferating entity,25 as detested \u201cmi grants\u201d across diff er ent servers and games, or as a degenerative illness such as cancer. Invoking long- standing historical sentiments associating Chinese mi grants with infectious disease (as Nayan Shah has pointed out in his study of San Francisco Chinatowns and public health in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries,26 and as the con temporary era of COVId has highlighted),  these gamers conflate Chinese-ness and cheating through the rhe toric of contagion and invasion. Yet just as  these hackers appear in diff er ent servers and shooter games, so do  these racist comments. In the same pathways, they spread to diff er ent gaming communities and spew racist beliefs for the sake of maintaining the sanctity and purity of rule- based play.226  Huan HeAs an acute example of procedural racism, the association between Chi-neseness and cheating draws from but is not contained by existing ludo- orientalist discourse. Although Chinese cheaters are often negatively ste reo typed through the language inherited by Euro- American orientalisms, the disdain  toward Chinese cheaters circulates in diff er ent regions that cannot be reduced to \u201cEast\u201d versus \u201cWest.\u201d For instance, due to the proximity of their data centers, players from Japan, South  Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Singapore are likely to meet Chinese cheaters in their regional servers and harbor similar anti- Chinese feelings. Yet the \u201cChineseness\u201d of the perceived cheaters can activate a range of responses from comments directed at Chinese  people to sentiment targeting the Chinese nation- state, especially since certain hackers (like \u201cChina- supre\u201d in Kylin\u2019s video) use their gamertag to suggest a type of national supremacy. Like the code- based cheats that range from blatant aimbot (i.e., auto- locking onto  enemy targets) to \u201csoft\u201d hacks (i.e., subtler versions of enhanced aim assist), the racial meaning associ-ated with Chinese cheaters span from the explicit to the subdued. Yet what unites  these discourses is the phenomenon of code- based hacking, a technical procedure that demonstrates how computational and cultural meaning are mutually reinforcing.Most Chinese cheaters are accused of using software hacks to enhance their gameplay to inhuman levels, but gamers also report encounters with Chinese \u201cbots\u201d who attempt to sell cheats through the game\u2019s team communication platform. For instance, in a YouTube video published less than a month  after the release of Apex Legends, a player named \u201cChillTyme\u201d documents his personal encounter with hackers on Asian servers advertising cheats for the game.27 In his stream- recorded footage, the video begins with light elevator  music playing in the audio game chat, the voice communication system for teammates to use during each round.  After a few seconds of  music, an auto-mated voice recording plays an advertisement in Mandarin Chinese for how to purchase software hacks. The \u201cbot\u201d player also writes a code of letters and numbers in the text chat. In the video, we hear ChillTyme exclaim a mix of confusion and amusement, as it is presumably his first time encountering a nonhuman teammate whose entire purpose is to spam teammates with cheat ads. At the end of the video, ChillTyme asks the viewer if they have experi-enced any similar experiences, as he believes Chinese \u201cbots\u201d are infiltrating Asian and North American servers. In the form of nonhuman players who join games simply to advertise hacks, this version of Chinese cheaters becomes a similar nuisance with the potential to ruin gameplay across diff er ent global  Chinese\/Cheating 227servers. If legacies of techno- orientalism have perpetually conflated the Asian and the technological across diff er ent social histories,28 then  these fully au-tomated nonhuman player- bots (whose function is not even to participate in gameplay) are a code- based archetype of technical hacking, invading and degrading the \u201cintegrity\u201d of virtual presence.Although I have primarily focused on Apex Legends and pubg, the threat of Chinese cheaters is not game- specific but, rather, associated with the genre of multiplayer shooters. A quick search through Reddit\u2019s diff er ent gaming  forums  will yield players documenting their experiences with Chinese hack-ers or Chinese cheat sellers in Fortnite, Call of Duty, Battlefield, Counter- Strike: Global Offensive, and other games in this genre. Part of the gamer discourse surrounding Chinese cheaters is that they migrate from game to game, exploiting code- based hacks or selling software through in- game bots. In Patterson\u2019s discussion of gaming genres, he describes big- budget first- person shooters as the \u201cleast Asiatic game genres out  there,\u201d29 as their game worlds often invoke militaristic, nationalist, and\/or imperial themes and mechanics from a Euro- American perspective. At their core, their game environments and narratives are rooted in ideas of combat, conquest, and victory.30 Considering games like Amer i ca\u2019s Army, Doom, and flight simu-lators, Alexander Galloway has asserted that shooters draw heavi ly from military ideology with varying degrees of realism, where the experience of being a \u201cplayer\u201d soldier is not unrelated to military recruitment.31 The presence of Chinese cheaters in this specific genre, then, must also be understood within the rising popularity of first- person shooters in China. If first- person shooters stem from a Euro- American military ideology en-trenched in nationalist and imperialist desires, then this popularity among Chinese players may also signal how first- person shooters can mediate  these ideologies through a Chinese nationalism. Games like  Giant Inter-active Group\u2019s Glorious Mission (resembling the Call of Duty franchise) and Shenzhen- based Tencent\u2019s Game for Peace (a Chinese version of pubg Mobile) represent how the Chinese gaming industry has adapted many Euro- American first- person shooters. In this view, the presence of Chinese cheaters can also be understood as a part of China\u2019s entry into the genre of multiplayer shooters, with Br shooters experiencing the most recent uptick in hackers. From the lens of Chinese militarism, the logic of invasion refers to the spread of Chinese neoimperialism, embraced by Chinese gamers who may utilize their gaming presence and skill to celebrate Chinese nationalism across region- based servers.228  Huan HeGames studies scholars have examined how Chinese players (or perceived to be Chinese players) are also negatively racialized in other genres, most notably in MMOrpGs (massive multiplayer online role- playing games) such as World of Warcraft and Lineage II.  These games contain vast virtual econo-mies that play a crucial role in how a player\u2019s avatar levels up and advances in power and privilege, or what Edward Castronova calls \u201cavatarial capital.\u201d32 A player often must dedicate many hours a day to perform tasks, quests, and duties to accumulate in- game currencies, abilities, or status. This play- based  labor, or what most gamers call \u201cgrinding,\u201d is part of the built-in difficulty of  these game worlds and separates the casual player from the die- hard gamer, many of whom  will have logged thousands of hours of gameplay. Within  these MMOrpG worlds, Chinese farmers are commonly perceived by gamers to be ingenuine players who level up accounts to sell them to  others, or by harvest-ing in- game virtual currency in exchange for real- world profit. Viewed as a type of Chinese cheating, gold farming, according to Tara Fickle, makes  these games not more difficult but too \u201ceasy\u201d for  those who have the resources to purchase an already \u201cfarmed\u201d account.33 Put simply, it \u201ccheapens\u201d the gam-ing experience for  others. The language racializing gold farming reproduces the anti- Chinese sentiment regarding Chinese laborers during the nineteenth  century, in which the threat of Asiatic  labor was framed as a \u201ccheapening\u201d of white  labor.34 Lisa Nakamura has also discussed how the phenomenon of Chinese gold farming configures race not as a vis i ble digital identity but as the effect of a style of play, allowing gamers to dislike a par tic u lar way of gaming rather than a specific player.35 Noting similarities in Lineage II, Constance Steinkuehler has suggested that within this diff er ent MMOrpG, many players create an \u201c \u2018us versus them\u2019 mentality to wage perpetual field war against all (perceived) Chinese,\u201d whereas Chineseness marks the bound-aries of fair play.36Thus, the phenomenon of Chinese cheaters is partially defined by an in-ability to be contained by the virtual borders of any specific game or genre. In  these games, both Chinese gold farmers and Chinese cheaters in multiplayer shooters depict how, in the words of Nick Yee, \u201coffline identities and eth-nicities are forcibly dragged into online games in which national bound aries do not exist.\u201d37 Yet how racial meaning shut tles between ludic and social contexts is diff er ent depending on the social- technical systems undergird-ing each game world. If Chinese gold farmers are racialized by their style of play, a repetitive, robotic embodiment of the player- laborer that denigrates the avatarial \u201cfreedom\u201d of other MMOrpG players, then Chinese aimbotters  Chinese\/Cheating 229are racialized by their conflation with technical misuse. In the server- based play hosted across global data centers, Br shooters demonstrate how techni-cal function and malfunction enact an impor tant role in shaping the gaming experience. As a concept, procedural racism identifies how racial meaning in digital games emerges not only as an effect of style but also as an effect of technical (mal)function and its invasive presence. Ideas of foreignness, a hall-mark of Asian racialization in Euro- American histories, are even more compli-cated in the digital realm, where connection to servers is linked to the stability of a game\u2019s avatarial production and procedural mechanics. As computational infrastructures become integral features of multiplayer Br shooters, they also become the terrain in which renewed racial discourse emerges, coded and recoded as a threat lurking at the outskirts of the digital battleground.China as a \u201cGlobal Cheater\u201dThe racial marker of \u201cChinese cheaters\u201d is not unique to gaming communi-ties. In November\u00a02019, the rhe toric of \u201ccheating\u201d characterized much of President Donald Trump\u2019s commentary on the US- China trade war. Echo-ing his anti- China statements that had galvanized his  political base, Trump stated at the Economic Club in New York: \u201cSince China\u2019s entrance into the World Trade  Organization in 2001, no one has manipulated better or taken advantage of the United States more. I  will not say the word \u2018cheated,\u2019 but nobody\u2019s cheated better than China.\u201d38 Under lying the Trumpian promise to \u201cMake Amer i ca  Great Again\u201d is the use of China as a symbol not only of a nation in direct economic competition with the United States but, indeed, of all that threatens the American fabric of freedom, equality, and fair play. Trump\u2019s rhe toric describes China as an economic and national threat, and his comments frame US- China relations as a game. Tara Fickle has argued that  there is a structural relationship between games and neoliberalism, in which ludic rhe toric\u2014 such as fairness, deservedness, winners, and losers\u2014 condition socioeconomic real ity.39 Through the framing of a game with win-ners, losers, and cheaters, this rhe toric produces a racial proxy\u2014 \u201cChina\u201d as a national player\u2014 that allows racist sentiment to circulate through an avatar of international geopolitics. Insofar as neoliberalism touts a \u201ccolor- blind\u201d and \u201cpostidentity\u201d US nation- state,40 it appears that pro cesses of racialization are even more gamelike than ever, where racial meaning \u201cflickers\u201d from view in ways that resemble the ephemerality of digital environments.41230  Huan HeGaming forms, structures, and logics are all around us, and their avatars and rhe toric actively shape phenomena from the geopo liti cal to the per-sonal. Although the relationship between games and society is not necessar-ily deterministic, it is impor tant, as Amanda Phillips has suggested, to look for \u201cparallel developments and mutual constitution rather than linearly for causality.\u201d42  Battle royale shooters dramatize the zero- sum logic that has typi-fied US- China antagonism by casting global capitalism and imperialism as a \u201clast one standing\u201d competitive game. By framing China as the \u201ccheaters\u201d\u2014 rather than, say, the nation\u2019s \u201cenemies\u201d\u2014 the Trumpian rhe toric of Chinese foul play suggests that  there is something rigged about the terms of play for modern economic prosperity that perpetually  favors the expert manipulators.Across  these cases, the rhe toric of Chineseness refers not only to racial bodies but also to procedures, a system of rules, functions, and operations that exceed visual cognition and capture. Both in the case of global economics and server- based Br shooters, Chineseness signifies the potential for sys-temic malfunction or misuse, shoring up an anxiety about the socio- technical structure of the \u201cgame\u201d itself. Uncomfortably aligned with the procedural\u2019s latent threat,  these negative encodings of Chineseness become a burden for racial subjects,  whether their identities are virtual or real.Notes 1 BattlEye, \u201cWe are currently banning.\u201d 2 Arik_De_Frasia, \u201cWhat makes online cheating so prevalent in China?\u201d 3 Patterson, Open World Empire, 27, and \u201cAsian Americans and Digital Games.\u201d 4 Steinkuehler, \u201cThe Mangle of Play,\u201d 209. 5 Kylin, \u201cApex Legends\u2014 Chinese Player Using Aimbot\u00a0\/\u00a0Hack.\u201d 6 Consalvo, Cheating, 123. 7 J.\u00a0H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, 71. 8 Bogost, Persuasive Games, ix. 9 Nakamura, Cybertypes, xv. 10 Fickle, The Race Card, 3. 11 Fickle, The Race Card, 8. 12 Patterson, Open World Empire, 38. 13 \u201cDanny Quach,\u201d Re: Kylin, \u201cApex Legends\u2014 Chinese Player Using  Aimbot \/ Hack.\u201d 14 Banks, \u201cApex Legends Dev Responds.\u201d 15 Banks, \u201cApex Legends Dev Responds.\u201d 16 Morse, Virtualities, 6. Chinese\/Cheating 231 17 For a comprehensive account of anti- Chinese racial vio lence and law, see Lew- Williams, The Chinese Must Go. 18 K. Chang, Pacific Connections, 45. 19 Lye, Amer i ca\u2019s Asia, 7. 20 Fickle, The Race Card, 44. 21 Snoobboons, \u201cChinese Cheater on Apex Legends.\u201d 22 DerpHard, comment on Snoobboons, \u201cChinese Cheater on Apex Legends.\u201d 23 xzacc91, comment on Snoobboons, \u201cChinese Cheater on Apex Legends.\u201d 24 Grudge122, comment on Snoobboons, \u201cChinese Cheater on Apex Legends.\u201d 25 Grudge122, comment on Snoobboons, \u201cChinese Cheater on Apex Legends.\u201d 26 For more on the racial discourses linking Chineseness and contagion, see Shah, Contagious Divides. 27 ChillTyme, \u201cHow Chinese Hackers Are Selling Cheats.\u201d 28 Roh, Huang, and Niu, Techno- Orientalism, 2. 29 Patterson, Open World Empire, 196. 30 In 2018, the US Army and Navy even established their own esports team and Twitch streaming channel. 31 Galloway, Gaming, 70\u201371. 32 Castronova, Synthetic Worlds, 110. 33 Fickle, The Race Card, 183. 34 K. Chang, Pacific Connections, 45. 35 Nakamura, \u201c Don\u2019t Hate the Player,\u201d 130. 36 Steinkuehler, \u201cThe Mangle of Play,\u201d 208. 37 Yee, The Proteus Paradox, 95. 38 Cox, \u201cTrump Says China Cheated Amer i ca on Trade.\u201d 39 Fickle, The Race Card, 6. 40 Eng, The Feeling of Kinship, 2. 41  Here I am invoking N. Katherine Hayles\u2019s notion of \u201cflickering signifiers,\u201d in which information technologies reconfigure the relationship between mate-riality and form, signifier and signified. Hayles, \u201cVirtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers,\u201d 77. 42 Phillips, \u201cShooting to Kill,\u201d 144.Romancing the Night AwayQueering Animate Hierarchies in  Hatoful Boyfriend and TusksIn April\u00a02011,  Japanese artist and game developer Hato Moa released Hatoful Boyfriend, a humorous video game about a  human who dates pi-geons in a postapocalyptic Japan, which  rose to unexpected global popularity and commercial success, with overwhelmingly positive reviews from major gaming news outlets in Japan, North Amer i ca, and  Europe. Another testa-ment to the game\u2019s success was its numerous spin- offs, such as a sequel game, comic books, and assorted merchandise. Hatoful Boyfriend\u2019s success came as a surprise to critics and gamers alike for several reasons, such as its absurd yet intriguing pigeon- dating premise. Most of all,  people  were surprised by its engaging storyline,  because Hatoful Boyfriend is a parody of dating games, a somewhat maligned game genre within the gaming community due to its focus on romantic storylines and assumed frothy content. Though the genre originated in Japan, Hatoful Boyfriend\u2019s popularity illuminated its dedicated transnational fanbase and spawned an uptick in dating game parodies, from both small and large developers across the globe.Miyoko Conley11 Romancing the Night Away 233This article examines two  independent dating game parodies with non-human animal (or animalistic) love interests: Hatoful Boyfriend, created by Hato Moa, and Tusks: The Orc Dating Sim (2017), created by queer Scottish game designer Mitch Alexander.1 I define dating games as a genre where love and intimate relationships are the primary narrative focus and where gameplay revolves around dating or other relationship- building activities. The goal of  these games is to successfully gain the affection of a partner by choosing the correct options at key points and to end up in a romantic relationship with them.  After the player finishes one route, they are expected to replay the game  until they partner with  every romanceable character.2 The games encourage replaying through rewards such as unlocking pictures, or some-times unlocking a final route called the \u201ctrue\u201d ending. As a narrative- and character- driven style of game, it is impossible to separate narrative from gameplay when discussing dating games; the play is the narrative. Therefore, I consider dating game parodies to be any game that somehow subverts the genre\u2019s traditional structures through narrative and mechanics.I build on previous studies of indie visual novels and dating games, which utilize queer frameworks to demonstrate how  these games can unsettle heter-onormativity and gender roles.3 My par tic u lar interest is how the intersection of nonhuman animals, Asian  popular culture, and biopolitics in Hatoful Boy-friend and Tusks queers notions of animacy\u2014 the quality of agency, aware-ness, and liveness. I argue that Hatoful Boyfriend and Tusks illustrate how tightly woven race, nationality, sexuality, and animality are in determining which lives are considered more valuable by making the player seriously con-sider the nuances of dating an animal partner. Through queer game design, they ultimately turn  those hierarchies into messy question marks and take  pleasure in reforming nonnormative intimacies to resist imperial legacies and imagine  future worlds.Mel\u00a0Y. Chen\u2019s influential works on animate hierarchies\u2014 and their argu-ment that sexuality is central to the imagination of our lives4\u2014 underpins my contention that dating game parodies are a prime site to interrogate the heteronormative and racialized logics that govern the ordering of life. Chen analyzes the linguistic and visual ways  these hierarchies have been reinforced to oppress certain groups of  people, particularly through ani-mal figures (some familiar examples might be racist images equating Black folks with monkeys or depicting Chinese  people as disease- carrying rats). Chen also reminds us that  these notions affect real- life systems. They cite 234  Miyoko Conleyhow Black, Indigenous, and disabled  women have been subject to involun-tary sterilization to illustrate reproductive mandates prioritizing certain be-ings over  others.5 We can also see this in Dobbs v. Jackson  Women\u2019s Health  Organization, the 2022 US Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade. Many folks  were quick to point out that  those who can get pregnant now have less bodily autonomy than a corpse\u2014 a very inanimate  thing\u2014as organs cannot be harvested without prior consent. (Amanda Lehr skewered the ruling with a parodic article for McSweeney\u2019s titled \u201cFor Bodily Autonomy Reasons, I Now Identify as a Corpse.\u201d) Coupled with studies that show how the decision  will disproportionately impact Black and brown  women, disabled  people, and LGBTq+ communities, it becomes clear that interlocking notions of animacy, race, and sexuality continue to undergird governance. Dating game parodies provide a way for developers and players to engage with and critique  these systems, by weaving the overarching game structure into the romantic narratives; the way players understand the game as a  whole becomes part of the story, and through interacting with it, they participate in\u2014or disrupt\u2014 larger heteronormative narratives.As part of a genre that developed in Japan and is heavi ly tied to  Japanese pop culture tropes, visual styles, and media mix marketing,6 dating games are inextricable from the transnational flows of Asian media and are always in relation to Asia, Asianness, and the Asiatic. Christopher Patterson notes that within video games, the Asiatic becomes a technology rather than a repre sen ta tion.7 Remixing and deconstructing Asian media tropes is one of the core ways dating game parodies queer normative gender and sexual ex-pectations, making Asianness integral to the subgenre, even when the game is not explic itly related to an Asian country. Chen also locates transnational media flows and the recombination of Asian signifiers as productive sites to consider slippages within animate hierarchies; in one example, they analyze how the Fu Manchu figure stitches together a myriad of vari ous and opposing animalistic, gendered, and sexual codes and offers a queer animal- blend of an Asian body that bolsters the  stereotype of Asians as inscrutable yet also potentially evades easy categorization.8However, Patterson also locates Asianness as a fraught and understudied area in other wise queer and inclusive visual novels, where the Asiatic becomes a vehicle to explore queer worlds, but one that could also problematically further techno- orientalist  stereotypes or dispense with racial backgrounds all together.9 Dating game parodies are not immune to  these issues  either,  Romancing the Night Away 235but the games I consider  here deploy a combination of Asian  popular cul-ture, animality, and queer romance to show the potentiality of the subgenre to disrupt animate, imperial hierarchies. Specifically, Hatoful Boyfriend and Tusks build on the themes of contamination and toxicity in relation to Asianness as discussed in the introduction to this volume, particularly around the weaponization of so- called Asian diseases and imperial logics that view Asians as invading hordes. While  these dating games illustrate diff er ent ways Asianness traverses animate hierarchies, including to rein-force them, they also lean into the potentiality of porous bound aries through their nonhuman datable characters, biopo liti cal narratives, and subversion of game mechanics.Heteronormative Structures in Dating GamesScholars often point out how dating games can reinforce heteronormativity and  stereotypical gender roles. One way is through the dominance of hetero-sexual repre sen ta tion in their narratives. In Japan, dating game subgenres usually target an assumed audience, mainly straight men (bish\u014djo games) or  women (otome games), and  these target audiences carry over when a game is localized for global distribution. The datable characters are also almost exclusively straight, with few repre sen ta tions of LGBTq+ characters.10 Ad-ditionally, a significant amount of dating games reproduce traditional gender roles in romantic relationships. Sarah Christina Ganzon shows how many otome games formulate the female protagonist\u2019s primary role as a \u201ccarer\u201d for the men in their lives.11 Leticia Andlauer describes the traditional otome heroine as pure, sweet, kind, and having a \u201cfragile aspect,\u201d and Emily Taylor analyzes how datable  women in bish\u014djo games eventually become dependent on male protagonists.12 However, Patterson and Salter and colleagues argue that indie designers often respond to this lack of repre sen ta tional diversity and strive to incorporate a variety of genders, sexualities, and races in their games.13 Ganzon has also noted that fans have the power to lobby for more diverse romance options.14It is also not a foregone conclusion that mainstream dating games are only heteronormative, and even if they promote heteronormativity in one way, they can also contain narratives and mechanics that complicate it in another. Some ways that scholars see dating games breaking with hegemonic 236  Miyoko Conleystructures include (but are not  limited to) the ease and accessibility of visual novel game engines like Ren\u2019py, or distribution platforms like itch.io that offer alternatives to AAA game production;15 how the looping structure of dating games encourages players to explore diff er ent romantic partners;16 the way historical otome games offer female players the opportunity to assert their presence in historical narratives that often exclude them, effectively \u201cqueer-ing history\u201d;17 and the opportunity for intimacies with virtual characters.18I view dating games as largely promoting hegemonic heteronormativity through the idea that romance and sex are \u201cwinnable.\u201d The point of dating games is to \u201cwin\u201d a par tic u lar partner and get their \u201cgood\u201d ending, which usually means a straight, monogamous relationship. All choices and strategy go  toward completing that objective by reading character archetypes to dis-cern what responses  will yield the best results. If a player fails, they  will get the \u201cbad\u201d ending (usually without romance or even resulting in a character death), or the story may stop early if the player chooses too many wrong op-tions. The only option for the player is to fall in line and choose  whatever the game deems the correct option, often along gendered lines. Driving  toward a predetermined end of relationship- as- reward echoes Elizabeth Freeman\u2019s concept of chrononormativity, or the biopo liti cal  organization of  human life  toward maximum productivity, where the temporality of \u201cideal\u201d life stages (school, job, marriage,  children) are ordained by the state.19 The game turns  every social interaction into a test of right and wrong that could yield the ultimate win conditions. If the game contains a simulation ele ment, such as raising stats the partner  will like, romance also becomes a form of time management and productivity.The common archetypes found in dating games often reference  Japanese  popular culture tropes as well. For example,  there is usually a tsundere char-acter, who is initially cold or even hostile to the protagonist but over time reveals a softer side. Other common tropes are yandere (someone who is \u201clovesick,\u201d but to a dangerous, obsessive degree) and the genki or energetic character, and  there are many more. The use of such set character archetypes can underscore the heteronormative structure in dating games,  because while the tropes can be deciphered visually, they are also performative and read through the way the characters act and speak. In turn, the player enacts socialized, normative dating habits when playing the game as they try to suc-cessfully romance  these set types. Essentially, the characters in traditional dating games are made up of readable ele ments that can be broken down into component parts, cata logued, and \u201cgamed.\u201d Romancing the Night Away 237Animality and Blurring Bodily Bound aries in Hatoful BoyfriendOne of the primary ways parodies queer dating games is through upending player expectations with seemingly absurd dating options. In Hatoful Boy-friend, that means pigeons. The protagonist is a girl named Hiyoko (a pun on both a girl\u2019s name and the word for \u201cchick\u201d in  Japanese),20 who is the only  human student at an all- pigeon high school in Japan, called St.\u00a0Pigeonation. Hiyoko is a  human representative at the school, serving as an experiment to see if  humans and pigeons can live together in harmony. In Hatoful Boy-friend\u2019s fiction, a variant of the H5N1 virus (the \u201cbird flu\u201d) wiped out most of humankind.  Human governments tried to spread a counter- virus to kill the dangerous birds, but this instead resulted in birds gaining human- level intelligence and becoming the dominant life- forms on the planet. In addition to the romance plotlines, Hatoful Boyfriend\u2019s story is saturated with a larger biopo liti cal conflict between birds and  humans in a postpandemic world, and the game\u2019s continual references to the birds\u2019 identities and bodies draw out anx i eties around race, nationality, contamination, and the permeability of bodily bound aries.In one way, Hatoful Boyfriend falls into a broader lineage of animal- centric games, and, more specifically, within Marco Caracciolo\u2019s formulation of \u201canimal mayhem games,\u201d which feature an animal avatar that deliberately hinders  human activities.21 A prime example of this is Untitled Goose Game (2019), where the player controls a goose character and completes objectives that largely upset the  humans around town. Unlike games that purport to provide an au then tic \u201canimal experience\u201d for a  human player, which can reinforce Western philosophical notions of  human dominance over nature, animal mayhem games do not allow the player full control over the animal avatar and instead disorient them, taking a nonhuman view of the world. Though in Hatoful Boyfriend the player does not control a pigeon character  until the very last route, the player must consider pigeons as legitimate and attractive romantic partners, which similarly upends anthropocentric views.Though  there are no explicit sex scenes in the game, it is apparent that the protagonist does find the birds attractive, although the character never elabo-rates how a human- pigeon physical relationship would work. For example, in a scene at the school pool the protagonist sees the birds splashing around and thinks: \u201cAll  these damp, tight- clinging feathers are making my heart race . . .\u201d which emphasizes the pigeons\u2019 erotic attributes.  Humans often use 238  Miyoko Conleyanimal figures to represent \u201cour\u201d more animalistic sides, and it is not uncom-mon for certain animals to represent sex in general (such as a sexually active, virile man being called a \u201cstallion,\u201d or an older  woman in a sexual relationship with a youn ger man being called a \u201ccougar\u201d). Chen also shows how animals become sexuality through scientific research that uses nonhuman animal biological materials for human- directed reproductive research,22 indicating how blurry and permeable the line between  human animal and nonhuman animal already is both symbolically and biologically. The datable pigeons in Hatoful Boyfriend are particularly surprising  because pigeons are historically not considered the most erotic of animals in  humans\u2019 imaginations: they are often called \u201crats of the skies\u201d and are largely seen as scavengers that carry disease. The character sprites in the game are pictures of real- life birds, which again emphasizes that  these are truly birds; they are si mul ta neously close to our real ity as photo graphs of real animals and made even stranger, as they do not fit into the manga\/anime aesthetic typical in dating games. Additionally, the pigeons are just as smart as (or even smarter than) the  human protago-nist, while retaining their pigeon- ness through references to their bird bodies and birdlike preferences.23 When dating game parodies utilize outlandish, nonhuman dating partners, they make the player shift their perspective and enact the instability of human\/nonhuman bound aries; the player must regard the pigeons as desirable partners and form attachments to them in order to continue the game.It is worth noting that in the game, the birds\u2019 sexuality falls more  toward heteronormative, as nearly all the datable birds are male, and the protago-nist is female. The one datable female bird, Azami, is treated more like a side quest, as she is not a main character and has a rather short route. Ad-ditionally,  there is also an option to turn on \u201c human portraits\u201d for the main pigeons.  These portraits appear one time when the characters are introduced, fading in  behind their pigeon counter parts like a specter. In one way, this can be viewed as anthropomorphizing the pigeons, suggesting that they need to be \u201chumanlike\u201d to be considered fully desirable and not too improper as partners. The  human portraits are also illustrated in manga\/anime style, more firmly seating them in  Japanese  popular culture tropes, which gives the player a hint regarding the character archetype. However, one pigeon, Okosan, does not have a  human portrait; when he is introduced,  there\u2019s just an illustration of a pigeon in a high school uniform (see figure\u00a011.1). While this is meant to be humorous, Okosan\u2019s portrait also indicates the easy slip-page between the two portrait styles and the unstable bound aries between  Romancing the Night Away 239 human and animal. And as the  human portraits only appear in conjunction with the pigeon ones, they come to signify a queer refusal to consider them as either\/or; instead, they are always both.Hatoful Boyfriend also points to how this slippage between  human ani-mals and nonhuman animals shifts depending on which  people and\/or animals we are talking about, and how animality is tied to race, nationality, and ability. As Antoinette Burton and Renisa Mawani argue, animals are crucial to understanding imperial histories.24 The authors\u2019 bestiary of com-mon animal figures in nineteenth- and twentieth- century British imperialism 11.1. A comparison of a  human portrait and pigeon portrait in Hatoful Boyfriend. Screenshots by author.240  Miyoko Conleyreveals the ways that animals (both literal and symbolic)  were used to rein-force  European racial supremacy within transnational imperialist proj ects and cement conceptions of who was more  human or animate. One example Burton and Mawani use is the racialization of mosquitoes as  Japanese in American propaganda during World War II to symbolize how both  were considered the \u201c enemy\u201d at the time (since mosquitoes carried malaria), discursively lowering their place on the animate scale and classifying them as subhumans that can somehow \u201cinfect\u201d the population.25In Hatoful Boyfriend, complex intersections of race and nationality within animate hierarchies play out through its pandemic storyline. The game\u2019s setting recalls the ways that viruses become nationalized and racialized, and the xenophobic incidents that happen during disease outbreaks. With the recent COVId- 19 pandemic, it is not a stretch to see how a disease be-comes racialized, given the rise of anti- Asian and anti- Chinese sentiment around the world, including within other Asian countries.26 Chen notes other outbreaks\u2014 SArS and, apropos for Hatoful Boyfriend, bird flu\u2014 that  were perceived as \u201cAsian\u201d biosecurity threats in the United States.27 Though it seems Hato Moa has not talked about the bird flu in relation to Asia in Hatoful Boyfriend, and it is impor tant to bear in mind that the game draws from a  Japanese cultural context (where certain animals may carry diff er ent racial connotations), the game\u2019s storyline about disease control highlights the association between birds and disease and how, in many parts of the world, bird flu was racialized as \u201cAsian.\u201d The game asks us to consider not only who is desirable but also who is framed as a threat to bodily bound aries.Xenophobia and other prejudices are also pre sent in the game through the characters\u2019 ingrained biases, showing that certain hierarchies are upheld in this world. Much of the prejudice expressed is based on class, as some pigeons are wealthy and  others are not. Some of the pigeons also say derisive  things to Okosan, who cannot speak as well as the  others and is therefore viewed as less intelligent\u2014 notable, considering that Okosan is the only pigeon with-out a  human portrait, making him less \u201chumanlike\u201d and suggesting paral-lels to the prejudices faced by disabled  people. As for xenophobia, the elitist noblebird Sakuya continually disparages fellow student Anghel (the Tagalog word for \u201cangel\u201d), who hails from the Philippines. Sakuya calls him a peasant and tells him to \u201cbang some coconuts together.\u201d Sakuya himself is French, which is a common character trope in anime and manga and usually signals that a character is romantic and cosmopolitan. Within the game\u2019s  Japanese setting, however, Sakuya\u2019s prejudice calls up a longer, violent history between  Romancing the Night Away 241Japan and the Philippines, and shows that anti- Filipino sentiment\u2014 and the colonial histories it is tied to\u2014 still exists in the game\u2019s postapocalyptic  future. Even the protagonist Hiyoko is not immune to viewing Anghel in a colonial frame: she admits she has the strange urge to call him \u201cbananaman\u201d (and does so, though only in her narrated thoughts).Rather than treating all birds as equal or interchangeable, Hatoful Boy-friend leans into the discomfort that animate hierarchies bring to the fore. It does not shy away from the language that makes certain \u201c people\u201d more or less  human,  whether it draws them closer to animals (Okosan is the most \u201cbirdlike\u201d) or even to  things and foodstuffs (coconuts, bananas). The player cannot opt out of  these conversations and must contend with  these animate divisions,  whether by choosing to defend Okosan from Sakuya or figuring out how to keep Anghel away from school doctor Shuu, who is interested in researching him for a bioterrorist plot.28While Hatoful Boyfriend\u2019s mechanics follow typical dating game design, the sometimes confounding or silly character choices and outcomes play with\u00a0their narrative structure. A common trait across many parodies is to upend the stan-dard romance novel trope of the \u201chappily ever  after,\u201d or, in dating game vernacular, the \u201cgood\u201d endings. Dating games\u2019 main mechanic is the choice mechanic, where players choose between dialogue options or actions to ad-vance the story. What the player chooses affects the storyline, which gives the feeling of agency. Contrary to the idea of \u201cchoice,\u201d however, dating games promise happily- ever- afters, so long as the player performs the correct ac-tions. If a player wants the \u201cgood\u201d endings, they need to choose a specific set of options that  will please their romantic partner, which means  there is no real choice, as the only way to pro gress in the game is to choose all the right options and end the game in a monogamous relationship.Hatoful Boyfriend critiques player choice through the tone in its end-ings; most of the individual routes have an uncertain, unsettling, or eccen-tric ending. For example, if the player successfully romances their kind best friend, Ryouta, his ending takes a melancholic turn when his  mother passes away, which leads Ryouta to worry about his lifespan compared to the pro-tagonist\u2019s. Shy, bookish Nageki turns out to be a literal ghost and fades away. Okosan engulfs the world in pudding. And if the player romances the sinister school doctor Shuu, who is the yandere or obsessive archetype, Shuu al-ways kills the protagonist and keeps her brain, no  matter the ending. In his \u201cgood\u201d ending, Shuu takes his own life, but before he does, he asks Hiyoko if she truly cared for him. The player\u2019s choices are \u201cYes,\u201d \u201cYes,\u201d and \u201cYes.\u201d 242  Miyoko ConleyThis dialogue is si mul ta neously a critique on how limiting (and potentially dangerous) archetypes like the yandere are, and also a comment on how  little control the player has; it lays bare how inevitable the ending was based on typically heteronormative game structures.The illusion of choice dissolves even further in the very last route of the game, titled \u201cBad Boys\u2019 Love.\u201d At the start of this route, the player suddenly takes on the role of Ryouta. This is the only time the player plays as a pigeon, and the route begins with Hiyoko getting murdered and Ryouta resolving to figure out what happened to her. The school is si mul ta neously walled off in an emergency drill, and the player learns that a faction of the bird government has been conducting experiments on pigeons in the school to create a virus that  will wipe out the remaining  humans, refocusing the story on the sci-fi, biopo liti cal narrative. Ryouta finds out he was unknowingly infected with the virus and accidentally killed Hiyoko.  After unwittingly killing Hiyoko a second time (her brain was transferred to a robot that Ryouta attacks), Ryouta ultimately locks himself in a chamber with Hiyoko\u2019s brain, which is still conscious sans body, to await a cure. The player cannot affect the overall outcome of this route; though they still choose options at key moments,  there is no way to stop the major events from happening. Overall, the one- to- one couplings the player built prior are not helpful,  because no  matter what hap-pens,  there is still a larger state conspiracy at play, suggesting that though thought- provoking, the previous monogamous, heterosexual pairings do not work in this posthuman  future.Animate NPCs in TusksHatoful Boyfriend uses unexpected datable characters (pigeons) to disrupt the human\/animal divide by both refusing strict binaries and exposing how race and nationality are tied to fears of contamination. Similarly, Tusks: The Orc Dating Sim deploys nonhuman datable characters (orcs) to show how animal- adjacent creatures are used to bring certain groups of  people lower on the animate scale. In the game, the player\u2019s romantic options are all male orcs or similar species (the group also contains a selkie and a gris), and the\u00a0protagonist is also a male orc, putting gay relationships front and center. The game is set in a pseudo- mythical, medieval Scotland, and the characters are traveling north together from an annual orcish assembly. Though the game is ostensibly set in the past, the orc characters are on the precipice of their  Romancing the Night Away 243own apocalypse of sorts, as they traverse  human lands that are growing ever more hostile  toward them. For example, at one point in the game the group runs into a literal human- built wall meant to keep them off the land they must cross; the orcs are supposed to have a formal writ of passage to go through, though this rule was only recently created by the  humans and never discussed with the orcs. At another point, orc scholar Brocgin explains how orcs are not allowed to attend  human colleges and details the numerous hurdles he has gone through to obtain scholarly material and attend lectures, signaling how cordoned off academia (and therefore official rec ords) are to the orcs.In a 2015 interview with Vice, designer Mitch Alexander said he specifically chose orcs  because of their perpetual status as \u201coutsiders\u201d and inherently evil creatures within the fantasy genre.29 Takeo Rivera notes that depictions of orcs represent a \u201cculmination of masculine chaos and barbarity, coded variously as Hun, Mongol, Islamic, and Black; they are characterized by their massive muscles, warrior culture, protruding canine teeth, green skin, tribal  political  organization, and, of course, bloodlust.\u201d30 Orcs are not simply \u201cnonwhite\u201d but a \u201cbarbaric\u201d and supposedly dangerous amalgamation of races, shifting between  stereotypes of Asian,  Middle Eastern, and African  peoples. In\u00a0J.\u00a0R.\u00a0R. Tolkien\u2019s influential Lord of the Rings series, orcs are coded as Mongol  stereotypes; he describes them in a letter as \u201csquat, broad, flat- nosed, sallow- skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to  Europeans) least lovely Mongol- types.\u201d31 As such, they are linked to racist images of Asians as invading hordes that have been prevalent in  Europe since the  Middle Ages. Alexander also saw how orcs\u2019 depictions othered them in additional ways, connoting \u201cableism, misogyny, homophobia, cissexism, and classism\u201d in one big bundle.32 Therefore, the ridiculousness of the game\u2019s premise comes not only from dating a mythical creature but also from dating an always already racialized and othered crea-ture who takes on all marginalized codes to represent the lowest of life- forms.One way the game tackles otherness and animacy head-on is through Aed, the one optically white  human character. He is studying orcs, and his con-versations involve interviewing the other orcs, including the player. Aed\u2019s human- centric worldview is apparent; at one point, he calls the orcs \u201ccivi-lized, like  humans,\u201d and eventually group leader Ror has to explain the lin-guistic animacy of words like humanity that push all  others to the margins of society. The player\u2019s choices in Aed\u2019s conversations are about how they  will respond:  Will they directly call out Aed?  Will they try to be \u201cnice\u201d and smooth  things over?  Will they say nothing? For example, in his disastrous interview 244  Miyoko Conleywith Ror, Aed centers the conversation on his own feelings. Aed asks Ror what orcs think of  humans\u2014 which Ror points out is a human- centric question\u2014 and Ror gives him a complex answer about orcs being subjugated  under  humans. Aed misinterprets this as all orcs hating  humans, and the player jumps in to mediate the conversation. Eventually, Aed congratulates him-self for making pro gress as an ally, completely centering himself by saying: \u201cThe most impor tant  thing is, I\u2019m growing a lot as a person with both of your help.\u201d If the player calls him out on this be hav ior, Aed confronts the player about it, and the player\u2019s options range from placating Aed to offering vari ous explanations for what he did wrong (figure\u00a011.2).  These moments illustrate the ways speech acts create animate hierarchies and make the player decide  whether they  will reinforce them or reject them.However, perhaps one of the biggest ways Tusks subverts dating game structure is through its approach to player choice and the choice mechanic. First, Tusks does away with individual route endings, disrupting the \u201chappily- ever- afters\u201d that exist in most dating games. While the game does not shy away from sex or intimacy (though the player can choose to turn this content 11.2. An example of choice options with Aed. Screenshot by author. Romancing the Night Away 245off),  there are no individual routes for the orc characters, and the romance does not happen at the end of the game. Rather than treating intimate scenes and naked character sprites as a \u201creward\u201d at the end,  these scenes come at diff er ent points during the fourteen- day journey. A player could also expe-rience multiple moments like  these with diff er ent orcs throughout a play-through, including an intimate encounter with the group\u2019s three polyamorous leaders. In fact, the game nearly forces the player to spend time with multiple orcs. The player chooses to spend time with an individual orc at the campsite each night, but  after a certain number of encounters, the orc  will ( gently) refuse to spend more time with the player no  matter how close they are. The refusals are not acrimonious but mundane; sometimes the orcs are just tired. This means that unlike with other dating games, the player cannot focus solely on one character, and they have to interact with the other members of the group. Refusals like this interrupt the dominant heteronormative logic of dating games, which rewards players with characters\u2019 time if they perform the correct actions. The narrative treats intimate scenes and the ability to partner with multiple characters as acts of closeness where monogamy is not the default.  These nonmonogamous queer relationships also shift the focus to how nonnormative intimacies can build community and found  family.Tusks also demonstrates a way to queer the choice mechanic that resists imperialist notions of domination and control through a setting called \u201cNpC autonomy.\u201d This means that at key moments in the game, the nonplayer characters  will vote on a decision or make their own choices instead of au-tomatically agreeing to  whatever the player decides. For example, when the orcs run into the wall that bars them from taking the path they need, the group votes  whether to storm the gate or sneak around. If NpC autonomy is turned on, the group can overrule  whatever the player decides. Additionally, at the end of each day, two orcs are sent out on guard duty, and if NpC autonomy is on, Ror decides which orcs go out rather than the player choosing. The player  won\u2019t be able to spend time with the orcs out on duty for that night, which adds an ele ment of randomness to relationships in the game. By grant-ing NpCs autonomy and breaking the reward cycle in dating games, Tusks reframes dating as an activity that requires patience, consideration, and consent, not something a person can simply \u201cgame.\u201d And for the orcs, the NpC autonomy function allows creatures who\u2019ve been othered and controlled to express  resistance to the Western imperialist gaze that codifies them into racialized hierarchies.246  Miyoko ConleyConclusionI  will briefly conclude with a consideration of \u201cwalls\u201d as  metaphor that perme-ates both Hatoful Boyfriend and Tusks. In Hatoful Boyfriend,  there is visual evidence of walls from the previous world order, as the background land-scape is littered with buildings, symbolizing the shift in animate hierarchies from  human to bird. Also, the school is literally walled off in the very last route, indicating that just  because a hierarchy shifts, it does not mean that the new \u201ctop dogs\u201d (or birds)  will not reproduce former biopo liti cal controls. In Tusks,  humans erect walls to keep orcs out of both human- owned land and institutions of higher learning, which act as  metaphors for the historical erasure of marginalized folks that persists  today. Walls, or bound aries, are what govern the bodies in  these two parodies, gesturing also to the rigidity of the rules in the dating game genre, which always steer the player onto a par tic u lar, heteronormative path. Importantly,  these are state- sanctioned walls, meaning that Hatoful Boyfriend and Tusks are not simply commenting on personal prejudices; rather, they are highlighting structures of imperialist, racial, and sexual hierarchies that undergird romantic relationships and the overall ordering of life. There is another wall that  these games ask the player to consider: the fourth wall, or the  imagined separation between the audience (player) and the actors (or characters) in the story world. On the one hand, any dating game parody would instantly break the fourth wall,  because the games constantly refer-ence the player;  these parodies run on the assumption that the player under-stands the structure of dating games and that  they\u2019ll be able to recognize all the ways the games depart from their norms, creating a metagame for the player through in- jokes, references, and diverted patterns. The resonance of nonhuman intimacies with players is clear through the number of parodies that have come out in the last ten years from both professional game studios and individual fans, creating an ongoing conversation on the potentialities of  these relationships. This pool of parodies includes games with datable  horses (My  Horse Prince [2016]), monsters (Monster Prom [2018]), weapons (Boy-friend Dungeon [2021]), and many other options, including the computer uI (Date (Almost) Anything Simulator [2017]).For Hatoful Boyfriend and Tusks, their endings turn to repeated queer intimacies as crucial to  future survival, through an emphasis on the player\u2019s embodied experience. The two games end with similar narrative sections. In Hatoful Boyfriend, once Ryouta and the main character\u2019s brain are locked in  Romancing the Night Away 247a room, the main character asks Ryouta to fill her in on what has happened. Ryouta replies: \u201cWhere do I start? Every thing that\u2019s happened, what\u2019s hap-pening now, and\u2014 every thing that might happen, one day. We have plenty of time to talk about it all.\u201d In  these last moments, Ryouta invokes a consid-eration of \u201cevery thing that\u2019s happened\u201d in the past, pre sent, and pos si ble  future, which focuses on the  process the player has gone through, or the multiple playthroughs they have performed and  will perform.33 Similarly, in Tusks,  after the orc group makes it to their destination, the narrator frames the orcs\u2019 journey as a historical text. The narrator claims that  there have been many versions of this story, which is a meta- acknowledgment of the player\u2019s many playthroughs, but importantly, the game ends with a disruption to the authority of the written text. The last lines in the game are \u201cI hope the version of the story you read told you something worth hearing. And if not? You and I can reinterpret it and rewrite it, together or individually,  until it works.\u201dIn emphasizing repeated playthroughs that  will continue,  these endings shift the importance away from static, hegemonic authority and onto the player\u2019s repeated, embodied experience, or, to use Diana Taylor\u2019s terms, they highlight the importance of the repertoire (embodied knowledge not captured in written archives, such as gestures, movements, sounds, ceremonies, and other  performances) as equal to the archive (written, textual documents).34 This is significant in games where institutions of higher learning have  either shut certain  people out (in Tusks) or ultimately served as institutions of con-trol (in Hatoful Boyfriend). By invoking revision and reper for mance, the games acknowledge that replaying is an impor tant aspect of dating games but also suggests that any written rec ord or \u201ctrue\u201d ending is not what the play is about. The player is not left with straight, linear routes but with a series of queer relationships (with  humans, animals, and  things) that both resist imperial legacies (within Tusks medieval lore) and suggest a way forward (in Hatoful Boyfriend\u2019s sci-fi  future setting). The games, then, turn to queer intimacy, and the continual formation of them, as a recuperative space for survival in the past, pre sent, and  future.Notes 1 I am analyzing the English- language versions of  these games. 2 Dating games are closely related to another style of game called visual novels, which combine on- screen narrative text with 2d backgrounds and  character sprites. They also utilize a branching narrative format but can be about any subject  matter. Another term that is often used for dating games is 248  Miyoko Conleydating sims. Technically they contain simulation ele ments, though sometimes the term gets applied to all dating games. 3 I am particularly indebted to the work of Reed, Murray, and Salter, Adventure Games; Salter, Blodgett, and  Sullivan, \u201c \u2018Just  Because It\u2019s Gay?\u2019 \u201d; and Patterson, \u201cMaking Queer Asiatic Worlds.\u201d 4 M.\u00a0Y. Chen, \u201cAnimacy as a Sexual Device,\u201d 2. See also M.\u00a0Y. Chen, Animacies. 5 M.\u00a0Y. Chen, \u201cAnimacy as a Sexual Device,\u201d 2. 6 \u201cMedia mix\u201d is a business practice in Japan that disperses content across diff er ent platforms, such as anime, manga, video games,  etc. See Steinberg, Anime\u2019s Media Mix. 7 Patterson, Open World Empire, 58. 8 M.\u00a0Y. Chen, Animacies, 121. 9 Patterson, \u201cMaking Queer Asiatic Worlds.\u201d 10  There are yuri (girls\u2019 love) and yaoi (boys\u2019 love) games as well. However, it is impor tant to note that yuri and yaoi are specific genres in Japan, and  these media cannot be assumed to be made by queer creators for a queer community. See E. Friedman, \u201cOn Defining Yuri\u201d; and Wood, \u201cBoys\u2019 Love Anime.\u201d 11 Ganzon, \u201cMaking Love Not War,\u201d \u201cSweet Solutions,\u201d and \u201cInvesting Time.\u201d 12 Andlauer, \u201cPursuing One\u2019s Own Prince\u201d; E. Taylor, \u201cDating- Simulation Games,\u201d 201. 13 Patterson, \u201cMaking Queer Asiatic Worlds\u201d; Salter, Blodgett, and  Sullivan, \u201c \u2018Just  Because It\u2019s Gay?\u2019 \u201d 14 Ganzon, \u201cSweet Solutions.\u201d 15 Salter, Blodgett, and  Sullivan, \u201c \u2018Just  Because It\u2019s Gay?\u2019 \u201d 16 Andlauer, \u201cPursuing One\u2019s Own Prince.\u201d 17 Hasegawa, \u201cFalling in Love with History.\u201d 18 Galbraith, \u201cBish\u014djo Games.\u201d 19 Freeman, Time Binds, 3. 20 The player  here, as in most other dating games, has the option to name the protagonist. 21 Caracciolo, \u201cAnimal Mayhem Games.\u201d 22 M.\u00a0Y. Chen, Animacies, 103. 23 Hato Moa said in interviews that the reason she chose pigeons is  because she sincerely likes them. While many  people might find the premise ridicu lous at first, the choice of  these birds was not  because they are unappealing but, rather, to demonstrate their attractiveness. M. Nguyen, \u201cWould You Date a Bird?\u201d; Murdoch, \u201cHatoful Boyfriend.\u201d 24 Burton and Mawani, Animalia. 25 Burton and Mawani, Animalia, 6. 26 Rich, \u201cAs Coronavirus Spreads.\u201d Romancing the Night Away 249 27 M.\u00a0Y. Chen, Animacies, 171. 28 In the last route, it is revealed that Anghel releases hallucinogenic phero-mones, which makes anyone in his direct vicinity experience what he does. 29 McCasker, \u201cThis Gay Orc Dating Sim.\u201d 30 Rivera, \u201cOrdering a New World Orientalist Biopower,\u201d 199. 31 Tolkien to Forrest\u00a0J. Ackerman, June\u00a01958, The Letters of J.\u00a0R.\u00a0R. Tolkien, 274. 32 McCasker, \u201cThis Gay Orc Dating Sim.\u201d 33 Hatoful Boyfriend contains an epilogue in which Ryouta and Hiyoko are fi nally released. 34 D. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire.The Fujoshi Trophy and Ridiculously Hot MenOtome Games and Postfeminist SensibilitiesIn the 2011 Anime Expo in Los Angeles, members of Aksys games\u2019 market-ing team came dressed up as anime versions of historical  Japanese samurai Hajime Saito and Toshizo Hijikata.  After announcing their localization of Fate\/ExTrA, the team played another trailer. Interspersed with images from the game, the trailer text read:A historical tale from Japan . . .Set at the finale of a  grand eraFilled with honor, courage and sacrifice . . .And ridiculously hot men?!Aw yeah.That last two lines in par tic u lar triggered numerous laughs and cheers from the audience as the trailer cut to a subtitled version of the opening  music video for the game. The trailer in question is for Hakuoki: The Demon of the Fleeting Blossom, which they  were releasing the following year for the pSp.Sarah Christina Ganzon12 The Fujoshi Trophy and Ridiculously Hot Men 251Hakuoki was first released in 2008 for the pS2\u00a0in Japan. The year before this announcement, the anime adaptation was released, which helped create some interest among anime fans outside Japan. Hakuoki is an otome game. In its country of origin, otome games are known to be games created for  women characterized by a focus on romance, easy controls, and links to media cre-ated for  women and girls within the context of the anime media mix.1 While Hakuoki is not the first otome game translated to  English,2  there was a lot of speculation about how much this type of game would sell outside its country of origin, especially given that it is a game mostly marketed to  women in Japan, and most  people who know about Hakuoki via the anime are considered very niche audiences even in otaku communities. Moreover,  there  were no local-izations from  Japanese otome game companies or their partner companies in  English for many years since 2006. While  there would be  independent makers outside Japan making games\u2014 games such as Sake Visual\u2019s Re: Alistair in 2010 or localizations of Korean online otome games such as Galaxy Games\u2019 Star Proj ect, in between 2006 and 2012\u2014 and fan- made localizations such as the  English patch for Starry Sky in Spring in 2010,  there  were no official localizations from  Japanese companies or their partner companies from 2006  until Hakuoki\u2019s release in 2012. Though otome games from 2006 to 2012  were considered a novelty, discussions on hot men in  Japanese games  were not. Many years prior to this announcement in 2011, games such as Final Fantasy VII also instigated conversations among its players on androgynous men, and  these discussions also denote how certain masculine ideals help create perceptions of  these games\u2019 \u201cJapa neseness\u201d among player communities.3 Using \u201cridiculously hot men\u201d as a punchline plays into  these ideas. After its release, Hakuoki became the first best- selling otome game, lean-ing on several ports to Nintendo 3dS, PlayStation 3, mobile, and a  later two- part edition released by Idea Factory International. Hakuoki\u2019s success allowed Aksys Games to localize more otome games for pSp, pS Vita, PlayStation 4, and the Nintendo Switch, including titles such as Sweet Fuse (2013), Norn9 (2015), Code Realize (2015), Collar x Malice (2017), and many other titles, as well as otome game fan disks.Previous scholarship on Hakuoki highlights in ter est ing aspects of female- dominated fandoms. Hasegawa, for instance, looks at Hakuoki as a case study to show how fans queer history that is male- dominated and heteronormative.4 Lucy Morris reflects on how the global appeal of the Shinsengumi centers on how the game recycles plot devices and archetypes from  popular romantic 252  Sarah Christina Ganzonfiction.5 More recently, Susana Tosca examines how Western audiences  appropriate the world of Hakuoki in fan fiction to create hybrid worlds based on their interpretation of Hakuoki\u2019s retelling of history that allow  women to incorporate  these worlds in their lives and their fantasies.6 This essay re-threads and acknowledges  these points on games as texts created for  women, and on  these points on female fandoms. However, for this essay, I wish to focus on Hakuoki\u2019s localization itself as a transcreated text.Lit er a ture on game localization introduces the concept of transcreation. Carmen Mangiron and Minako O\u2019Hagan (2006) point out that the main goal of localization is \u201cto preserve the gameplay experience for the target players, keeping the \u2018look and feel\u2019 of the original\u201d and to make sure the target players feel as if the game was developed for their own language. For this reason, they point out that fidelity for translators means being loyal not just to the language in the game text but to the  whole gameplay experience. Thus, they argue, \u201cin game localisation, transcreation, rather than just translation, takes place.\u201d7This essay examines Hakuoki\u2019s localization as a transcreated text that communicates assumptions about its presumed female player\u2014 particularly the ways it wants to insert  women into this historical narrative. In the lo-calization, players are addressed as fujoshis, a derogatory  Japanese term for female geeks who are invested in boy\u2019s love or male- male romances. By pointing out how certain creative decisions in the localization, I examine how localization repositions fujoshi identity and desire for men as something that is heteronormative. Ultimately, this rechanneling of desire  toward hegemonic masculinity indicates postfeminist and postracist sensibilities embedded within transcreation that mask racism and sexism in the game.Postfeminism (and Postracism)A continuously growing body of lit er a ture in feminist media studies and lit-er a ture is concerned with postfeminism\u2014 a cultural sensibility made up of several interrelated ideas. Rosalind Gill enumerates the following key ideas within postfeminism: \u201cthe notion that femininity is a bodily property; the shift from objectification to subjectification; an emphasis upon self surveil-lance, monitoring and self- discipline; a focus on individualism, choice and empowerment; the dominance of a  makeover paradigm; and a resurgence of ideas about natu ral sexual difference.\u201d8 Within postfeminism, Angela McRobbie (2004) describes a \u201cdouble entanglement\u201d of neoliberal values to  The Fujoshi Trophy and Ridiculously Hot Men 253discourses of gender and sexuality. In this way, the cele bration of  women\u2019s choice and freedom is tied to individual lifestyle choices and consumer culture, thereby removing the link between agency to feminist  political action.9 Gill further elaborates that this renegotiation of agency and choice points a shift in mass culture  toward depicting  women as sexual subjects rather than sexual objects. In addressing  women as subjects, postfeminism interpellates  women to make themselves as desirable sexual subjects for men and the male gaze, and empowerment often articulated via consumer culture and via choosing traditional gender roles.10While the lit er a ture on postfeminism primarily concerns texts and dis-courses from the Western world, Dosekun (2015) extends the analy sis of postfeminism  toward its manifestations in the non- Western world. Postfemi-nism, she argues, is \u201creadily transnationalized . . .  because it is a fundamen-tally mediated and commodified discourse and a set of material practices.\u201d11 Though she acknowledges that postfeminist sensibility emerged in the West as a reaction to second- wave feminism, she argues that \u201c because post- feminism is a commodification and hollowing out of this feminist history, . . .  under con-ditions of globalization, post- feminism is sold and consumed transnationally without this history.\u201d12 Furthermore, she explains her usage of the term transnational, since it \u201crefers to a critical mode of thinking across borders and thus thinking across multiple intersections, forms, and sites of difference at once. . . . Therefore, to think transnationally about post- feminism is to consider how, as an entanglement of meanings, repre sen ta tions, sensibilities, practices, and commodities, post- feminism may discursively and materially cross borders, including  those within our feminist scholarly imaginaries.\u201d13 In relation to  Japanese pop culture, Christine Reiko Yano elaborates on how products such as Hello Kitty and cute culture contribute to the Euro- American ideals of girl power by positioning  women as consumers.14 Thus, studies such as  these indicate how  Japanese  popular cultures participate in constructing  these constructions of meaning and commodification of female agency.Recent game studies lit er a ture borrows from postfeminist criticism, par-ticularly in the critique of gendered discourses in games and game culture. John Vanderhoef links the feminization of casual games to discourses in  popular games media, and points out how postfeminist culture dismisses sexist comments about casual games simply as tongue- in- cheek remarks while si mul ta neously reinforcing  these gendered notions.15 Sarah Stang, bor-rowing from Hannah Hamad\u2019s critique on postfeminist fatherhood, extends this analy sis to constructions of fatherhood in her analy sis of father- daughter 254  Sarah Christina Ganzonrelationships in a number of AAA games.16 Alison Harvey and Stephanie Fisher call attention to how postfeminist discourse, tied with neoliberalism, constrains  women\u2019s participation within game industries.17To  these, I add how the commodification of  women\u2019s choices and agency can also mask problematic ele ments, including historical revisionism and racism. Studies indicating how the notion of a postracial society is part of a  political backlash in the post\u2013 civil rights era that denies how racism continually fig-ures in structural inequalities and ideological under pinnings.18 Ralina Joseph, in her case study examining discourses surrounding Tyra Banks, indicates how postfeminism and postracism go hand in hand to deflect race and gender critiques.19 In my examination of Hakuoki, I look into how game localiza-tion as transcreation can become a postfeminist way of masking some of the sexist and racist aspects of  these games by redirecting them  toward desiring heteronormative masculinity.  These redirections participate in the discourse of remasculinizing Asian men and position  women as desiring subjects in relation to  these men. Thus, this form of postfeminism is also postracist.Emotional  Labor and Postfeminist Narrative ChoicesHakuoki (2008) is a visual novel released on PlayStation 2\u00a0in Japan, but one that has also received ports to other systems, such as pSp, Nintendo dS, Nintendo 3dS, and PlayStation 3. In 2015, a two- part version of the game was released on the pS Vita, with additional character routes and down-loadable content. Set during the Bakamatsu, the game follows the story of Chizuru Yukimura, a girl who dresses up as a boy to go to Kyoto and find her  father, who has gone missing.20 Once in Kyoto, she\u2019s attacked by a group of murderous vampire- like men, only to be saved and taken into custody by the Shinsengumi.21  After she finds out that she\u2019s the  daughter of a man who has developed a serum called the  Water of Life that turns  people who drink it into mad, bloodthirsty, vampire- like berjerkers called the rasetsu, they enlist her aid to find her  father.22  Things get even more complicated when Chizuru discovers that she\u2019s an oni (demon) and that  there is a group of de-mons hunting her, led by Chikage Kazama, a demon lord who wants her as his bride.  Because this is a game about dating members of the Shinsengumi, such as Shinsengumi captains Toshizo Hijikata and Souji Okita, as well as other historical characters of the Bakamatsu, such as Ryouma Sakamoto and Iba Hachirou,23 the narrative choices in the game mostly center around  The Fujoshi Trophy and Ridiculously Hot Men 255getting a male character\u2019s attention during the first half of the game in order to get locked into a character route. If one does not get locked into a route with a character on the first half, one gets the normal ending: in the original version of the game, one ends up with Chikage Kazama; and in the two- part edition, one gets sent away by the Shinsengumi for protection from the war.24Once a route is determined, choices in the second half of the game revolve around getting as much affection as pos si ble from that character, usually by picking choices that demonstrate empathy for the character, and keeping that character sane by making the choice to offer the player character\u2019s blood. The reason for this is that halfway through the game, the character whom Chizuru dates mostly ends up becoming a rasetsu for vari ous reasons;25  these reasons usually revolve around protecting Chizuru or prolonging their own existence in the game\u2019s narrative longer than the  actual historical figures, who may have died before or early on in the Boshin War.26 In a number of the game\u2019s storylines,  these characters\u2019 decision to become rasetsu is usually depicted as a heroic act, something akin to a Faustian imperative, especially when they strive to become more than what they are\u2014 men from non- samurai classes rising to become true samurai by upholding the bushido (samurai ide-als and codes of honor) and defending the doomed shogunate. However, the consequence for this choice to become rasetsu is a slow descent to madness, especially as the rasetsu tend to thirst for blood from time to time. For this reason, the correct choice as imposed by the game to get the good endings for  these characters always involves Chizuru offering her blood to  these men. The game also gives Chizuru the option to make the men endure their bloodlust or give them medicine to suppress it, but continuously choosing both options always leads to bad endings.27 Interestingly,  these moments wherein Chizuru gives her blood are some of  those rare moments wherein Chizuru is shown to be very intimate with  these men (figure\u00a012.1). Although Chizuru is an oni, one almost never sees her in her oni form. The only instance in which one sees her in this form is one moment in Souji Okita\u2019s route when she chooses to share her blood with him (figure\u00a012.2). As otome game heroines are rarely depicted having sex with their love interests, moments such as  these become the substitute for intercourse.28 In this way, monstrosity in the game also implies repressed sexual urges.As a player character, Chizuru has very  little agency in the narrative even though she dresses up as a man and carries a short sword; she mostly acts as a spectator to the historical events happening around her. None of the game\u2019s narrative choices allow her to meddle with history. Despite being a 256  Sarah Christina Ganzondemon and having powers similar to  those of other power ful demons, such as Kazama (e.g., the ability to heal quickly),29 she fights back only a few times, and does so then only to allow her love interest to gain advantage over his opponent. Her value as a  mother figure and life- giver to all the men in the narrative is repeated a number of times in the game. In most of the routes, the narrative places her in dangerous situations so all the men are obligated to save her. In Souji Okita\u2019s route, the one route where she drinks the  Water 12.1. Sample image of Chizuru giving her blood in Hakuoki.12.2. Chizuru sharing her blood with Okita in Hakuoki. The Fujoshi Trophy and Ridiculously Hot Men 257of Life (she never makes this choice; her twin  brother forces it on her) and gains rasetsu powers, she acquiesces to Okita\u2019s request to stand back and let him fight for her, even if she clearly is able to hold her ground at this point. Most storylines and branching narrative arcs wherein she displays the most agency are stories outside the historical narrative.30Nonetheless, it is Chizuru\u2019s narrative positioning that is the most in ter-est ing in the game. Her purpose mostly revolves around collecting intimate moments with  these men who are about to die. As Chizuru is the narrator, players see history through her eyes, and the implication of this narrative positioning is that Chizuru outlives  these men to tell their story. In this way, it also positions the presumed female player as a collector of historical narra-tives. It is in this positioning that some find potential in the game. Hasegawa argues that even though the historical narrative in the game is nationalistic and masculine, players can \u201cembrace romance as a new way to interact with history, to imagine their space in the past, as well as to produce alternative narratives.\u201d31 This is especially true with a number of players in Japan, as the game is often mentioned as one that helped trigger a wave of rekijo tourism.32 While  there is no denying that players can definitely define their own agency even within a very sexist and heteronormative game, the issue  here is that choices in the game encourage postfeminist self- objectification and acknowl-edge that  women\u2019s value is  measured by the men around them. In this way, the choices are characteristically postfeminist. But player characters need not be doormats to communicate postfeminist sensibilities.Essentially, almost all of the correct choices to get good endings in the game demonstrate the  performance of emotional  labor. Arlie Hochschild defines emotional  labor as that act of managing feelings and certain expressions, point-ing out how differences in social situation, gender, or race can vary the degrees to which individuals are socialized into performing emotional  labor.33 While Hochschild specifically pointed out that her definition excludes  those outside a work context,  others have expanded this to include invisible  labor and emotion work that  women are expected to do outside workspaces.34 The  performance of emotional  labor in games is of course nothing new. Shira Chess, in her study of time- management games, points out how games designed for  women often highlight expectations for  women to perform emotional  labor.35 A number of otome games, including Hakuoki, are no exception to this, and romance in  these games becomes the reason for the  performance of emotional  labor.Notably, Hakuoki also pre sents the notion of alternative history.  These con-structions of alterative narratives demonstrate what Lynn Spigel describes 258  Sarah Christina Ganzonas a nostalgia for a prefeminist past as a way of imagining a  future without feminism.36 All  these  women need is love,  after all. By peppering the world with power ful  women and the ability to make choices, they erase histories of oppression and offer a vision of a world wherein feminism is not needed. In  these game worlds, choice constructs postfeminist desire  because the choices that are always made available are the choices that postfeminist  women would make. In this way, the discourse of love as a choice constructs ideal otome girlhoods. Games such as Hakuoki indicate how postfeminist sensibilities can emerge in diff er ent contexts, without ever needing to acknowledge postfemi-nism\u2019s history and origins. Instead, postfeminism constructs its own heritage, validating its existence in  these games and texts made for  women, as a way of erasing advancements that  women made for themselves in pursuit of equality.What\u2019s even more disturbing is how the game\u2019s routes repeatedly retell something akin to a jingoistic Lost Cause narrative. It idealizes  these men who notably committed many atrocities for a dictatorial regime and who  were ultimately dedicated to bushido. Studies indicate how bushido is actually a concept that was constructed from the late nineteenth  century through the 1930s; it would become a fundamental component of  Japanese militarism leading to World War II.37 Narratives about the Shinsengumi  were part of the propaganda that fueled this militarism and nationalistic discourse\u2014 a way that  people defined themselves against foreign \u201c others.\u201d While studies on con temporary portrayals of the Shinsengumi in games and anime indicate how the Shinsengumi became floating signifiers depending on how their au-thors may choose to define them,38  these narratives are still part of a trend  toward historical revisionism and nationalistic nostalgia. As the game system encourages replay, the system positions the presumed female player as an impor tant part of this historical revisionism.39 Thus, the game\u2019s postfeminist cele bration of  women as collectors of narratives downplays the racism of this form of historical revisionism and nationalistic discourse. This masking of that kind of racism becomes even more prevalent in the localization in the way it redirects players\u2019 attention to the \u201chotness\u201d of  these men.The Fujoshi Trophy: Transcreating Otome Games for the WestOtome games contain postfeminist sensibilities unique to the cultural con-texts of their places of origin. The challenges of localizing Hakuoki for the West, as well as for other English- language players, include players\u2019 lack  The Fujoshi Trophy and Ridiculously Hot Men 259of knowledge on  Japanese history and the games\u2019 historical characters, and the absence of the anime media mix\u2019s infrastructure to allow dedicated spaces for media consumption around otome games. Nonetheless, in 2010, Aksys Games released a two- part survey on otome games. The first set of questions dealt mostly with  people\u2019s knowledge about otome games and interest in dating simulators, while the second set of questions dealt with consumption practices around potential otome game releases.40 Although the results of the surveys  were not published, at Anime Expo 2011 Aksys announced their release of Hakuoki for the pSp. Prior to announcing Hakuoki, the publisher and localization com pany released titles from the Guilty Gear and BlazBlue franchises, and released 999 for Nintendo dS, furthering its reputation among non- Japanese game players for picking up very niche  Japanese game titles that many other companies would not localize.In the case of Aksys Games, in deciding to localize Hakuoki, they  were not merely commercially localizing one title; rather, they  were localizing the otome game category and types of experiences and forms of consumption that go along with otome games. For this reason, this act of bringing Hakuoki out-side Japan also means defining what otome games are outside their country of origin. Apart from the absence of the anime media mix providing the context of narrative consumption, challenges also include bringing a female- coded category of games to geek cultures and game cultures that is not only male- dominated but also very hostile to  women. The year 2011 was,  after all, also the year of the Dickwolves controversy.41During the announcement of the game and  after playing the trailer, the team described Hakuoki as an otome game and explained that otome games are games where one plays a female protagonist dating hot men. Of course, the discussion of hot men in relation to  Japanese games is nothing new. Lucy Glasspool, in her analy sis of discourses of masculinity in the Final Fantasy games and fandoms, points out how many localized  Japanese games tend to provide ample \u201cfragrance\u201d for fans to create images of \u201cJapa neseness\u201d that are linked with gender. Borrowing from Judith Butler, she argues that the idea of \u201cJapa neseness\u201d is performative and that fan imaginings of \u201cJapa neseness\u201d often act as promotional tools. She indicates that \u201cbottom-up\u201d transforma-tions of some  Japanese games by fans tend to create orientalist associations with androgynous masculinity and same- sex desire, and she points out that  these associations often promote Western masculinity and heteronormativ-ity.42 As seen in the trailer described in the introduction, the game\u2019s \u201chot men\u201d also become markers of its \u201cJapa neseness.\u201d43 More importantly, by 260  Sarah Christina Ganzonemphasizing its promotional material featuring hot men,44 Aksys touches on par tic u lar ideas of masculinity in relation to its games\u2019 characters, but also turns the discussion more  toward the cele bration of non- Western masculin-ity. While much of Aksys\u2019s discussion of otome games and hot men points out that  these games  were made for female audiences, they also point out that men could play  these games as well. No doubt this step is intended to make otome games more accessible, extending them beyond their original intended audience. Nonetheless, it is still impor tant to examine this shift in the value of hot men, as the study of shifting values may indicate par tic u lar structures of feeling associated with  these ideas and images.45 Research on Asian masculinities tends to indicate how Asian men tend to be emasculated in lit er a ture and  popular media.46 Studies also discuss how several critics have deployed the strategy of remasculinization in response to this emasculation.47 Arguably, the game also deploys this strategy in presenting the game\u2019s male heroes and love interests.Notably, the text translation in the visual novel remained close to the source material. Major changes  were seen in  later editions of the game, which included PlayStation trophies. The success of Aksys\u2019s localization of Hakuoki for the pSp made way for multiple ports, including ones for the Nintendo 3dS, mobile, and the pS3.  Until the release of Idea Factory International\u2019s two- part version, the pS3 version was considered the definitive edition, as it had the most content, including extra and downloadable content. The pS3 version is also the first of the games that featured trophies, and liberties  were taken with the translation of  these trophies ( table\u00a012.1). The translations include a number of intertextual references to North American  popular culture ref-erences, puns, and phrases. The use of  these intertextual references reveals much about their target audience, mostly female fans who have grown up with North American  popular culture. Similarly, Idea Factory International\u2019s two- part version also uses intertextual references ( table\u00a012.2). In some of  these examples, humor is used to mask some of the game\u2019s sexist ele ments. Even in some examples, such as the \u201cDoes This Mean I Can Go Outside Now . . . ?\u201d trophy in the Idea Factory version, which acknowledges Chizuru\u2019s Stock-holm syndrome, humor is used as a way of both acknowledging sexism and deflecting criticism.Out of all the trophies listed, it is Aksys\u2019s use of the term fujoshi for the platinum achievement that is the most in ter est ing. Fujoshi, which literally trans-lates as \u201crotten girl,\u201d refers to female otaku in Japan who are fans of the yaoi (boy\u2019s love) genre.48 Studies about fujoshi reveal this to be a self- deprecating  The Fujoshi Trophy and Ridiculously Hot Men 261yet celebratory term; it had been expanded to encompass female fans of anime and manga.49 In its original context, according to previous scholarship, the term fujoshi harks back to a form of nonproductive sexual desire, framing their relationship to mass media and their desire for boys\u2019 love as the cause.50 In many cases in their usage in anime and manga, the terms otome and otaku or fujoshi are not synonymous.51 However, Aksys\u2019s translation does make some sense, especially if one considers how one could get the Fujoshi trophy in the pS3 version of the game. In order to collect the Fujoshi trophy, one has to finish all the storylines in the game, absorb all the narratives and lore, and collect all the images of Chizuru\u2019s love interests. In a lot of ways, to get the Fujoshi trophy, one has to collect a lot of images of hot men, and this may be how the game\u2019s  English translators perceive the  process of becoming a fu-joshi. By making this into an achievement, the game makes a term originally  Table\u00a012.1 jApANESE TrOpHy LITErAL TrANSLATIONAkSyS\u2019S TrANSLATIONdESCrIpTION\u30d7\u30e9\u30c1\u30ca\u30c8\u30ed\u30d5\u30a3\u30fc Platinum Trophy Fujoshi Got all the tro-phies. Well done!  You\u2019re a beautiful person with your  whole life ahead of you.\u9bae\u70c8\u306a\u8a18\u61b6 Vivid Memory Bark Street Boys Unlocked all movies\u85e4\u5802\u3068\u306e\u601d\u3044\u3067 Your Memories with ToudouToudou Recall Unlocked all Toudou images\u658e\u85e4\u3068\u306e\u601d\u3044\u3067 Your Memories with SaitoOut of Saito Unlocked all Saito images\u539f\u7530\u3068\u00b7\u00b7\u00b7 Harada . . .  Ronin in the Streets, Samurai in the SheetsFinished  Harada\u2019s route262  Sarah Christina Ganzondeemed nonproductive into one deemed productive. Instead of describing  women fantasizing about men falling in love with each other, it redirects this desire  toward the games\u2019 heteronormative relationships. The act of collec-tion and aestheticization of idealized male bodies underscores masculinity as a form of bodily property that helps create a par tic u lar notion of femininity that corresponds to it. By focusing on the act of collection around hot strong heterosexual  Japanese historical characters, the transcreated game system enables what Evans and Riley describe as a \u201cvisual economy that turns desire  toward hegemonic masculinity.\u201d52 At the same time, by focusing on the men\u2019s \u201chotness,\u201d it masks the problematic jingoist ele ments that I mentioned  earlier about  these men and the narratives surrounding them. Thus, by redirecting desire  toward heteronormative masculinity and by masking the narrative\u2019s more nationalistic (and, by extension, racist) ele ments, the Fujoshi trophy indicates an attempt to  popularize and commodify identities seen as other. Rosi Braidotti points out a similar trend of popularizing queerness in con-sumerist neoliberal youth cultures, maintaining that such frameworks may  Table\u00a012.2 jApANESE TrOpHy LITErAL TrANSLATIONIfI TrANSLATIONdESCrIpTION\u98a8\u30ce\u7ae0\u3092\u7d42\u3048\u3066  After the Wind . . . Does This Mean I Can Go Outside Now . . . ?Obtained all trophies\u65b0\u9078\u7d44\u306e\u79d8\u5bc6\u3092\u77e5\u308b Know the  Shinsengumi\u2019s SecretStill a Better Love Story than . . . Cleared chapter\u00a03\u9b3c\u306e\u526f\u9577\u306e\u9032\u3080\u9053 Ogre Deputy Chief \u2019s PathJust a Small- Town Boy . . . Hijikata route started\u96ea\u6751\u306e\u5a18\u3068\u3057\u3066 As a  Daughter of YukimuraKazablanca Kazama route cleared\u8a18\u61b6\u306e\u5168\u3066\u304c\u3053\u3053\u306b  Here Are All the MemoriesGeorge Lucas Would Be ProudCG completed The Fujoshi Trophy and Ridiculously Hot Men 263encourage exploring otherness, but they focus on identities that are market-able. She argues:The other complex feature of  these new master- narratives is the ability to take \u201cdifferences\u201d into a spin, making them proliferate with an aim of ensuring maximum profit. Advanced capitalism is a difference engine\u2014 a multiplier of de- territorialised differences, which are packaged and mar-keted  under the labels of \u201cnew, hybrid and multiple or multicultural identities.\u201d It is impor tant to explore how this logic triggers a vampiric consumption of \u201c others,\u201d in con temporary social and cultural practice. From fusion- cooking to \u201cworld  music,\u201d the consumption of \u201cdifferences\u201d is a dominant cultural practice.53While games can provide liminal spaces for the exploration of identity, what the transcreated game system does is channel  these in directions that are most beneficial to capitalism, commodifying  women\u2019s choices and denying the existence of racism. The transcreated game system can thus underlie the transformation of selves in line with postfeminist sensibilities. In this way, game localization makes a text produced in one par tic u lar postfeminist and postracist context adaptable to another.ConclusionThis examination of Hakuoki and its localizations shows how postfeminist sensibilities are transnational and postracist, adapting to diff er ent contexts as a way of directing discourses of both femininity and masculinity to make them appear productive and mask the game\u2019s sexist and racist ele ments. The discourse of \u201chotness,\u201d as it remasculinizes Asian men, distracts players from the game\u2019s nationalistic nostalgia. The creation of the \u201cFujoshi trophy\u201d disregards the complexities of how female fandoms (particularly  Japanese female fans of boy\u2019s love) redefined this identity. As players of otome games are usually presumed to be  women, even as it positions  women at the cen-ter of the game narrative and the act of collecting, the game commodifies  women\u2019s choices. Titles that have followed Hakuoki, such as Code Realize, Norn9 and Collar x Malice, continue to mask some of the games\u2019 sexism and heteronormativity by shifting the focus to \u201cbad ass\u201d  women.Although this analy sis focuses exclusively on the game and its localiza-tion, it also raises the question of how we can examine predominantly female 264  Sarah Christina Ganzonfandoms within postfeminist media cultures. While Hakuoki\u2019s fans can use the game as a way of queering history and can appropriate this world to create their own versions in fan fiction, the discussions within  these female fandoms also omit the subjects of race and racism. Rukmini Pande, in par-tic u lar, argues that fandom algorithms or fandom protocols often contribute to silencing discussions of race among fans.54  Future scholarship on Hakuoki and otome game fandoms can look into the vari ous ways they mute talk of racial issues.Notes 1 H. Kim, \u201c Women\u2019s Games in Japan.\u201d 2 The first otome game localized in  English is Yo- jim- bo (2006), a pC- based game by Hirameki International.  Little is known to what happened to this game or the com pany that localized it, but years  later, fans and bloggers would replay this and talk about this as the very first title localized in  English. Examin-ing blogs and forum discussions around 2011\u201312 prior to Hakuoki\u2019s release, one would find fans encouraging each other to support and purchase Hakuoki to show companies that  there is a market for otome games outside Japan, and so Hakuoki  won\u2019t \u201cfail\u201d like Yo- jim- bo did. 3 Glasspool, \u201cMaking Masculinity.\u201d 4 Hasegawa, \u201cFalling in Love with History,\u201d 136. 5 Morris, \u201cLove Transcends All (Geo graph i cal) Bound aries.\u201d 6 Tosca, \u201cAppropriating the Shinsengumi,\u201d 176. 7 Mangiron and O\u2019Hagan, \u201cGame Localisation.\u201d 8 Gill, \u201cPostfeminist Media Culture,\u201d 149. 9 McRobbie, \u201cPost- feminism and  Popular Culture.\u201d 10 Gill, \u201cPostfeminist Media Culture,\u201d 149. 11 Dosekun, \u201cFor Western Girls Only?,\u201d 961. 12 Dosekun, \u201cFor Western Girls Only?,\u201d 968. 13 Dosekun, \u201cFor Western Girls Only?,\u201d 965. 14 Yano, Pink Globalization, 37\u201339. 15 Vanderhoef, \u201cCasual Threats.\u201d 16 Stang, \u201cBig Daddies and Broken Men.\u201d 17 Harvey and Fisher, \u201cEvery one Can Make Games!\u201d 18 Teasley and Ikard, \u201cBarack Obama and the Politics of Race.\u201d 19 Joseph, \u201cTyra Banks Is Fat.\u201d 20 The Bakamatsu was the period in  Japanese history that marked the end of the Edo period and the Tokugawa shogunate. 21 The Shinsengumi  were Kyoto\u2019s elite police force, most of whom died fight-ing in the Boshin War. The Fujoshi Trophy and Ridiculously Hot Men 265 22 In some routes in the game, it is explained that the  Water of Life was developed from the blood of \u201cWestern Oni,\u201d and in Keisuke Sanan\u2019s route, which is part of the expanded edition, vampires are named to be the original rasetsu. In a lot of ways, one could surmise that the rasetsu plot in the game borrows heavi ly from vampire fiction, such as Twilight and the shojo manga Vampire Knight. 23 The list of datable characters in the original game are Toshizo Hijikata, Hajime Saito, Souji Okita, Toudou Heisuke, Sanosuke Harada, and Chikage Kazama. In the two- part version of the game, the list is expanded to include Ryouma Sakamoto, Iba Hachirou, Kazue Souma, Keisuke Sanan, Susumu Yamazaki, and Nagakura Shinpachi. Hijikata\u2019s route is mostly regarded as the \u201ccanon\u201d route, as his storyline reveals him to be the titular Hakuoki, or Demon of the Fleeting Blossom. 24 Changes  were made in the two- part edition:  because Chikage Kazama\u2019s route was changed to a character route, this time one has to make choices to end up with this character, just like the rest of the other datable characters. 25 Almost every one except Sanosuke Harada becomes a rasetsu. 26 Hijikata and Saito\u2019s routes revolve around protecting Chizuru. The routes of Toudou Heisuke, Souji Okita, Keisuke Sanan, and Ryouma Sakamoto revolve around prolonging their existence in the game\u2019s narrative longer than that of the  actual historical figures. For example, the historical Toudou Heisuke died during the Aburakoji Affair in 1867, and Souji Okita died from tuberculosis sometime in the  middle of the war. The rasetsu plot keeps them longer in the game\u2019s nar-rative, which roughly ends around 1869  after the fall of the Ezo Republic. The Boshin War was the  Japanese civil war (ca. 1868\u201369). 27 Bad endings usually lead to Chizuru and\/or her love interest  dying in hor-rible deaths, in comparison to good endings, where they mostly live happily ever  after following the war. 28 The amount Chizuru gets to have sex varies in both versions of the game. In the original version, the only time she has sex is in Harada\u2019s route. In the two- part version of the game, in addition to Harada\u2019s route, Chizuru also sleeps with Ryouma Sakamoto and Kazue Souma in their character routes. 29 This is slightly amended in the two- part edition, where the game adds an explanation why Chizuru does not fight: according to the game\u2019s lore, male demons are always more power ful than their female counter parts. 30 For example, in Kazama\u2019s route, Chizuru can choose to take responsibil-ity for her  father\u2019s actions and hunt him down, thus claiming her position as the head of her oni clan, but this is a storyline that exists outside the historical narrative that\u2019s usually front and center in this game. Chizuru in Ryouma Saka-moto\u2019s route is given a similar choice. But even in  those two routes, she almost always needs to partner with  these men in hunting her  father down. 31 Hasegawa, \u201cFalling in Love with History,\u201d 136. 32 Sugawa- Shimada, \u201cRekijo, Pilgrimage and \u2018Pop- Spiritualism.\u2019 \u201d266  Sarah Christina Ganzon 33 Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 35. 34 Chess, Ready Player Two; Hartley, Fed Up. 35 Chess, Ready Player Two. 36 Spigel, \u201cPostfeminist Nostalgia for a Prefeminist  Future.\u201d 37 Benesch, \u201cBushido.\u201d 38 Lee, \u201cBecoming- Minor through Shinsengumi.\u201d 39 In a lot of ways, it is not too dissimilar to US groups such as the United  Daughters of the Confederacy. 40 Ishaan, \u201c Here\u2019s Another Aksys Survey on Otome Games.\u201d 41 The Dickwolves controversy was an incident involving the Penny Arcade online comic and its perpetuation of rape culture. 42 Glasspool, \u201cMaking Masculinity.\u201d 43 Interestingly, the trailer they showed before Hakuoki was Fate\/Extra. While Hakuoki has so much focus on \u201chot men,\u201d  there was no mention of \u201chot  women\u201d in the case of Fate\/Extra. 44 See also their two- part interview with Siliconera: \u201cAksys Roundtable Interview,\u201d Siliconera, June\u00a021, 2011. 45 Skeggs, \u201cValues beyond Value?\u201d 46 T.\u00a0H. Nguyen, A View from the Bottom, 2\u20133; Eng, Racial Castration, 28\u201329. 47 V.\u00a0T. Nguyen, \u201cThe Remasculinization of Chinese Amer i ca,\u201d 133. 48 The male equivalent of the term fujoshi is fudanshi. 49 Suzuki, \u201cThe Possibilities of Research on \u2018Fujoshi\u2019 in Japan.\u201d 50 Galbraith, \u201cMoe Talk.\u201d 51 Take, for example, in the anime Watashi ga Motete D\u014dsunda (Kiss Him, Not Me!) a hilarious scene depicts its protagonist\u2019s personality as scale as one that slides from otome to otaku quickly when she gets lured into buying mer-chandise from her favorite BL anime. Since the protagonist is a fujoshi, she also laments that when she suddenly attracts a lot of boys in her school that her life is suddenly turned into an otome game. 52 Evans and Riley, \u201c \u2018He\u2019s a Total TubeCrush,\u2019 \u201d 11. 53 Braidotti, \u201cFeminist Epistemology  after Postmodernism,\u201d 66. 54 Pande, Squee from the Margins, 116.Mobilizing  MachinesPart 5This page intentionally left blankHow Do We Talk about   Things That Are Happening  without Talking about   Things That Are Happening?Designer Roundtable #5FEATURING:Mike Ren Yi, a game designer and filmmaker based in Shanghai, working at the intersection of games, anima-tion, and films. He is currently a video producer at RADII China, and before that he was a level designer at Ubisoft Shanghai. He also runs Branches: Interactive Storytelling, a community and workshop series centered around narrative-driven interactive stories. His  independent video game proj-ects about China- US relationships include Hazy Days (2016), a breathing simulator set in China; Novel Contain-ment (2020), a docu- game reflecting the COVID outbreak; and Yellow Face (2019), a game about casual racism targeted  toward Asian Americans.Pamela Punzalan, a Nebula Award\u2013 nominated queer Filipina game designer, editor, writer, cultural  consultant, and sensitivity reader based in Metro Manila. She has pursued a master\u2019s degree in literary and cultural studies at the Ateneo de Manila University and taught at high 270 Designer Roundtable 5school and university levels. Beyond producing her own games, Pam has been part of the team for proj ects like The Islands of Sina Una (2021), the D&D Cultural and Ancestry Zine, Spire: Shadow Operations (2020), and Thirsty Sword Lesbians (2021).Melos Han- Tani, a Tokyo- based game developer, composer, and program-mer who is the cocreator of the Anodyne series (2013\u201319), Even the Ocean (2016), and Sephonie (2022). Previously a game design and game  music lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he also created the game All Our Asias (2018) and enjoys walking outdoors and writing about games on his blog. He runs the game studio Analgesic Productions with Marina Kittaka.Yuxin Gao, a Chinese game de-veloper and producer based in the United States and an MFA in game design from New York University. Her work explores the intersection of journalism and games. During the Hong Kong extradition bill protests in 2019, Gao curated the Year of the Pig exhibition at Babycastles gallery in New York, showcasing indie games made in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. In 2020, she directed and programmed Out for Delivery, a 360- degree interactive documentary following a food delivery courier at the start of the pandemic in China.Mike Ren Yi:  After I joined some game jams in New York, I moved out to Shanghai in 2014, and within a month I got a job at a mobile game com pany that was  doing free- to- play games.  After that, I worked at Ubisoft [the French game com pany known for the Assassin\u2019s Creed series, the Far Cry series, and  others] Shanghai for two and a half years\u2014 I was about four years in the video game industry and in Shanghai\u2014 and then I left. Now a lot of my work talks about China, but it\u2019s also not talking about China. I think it\u2019s a valid point to ask if I\u2019m gonna get in trou ble for making  these games, and I think, honestly, I do have a certain amount of privilege that\u2019s offered to me  because even though I\u2019m living in China, I\u2019m not a Chinese citizen. And in my games, I try to not actively reference China. The games have an aesthetic of what the city looks like to me, and I use games to view  things happening around me. It\u2019s a way for me to  process thoughts. I\u2019m a Chinese immigrant, and when I first got to Amer i ca, it was quite difficult. But I think having a Gameboy Color  really changed that. I was growing up at a time where Pok\u00e9mon was the  thing, which, thank God for that,  because in the very beginning it was the only way I could communicate and connect with  people.Pamela Punzalan: For video games, Filipinos are primarily the invisible hands of development. So nobody  really talks theory, they only produce; even the  How Do We Talk about Things? 271big universities do not have a formal game design course. Instead, we have our equivalent of blue- collar vocational schools that do game design. I grew up thinking that game design was merely a hobby\u2014 thinking this was a mix, of course, of traditional Filipino upbringing where they think that art is pretty, but you  don\u2019t actually go into it for a  career  unless you want to starve. The Square Enix store does not have the Philippines listed as a country.  There are a lot of game studios that just forget we even exist:  there\u2019s an idea that Filipinos do not play games.  Because beyond being the invisible hands, we are also the invisible market. We speak  English very well, we consume primarily  English media, and yet most big companies ignore us. I want to change that. And the first way of  doing that is to actually have publishing studios and means that  will let  people put their games out.To Mike\u2019s point: Ubisoft hit Manila too. Well, not Manila, actually. They went down to a province in 2015. And their hiring policy was fascinating. They did not get experienced  people very often. They built from the ground up. They  were specifically looking for a few experienced heads to manage proj ects and bring a local face. But the main hiring base  were all straight out of college. And  those kids moved on to develop, I think, [the Assassin\u2019s Creed games] Odyssey [2018] and Valhalla [2020].Mike Ren Yi: Yeah,  they\u2019re very global focused. The heads from France or Montreal would basically find locals to hire.  There\u2019s a  thing in Shanghai where every one who works in the industry has done time at Ubisoft  because it\u2019s the best school you can go to learn a specific type of design, which is open world design, or the Ubisoft philosophy on that genre.Melos Han- Tani: What are the local views on game design? Do they tend to agree with what Ubisoft teaches? Or do they go against that?Mike Ren Yi: Ubisoft has a very specific methodology for open world de-sign, which is also one of the reasons every thing feels quite copy- and- paste between their games. I  don\u2019t want to generalize too much, but that was my feeling at Ubisoft Shanghai when we  were working on some proj ects. But  every studio around the world has a dif fer ent way of working, and with  these big proj ects, the methodology needs to go across all  these teams. It\u2019s a  really in ter est ing way of fragmenting parts of a game, to basically not outsource per se but to have an entire com pany over  here  doing one  little ele ment of a big open world. One of the fun  things that Ubisoft Shanghai loves to say is that 272 Designer Roundtable 5almost  every animal in Ubisoft games\u2014 the AI, the be hav ior, the gameplay\u2014is made in Ubisoft Shanghai.Yuxin Gao: Mike\u2019s point about getting in trou ble for making games about China makes me think about how  people look at Out for Delivery [Gao\u2019s 2020 360- degree documentary game about a courier\u2019s life during early COVID time in Beijing]. When  people see a  political game, they think it must be to criticize the government. But that\u2019s something I\u2019m not trying to do directly, for a specific reason. I feel the purpose of the work is for  people to be able to experience a small trace of history in my home country, where newspaper censorship has been so tight that it\u2019s difficult to figure out what has actually happened. So my focus is not  really to anger or point fin gers. And I still  don\u2019t want the games to be banned in China. So a lot of times my approach is to reflect individual stories.  People come across my work and ask, \u201cWhy are you making this? This is  going to endanger you.\u201d But I tell them I just want to preserve the moment, or in some way leave traces of it.Melos Han- Tani: I won der how  others have dealt with the kind of pressure that comes about when, for example, a white person plays a game by some-one from China and may read it as representative of  every Chinese person. How do  others think about that unreasonable view that a single person can represent entire groups of  people? Do you choose to ignore it?Pamela Punzalan: That is a question that preoccupies a lot of the indie table-top [nondigital games] space in the Philippines,  because the barriers of entry are massive. My group, Play without Apology, got involved with Gamers and Gaming Meets Philippines (GnG), who  were into  organizing miniconventions specific to tabletop gamers, and who  later helped us set up the first minicon for gamers who  were  women and\/or queer. But actually producing a game where you can see yourself is hard. You  will have no audience in the Philip-pines; they  will not understand you. You\u2019ll barely have an audience in North Amer i ca  unless you want to put up with constantly being told, \u201cOh, this is such a unique Filipino theme,\u201d which is a very strange statement given that we  don\u2019t even know what \u201cFilipino\u201d is.Melos Han- Tani:  There\u2019s a lot of ways of  going at Asianness through games. What tends to be common is some aspect of preserving  either past or pre sent history within the game. So that could be researching the past of the country,  How Do We Talk about Things? 273or portraying a present- day event. I think that\u2019s one unifying thread I see amongst creators who are not just making games for the commercial status quo. Asian creators tend to be concerned with putting history or their real ity into the game in some form. So, for me, for a long time, I wondered, \u201cHow do I talk about being Asian?\u201d But then eventually I realized this is a question that has no answer  because  there\u2019s no fixed group or culture of Asianness. So I feel the best  thing I can do, perhaps, is to pick certain aspects of history. Marina [Kittaka] and I both had a similar experience of growing up in insulated parts of the USA, when the virtual space of Twitter during Black Lives  Matter and Ferguson exposed us to lots of ideas, and at a far faster rate than our schools. So our goals now are to give new experiences to  people playing our games that get them to think more in depth about Amer i ca and themselves.Mike Ren Yi: When I was making Yellow Face [Yi\u2019s 2019 game about anti- Asian microaggressions], it was coming from a place of hatred. I was  really frustrated with a lot of  things\u2014in my personal life, and also in media repre-sen ta tions of Asians. Making the game was cathartic for me. I remember I had a white guy afterward who was like, \u201cHey,  great game. I wanted to share it, but it\u2019s kind of weird.\u201d Then he threw one of the jokes in the game back at me. He said, \u201cI guess you  really do look like the guy from The Hangover.\u201d And I thought, this is so fascinating: this person thinks  they\u2019re not the person I\u2019m talking about in the game. Like, \u201cOh, that\u2019s not me, that\u2019s bad white  people. I\u2019m a good white person.\u201d The way that they generalize Asians is the same way that they can separate themselves from other white  people.Yuxin Gao: Sometimes I ask myself if I\u2019m making games just  because I came to New York and met friends who are curious about Asian and Chinese experi-ences. Sometimes I won der if my work is intentionally made \u201ctoo Chinese\u201d to satisfy the craving for Chinese content. \u201cWould Out for Delivery be in ter est ing to play for someone who lives in China and speaks Chinese?\u201d \u201cWould Year of the Pig be as well received if it  were exhibited in China?\u201d I think about  these questions. I am self- conscious about telling Chinese stories in the  English language. I want to make sure they are true to what I experienced and how I feel, not ideas I get from reading  English media. Since I speak both languages and spend time in both countries  every year, it\u2019s easy to recognize that two power ful ideology\/propaganda machines are constantly blasting their realities at me. When making anything social or  political, I need to be careful about  these  things. When I was making Out for Delivery, I was pretty confident 274 Designer Roundtable 5about my motivation. I care about mi grant workers. When I lived in Beijing, I  really felt for them when I read about the massive cleanup\u2014or demolishing\u2014of suburban Beijing in 2017 that forced a lot of  people out of the city. The stories of  these  people touched me, and I always wanted to pursue it.  There are times, though, when the idea of specializing in Chinese stories is stifling.Mike Ren Yi: It\u2019s  really fascinating to be a designer in China now. How do we talk about  things that are happening without talking about  things that are happening? One of the in ter est ing  things about working in China is every one seems to have an understanding of what is socially and po liti cally acceptable and what  isn\u2019t. Games are in ter est ing  because  people  don\u2019t  really take them that seriously  here. Even when I talk to industry designers in Shanghai,  they\u2019re shocked and appalled that you can make games about serious  things. And one of the cool  things I love about games is that through interaction, we can express our feelings and emotions. Like, you can put the player into a situation where  they\u2019re not empowered, and what if the verb is not \u201cto shoot\u201d?  These  little indie games I make are experiments on the form of games, attempts to take  things the player is familiar with and ascribe new goals, which is sometimes uncomfortable.Pamela Punzalan: That resonates with me,  because I am on the fringes as the person of color in the region. The question I\u2019m getting from you, Mike, is  people telling you that you  will get in trou ble for making a game about China. But what me and my colleagues tend to get is, \u201cWhere\u2019s the Filipino in your game? I thought you  were Filipino. Why are you not writing Filipino narratives?\u201d And one of the issues that we have in our BIPOC spaces is that many designers in tabletop who are  people of color insist that they can speak for\u00a0all  people of color. They feel their otherness allows them to do that  because they are an other in a white space, completely forgetting the fact that  people like me exist [in the Philippines]. And I  really like how you pointed out, Mike, that games evoke feelings and actions and simulation,  because in tabletop we play games, but they are not programmed. They  don\u2019t have par tic u lar algorithms, and  there is no set path for you. In tabletop, we can decide that  whatever is written in the rule book is wrong. The tabletop is supposed to be fully collaborative and completely mutable. And that type of immersion merits a lot more study than what\u2019s currently given to it. And on a discursive level, we have to move away from using video game studies frameworks to study tabletop. How Do We Talk about Things? 275Melos Han- Tani: I think it\u2019s impor tant to allow  people to explore history or write about more recent topics\u2014 like, Asian creators who just want to show what it\u2019s like living in 2021\u00a0in Taiwan, or want to talk about the  Japanese colonial period of Taiwan. At Analgesic Productions, we make commercial games, but they tend to be much more informed by par tic u lar aspects of history, and in thinking about ourselves and where  we\u2019re living. Compared to the average commercial game developer, Marina and I do a lot more reading and research, even if it  doesn\u2019t necessarily make its way into the final games. In some ways our work is trying to get  people to think about life outside of Amer i ca\u2014 partially informed by how I\u2019m from the USA but living in Tokyo now. Or how  there are complex relations between countries, and how \u201ccountries\u201d are not even a fixed or timeless concept.Yuxin Gao: In my own work, in retrospect, I often ask, \u201cWho am I making this for?\u201d In Out for Delivery, the choice of following a courier and that op-portunity of witnessing the shutting down of Wuhan city at the very morning that the lockdowns happened was just  because I was looking for footage that would be visually in ter est ing for 360- degree video. I was scouting in all dif-fer ent places in China, shooting sixteen hours of footage trying to tell stories about mi grant workers in quickly urbanizing Chinese cities. Two days before my flight back to the US, I  couldn\u2019t sleep and was anxious  because I filmed all  these amazing locations, but I  wasn\u2019t sure that I would be able to connect them. I de cided to try to follow someone on a vehicle. A courier would be the perfect subject  because they are gig economy workers, and a lot of them are mi grant workers. Also, they bike around the city, providing a visual treat of the constantly changing city landscape. They interact with the locals in close proximity and reveal their strug gles through everyday conversations. So when I heard about the [COVID- 19] lockdown that morning, I was already on my way to film the couriers. Wuhan was shutting down, and couriers  were having  these conversations, just joking about  going home to play games all day. I felt that it was like being at the right place at the right time. But also, it was the technical decision that led me  there.Pamela Punzalan: In terms of personal design, I am very interested in seeing what has not been explored yet. My game Asian  Acceptance (2020) came from wanting to show  people the unique, quiet terror of living in a country that feels that you  shouldn\u2019t exist.  Because\u2014 this is gonna sound very blunt\u2014 white  people like to think that they know what protest games are. But I  don\u2019t 276 Designer Roundtable 5think they do. Not when  you\u2019ve got an antiterrorism bill in Manila that could literally have  people at my door right now if they found out that I was talking about this. Nobody talks about that. Nobody writes about that. And some  people also accuse my country of being passive. \u201cWhy  don\u2019t you protest? Why  don\u2019t you talk about it more, and why  don\u2019t you create more games?\u201d But I like to throw the question back: \u201cHow, when we  don\u2019t even have the words?\u201d It\u2019s a collective experience of trauma. How do you begin with that when your own history is a patchwork? It has been for centuries. We  were colonized five times. Where do you begin? What is culture? Who are you? And how do you define that for yourself when every one  will tell you  you\u2019re  doing it wrong? I want to impress the idea that fun also means profoundly disturbing. If it disturbs you, then  there is an in ter est ing kind of enjoyment to that,  because it made you step out of yourself. If I could make more games that have  those moments, I\u2019ve done my job.The formulation of this essay begins with my personal experience as a Black nerd (Blerd) growing up in New York City who watched anime, played  Japanese fighting games, and listened to East Coast hip- hop during the early 2000s. For this generation of millennials of color,  these interests  were not unusual. In his now- seminal article \u201cJapan\u2019s Gross National Cool,\u201d Douglas McGray argues that despite economic stagnation, by the year 2002 Japan was becoming a cultural superpower through the global exportation of pop Introduction: Theorizing the BlerdA man from Texas[ ] had told me how astonished he was when he went to Shibuya. He said: \u201cI thought I was in Harlem or someplace, all  those kids walking around looking like black hip- hop artists. . . . What was amazing was,  here they are completely copying the fashions of African- American kids.\u201d\u2014 Ryu Murakami, In the Miso SoupHip- Hop and  Fighting GamesLocating the Blerd between New York and JapanAnthony Dominguez13278  Anthony Dominguezculture phenomena like Pok\u00e9mon (1996) and Hello Kitty (1974).1 Missing from McGray\u2019s analy sis, however, are the ways in which Black culture and producers have also influenced and remixed  Japanese pop culture, and for the purposes of this essay, the crossovers between Black culture and  Japanese fight-ing games.As media scholar Yoshimasa Kijima details,  Japanese fighting games evolved from the arcade genre of side- scrolling beat-\u2019em- ups, like Final Fight (1989). In side- scrolling beat-\u2019em- ups, players battled enemies in fictional-ized settings based on real environments, such as Final Fight\u2019s Metro City being a stand-in for New York City. Kijima highlights that the beat-\u2019em-up, and soon thereafter the fighting- game genre,  were distinct in the large scale of their settings, which reflected a sightseeing impetus.2 Street Fighter II (1991) features stages ranging from a casino in Las Vegas, to a flamenco tavern in Spain, to a feudal  castle in Japan.Despite their  Japanese production, by reflecting a global influence through sightseeing, fighting games and beat-\u2019em- ups offered early repre sen ta tions of Black characters and culture in video games. Games like Sega\u2019s Streets of Rage (1991) franchise or Capcom\u2019s Street Fighter series allowed players to pick a multitude of Black characters. Furthermore Capcom\u2019s Street Fighter III: 3rd\u00a0Strike (1999), Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes (2000), and Capcom vs. snk 2 (2001) featured soundtracks composed of jungle, hip- hop, r&B, and jazz  music. Black hip- hop artists like MF Doom and Madlib would also go on to sample sound clips from Street Fighter II on their landmark  album, Madvillainy (2004), whereas the American television- programming block Adult Swim would air commercials for anime set to trip- hop  music by the likes of legendary Black producer J Dilla.From  these events and mixed media emerge the historical presence and influence of Black communities within the  Japanese pop culture of fighting games. In this chapter, I demonstrate how the metaphysical environment of an arcade and its community functions as an intersectional social space. By developing a brief historical overview of the Blerd identity in relation to New York City\u2019s fighting- game community (fGC), I argue that this specific instance of Blerd culture in New York City during the early to mid-2000s was formed by the synthesis of New York City\u2019s hip- hop culture and  Japanese otaku culture. Hip- Hop and Fighting Games 279More than Just BlackGame studies scholars Michael Ryan Skolnik and Steven Conway link the space of the video game arcade to masculinity, arguing that video game arcades are both physical spaces for play and metaphysical spaces in which identities form.3 Facets of arcade culture, like competing over high scores, led to the emergence of machismo attitudes, and even when the popularity of arcades seceded to home consoles, the machismo attitude persisted across mediums, leading to the tired trope of video games as a masculine hobby. TreaAndrea Russworm points out, however, that video games are also perceived as a white masculine hobby by fans who police the borders of fandom.4 My own interven-tion  here lies in dispelling this myth by demonstrating how the Blerd identity, and Blerd communities and culture, can form at the crossroads between physi-cal and digital spaces.The Black media scholar Anna Everett argues that online spaces have been key to the creation of Blerd communities. As Everett details, early discussions of the internet portrayed the frontier of cyberspace as a primarily white space; Black  people seldom if ever appeared in specialized computer magazines like Wired and Mondo 2000.5 My research therefore focuses on how Black social spaces centered around nerd culture can dismantle racist ideologies, such as what Everett calls, \u201cblack technophobia,\u201d the belief that Black communities  don\u2019t participate in digital spaces.6As Kishonna\u00a0L. Gray contends, Black gamers often strug gle with being perceived as more than gamers who are \u201cjust black.\u201d Rather, Gray contin-ues, the identity of Black gamers operates within a nexus that includes \u201cskill sets, intellectual contributions, and technical expertise.\u201d7 The Blerd must be understood as more than just a Black nerd; the Blerd is a Black nerd whose identity forms at the intersection of their race, gender, class, and cultural consumption\u2014in this case  Japanese fighting games and anime.8The modern Blerd as an identity in the United States emerged  toward the late 1980s and early 1990s in the character of Steve Urkel from the Ameri-can  television show  Family  Matters (1989\u201398). Yet in the next section I also complicate this reading of Urkel through my own personal experience of \u201cdiscovering\u201d the Blerd identity at a panel on the subject at the Anime NYC 2017 convention, thereby exposing the shortcomings and limitations of Blerd characters like Urkel. It is through this personal experience that I shift to discussing the fGC, a community I participated in as a fan, playing  Japanese fighting games and watching video game streams online.280  Anthony DominguezHistoricizing the Blerd within the FGCIn 2006, the streaming group known as \u201cTeam Spooky\u201d would begin spear-heading early cultivation of New York City\u2019s fGC through grassroots efforts like tournament gatherings, and  later online streaming on platforms like Twitch and YouTube. Key moments in Team Spooky\u2019s history include the \u201c Battle by the Gazebo\u201d (BBG) tournament series centered on the  Japanese anime fighting game Melty Blood (2002). Held in a public park adjacent to the Chinatown Fair Arcade, BBG continued the practice of repurposing public space that grew from the practice of hip- hop block parties in the South Bronx during the 1980s.As arcades throughout New York City closed down, such as Playland in Times Square, Chinatown Fair Arcade emerged as the premiere hub for New York City\u2019s fGC to gather. Chinatown Fair Arcade would also close in 2011, but in 2012 it would reopen  under the new owner ship of Lonnie Sobel, who wished to rebrand the arcade as more  family friendly. Lobel\u2019s remarks regarding the old Chinatown Fair atmosphere, the arcade\u2019s subsequent rebranding, and the removal of the fighting games that made the arcade  popular become part of a longer history concerning moral panics over arcades and their demographics.In 2011, following the closure of Chinatown Fair, former employee Henry Cen would go on to open the Next Level Arcade in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, with the goal of providing a new space for the community who used to gather at Chinatown Fair. Operating within Next Level, Team Spooky would begin streaming a variety of tournaments online. The fusion of Next Level\u2019s physical space with the digital platform of Twitch served as the meta phorical nexus between New York and Japan, a space where members of the Blerd community could gather and create their own unique culture.At tournaments held at Next Level, players like IfC Yipes would become even more notable for their commentating prowess. While commentating has always been a part of the fGC, streaming practices on Twitch and YouTube would bring commentating into the wider public. I argue that this commen-tary harks back to the  performance of masculinity found in arcade spaces but also, as with \u201990s hip- hop, references the local culture. In this case, the com-mentary of IfC Yipes explic itly references the culture of New York City and yet becomes remixed by the commentary\u2019s application to  Japanese fighting games, thereby producing a new subculture. If commentary can be linked to the hip- hop MC through signifying, then by commentating on Marvel vs Capcom 2, a  Hip- Hop and Fighting Games 281 Japanese fighting game, Yipes\u2019s commentary also serves as an example of how this specific subculture of the fGC fits between hip- hop and otaku culture.What Is a Blerd?Originally slated to appear in only one episode of  Family  Matters, the char-acter Steve Urkel turned out to be wildly  popular and soon became the pro-tagonist of the series. With his suspenders, thick glasses, and high- pitched voice, Urkel served as an emblem of American nerds during the late 1980s. Yet Urkel\u2019s identity as a Black man must be considered in relation to his iden-tity as a nerd. Ron Eglash emphasizes Urkel as a prime example of the Blerd within American media and points  toward Urkel\u2019s appeal in how he \u201c[op-poses] the myth of biological determinism\u201d and \u201cmust pull himself up . . . the social status rungs of youth subculture.\u201d9While Urkel may be proof against certain racial  stereotypes, however, he becomes indicative of  others. Urkel\u2019s a scientific genius, but his dorky personality puts him at a disadvantage in his love life, and he begins to at-tract the attention of  women only  after he develops a potion that allows him to switch personalities.  Under this new guise Steve Urkel becomes Stefan Urquelle. Stefan  doesn\u2019t slouch; he speaks in a cool baritone, and, perhaps most impor tant, lacks Steve\u2019s scientific genius. While Stefan recalls Black r&B or soul musicians, his  performance of Black masculinity serves as visual codes for the type of Black masculinity that would emerge alongside hip- hop and gangster rap in the early 1990s.Robin Boylorn highlights that films influenced by hip- hop and gangster rap, like Boyz N the Hood (1991), Juice (1992), and Menace II Society (1993), \u201cdictated black masculinity in real life.\u201d10 In  these films, Black men  were expected to be heterosexual, demeaning  toward  women, aggressive, and virile, traits that resurface in Stefan. Yet  these two personalities of Steve and Stefan reinforce notions that Black  people cannot be nerds without sac-rificing supposed notions of what it means to be Black. Judith Roof positions Urkel within a lineage of scientists who gain sexual prowess but in turn give up their intelligence.11 In  Family  Matters, Urkel must choose between being \u201cBlack\u201d and being a nerd. Consequently, Urkel must  either be a genius or sublimate his sexual desire, thus he fails in being a more complex repre sen-ta tion of the Blerd, one who can be a nerd without needing to reaffirm their Black racial identity.282  Anthony DominguezRedefining the Blerd as OtakuIn 2017, I attended a panel at Anime NYC titled \u201cNerds on Hip- Hop: Bridg-ing Anime and Hip- Hop.\u201d Hosted by Victoria Johnson and Marcus Wolfe and featuring three guest speakers\u2014 Detroit- based rapper Noveliss, cultural critic Valerie Complex, and graphic novelist Stephane Metayer\u2014 the panel discussed the intersection between hip- hop and anime culture. In recount-ing how she got into anime, Complex describes discovering the series 8 Man  After (1993): \u201cI saw one that  really changed my perspective. . . . It was called 8 Man  After. It was one that  really impacted me cuz [sic] it was the first time that I saw a Black character in anime cuz I  didn\u2019t know Black  people  were in that [anime] at the time.\u201d12 In becoming a global product, by the 1980s, anime began to reflect a global audience by blurring cultural origin and loosening the requirements of cultural repre sen ta tion.13 Just as in the  earlier examples of beat-\u2019em-up and fighting games, in having Black repre sen ta tion, anime like 8 Man  After crosses the borders between global production and national identity and thus offers an alternative of Black repre sen ta tion found in characters like Urkel or  those populating New Black Hollywood films\u2014 a repre sen ta tion defined by  either the sup-pressing of Black male sexual desire in order to be seen as an au then tic nerd, or the incitement of Black male sexual desire in order to be seen as authentically Black.By banding together to talk about our shared interests and the difficul-ties  we\u2019ve experienced due to our identities as Black gamers\/anime fans, we  were forming a network of support and  resistance. Yet we  were also a specific category of Blerds who had gathered to form this community at an anime convention; we  were also otaku, a  Japanese word first coined in the 1970s to describe a nerd, usually a nerd obsessed with anime. To be an otaku, however, one  doesn\u2019t necessarily need to be a fan of anime.  Japanese scholar Izumi Tsuji describes the \u201ctrain otaku,\u201d an otaku utterly devoted to the study of  Japanese trains;14 Yoshimasa Kijima, on the other hand, outlines the \u201cfighting- gamer otaku,\u201d an otaku devoted to playing fighting games competitively.15  These identities should be thought of not as hierarchical and fixed but, rather, as horizontal and amorphous, with communities that frequently overlap. Fur-thermore, while the word otaku originates from Japan,  Japanese scholars like Azuma Hiroki have drawn attention to how the otaku identity is not exclusive to Japan, once again reminding us how  Japanese pop culture traveled beyond the borders of Japan via globalization.16 Hip- Hop and Fighting Games 283 Those of us at Anime NYC had been exposed to imported  Japanese pop cul-ture at some point in our lives,  whether anime such as Dragon Ball Z (1989) and Pok\u00e9mon, or video game consoles from  Japanese companies like Sony (PlayStation), Sega (Genesis, Dreamcast), and Nintendo (SNES, Nintendo 64, GameCube). Our communities  were products of globalization, but each\u00a0suc-ceeding generation had been defined by diff er ent communication infrastruc-tures. For the Blerds at Anime NYC 2017, it was access to the internet, which alerted us that we  were indeed not alone. We  were not simply consuming  Japanese pop culture, however, but also filtering it through our personal ex-periences as Blerds, thus finding connections between Black culture and  Japanese media, such as the myriad of connections between hip- hop  music and  Japanese pop culture: Kanye West\u2019s homage to Katsuhiro Otomo\u2019s Akira in his  music video for Stronger as well as his collaboration with  Japanese art-ist Takashi Murakami on his third  album, Graduation (2007); Lupe Fiasco directly referencing the character Dhalsim from Street Fighter II on his track \u201cYoga Flame\u201d; or RZA from Wu- Tang Clan reading Goku from Dragon Ball Z as the con temporary Black man in Amer i ca.  These examples alongside the anecdote I\u2019ve examined  here denote how Blerd communities remix  Japanese pop culture through a Black lens to produce new forms of culture and fan-doms. In  doing so, the Blerd as an otaku significantly differs from a  stereotype like Steve Urkel,  because it allows the Blerd to be both Black and a nerd.Locating the Blerd within the FGCI\u2019ve talked about your parents\u2019 responsibility for making sure you stay on track and you get your homework done, and  don\u2019t spend  every waking hour in front of the TV or with the Xbox.\u2014 former US president Barack ObamaMy experience at Anime NYC led me to rethink the shaping of my own Blerd identity and consequently my role within New York City\u2019s fGC as a participant- observer. Like the community I had encountered at the Nerds on Hip- Hop panel, the fGC held an impor tant role in shaping con temporary Blerd identity through the repre sen ta tion of Black characters in fighting games and the presence of Black fandoms in the community. While I grew up playing fighting games, I did not become aware of the wider fGC  until 284  Anthony Dominguezthe advent of video game streaming around the year 2011 on platforms like UStream and Twitch. On Twitch I watched the streaming channel Team Spooky,  because they  were also based in New York and featured players and commentators like the team\u2019s  founder, Victor \u201cSpooky\u201d Fontanez; Sanford Kelly; Justin Wong; Arturo Sanchez; and Mike \u201cYipes\u201d Mendoza. Here was a multiracial group of  people from New York City who embodied the city\u2019s hip- hop braggadocio in their playstyle and commentary but also, through the practice of streaming, openly consumed  Japanese media and thereby challenged conventional notions of Black identity. In essence, watch-ing Team Spooky was unknowingly also my first encounter with a wider Blerd community. Yet this encounter was not entirely accidental. While anyone interested in the fGC would perhaps stumble on Team Spooky,  there  were specific material, cultural, and technological shifts that led to the popular-ity of both Team Spooky and fighting games at large around the year 2011.The basis for Team Spooky had been around for years before the establish-ment of Twitch, but it would be wrong to argue that Team Spooky\u2019s produc-tion shifted from a physical to digital space much like the shift from arcades to console gaming at home. Rather, Team Spooky\u2019s streaming practices highlight the overlap between physical and digital spaces. As I previously mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, in 2008 Victor Fontanez hosted the fighting- game tournament series  Battle by the Gazebo (BBG), centered on the anime- fighter Melty Blood. Fontanez held BBG in a public park next to Chinatown Fair,  because the arcade did not have a Melty Blood cabinet. To facilitate the tournament, Fontanez and other attendees would gather their laptops and arcade sticks and congregate around a nearby Snapple machine, whose outlet they siphoned for power.Although the park was not an arcade, by hosting the tournament in the park Fontanez and the other players re- created the arcade environment. In essence, the BBG tournament gave players interested in playing Melty Blood a space to gather when  there  wasn\u2019t one available. In his essay Times Square Blue, Samuel Delany highlights the importance of public space for communal building. For Delany, public spaces in the city could facilitate the gathering of interracial and interclass gatherings.17 By repurposing the space of the park and its outlets, BBG had a similar function in creating an interclass and interracial otaku community around Melty Blood.BBG can also be linked to previous practices of repurposing public space in New York City\u2014 the tournament shares an affinity with hip- hop block parties  Hip- Hop and Fighting Games 285held in the Bronx during the early \u201970s. At this point in time, hip- hop had not emerged into the mainstream and consequently lacked any formal space to be celebrated. Instead, parties  were held on the street, and djs would bring their equipment to  these public areas and station themselves near outlets whose power they could use for their turntables.18Although the events of BBG and hip- hop block parties are separated by space and time, they both demonstrate Delany\u2019s argument while also being rooted within the specific geography and history of New York City. Simi-lar to the shift of hip- hop from block parties to clubs and dancehalls, Melty Blood in Amer i ca would eventually move from the streets to the sanctioned spaces of the arcade and  hotel ballrooms, where bigger tournaments like the Evolution Championship Series would be held. Still, however, by hosting the informal BBG, Fontanez allowed for the growth of both the fGC and Blerd communities.Chinatown Fair and Next LevelWhile BBG evinces the importance of public and informal spaces in the for-mation of Blerd communities, New York City\u2019s fGC also had the Chinatown Fair Arcade. By 2008, Chinatown Fair remained the only traditional arcade left in New York City  after rising rent costs led to the closure of Playland in Times Square. Owned by Sam Palmer, an Indian immigrant, Chinatown Fair focused its business on competitive  Japanese fighting games like Street Fighter, Tekken, and Marvel vs. Capcom. Consequently, it was at Chinatown Fair that prominent fGC players from New York City would gather, such as Sanford Kelly, Arturo Sanchez, Mike Mendoza, and Justin Wong. Chinatown Fair thus served as a point of origin for the Blerd community and subculture emerg-ing from New York City\u2019s fGC, such as the  Battle by the Gazebo tournament series previously held next door.In 2011, though, Chinatown Fair would also close down. It reopened the following year  under the new owner ship of Lonnie Sobel. Unlike Palmer, Sobel did not express interest in the historical background of Chinatown Fair as a grassroots community for New York City\u2019s fGC. Rather,  under Sobel\u2019s owner ship, the  Japanese fighting games that attracted the fGC to Chinatown Fair and led to Chinatown Fair\u2019s reputation  were removed. In an interview with The Verge, Sobel expressed his desire to transform Chinatown Fair into \u201ca cross between Dave & Busters and Chuck\u00a0E. Cheese.\u201d19 In Kurt Vincent\u2019s 286  Anthony Dominguezdocumentary on Chinatown Fair, The Lost Arcade (2015), Sobel\u2019s grand son reveals that Sobel wished to rebrand the arcade to be more  family friendly in order to deter the \u201cteen agers hanging out  there.\u201dSobel\u2019s rebranding of \u201cChinatown Fair Arcade\u201d into \u201cChinatown Fair  Family Fun Center,\u201d which included the removal of  Japanese fighting games and thereby the previous fGC audience, marked the loss of a Blerd space. Dmitri Williams contends that news media often reported arcades as breed-ing grounds for crime that threatened conservative social values,20 so Sobel\u2019s remarks about the old Chinatown Fair become situated into a history of moral panic regarding the metaphysical space of arcades as intersectional spaces.In The Lost Arcade, while attendees do attest that Chinatown Fair often reeked of cigarettes and that its basement walls  were dank, thus producing an atmosphere of \u201cgrime\u201d not too dissimilar from the rest of New York City, they also fondly maintain that Chinatown Fair served as a communal space, especially for players of color from working- class backgrounds. The closure of Chinatown Fair would subsequently lead its former man ag er, Henry Cen, to establish the Next Level arcade in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, in 2011. Next Level would serve as the spiritual successor to Chinatown Fair, though it would also differ from it. Twitch and UStream  were emerging online as the first platforms to embrace live- streaming, and as a grassroots space, Next Level would be key in the growth of the fGC\/Blerd community through streaming practices.At Next Level, Team Spooky would emerge as a prominent streamer within the fGC,  handling production and streams for tournaments held at the arcade. It was precisely  these same streams that led me to discover the wider fGC and retrospectively, a Blerd community. Although I lived in New York City, I had never been to Next Level, but through Twitch I could  metaphorically inhabit Next Level alongside other viewers. In this regard, Twitch, like the public park where Fontanez held BBG, became an extension of the arcade environment. While home consoles  were now the dominant way to play fighting games, streaming illustrated a new way that arcades could still survive despite shifts in gaming culture and rising rent costs in the city. Streaming therefore encompassed a fusion of physical and digital spaces and, in the case of the fGC, a fusion of New York City\u2019s hip- hop culture and  Japanese otaku culture.In the creation of this Blerd community, the  labor  behind streaming prac-tices must also be acknowledged. At Ultimate Fighting Gamer 8, Fontanez held a panel on the origins of Team Spooky and discussed the technologi- Hip- Hop and Fighting Games 287cal logistics  behind streaming production. Fontanez revealed that with the growth of streaming in 2012, Team Spooky also expanded their production, shifting from just streaming gameplay footage to including a web camera that could also live- stream commentators and players. Through the streaming of players, commentators, and gameplay, Team Spooky offered repre sen ta tions of the Blerd not found elsewhere. Take, for example, the epigraph that opens this section. For then\u2013 US president Barack Obama, playing video games ran antithetical to notions of Black excellence. Instead, Obama encouraged a focus on performing well academically, perhaps at the risk of erasing dif-fer ent Blerd identities. By contrast, in watching Team Spooky\u2019s streams I found Blerd repre sen ta tions that existed between New York City hip- hop culture and  Japanese otaku culture but also within Everett\u2019s concept of Black cyberspace.Commentating as SignifyingOstensibly, the commentator works to provide a play- by- play analy sis, but within the fGC, the commentator also controls the atmosphere of the room\u2014 whether they are working to excite the crowd for an upcoming match or tak-ing a more casual approach by making jokes about the game or the players on stream. Through the practice of signifying, fGC commentators can be linked to the hip- hop MC. Building off the work of Henry Louis Gates\u00a0Jr., who defines signifying as saying one  thing and meaning another, Crystal Belle elaborates that signifying allows the MC to \u201cbring in cultural and historical links to their creativity.\u201d21 Belle uses the example of Jay- Z, who uses wordplay to allude both to his home neighborhood of Bedford Stuyvesant and to the dangers of Black working- class life in New York City.In this regard, the commentator\u2014 like the MC\u2014 brings their local and cul-tural background to their commentary. In his own study of the fGC, Todd\u00a0L. Harper provides an anecdote of the commentator Yipes, praising Yipes for his showmanship but also questioning how New York\u00a0\/\u00a0East Coast culture has influenced Yipes\u2019s commentary.22 The answer to Harper\u2019s question lies in examining how Yipes, a New York\u2013 based commentator, practices signifying.In one famous YouTube video titled \u201cmahvel baybee!,\u201d Yipes\u2019s unique commentary for Marvel vs. Capcom 2 can be heard throughout. In one match, a player can be seen controlling the character Sentinel, but this specific player has chosen the orange- and- blue color scheme for the char-acter. Consequently, Yipes dubs the Sentinel \u201cthe New York Knicks\u201d and, 288  Anthony Dominguezwhen the player loses, yells, \u201cFuck the Knicks.\u201d23 At another point, Yipes compares a combo\u2014 a string of individual hits\u2014to H\u00e4agen- Dazs ice cream  because the player on the receiving end is launched into the air and is thus \u201cscooped.\u201dYipes\u2019s commentary has now become intrinsic to the Marvel vs Capcom community: terms Yipes ad- libbed while commentating have become stan-dard phrases for players. In the  earlier example, \u201cH\u00e4agen- Dazs\u201d referred to aerial combos, but we can also draw attention to the term Pringles, a diff er ent way to describe a player who has weak defense and thus, like the Pringles potato chip, breaks easily. In referencing the New York Knicks, H\u00e4agen- Dazs, and Pringles to define gameplay in Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Yipes employs sig-nifying but does so in a way that brings his specific cultural background into his commentary.ConclusionBy arguing that the New York City\u2019s fGC culture draws influence from hip- hop and otaku communities, I have demonstrated how arcade spaces can be in-tersectional but also expand beyond the space of the arcade,  whether a public park, a Twitch stream, or a YouTube video. Consequently, in examining how the metaphysical space of the arcade can exist in online spaces, we can dispel myths of gaming spaces being perceived as largely white and also reaffirm the existence of a digital Black space. Within this digital Black space\u2014 between New York and Japan\u2014 the hip- hop otaku can be found.It would be naive, however, to believe that the infrastructure that makes  these Blerd communities pos si ble are intrinsically built for that purpose. As the rebranding of the Chinatown Fair arcade demonstrates, an arcade cannot be designated a Blerd space simply by virtue of being an arcade. Similarly, we must also question the infrastructure of online platforms like Twitch and YouTube. In May\u00a02021, Twitch announced the introduction of \u201ctags\u201d to their platform. Tags include race, gender, and sexuality, and they allow for stream-ers to signal  toward their identity. Tags can thus potentially curb the influence of the algorithm by allowing something like the Blerd community to become more vis i ble, thereby making the platform more inclusive.It becomes equally imperative, however, to question how inclusive spaces within the fGC and wider gaming communities actually are. Although Black gamers are more vis i ble within the fGC, Skolnik and Conway remind us that  Hip- Hop and Fighting Games 289the nostalgia for the techno- masculine arcade space also persists within con-temporary attitudes of the fGC.24 The overlap between  performances of mas-culinity within the fGC\/arcade space and hip- hop communities highlights the fact that although  these fandoms can be inclusive, they are far from utopian. Ultimately, though, the fGC does still in some ways foster a sense of commu-nity across overlapping identities,  whether the otaku, Blerd, or hip- hop fan.Notes 1 McGray, \u201cJapan\u2019s Gross National Cool,\u201d 48. 2 Kijima, \u201cThe Fighting Gamer Otaku Community,\u201d 256. 3 Skolnik and Conway, \u201cTusslers, Beatdowns, and  Brothers,\u201d 743. 4 D. Kim et\u00a0al., \u201cRace, Gender, and the Technological Turn,\u201d 156. 5 Everett, Digital Diaspora, 19. 6 Everett, Digital Diaspora, 19. 7 Gray, Intersectional Tech, 24. 8 Although I employ the framework of the Blerd throughout this chapter, I wish to note the diversity of the fGC. The fGC contains intersections beyond just Black American and  Japanese culture, yet I begin this discussion using the framework of the Blerd  because of its roots in my own personal experience. 9 Eglash, \u201cRace, Sex, and Nerds,\u201d 55. 10 Boylorn, \u201cFrom Boys to Men,\u201d 147. 11 Roof, \u201cSex and the Single Nerd,\u201d 219. 12 Nerds on Hip- Hop, \u201cNerds on Hip- Hop.\u201d 13 Darling- Wolf, Imagining the Global, 121. 14 Tsuji, \u201cWhat Are Train Otaku?,\u201d 3. 15 Kijima, \u201cThe Fighting Gamer Otaku Community,\u201d 256. 16 Azuma, Otaku, 10. 17 Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, 111. 18 Diallo, \u201cHip- Hop Cats in the Cradle of Rap,\u201d 3. 19 Kopfstein, \u201cNew York\u2019s Chinatown Fair Arcade Reopens, but the Game Has Changed.\u201d 20 D. Williams, \u201cA Brief Social History of Game Play,\u201d 235. 21 Belle, \u201cFrom Jay- Z to Dead Prez,\u201d 295. 22 Harper, The Culture of Digital Fighting Games, 112. 23 Gabby Jay, \u201cmahvel baybee!\u201d 24 Skolnik and Conway, \u201cTusslers, Beatdowns, and  Brothers,\u201d 758.Introduction: \u201cThis Is What We Do in #AnimalCrossing . . .\u201dOn a clear night, eight  people are huddled on the seashore of an unin-habited island. They are each wearing a formal black dress, a yellow hard hat, a surgical mask, and a black gas mask. Beside them lies an erected gravestone adorned with a candle, a white cosmos, and a  woman\u2019s portrait. Although the portrait appears blurred, it is not difficult to recognize Carrie Lam, who served as the chief executive of Hong Kong from 2017 to 2022. She became an antidemo cratic figure when she proposed an extradition bill in It\u2019s essential for HKers to maintain momentum & raise global awareness. Even though Gov has abused the coronavirus  measures to suppress any form of  protest, we  will try  every means to call for changes. #AnimalCrossingNewHorizons is one of the means for us.\u2014  Joshua Wong, \u201cIt\u2019s Essential for HKers to Maintain Momentum & Raise Global Awareness\u201d\u201cThis Is What We Do\u201dHong Kong Protests in Animal Crossing: New HorizonsHaneul Lee14 \u201cThis Is What We Do\u201d 291early 2019 that \u201cwould allow criminal suspects to be sent to mainland China for trial.\u201d1 Although the bill was withdrawn  later that same year, it triggered massive prodemocracy movements on the streets of Hong Kong against the administrative action to surveil and suppress dissent.The group of eight mourning Lam are in fact gamers inhabiting virtual bodies in the social simulation video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020), and the gamers holding a virtual funeral  service are young Hong Kong protesters. Their in- game  performance looks far removed from any of the  great solemnity, tension, or sense of emergency in street protest scenes captured by mainstream news media. Perhaps this is  because the fake funeral was orchestrated as a form of protest action by a small number of  people acting as game characters in a virtual space. However, the  political activ-ity in the digitally animated island of Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ac) still subverted the antidemo cratic authoritarian status quo by securing the protesters against real- world police brutality while also offering a public and highly vis i ble platform for dissent. Moreover, the protest occurred during the peak of the COVId- 19 crisis, making it a way to shelter in place for protesters.Joshua Wong, a leading activist figure in the Hong Kong protest move-ments since 2014, was one of the participants in the virtual funeral  service for Lam and tweeted the image described above with the following comment (figure\u00a014.1): \u201cThis is what we do in #AnimalCrossing . . . maybe it\u2019s why  these  people are so anxious to go back to the game!!\u201d2 Besides the staging of Lam\u2019s funeral, Hong Kong protesters participated in a variety of other  performances of  political protest in the game, such as putting up a virtual ban-ner displaying the message \u201cLiberate Hong Kong\u201d and launching a harmless (but still resentful) attack with butterfly nets against pictures of antidemo-cratic personages like Carrie Lam or Xi Jinping, president of the  People\u2019s Republic of China (PRC) (figure\u00a014.2).3 Wong and his fellow activists used the online space of ac to stage their protest against the state. In  doing so, they  were able to avoid the dangers both of offline protest and of COVId- 19. That is, they occupied and used this space to perform vari ous modes of protest sheltering from real- life clashes with the Hong Kong riot police. However, this also means they had to adhere to the rules of the game.What do the ac- based Hong Kong protests tell us about gaming- as- protest, or protest- as- gaming? The way gamers circumvent the issue of  political suppression must be examined within the framework and rules of ac. I  will thus investigate how ac engages players through its mechanism of creating a fictional world that is also socially real.  Here Ian Bogost\u2019s reading of ac 14.1. Animal Crossing characters\u2019 fake funeral for Carrie Lam. Screenshot from Joshua Wong (@joshuawongcf), \u201cThis is what we do in #AnimalCrossing . . .\u201d14.2. Protester players whipping Carrie Lam\u2019s face with butterfly nets. Screenshot from Studio Incendo (@Studioincendo), \u201cThis is how #hongkong ppl spend our time during coronavirus lockdown . . .\u201d Note: Studio Incendo\u2019s Twitter page is  currently unavailable. \u201cThis Is What We Do\u201d 293is useful, allowing us to see the ac- based virtual Hong Kong protests as a form of (re)invention of a space where antistate activities can exist unsup-pressed. According to Bogost, ac as \u201ca  political hypothesis\u201d is a place to experiment with life routines, including social interactions with  family mem-bers or friends, to see \u201chow a diff er ent kind of world might work\u2014 one with no losers.\u201d4 In the context of the virtual Hong Kong protests, the protesters, inhabiting a virtual island in ac, made their own safe space, one where they could stay connected with other fellow protesters in diff er ent places or time zones by communicating across game consoles, smartphones, social media, and online forums.The Hong Kong protesters\u2019 networked activities in ac should be viewed as a form of  political participation that occurs in a virtual space, a world  free from police brutality and the pandemic. Thus, I  will pay attention to ac\u2019s \u201cnetwork play mode,\u201d which is available only for Nintendo Switch\u2019s annual membership holders. Playing ac in network play mode, which allows eight ac players to gather at one time, does not simply mean that players can hang out with fellow players. To be able to socialize virtually, players must share a personal Dodo code with trusted  people to visit them on or invite them to the site. It keeps the protesters\u2019 communications and  political actions private and secure.Moreover, it is noteworthy that many protesters during the 2014 Occupy movement in Hong Kong also communicated via \u201cclosed\u201d text apps, which used individual cellular signals, rather than public ones, which used data or Wi- Fi. This fact is useful for understanding how the protesters use ac in a radically playful way as a protest site. As Zhongxuan Lin posits, the rise of social media as a new protest tool points to the rise of a youn ger generation of protesters who are skilled in using digital media technology, and suggests changes in the styles and scales of mobilizing, staging, and participating in social movements.5 The protesters\u2019 abilities to develop their protest tactics by using digital media technologies\u2014 including not only social media but also video games\u2014 have decentralized the social movements in Hong Kong.Even before the ac- based Hong Kong protests,  political activism had al-ready intersected with online life- simulation games such as Linden Lab\u2019s Second Life (2003) or Electronic Arts\u2019 Sims series (2000\u20132023).  These games have provided alternative venues for many social movements, from the 2007 virtual protests of IBM workers in Italy to the Black Lives  Matter rallies that have occurred since 2013 (figure\u00a014.3).6 Protesters have held  political events in virtual spaces to allow a large number of players to see what they are  doing in them. From designing or buying virtual protest gear (banners, pickets, or 294  Haneul Leeclothes) to decorating their game characters to hold or participate in a virtual sit-in demonstration, the protesters have appropriated gaming technologies to playfully express their grievances about real- life prob lems. Their protest-ing as gaming\u2014or gaming as protesting\u2014 has made game spaces function as alternative protest sites.That is, the sheltered spaces the protesters have created within virtual game worlds differ from the protest sites they can physically attend.  These spaces also differ  because of the protesters\u2019 awareness of their positions in them. By dissecting the virtual Hong Kong protest scenes captured in ac, I  will discuss how the ac- based protesters\u2019 playful activities contributed to space- making for their own purposes. Also, through a comparison with other virtual Hong Kong protests that have been mobilized in the larger game world, I  will ex-plore the insulated nature of the networked gaming that the trusted protesters who play ac use. Through a close analy sis of gaming- as- protest, or protest- as- gaming, I  will argue that the closed networked gaming space of ac became a place where radically playful protest activities  were enacted in and beyond ac.The Hong Kong Protests in the Digital Media SpaceSince the handover of Hong Kong to the PRC in 1997, the PRC\u2019s control over the region has increasingly tightened despite the reunification slogan, \u201cOne Country, Two Systems.\u201d Following past social movements, the Hong Kong Federation of Students and Scholarism, a student activist group  organized by 14.3. Ebonix\u2019s \u201cBlack Lives  Matter Rally Pack\u201d for The Sims 4. Image cour-tesy of Ebonix. \u201cThis Is What We Do\u201d 295Agnes Chow, Joshua Wong, and  others in 2014, led the Umbrella Movement.  These young protesters have used digital media\u2014 from social media outlets (Facebook or Twitter) to video games (ac or Liberate Hong Kong [2019])\u2014in diverse ways, with varying degrees of success, to conduct protest tactics against the state. The growth of digital media employment has expanded the range of potential shapes of protest spaces, and varied protest tactics have become available in digital spaces.However, as scholars like Zhongxuan Lin and Laikwan Pang have argued, the Hong Kong protests  were provoked not solely by digital media itself but by protesters who could employ its technology and device for their own use.7 As Lin points out, young activists who  were \u201csophisticated media users\u201d and highly skilled in engaging with vari ous digital media advanced the Umbrella Movement.8 The \u201cinconspicuous\u201d media users (activists) and their \u201cdisor ga-nized\u201d tactics regarding social media technologies made them \u201creor ga nized in  every occupied area at the micro level.\u201d9 The decentralizing of the power of larger social movements was pos si ble  because, as Pang states, \u201csocial media can mediate and liaise  political concerns and private emotions,\u201d which pro-liferate its impact on the larger society or related communities.10 The sharing of frustration, anger, and aspiration on social media often provokes a coun-termovement in and beyond the given media platforms as well.11 Here the Blitzchung incident is a good example of how an individual  political comment made live on YouTube was drawn into a larger  political controversy. At the 2019 Grandmaster Finals for Hearthstone (2014), an online card game from Blizzard Entertainment, Ng Wai Chung, also known as \u201cBlitzchung,\u201d appeared in a postmatch live- stream interview. He was wearing goggles and a gas mask\u2014 a direct visual reference to the Hong Kong protests. And he made an explicit verbal comment about liberating Hong Kong. The interview immediately went viral. Blizzard Entertainment disqualified Blitz-chung, banned him for one year from the Hearthstone League, and deprived him of his rank and prize money.12 In response to public resentment, J. Allen Brack, president of Blizzard Entertainment, reduced the period of suspen-sion to six months and explained that the corporate decision was made \u201cto bring the world together through epic entertainment, celebrate our players, and build diverse and inclusive communities.\u201d13 Yet, Brack\u2019s utopian account indicates the weakness of decentralized protest activity, which the platform  owner can censor and eliminate from the game. The corporate threat dis-closed the counterpower of  independent protest activity to provoke a chain reaction of other protest actions.296  Haneul LeeAs an immediate countermove to his ban, Blitzchung live- streamed a play-through of Liberate Hong Kong (lhk) on the live- streaming platform Twitch. Produced by a group of Hong Kong\u2013 based game developers, lhk centers on a frontline protester defying police brutality on the streets of Hong Kong and includes gameplay tools and mechanics such as rubber bullets, tear gas can-isters, and arrests (figure\u00a014.4). As Josh Ye states, the game was developed to be \u201ca part of the protest movement, taking the fight beyond the streets of Hong Kong.\u201d14 In response to lhk, a mobile game called Fight the Trai-tors Together (ftt, 2019) was produced and released in China (figure\u00a014.5). The game induces players to launch an attack against a group of high- profile Hong Kong protesters, including Joshua Wong and Martin Lee, who  were disparagingly marked as \u201ctraitors\u201d or \u201cuseless youth\u201d carry ing weapons.15 The confrontation between  these protest games indicated that video game activism had entered a new phase in which a protest game was being designed to influence players to change their be hav ior.Despite the intentions  behind them,  these sorts of  independent games, created by  either protesters or propolice developers, has not made much of an impact except as a propagandistic tool.16 That throws further doubt on expectations regarding educational video games\u2019 creation and use as an \u201cac-tivist medium.\u201d17 As Taylor Anderson- Barkley and Kira Foglesong note, edu-cational games center on fostering a feeling  toward  others, making players aware of a sociopo liti cal message at stake in the course of play, and represent-ing players\u2019 corporeal experience and observations on specific circumstances in an immersive setting.18 So the newly developed games are significant as a device for influencing players\u2019 be hav iors offline. Still, given that some games, including lhk, should come with their own set of affordances, such games also have limitations for lacking the accessibility and viability to develop pro-test tactics or use them in the external world.Virtual Hong Kong protests are taken more playfully by inconspicuous gam-ers as \u201cleaderless\u201d protesters in multiplayer online games than in  independent activist games.19 Looking at the Hong Kong protests mobilized around Bliz-zard\u2019s team- based first- person shooter game Overwatch (2016), the con-version of the game\u2019s Chinese character, Mei, into a Hong Kong protester could be an example of the protesters\u2019 creative associations with commercial online games. When Blizzard clamped down on Blitzchung, a Reddit user, u\/batture, posted a meme of Mei on r\/Hong Kong with the following caption: \u201cIt would be such a shame if Mei from Overwatch became a pro- democracy symbol and got Blizzard\u2019s games banned in China.\u201d20 In the game, Mei is a 14.4. Liberate Hong Kong (2019). Image courtesy of Liberate Hong Kong Game\u00a0Team.14.5. Fight the Traitors Together (2019). Screenshot from Josh Ye, \u201cChina Has Its Own Hong Kong Protest Game That Lets You Beat up Activists.\u201d Abacus, South China Morning Post, December\u00a06, 2019, https:\/\/ www . scmp . com \/ abacus \/ games \/ article \/ 3040864 \/ china - has - its - own - hong - kong - protest - game - lets - you - beat - activists.298  Haneul Leefemale climatologist and adventurer from Xi\u2019an, China, and her catchline is \u201cOur world is worth fighting for.\u201d21 u\/batture\u2019s post stirred up other Reddit users, and they began to produce a variety of memes of Mei with the message \u201c Free Hong Kong\u201d to express their support for the protests (figure\u00a014.6).However, turning Mei into a Hong Kong protester took more than simply adding  political comments to her image. It required unsettling the lurking racist and nationalist fantasy represented through Mei, which is \u201cthe opti-mism of mainland China burgeoning with wealth and global prowess.\u201d22 In the memes that Reddit users created, Mei became an antihero disowning the nationalistic reverie of the PRC, undercutting the given narrative. In other words, Reddit users disoriented the rationale of Mei via their uncon-strained reworking of racial politics as virtual protest  measures. They also circulated memes through other social media platforms using the hashtag #MeiSupportsHongKong. Consequently, the unor ga nized protesters\u2019 collec-tive redevelopment of Mei as a supporting symbol of the Hong Kong protests demonstrated the scalability of their radically playful protest activities across media platforms.23Online multiplayer- game- based protests indicate that online video games are a new space of collaborative and collective actions for challenging the on-14.6. u\/FloL00L, \u201cPro Hong Kong Mei Inspired by a Post on  Here. Fuck Blizzard,\u201d Reddit, October\u00a08, 2019, https:\/\/ www . reddit . com \/ r \/ HongKong \/ comments \/ df5txl \/ pro _ hong _ kong _ mei _ inspiered _ by _ a _ post _ on _ here \/ . \u201cThis Is What We Do\u201d 299going suppression of the  people of Hong Kong in the real world. As observed in previous cases, ac gamers also fought against suppression in their virtual islands by unsettling the politics and mechanics of the game and redevel-oping them into a new form and style of mobilization of  political protests in the virtual space. However, the ways ac gamers circumvented the issue of  political suppression differed from previous attempts in open world games and their related media platforms. The gamers\u2019  political gaming on a virtual island in ac was networked but gated, as they did not allow untrusted  others to participate in the protest scenes.Virtual  Political Protests Emerging from Animal CrossingFrom the siege of Hong Kong Polytech University in 2019 to the subsequent street clashes between protesters and police in 2020, the violent police crack-downs on the Hong Kong protests  were part of the reason that protesters went online. Moreover, the PRC\u2019s order to lock down Hong Kong in response to the pandemic, prohibiting crowds from gathering in public and forcing  people to stay indoors, made protesters take to an online\/virtual space as an alternative protest space. This way they used digital technologies to not only circumvent but also challenge the situation.The fifth edition of the Animal Crossing franchise, Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ac), is an open- ended and real- time social simulation game Nin-tendo developed and released in 2020, designed to be played on the Nintendo Switch. Like many video games, it has a user- friendly mechanism and inter-face allowing you to turn a deserted island into \u201cyour dream getaway.\u201d24 The pos si ble social interactions also made ac more  popular when the pandemic happened, and many  people, including politicians, started playing it. For example, Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez\u2019s call for invitations from random ac users and visits to a few selected users\u2019 islands at the time showed that ac was conceived as a kind of social media platform rather than just a video game.25 Uninterested parties hardly acknowledge any social activities enacted by a group of trusted players in the world of ac.This restricted openness was a crucial framework of ac for Hong Kong protesters to create a \u201cdigitally networked public sphere\u201d in the game\u2019s gated virtual island.26 That is, as Zeynep Tufekci posits, a digital media platform like ac \u201chelp[ed]  people reveal their (other wise private) preferences to one another and discover common ground.\u201d27 Tufekci\u2019s reference is to  political 300  Haneul Leeprotests on social media platforms, where \u201cthe bound aries of private and public, home and street, and individual and collective action\u201d are blurred.28 However, her argument is still helpful to explicate the ac- based Hong Kong protests  because they  were  organized based on trusted protesters\u2019 shared  political consciousness. The in- game protests against the PRC\u2019s autocracy further obscured the line between the virtual and the  actual. Like social media platforms, ac was transformed into a sphere of  political protest, where the fantasy and the real intersected through its seemingly apo liti cal mechanics and gameplay.29ac asks a player to develop a deserted island eco nom ically and culturally. In the economic aspect, the player as an inhabitant of the island engages in long hours of virtual manual  labor\u2014 growing fruits and plants, mowing grass, fishing and hunting bugs, digging up fossils and iron\/gold nuggets, and fell-ing trees. The players are regularly given \u201cdIy  Recipes\u201d as a form of reward for their  labor to make a new item (furniture, ornament, or implement) for their living space.  Here each player\u2019s  labor power is interchangeable; players can barter in- game items for what they need. Selling items gathered through such  labor is a necessary part of the game for the player to pay back a loan for building a  house from Nook Inc., a virtual development com pany owned by the raccoon character Tom Nook. Players can use the money remaining  after the debt has been paid off to construct the island\u2019s infrastructure with materials purchased in the Nook Shop, a virtual store in the game.However, the player is never actually able to  free themselves from debt  because Tom Nook encourages them to continue taking out new mortgages for better  houses in terms of size and design. ac\u2019s debt- capitalism economics, as Naomi Clark explains, epitomizes the village debt system in premodern Japan, which was \u201cwhat made villages continue to function\u201d without direct income coming in from indigent villa gers.30 In ac, the mortgage system forces the indebted player to continue to engage in relentless  labor to work off their debt, develop a personal paradise, and nourish its culture.31 At the same time, the game requires the player to do gratuitous tasks such as collecting fossils, marine life, and insects and donating them to a virtual museum founded to promote the cultural development of the game\u2019s island.Interestingly, as Ian Bogost asserts, the game\u2019s debt- capitalism economics mingled with volunteerism allowed players to \u201creclaim [the] structure and routine\u201d of their social activities in the virtual space during the lockdown.32 The Hong Kong protesters re- created the structure and routine of their pro-test activities in the game space by taking the in- game tools for their own  \u201cThis Is What We Do\u201d 301use. For example, the \u201cPro Design\u201d app that players can purchase for Nook Miles, a virtual currency acquired in ac, provides players with a set of tools for customizing their own items. To identify themselves as protesters, the players produced and carried protest gear\u2014 yellow hard hats and gas masks, for instance.In addition to  these more obvious objects, yard signs\u2014 replacing placards or banners hung on Hong Kong streets\u2014 were used to publicly display mes-sages like \u201c Free Hong Kong Revolution Now.\u201d Such  political messages served as shared objects among specific groups of islanders in the game. Like the virtual banners, all the items retooled for  political use  were the protesters\u2019 private possessions in ac.  These self- owned game items  were made playable for a specific group of players only. However, they  were also distributed using  free qr or special codes through social media or online forums by the creators of the items, who \u201cwant to spread awareness\u201d of the movement.33From displaying a virtual banner and buying protest gear to decorate their game characters to  organizing a virtual sit-in, the series of protest activities made it plain that the protesters  were reacting against the pre sent state of the real world. In addition, they reinvented their protest tactics to make them appear more moderate in the virtual space. The spatial and formal reor ga ni-za tion of their  political actions in ac shows the utility of the game for carry ing out  political protests in Hong Kong to cope with the existing difficulties of administrative oppression, police brutality, and the COVId- 19 pandemic.Proliferating Networked Protests on the Gated Islands of Animal CrossingPlaying ac in network play mode is allowed only for  those who subscribe to Nintendo Switch Online. With a shared Dodo code, which is a mix of letters and numbers, trusted players (up to eight) can assem ble in a gated island of ac for social gaming based on affinity without random interruptions. Gated network play is an impor tant  factor of ac with regard to the new protest culture  independent Hong Kong protesters have cultivated.Yet digital protests have robust similarities in terms of how protesters use digital technology as a protest tool. As discussed in the context of video game\u2013 based protest movements, gamers as decentralized protesters have created protest items (e.g., signs and costumes) and shared  those items with  others. The ability to modify items in this way allows them to challenge the 302  Haneul Leepolitics of the games they play. However, as Tufekci states, each protest has its own \u201cgrievances,\u201d and the vari ous issues require diff er ent responses.34 She also notes that \u201cprotests are also locations of self- expression and communi-ties of belonging and mutual altruism.\u201d35 If Tufekci\u2019s account is valid, then Hong Kong (HK) protesters\u2019 strug gles and frustrations  were acknowledged in ac, and the game allowed the protesters to give voice to themselves, take creative and collaborative action, and\u2014 most impor tant\u2014 protect their com-munity based on shared material. Because the networked protests  were performed in a closed public sphere, the protesters could protect themselves against disruptive influ-ences, including police vio lence and propolice protesters\u2019 retaliation. How-ever, the ability to protect one\u2019s own community is rarely available in virtual protests in massively multiplayer online role- playing games. For example, when a gamer- organized protest group, \u201cStand with Hong Kong,\u201d launched a virtual protest in the open world game  Grand Theft Auto V (gta), the group\u2019s action triggered a counterreaction from mainland gta players, who showed hostility to the protests.36 The confrontation provoked wild \u201cvir-tual scuffles\u201d between the two parties in the online game space and related online forums.37 The way in which the gta- based protesters politicized the game platform to reveal their grievances differed  little from how ac-tivists carried out protests in ac. However, whereas protesters\u2019 strug gles  were redressed by\u00a0reenacting real- life clashes between them and riot police in the open world game space, the protests on the gated virtual island of ac circumvented this\u00a0issue by politicizing in- game leisure activities and prolif-erating their gated plays.In one ac- based protest scene in HoSaiLei\u2019s Twitter posts, seven ac char-acters don protest gear (gas masks, goggles, and hard hats); form a musical band; play instruments (piano, saxophone, drum, and violin); and sing \u201cGlory Be to Thee, Hong Kong,\u201d the HK protesters\u2019 anthem, by spreading the lyr ics through the game\u2019s chat function with their consoles or smartphone apps (figure\u00a014.7). Players must perform a considerable amount of  labor in ac to acquire musical instruments. Possessing them allows gamers to take  pleasure in strengthening ties among each other.When rendering the protest anthem in the gated game world, the seven players displayed their ability to politicize the game\u2019s apo liti cal nature for demanding social change. It carried the significance that the civic anthem was performed on other media platforms or in public spaces, such as Hong Kong\u2019s streets and shopping malls. By gathering to sing the anthem on the virtual  \u201cThis Is What We Do\u201d 303island, the protesters avoided the physical threat they would have dealt with in a real- life demonstration, including the riot police\u2019s clubs,  water cannons, and surveillance cameras. The group of trusted protesters\u2019 in- game musical demonstration did not function just as a playful protest; their networked  political gaming in such a gated space also became a way to deepen the sense of intimacy and care for their survival and  resistance.In other words, ac players reassembled their virtual manual  labor as a source of sociopo liti cal power to transform the gated game world into a place of shielding their collective  political voice from the PRC\u2019s antidemo cratic suppression of dissent. By unsettling the debt- capitalist politics of ac, the protesters reclaimed the right to carry out sit-in demonstrations in the in- game virtual islands for maintaining opposition to oppression. Their net-worked gaming manifested itself as an exigent skirmish over their  political subsistence without any epic clashes with Hong Kong riot police on campuses or streets.Yet the fragility of the  political actions conducted in the gated virtual game space cannot be ignored: the collective strug gles and playful  resistance to the situation in Hong Kong  were hardly recognized beyond the sphere of the game. Nonetheless, despite their ephemerality,  these microscaled virtual 14.7. HK protester characters\u2019 rendering of \u201cGlory Be to Thee, Hong Kong.\u201d Screenshot from HoSaiLei (@hkbhkese), \u201c\u9858\u69ae\u5149\u6b78\u9999\u6e2f(\u52d5\u7269\u4e4b\u68ee\u7248).\u201d304  Haneul Leeprotests have allowed cross- platform media activism beyond ac\u2014 especially when protesters promoted screen captures of protest scenes on social media using hashtags, such as #AnimalCrossing with #LiberateHongKong, #Stand-WithHK, or #RevolutionOfOurTime. As Sarah Jackson and her colleagues insist, hashtags are useful tools for protesters to \u201cbridge  political conscious-ness across oceans and cultures\u201d by specifying the time, space, and initiative of their  political activities.38 For young Hong Kong protesters, the cross- platform mobility of  these microscaled  political movements became a way to build new ground to take their messages about their unending  resistance to state- sanctioned vio lence to the external space of the game, and to social media or online forums like Twitter or Reddit. There, ac- based  political protests and activities that  were once decentral-ized and blockaded have been made available for general viewers to witness protesters inhabiting cute characters and transforming the game into a pro-test site. This has spurred the construction of an alternative network with potential fellow protesters and supporters beyond the virtual world. Thus, the radically playful Hong Kong protests in ac are not a mere simulation of  political protests in the virtual world but a socially potent movement.Conclusion: Have You Seen What We Do in #AC?It should be kept in mind that ac is no longer a  popular medium for the Hong Kong protests (or any  political activism in general)  because its blockaded protests have been isolated from the corresponding larger social movements. Despite its transience, for young Hong Kong protesters ac and its closed sys-tem for networked gaming among trusted players  were effective in helping their  political protests continue in the virtual world without physical clashes with the riot police. The ac- based protesters reinvented street protest tactics through their playful subversion of the game\u2019s escapist narrative, rules, and mechanism entangled with debt capitalism. As a radically playful  political activity, their networked gaming allowed their  political consciousness and voices to be expressed and heard on the gated virtual islands the police could not access. At the same time, the ac- based protesters circulated the captured or recorded in- game protest scenes across social media or online forums, and that circulation enabled them to proliferate beyond the game\u2019s simulated bound aries. The way the protesters made their own safe places  \u201cThis Is What We Do\u201d 305in ac to keep their voices alive further suggests an alternative way to build a  political community that is not fragile and ephemeral\u2014 that strengthens  political activism in Hong Kong and expands its scope.Notes 1  Reuters, \u201cTimeline: Key Dates for Hong Kong Extradition Bill and Protests.\u201d 2 J. Wong, \u201cThis Is What We Do in #AnimalCrossing . . .\u201d 3 From the virtual fake funeral to the whipping  performance, that Carrie Lam became the subject of collective resentment was con spic u ous in ac- based protest scenes at the time. See Ong, \u201cAnimal Crossing: New Horizons Is Fast Becoming a New Way for Hong Kong Protesters to Fight for Democracy.\u201d 4 Bogost, \u201cThe Quiet Revolution of Animal Crossing.\u201d 5 Lin, \u201cContextualized Transmedia Mobilization,\u201d 55. 6 Prompted by the 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police-men, a Sims player, Ebonix, and fellow gamers  organized an antiracism rally in Sims 4. They created protest items such as BLM signs, costumes, skins, and hairstyles and made them downloadable through a shared code for other gamers to encourage them to join the virtual rally. BLM protesters entered into ac as well. Some Reddit users created BLM signs and costumes and shared the codes on Reddit; see u\/Emilyx666, \u201cBlack Lives  Matter!\u201d 7 Pang, \u201cRetheorizing the Social,\u201d 71; Lin, \u201cContextualized Transmedia Mobilization,\u201d 48. 8 Lin, \u201cContextualized Transmedia Mobilization,\u201d 54. 9 Lin, \u201cContextualized Transmedia Mobilization,\u201d 65. 10 Pang, \u201cRetheorizing the Social,\u201d 75. 11 Pang, \u201cRetheorizing the Social,\u201d 89. 12 Blizzard Entertainment, \u201cHearthstone Grandmasters Asia- Pacific Ruling.\u201d While giving a shout- out supporting the Hong Kong movement, two Taiwanese casters hid themselves  under their desks in solidarity with him. Of course, the casters  were also suspended. 13 Blizzard Entertainment, \u201cRegarding Last Weekend\u2019s Hearthstone Grand-masters Tournament.\u201d 14 Ye, \u201cA New Steam Game.\u201d 15 Ye, \u201cChina Has Its Own Hong Kong Protest Game That Lets You Beat Up Activists.\u201d 16 The fact that the  independent games  haven\u2019t made much impact also shows how such games are not necessarily  political or intrinsically progressive. 17 Anderson- Barkley and Foglesong, \u201cActivism in Video Games,\u201d 253. 18 Anderson- Barkley and Foglesong, \u201cActivism in Video Games,\u201d 262.306  Haneul Lee 19 Ming Ming Chiu, \u201cAre Video Games Making Hong Kong Youths Delin-quents, Loners . . . or Better Protesters?,\u201d Hong Kong  Free Press, September\u00a015, 2019; quoted in Davies, \u201cSpatial Politics at Play,\u201d 5. 20 u\/batture, \u201cIt would be such a shame if Mei from Overwatch became a pro- democracy symbol and got Blizzard\u2019s games banned in China.\u201d 21 Blizzard Entertainment, \u201cMei,\u201d accessed July\u00a028, 2023, playoverwatch . com \/ en - us \/ heroes \/ mei \/ .22 Patterson, Open World Empire, 65. 23 Some of the Reddit users on r\/Hong Kong also conferred about putting messages of\/about the Hong Kong protests in the live chat box of the game on the comment board.24 Animal - crossing . com \/ new - horizons \/ .25 Wilson, \u201cAOC Is Sharing Pears with Randoms on \u2018Animal Crossing\u2019  Because This Is Who We Are Now.\u201d26 Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas, 26.27 Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas, 26.28 Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas, 26.29 Pang, \u201cRetheorizing the Social,\u201d 89. 30 Nyu Game Center, \u201cNaomi Clark: Why Tom Nook Symbolizes Village Debt in 18th\u00a0 Century Japan.\u201d 31 Nyu Game Center, \u201cNaomi Clark: Why Tom Nook Symbolizes Village Debt in 18th\u00a0 Century Japan.\u201d32 Bogost, \u201cThe Quiet Revolution of Animal Crossing.\u201d33 u\/Emilyx666, \u201cBlack Lives  Matter!\u201d34 Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas, 88.35 Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas, 88.36 Ye, \u201cHong Kong Protesters and Mainland Gamers Clash in  Grand Theft Auto V Online.\u201d 37 Ye, \u201cHong Kong Protesters and Mainland Gamers Clash in  Grand Theft Auto V Online.\u201d38 Jackson, Bailey, and Welles, #HashtagActivism, xxxi.During the three- year  process of editing and  organizing this collection, we  were consistently challenged with the same inquiry coming from contributors, roundtablists, and even the reviewers of the final manuscript: How do games fundamentally disrupt our normative ways of understanding race? More precisely, what if we  were to see the racial logics in video games\u2014 particularly in games that situate players into racialized roles alongside racial-ized  others\u2014 not just as subjects of ideological critique but also as offering modes of reimagining \u201crace\u201d itself? How is the world making we see in games also a form of race making?While this inquiry has been marginal to game studies, it has been attended to critically by multiple authors, including Lisa Nakamura, Anna Everett, Adrienne Shaw, TreaAndrea Russworm, Jen Malkowski, and  others. More recently, this question emerged in response to one of the most tenacious Identity itself is a complex system\u2014 one whose potential ontological affinities with the medium of video games have not yet been fully grasped.\u2014 TreaAndrea\u00a0M. Russworm and Jennifer Malkowski CodaRole \/ Play \\ RaceChristopher\u00a0B. Patterson Tara Fickle308  Patterson and Fickleprob lems of game studies: namely, as Russworm wrote in 2018, \u201cthe fact that whiteness remains a defining feature of the continuing formation of game studies\u201d as well as within the games industry.1 However, critiques of white and male dominance in both game studies and game industries frequently turn to a commonly proposed solution: to diversify games through the inclu-sion of more nonwhite and queer characters, a shift that seems positive on first blush but that Adrienne Shaw, in 2014, importantly emphasized came as much from a market logic as from marginalized gamers themselves. As Shaw wrote, \u201cArguing for the repre sen ta tion of cleanly defined, market-able identity groups excludes  those at the margins of repre sen ta tion,  those who do not sit comfortably in demographic categories, and  those who exist outside the market.\u201d2 Since the transformations in game cultures  toward more marketable forms of progressive and antiracist politics (post- indie, post- #Gamergate), Shaw\u2019s cautionary remarks seemed to have predicted the shift in games from erasing discourses of race to quickly foreclosing  these discourses by envisioning \u201cracial issues\u201d as ends in themselves\u2014 that is, as a diversity \u201cwin condition\u201d that makes for a successful game (or a successful work of game studies).Second, this inquiry on how games can reimagine race must also be charged for its under lying assumptions: that racial difference can be general-ized to such an extent as to make any broad claims on its meanings, that video games represent a medium so exceptional as to disrupt the very core of racial discourses, and that we\u2014 two Asian\/American gamers and editors\u2014 would be so bold as to answer it. Or perhaps a more common charge against this in-quiry is the disbelief that the low art of video games, known for perpetuating racial  stereotypes and imperial vio lence, can say anything unique about how racializing pro cesses work. Yet what if, despite or even within  these prob-lem(atic)s, we still ventured boldly into the radical possibilities that games may offer, allowing them to take us beyond discussions of diversity  toward more antiracist and abolitional  political practices? Given that the medium of games is so focused on simulations, experimentations, and systemic views of race and identity, how could we not pursue its potential meanings for our ever more gamic  future?This brief coda, inspired by the chapters and roundtables in this collec-tion\u2014as well as our own experiences editing it\u2014 plays with the ways that games can transform our understandings of race through their procedural logics of racial management. While our introduction focused on the insularity  Coda 309of game studies, we use this concluding space to explore how this collection makes urgent a gamic relation to studies of race, revealing how games note limitations in perceiving and accounting for racial (in)justice. We ask how games can offer ways of understanding race as not merely structural but also an epistemic force guiding our perceptions and describing our experiences within the wider social and  political \u201cgame.\u201d Because race is a fundamental  organizing rule of our \u201creal world\u201d (our \u201cafk\u201d society), it is inevitably, not incidentally, baked into cultural produc-tions that represent or simulate that society ( whether implicitly or explic itly). Thus, instead of attempting to treat race as a form of quality control by explain-ing away, supplementing, or substituting for \u201cbad\u201d repre sen ta tions, we ask: How does race get implemented as not a bug but a feature of games? How do games, not despite but  because of their own racist repre sen ta tions, simulate the prob lems of racial hegemony and, through play, pre sent alternatives to the failed solutions of multicultural \u201cdiversity\u201d? Given the extent to which players and game communities have productively modded, hacked, or \u201cmetagamed\u201d games, can games offer us a theoretical approach to exploiting rather than attempting to eliminate their racial features?3 In what follows, we attempt to answer  these questions by examining three gamic racial logics that, beneath the particularities of their character repre sen ta tions, govern the Mass Effect trilogy (BioWare, 2007\u201312), Genshin Impact (miHoYo, 2020), and Divinity: Original Sin 2 (Larian Studios, 2017).1 \/ Multiculturalist Man ag er (Mass Effect)In role- playing series like Final Fantasy, Fallout, The Witcher, and Mass Ef-fect, the player tends to occupy a position of relative superiority or neutrality in relation to their nonplayable friends and teammates, who are often cast as  either explic itly racialized  human  others or implicitly racialized aliens, elves, monsters, mages, and so on. Mass Effect games, as the contributor to this collection Gerald Voorhees writes, professes \u201cthe unmitigated superiority of neo- liberal multiculturalism as a form of dealing with difference.\u201d4 They do so, as Patterson has argued elsewhere, by asking players to play the role of a \u201cmulticulturalist umpire\u201d:5 a  human literally named \u201cShepard\u201d who is meant to learn and reinforce the rules of tolerance in order to exercise their own quest to ensure the supremacy of \u201cglorified space cops.\u201d6310  Patterson and FickleAs scholars have noted, Mass Effect is a particularly apt game for con-versations about race,  because many of its alien species resemble encoded racial types within the context of the War on Terror, and  because the game seems to lay the groundwork for its own problematics. Players are not merely presented with choices that train them to police difference; rather, they are made to recognize how their own managerial roles reiterate histories of vio-lence despite their abilities to produce a diverse and tolerant squad. In the original Mass Effect, players must convince their nonhuman teammate, Wrex, to abandon the interests of his own species by allowing them to suffer forced sterilization.7 In Mass Effect 2, the player becomes a puppet of Cerberus, a violent  organization vying for  human (read: white) supremacy of the galaxy. In Mass Effect 3, the player discovers that the synthetic race they spent the entire first game killing\u2014 \u201cthe Geth\u201d\u2014 have been capable of self- sacrifice and motivations that reveal sentience and  free  will.Taken less as flawed repre sen ta tions and more as simulations of a form of racial management, games like Mass Effect compel us to question the mo-tivations of tolerance and multiculturalism as a means of perpetuating, not mitigating, our militaristic pre sent of empire and permanent war. In turn, we as editors are brought by this managerial form to consider our own decision- making in editing this collection, which, as a collection  organized around a racial identity (\u201cAsia Amer i ca\u201d) has the ambiguous role of diversifying the field of game studies (and the media associated with Asian American stud-ies), but also urges us throughout this volume to decenter Asian American identity as the primary logic guiding our editorial and writing practice. As mixed- race Asian American professors who work mainly on games, we may appear and indeed feel marginalized in our own contexts, yet when it comes to video games globally, our positions feel anything but marginal. Like Mass Effect\u2019s  humans, our roles as editors have felt in danger of being so con-cerned with managing (and even radicalizing) \u201cAsian American identity\u201d that we overlook the ways that our entire proj ect might be complicit in imperial and colonial vio lence (like the racial exploitation of factory work in games and the IT industry writ large or, more locally, the exploitation of contingent faculty  labor and the racialization of personnel hierarchies at our institutions). In short, the \u201cmulticulturalist man ag er\u201d role of  these games alert us, as editors, to the limitations of a familiar center\/periphery model of race, one in which the inclusion of more  peoples within our borders is the ultimate goal, while the mission and sanctity that exists within  those borders remain intact. Coda 3112 \/ Racial Empath (Genshin Impact)While the \u201cmulticulturalist man ag er\u201d role in games like Mass Effect focuses on diversity management as a form of distraction that feels like pro gress, another subgenre of role- playing games encourages players to regard exotic repre sen ta tions as voy eur is tic opportunities to play with the pain of, or as,  others. Such play frequently takes on the language of empathy as a means to appreciate rather than appropriate difference. Though it might appear to be a form of border- crossing, such gamic identity tourism, as Nakamura notes, reflects \u201ca desire to fix the bound aries of cultural identity and exploit them for recreational purposes.\u201d8 The desire to cloak this exploitation as empathy is especially vis i ble in the marketing of virtual real ity games, which, as our contributor Robert Yang has stated, marks them as \u201cappropriation machines\u201d that \u201care fundamentally about mining the experiences of suffering  people to enrich the self- image of Vr users.\u201d9 Such cross- racial play thus might identify as antiracist while also assuming what Bo Ruberg has called a form of \u201cembodied colonialism.\u201d10The Chinese- made 2020 role- playing game Genshin Impact can make an illuminating case study in understanding race as a form of cross- racial play that overlays the exotic, the empathetic, and the erotic, as it repeats many of the same familiar racisms of identity\/empathy tourism on an even more explicit level. In the game, players can inhabit forty- eight playable charac-ters as they explore a vast open world whose regions are based on par tic u-lar national medieval imaginaries (an English- style kingdom, Chinese- style villages, Japanese- style  temples, \u201c Middle Eastern\u201d\u2013 style gardens). As each playable character originates from a par tic u lar region, players can play as and with  these racialized  others while discovering more of their (often tragic) backstories, which promise deeper empathetic attachment. At the same time, the game asks players to do so while massacring enemies who are indisputably hybrid caricatures of Black and Indigenous populations (as emphasized by a video of one designer basing  enemy character movement on Native American dances).11 This \u201cludo- dissonance\u201d might seem a \u201cbug\u201d in the machine, yet it is precisely Genshin Impact\u2019s unabashed racism\u2014 and its foreignness as a Chinese product\u2014 that has allowed so many gamers and games journalists to look past its racist repre sen ta tions and to instead enjoy its racialized charac-ters as figures of empathy and eroticism. Similar to the commonplace sexual-ized bodies and attire of female avatars found in most games, the racisms in Genshin Impact are so explicit that conversations about them have become 312  Patterson and Ficklemoot, a  thing too obvious to mention, freeing games journalists and fans to focus on the attachments they feel  toward the game\u2019s many playable heroes. Often, too,  these attachments are tinged with erotic desire, as Genshin Impact pornography has been a phenomenon in itself, with over a thousand videos on Pornhub, and Genshin Impact communities have been known to (often uncomfortably) create space for queer desire and trans repre sen ta tion (par-ticularly through the playable god, Venti, a being who has mourned the loss of his dear friend for over a  century, and whose depression has caused him to spiral into a century- long alcoholic bender).In short, racial difference in Genshin Impact is treated as an opportunity to satisfy (and, for us, to reveal) the overlapping desires of empathy and erotics that enable ludic climax (all for the price of participating in the game\u2019s Gacha pay mechanics). Genshin Impact\u2019s entangling of sexual fetishes with fetishes for racial otherness further emphasizes the mechanics of desire whereby rac-ism functions: how it expects something, some deeper truth, or some magi-cal cure, that can only be provided through a racialized other. Thus, it is not despite but through the game\u2019s racism that we experience its  pleasurable pull. Such intimate entanglements of sexual and racial pathologization are intrinsic: as Patricia Holland has argued, the \u201cerotic life\u2014 a desiring life\u201d  will always carry a relationship with \u201cthe messy terrain of racist practice.\u201d12Genshin Impact can easily be accused of reproducing racist tropes; at the same time, the game expands our perspective of how race works by extend-ing racial logics into the overlapping realms of empathy and erotics\u2014 that is, it helps us see identity tourism and racial empathy as themselves speak-ing to the widespread logics of racial fetishization, the combined  pleasures of which constitute the appeal of cross- racial play. As Ol\u00faf\u00e9mi O. T\u00e1\u00edw\u00f2 has argued, such fetishizations also lie at the heart of diversity proj ects in academia  today, where committees and  those with power habitually \u201cdefer to\u201d\u00a0\/\u00a0\u201chave deference for\u201d  those whom they name as \u201cthe most marginalized in the room\u201d but whose perspectives also must be authenticated and deemed worthy of empathy by  those in privileged positions.13 As a \u201ccasual\u201d mobile game rather than a \u201creal\u201d pC or console game, Genshin Impact can also es-cape deeper critique on the basis of genre and format alone.14 Such critique reveals a further warning: while Genshin Impact\u2019s perceived foreignness as an Asian-made game provides evidence of  these racial logics\u2019 global circulation, rather than something exclusive to North American or  European game devel-opers, it also provides a ready- made excuse for Western game journalists, or for scholars outside Asian and Asian\/American studies, to avoid addressing  Coda 313its racial repre sen ta tion in the name of honoring contextual diversity (i.e., a narrow and isolationist interpretation of \u201ccultural relativism\u201d).3 \/ Cosmic Avatar (Divinity: Original Sin II)The word avatar has long been used in games discourse as a neutral term to describe a character or other in- game player proxy. Yet as one of our contribu-tors, Souvik Mukherjee, has argued elsewhere, the original Sans krit usage of avatar carried a par tic u lar meaning in its adoption by early game developers as \u201cthe manifestation of divinity that descends on Earth to destroy evil,\u201d with its most common  English translation as \u201c \u2018incarnation\u2019 (literally \u2018the being made flesh\u2019).\u201d15 The borrowing of this term from Hinduism into video games continues a long history of Silicon Valley technocultural fascination with \u201cthe East,\u201d meant both to orientalize and mystify a familiarly Christian messianic trajectory of heroes \u201cinvested with a sense of divine right, as their role is to restore a sense of order to the game world.\u201d16 While the avatar is often read within technoculture\u2019s broader proj ect of deincarnation (of a virtual shedding of the physical racialized and gendered body), role- playing games can allow us to dwell further in the potential of the avatar as the opposite: a re- incarnated, re- inhabitation of the body as a racial form.Most con temporary role- playing games, such as the Mass Effect series, see the avatar as a digital incarnation of the player themselves, as both individual (in the sense that they come from a player\u2019s  imagined and perhaps desired self) and diverse (in the sense that each avatar can be as unique as its player). Games usually enact this through some form of character customization that allows players to choose their race (often including a plethora of granular options related to appearance, skin tone, hair,  etc.). Such a perceived choice promises the player a chance not to play as another but to fi nally play \u201cas themselves\u201d\u2014to create an avatar \u201cas diverse as you are.\u201d Yet avatar racial-ization can also be enacted in games where characters are racialized but are intentionally not customizable; it is through such perceived programming limitations, in fact, that race is made meaningful as an in- game simulation rather than merely a repre sen ta tional \u201cskin.\u201d Games in the Elder Scrolls se-ries, the first and second Dragon Age, the Pillars of Eternity games, and the Divinity series not only cater the dialogue, plot, nonplayer character (NpC) be hav ior, and even the camera positioning to the player\u2019s selected racialized experience, but, as in traditional conceptions of the avatar itself,  these games 314  Patterson and Fickleare also commonly predominated by a messianic plot, where the player, no  matter their race,  will be set on a journey to become divine, to approach god-hood or sainthood, or to become renowned as a god- killer.It is through  these divine experiences as a racialized avatar that understand-ings of race can reach a more \u201ccosmic\u201d realm, a term Legacy Russell has used to emphasize how some users\u2014in her discussion, Black queer  women\u2014 find fulfillment in online identities despite their perceived fakeness.17 Russell cen-tralizes the body as a means to defeat the \u201cdigital dualism\u201d that sees afk (away from keyboard) bodies as real (carnate) and virtual bodies as merely  imagined (as without true form), which for Russell have led to discourses of identity tourism that see online identities as fake or problematic, even when Black queer  women find new forms of flourishing within them. In turn, Russell envisions the \u201ccosmic body\u201d as a concept of the body that blurs the real and the virtual by reinvoking Edouard Glissant\u2019s \u201cright to opacity,\u201d the refusal by the racialized subject in the face of colonial powers to meet their demand to express their  whole and transparent being.18 The cosmic body is neither real nor virtual; instead it is marked (or more accurately, unmarked) as \u201cinconceivably vast,\u201d pushing players to speculate on a world of prolifer-ated multiplicity rather than collected and coherent unity.19In Divinity: Original Sin 2, a cosmic sense of race emerges in the way players control and experience a motley crew of characters with diff er ent racialized backgrounds\u2014 Beast (dwarf), Sebille (elf), Fane (undead), and Red Prince (lizard)\u2014 while its two  human characters smuggle along differ-ence with them: Ifan Ben- Mezd talks to animals and can summon them by his side; Lohse is possessed so strongly by a demon that their characteristics and voices can become inseparable. But, again, this is the realm of repre sen-ta tion. What makes the game in ter est ing for us is not the particularity of the avatars but that the player\u2019s experience inhabiting them  will always be conditioned by the knowledge that the game has gone to  great lengths to tell each racialized group member\u2019s story differently\u2014 indeed, that the meaning of racial difference is narrative divergence. The player\u2019s experience is thus always  limited racially, as no single avatar can represent the universal\u2014 that is, all of the multiple aspects of the divine. One can never be presented with all the stories si mul ta neously; one can only see the par tic u lar, the limitations of flesh, and then speculate on the other lives and thoughts that  they\u2019ve been excluded from. In other words, it is not the virtual body but the cosmic body that the player becomes aware of through this racial form, even as it serves to make the game feel more \u201creal\u201d and replayable (an argument often made  Coda 315about nonlinearity as a defining game appeal). At the same time, the fantasy setting itself begins to resemble a \u201cskin\u201d of con temporary liberal multicul-turalism as practiced in North Amer i ca and  Europe: when playing as the Red Prince, a lizard, one is consistently presented with dialogue options with unfriendly NpCs that are literalizations (lizardizations?) of \u201cplaying the race card\u201d: \u201c You\u2019re only treating me this way  because I\u2019m a lizard!\u201dBeyond focusing on racialized avatars as (failed) attempts to simulate race as vicarious identity tourism\u2014to let the player experience \u201cwhat it\u2019s like\u201d to be an other\u2014 such role- playing games ask us to consider how the avatar creates a cosmic (rather than a par tic u lar or universal) racialized logic, which uses race as the expression of the limitations of a knowable, transparent body. Rather than see the body as a material given, Russell encourages the use of bodied as a verb, meaning \u201cgiv[ing] material form to something abstract\u201d\u2014 a  process that the avatar promises in its re- incarnation of the body that can also \u201cmake room for other realities.\u201d20 In Divinity, players are \u201cbodied\u201d through a constant feeling of embodied limitation that is exaggerated by the trope  toward divinity itself: as the game proceeds, each player is informed that the other characters might each be one of the \u201cGodwoken\u201d and, as such, must be viewed as threats rather than allies, whose thoughts and intentions  will remain (at least for this playthrough) opaque. Thus,  every racialized inter-action is laden with the constant sense of missing out on the experience of  others, making the player feel their singularity, their positionality, while also the vast, cosmic potentials of the world around them.  Every experience is deuniversalized, refracted from the one to the many. At the same time,  every interaction with the five other playable characters is infused with a similarly cosmic feeling: this character could have been me, I could have been them. Each other represents a diff er ent pos si ble self, and even the nonplayable  others are  either kin (i.e., the same race as the avatar) or  people who could have been kin.Shifting the focus away from race as a managerial exercise or a fetishistic opportunity for empathy, the racial logics of games like Divinity: Original Sin 2 focus not on the player learning from the other but, rather, on learn-ing how much they cannot understand, and how this limitation structures the way that they navigate the world. In the game studies world, perhaps recognizing the limitations posed by our professional avatars could help us better reveal the limitations of the vari ous magic circles that  we\u2019ve created to define \u201cus,\u201d and to reconfigure how we see (or do not see)  those who could not be included or even regarded as belonging with \u201cus.\u201d316  Patterson and FickleClosing the Loop: How Games Can ( Really) Unmake \u201cUs\u201dAs with our meditations on the limits of game studies in the introduction, we end this brief inquiry on gamic race making by considering what remains beyond the walls of the kingdom, who is not found in the room, and how the world making we see in games is also world ending: that is, abolitional.  Here we understand our investments in race as part of an abolitional practice that seeks to shift from the institutionalized terms and logics of our pre sent racial formation into something new and  imagined, something our experimenta-tions in interaction might reveal. At the end of this experiment, we have come to see interaction not merely as an editorial method but as a refusal of the competitive attitudes that compel us to respond to a racial injustice somewhere with the anger of our own injuries. Rather, interaction invites us to engage in ways that can make new and unpredictable forms of collabora-tion, co ali tion, and solidarity.The racial gamic logics explored in this coda urge us out of a dominant racial formation that privatizes racial justice by pinpointing racism onto seemingly anachronistic acts: racial slurs, personal traumas, and microag-gressions that can be reinterpreted or reinforced on social media. As  others have argued, such privatizations of racism can threaten abolitional praxis when they give legitimacy to the state and institutions (and, indeed, promise inclusion in them).21 The gamic forms of race we have analyzed  here give us a systemic view of race and help us understand its algorithms, its pro cesses, its operations. Games give us ways not only to read but also to abolish  these systems through forms of disruptive world making, of imagining what can happen  after we hit the reset button, when power might shift forms and we might run the risk of the rebels turning against acts of rebellion.Guided by our attachments as Asian\/Americans and as players ourselves, this book has swayed against giving definitive generalizations of games or \u201cAsia Amer i ca,\u201d refusing the identitarian frameworks that provide the grist of state and institutional planning. Instead, we have sought to trace the ungovernable and the unnamable ways of feeling, living, and playing, that pulse along the racial traces of Asia\/America. To do so, we have understood video games as a grippable, archival ballast in the vast viscosity of our context of technological empire. Where other mediums\u2014 lit er a ture, film,  performance\u2014 might see this empire\u2019s rocky shores and lapping  waters, video games are in the thick of the technological mass; they are its fun, cute, childish, Asiatic, and well- adorned scions. Dressed up as they may be, video games can help us see what writhes  Coda 317within empire\u2019s murk: the unseen work, the unheard deaths, and the possi-bilities of our collective strug gle. When asked \u201cWhat use are video games?,\u201d we reply, \u201cNothing but the collective unmaking of our violent, deadly world.\u201dNotesPart of this coda was published previously as Tara Fickle and Christopher\u00a0B. Pat-terson, \u201cDiversity Is Not a Win- Condition,\u201d Critical Studies in Media Communi-cation 39, no.\u00a03 (2022): 211\u201320. 1 Russworm, \u201cA Call to Action for Video Game Studies.\u201d 2 Shaw, Gaming at the Edge, 8. 3 Boluk and LeMieux, Metagaming. 4 Voorhees, \u201cNeo- liberal Multiculturalism in Mass Effect,\u201d 259. 5 Patterson, \u201cRole- Playing the Multiculturalist Umpire.\u201d 6 Cole, \u201cMass Effect\u2019s Revival Reminds Us It\u2019s Time to Abolish the Space Police.\u201d 7 For a close reading of this scene with Wrex, see Patterson, Open World Empire, chap. 3. 8 Nakamura, Cybertypes, 42. 9 Yang, \u201cIf You Walk in Someone  Else\u2019s Shoes.\u201d 10 Ruberg, \u201cEmpathy and Its Alternatives,\u201d 61. 11 Messner, \u201c Here\u2019s Why \u2018Boycott Genshin Impact\u2019 Is Trending on Twitter.\u201d 12 Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism, 46. 13 T\u00e1\u00edw\u00f2, \u201cBeing- in- the- Room Privilege.\u201d 14 Consalvo and Paul, Real Games. 15 Mukherjee, \u201cVishnu and the Videogame.\u201d 16 Wildt et\u00a0al., \u201c(Re-)Orienting the Videogame Avatar,\u201d 967. 17 L. 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Disco Elysium. zA\/uM, 2019. pC, Mac.This page intentionally left blankContributorsEdmond\u00a0Y. Chang (he\/they) is an assistant professor of  English at Ohio Univer-sity. Recent publications include \u201cImagining Asian American (Environmental) Games\u201d in amsj, \u201cWhy Are the Digital Humanities So Straight?\u201d in Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities, and \u201cQueergaming\u201d in Queer Game Studies. He is an editor for Analog Game Studies as well as the website Gamers with Glasses.miYoko ConlEY (she\/her) is an  independent scholar and games writer. She re-searches transnational media, theater, and fan cultures, with a focus on  Japanese and South Korean  popular culture, and she has been published in the journal Trans-formative Works and Cultures.anthonY dominguEz is a PhD candidate in cinema studies at Nyu Tisch School of the Arts. His dissertation focuses on Times Square and the influence of global capitalism on public space, architecture, corporate advertising, and military pow-ers. His research includes urban screens,  Japanese media, and Black nerd culture.tara FiCklE is an associate professor of  English at the University of Oregon, and her first book, The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities (2019), won the Before Columbus Foundation\u2019s American Book Award. Fickle is currently working on a digital archive and analy sis of the canonical Asian American anthology, Aiiieeeee! (Aiiieeeee . org ).Sarah ChriStina ganzon is an assistant professor of communication studies at Simon Fraser University. She is a member of the mLab and TAG research net-works. Her research revolves mostly around the areas of game studies and digital fandom. Recently she finished her doctoral thesis on otome games in  English and otome game players.350  Contributorshuan hE is an assistant professor of  English at Vanderbilt University. His research engages Asian\/American lit er a ture and culture, digital studies, critical game stud-ies, and poetics. His writing has been published in College Lit er a ture: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies and Media- N. He also writes poetry, which can be found in A Public Space, Beloit Poetry Journal, Colorado Review, and elsewhere.matthEw JungSuk howard is a PhD candidate in communication, rhe toric, and digital media at North Carolina State University. His research mobilizes Asian\/Americanist critique and feminist new materialist studies of race in contexts of globalization and transnational cultural industries. His dissertation is a media his-tory of Korean\/Americanness that implicates the Korean Wave in the racialization of Korean\/American diaspora.raChaEl hutChinSon is a professor of  Japanese and game studies at the Uni-versity of Delaware. Her work on repre sen ta tion and identity in  Japanese video games appears in Games and Culture, Game Studies,  Japanese Studies, Replaying Japan, and vari ous book chapters. Her books include  Japanese Culture through Videogames (2019) and the coedited  Japanese Role- Playing Games: Genre, Repre-sen ta tion and Liminality in the jrpg (2022).hanEul lEE (she\/her\/her) is a PhD student in cinema studies at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Her research focuses on informal media produc-tion, circulation, and consumption among mi grant workers, immigrants, and other sociopo liti cal precariats.kEita moorE (he\/him) is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies program who is inter-ested in the politics of temporality, place, and play that emerge at the intersection of video games and their critiques. His dissertation ethnographically analyzes game design and the production of social spaces and times in Japan.Souvik mukhErJEE is assistant professor in cultural studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta and a pioneering South Asian games studies scholar. His research looks at video games as storytelling media and as postcolonial media. He is the author of three monographs, including Videogames in the Indian Subcontinent (2022). Souvik is a DiGRA Distinguished Scholar.ChriStophEr\u00a0B. pattErSon is an award- winning author and associate profes-sor of social justice at the University of British Columbia. His academic works are Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Lit er a ture of the Transpacific and Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games; his creative books include Stamped: an anti- travel novel, All Flowers Bloom, and Nimrods: a fake- punk self- hurt anti- memoir.takEo rivEra (he\/him) is assistant professor of  English at Boston University and the author of Model Minority Masochism: Performing the Cultural Politics of  Contributors 351Asian American Masculinity (2022). His articles have been published in AmerAsia Journal,  Performance Research, and asap\/Journal, among  others. He is also an award- winning playwright.YaShEng ShE (they\/them and he\/him) is a PhD candidate at the Department of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Yasheng is inter-ested in catharsis and trauma narratives in video games, films, and anime. Yasheng has published several articles in peer- reviewed journals and edited collections from the perspectives of postwar Japan, gender, and  popular media.praBhaSh ranJan tripathY is a PhD candidate at the school of Arts and Aes-thetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and is currently working on a dissertation titled \u201cBetween WorkStation and PlayStation: The Cultural Location of Videogames in India.\u201d Interest areas include comic books, anime, video games, sports, and all  things  popular culture.gErald voorhEES is an associate professor in the Department of Communi-cation Arts at the University of Waterloo. He researches games and new media as sites for the construction and contestation of identity and culture, and he has edited books on masculinities in games, feminism in play, role- playing games, and first- person shooter games.This page intentionally left blankIndexPage numbers in italics refer to figures.2000 World Cyber Games, 191AAA game companies, 27, 89, 153, 157, 178, 185, 208, 236, 253\u201354Aarseth, Espen, 35acid communism, 67\u201369, 77\u201379, 81. See also psychedelic countercultureaddiction, gaming, 5, 73, 144\u201345. See also gamer death; player burnoutadjacency, 6, 69, 71, 75, 78\u201380; and utopia, 67\u201368, 76, 82, 83n17Age of Empires 3: The Asian Dynasties (En-semble Studios, 2007), 182aimbotting, 218\u201320, 223, 226, 228\u201329Ainu  people, 160, 171, 173Aksys Games, 251, 259\u201361; Fate\/extra (2011), 250, 266n43. See also HakuokiAlbrecht, Monika, 159\u201360, 162, 167Alexander, Mitch: Tusks: The Orc Dating Sim, 233, 235, 242\u201347algorithmic analy sis, 13\u201314, 23n38Allied Occupation of Japan (1945\u20131952), 102, 104\u20135, 119, 159, 161, 163, 170, 172Analgesic Productions, 275Anderson- Barkley, Taylor, 296Andlauer, Leticia, 235Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ac) (Nintendo, 2020), 21, 299\u2013300, 305n6; funerals for Carrie Lam in, 290\u2013 92, 305n3; networked play and, 293\u201394, 301\u20135animal mayhem games, 237anime, 33, 153, 240, 258, 261, 266n51, 280, 284; aesthetics of, 20, 52, 95, 97\u201398, 238, 250; Black fans of, 277\u201379, 282\u201383; market-ing media mix and, 248n6, 251, 259Anime Expo 2011, 250, 259Anime NYC convention (2017), 279, 282\u201383Anito: Defend a Land Enraged (Anino Enter-tainment, 2003), 150, 154Anodyne series (Kittaka and Han- Tani, 2013\u20132019), 208, 214, 270anthropocentrism, 80, 237, 244\u201345Anthropy, Anna, 17, 90anti- Asian sentiment, 7, 105, 122\u201323, 157, 223\u201330, 240\u201341, 273; COVId-19 pandemic and, 10, 15, 18, 54, 56, 63. See also racism; white supremacyanticheat software: BattlEye, 218anti- Chinese sentiment, 56, 157, 223\u201330, 240. See also racism; white supremacyanti- Filipino sentiment, 240\u201341. See also rac-ism; white supremacyanti- Muslim sentiment, 145. See also racism; white supremacyApex Legends (Respawn and Electronic Arts, 2019), 219\u201320, 223, 225\u201327ApM (actions per minute) metric, 195Appadurai, Arjun, 179\u201380, 183arcades, 3, 5, 37, 45, 144, 165; Black gamers and, 278\u201381, 284\u201388; Chinatown Fair Arcade (New York City), 280, 284\u201386, 288; fighting games and, 29\u201330, 137\u201338, 146n16, 354  Indexarcades (continued) 278, 284, 286; masculinity and, 137\u201338, 279\u201381, 289; Next Level Arcade (Brooklyn), 280, 286; Playland (New York City), 280, 285ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Na-tions), 187Asian American Writers Workshop, 27, 29Asian hands myth, 133\u201336, 142, 144\u201345, 199\u2013202, 212Asiatic, the, 6, 9, 74, 78, 178, 194, 196; cheating and, 218\u201319, 224\u201325, 227\u201328; definition, 18, 54\u201356, 64, 186; fetishization and, 7\u20138, 14, 182, 190, 202; queerness of, 17, 54\u201363, 68, 234Assassin\u2019s Creed series (Ubisoft, 2007, 2012), 33, 111, 270\u201371Association of Asian American Studies (AAAS), 15\u201316Atari, 180; Gauntlet (1985), 40authorship, 41, 155avatars, 40, 70, 103, 109, 122, 237, 311; ava-tarial capital, 228\u201330; in Divinity, 313\u201315Azubu Frost, 197Azuma, Hiroki, 9, 282Banerjee, Anando, 178\u201379Barthes, Roland, 68, 186BattlEye (anticheat software), 218 battle royale (Br) shooter games, 219, 224, 228, 230; Apex Legends, 219\u201320, 223, 225\u201327; Call of Duty, 155, 161, 174n6, 182, 185, 227; PlayerUnknown\u2019s Battlegrounds (pubg), 217\u201318, 223, 225, 227; procedural racism in, 221\u201323, 226, 229Belle, Crystal, 287Berlant, Lauren, 52biopolitics, 233, 235\u201337, 242, 246BioWare, 91, 96; Mass Effect trilogy (2007, 2012, 2020), 84n29, 92\u201393, 309\u201311, 313; Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003), 84n29biraciality, 32, 130; konketsuji and h\u0101fu identi-ties, 102\u201312, 113n28; in Metal Gear Solid series, 18, 93, 99\u2013100, 102\u201312, 113n22, 113n28, 113nn30\u201331, 123, 171\u201372. See also multiracial identitiesbish\u014djo games, 235Black Lives  Matter (BLM) movement, 56, 133, 273, 293\u2013 94, 305n6Black Mirror, 59, 61Black nerd (Blerd) identity, 17, 20, 277\u201381; in fighting game community, 283\u201389, 298n8; as otaku, 282\u201383Black technophobia, 279Blizzard Entertainment: Hearthstone (2014), 31, 295; Overwatch (2016), 57, 296\u2013 98, 306n20; StarCraft (1998), 30, 179, 191, 193, 195, 208; World of Warcraft (2004), 122, 228Blow, Jonathan: Braid (2008), 93Bluth, Don: Dragon\u2019s Lair (1983), 37Bogost, Ian, 15, 102, 221, 291\u201393, 300Bolter, Jay David, 196bootleg games, 90bootstrap mentality, 140Borges, Jorge Luis: \u201cThe Garden of the Forking Paths,\u201d 35\u201336, 47\u201349Bow, Leslie, 7Bowman, Mitch, 138Boylorn, Robin, 281Brack, J. Allen, 295Braid (Blow, 2008), 93Braidotti, Rosi, 262Brock, Andr\u00e9, 192, 196Brood War esports, 198Buddhist symbolism, 67, 176\u201377Burns, Matthew Seiji, 28, 30, 31, 33; Eliza (2019), 27, 32\u201333Burton, Antoinette, 239\u201340bushido philosophy, 139, 255, 258Butler, Judith, 259Byrd, Jodi, 23n34Caillois, Roger, 10\u201311, 23n30, 143, 163\u201364Call of Duty (Activision, 2003\u2013), 155, 161, 174n6, 182, 185, 227Camera Anima (Gee, 2020), 18, 89, 91Capcom, 133; Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (2000), 280\u201381, 287\u201388; Resident Evil 5 (2009), 101, 162, 164; Street Fighter series (1987, 1991, 1997, 2016), 29\u201330, 33, 59, 160, 162\u201363, 165\u201366, 180, 278, 283, 285capitalism, 57, 59, 64, 152, 161, 211, 224, 263; debt- capitalism, 300, 303\u20134; neoliberal, 55, 77, 222; racial, 9\u201310, 68, 171, 193\u201395, 201, 230; realism and, 66\u201369Caracciolo, Marco, 237c\u00e1rdenas, micha, 10, 13, 24n38caste, 182, 184Castronova, Edward, 228Cen, Henry, 280, 286Chakrabarti, Siddartha, 182Chan, Charlie, 5, 75Chan, Dean, 7, 23n27, 38Chan, Jeffery Paul, 7 Index 355Chang, Alenda, 23n36Chang, Kornel, 224character tropes, 3, 7\u20138, 48, 54, 57, 101, 308, 312, 315; in Choose Your Own Adventure books, 41\u201342; in dating games, 234\u201336, 238, 240\u201343; in fighting games, 59\u201360, 162\u201363, 180\u201381, 188n14, 189n31, 283; game makers on, 8, 31, 40, 96\u201397, 155, 195; roboticism and, 123, 228cheating, 5, 217; aimbotting, 218\u201320, 223, 226, 228\u201329; cheat sellers, 226\u201327;  Chineseness and, 20, 122, 194, 218\u201320, 222\u201330Chen, James \u201cjchensor,\u201d 133Chen, Kuan- hsing, 9, 23n26Chen, Mel\u00a0Y., 233\u201334, 238, 240Cheney- Lippold, John, 57Cheng, Anne, 54Chess, Shira, 257Chin, Frank, 7China and Chineseness, 19, 64, 161, 163\u201364, 186\u201387, 192; Beijing, 149, 272, 274; cheat-ing and, 5, 20, 122, 194, 218\u201320, 222\u201330; Chengdu, 97, 208; contagion discourse and, 56, 157, 225, 233, 240; esports and, 136, 199\u2013200, 202; game makers on, 31\u201332, 43, 90, 97, 150\u201357, 208\u20139, 211\u201312, 214, 269\u201375; as game setting, 78, 97, 168\u201371, 175n34, 269, 272, 274; Genshin Impact and, 153, 309, 311\u201312; gold farmers, 122, 194, 228; im-migrants and, 5, 105, 123, 157, 223\u201325, 270, 274\u201375; \u201cregion- lock,\u201d 223\u201325; Shanghai, 149, 269\u201372, 274; Shenzhen, 208, 212, 214, 227. See also  People\u2019s Republic of China (PRC)Chinatown Fair Arcade (New York City), 280, 284\u201386, 288Chinese Exclusion Act, 105, 157, 224Cho, Margaret, 68Choe, Steve, 22n7, 136Chris tian ity, 162, 165, 174n25, 210, 243, 313; Muscular Chris tian ity movement, 139\u201340Chuh, Kandice, 16, 55Chun, Wendy, 6\u20137, 54, 192\u201393, 202Chung, Ng Wai \u201cBlitzchung,\u201d 295\u201396Churchill, Winston, 182cinematic games: Death Stranding, 116Civilization series (MicroProse, 1991\u20132016), 161, 181\u201382Clark, Naomi, 92\u201393, 95\u201397, 300; Consen-tacle (2018), 18, 90, 98; SiSSYFiGHT 2000 (2000), 90code- based cheats, 220, 223, 225\u201327. See also aimbotting; speed- hacking; wallhackingColbert, Stephen, 57Colebrook, Claire, 188n9colonialism, 9\u201310, 14, 45, 55, 67, 144, 310\u201311, 314; Allied Occupation of Japan (1945\u20131952), 102, 104\u20135, 119, 159, 161, 163, 170, 172; Hawai\u2018i, 155\u201356; Indian subcon-tinent and, 177, 181\u201385, 187\u201388; Japan as colonized, 19, 101\u20132, 119\u201320, 125, 159\u201365, 170\u201373; Japan as colonizer, 19, 64, 101\u20132, 118, 125, 153, 159\u201363, 166\u201373, 240\u201341, 275; Philippines and, 153\u201355, 160, 163, 240\u201341, 276colorblindness, 39, 133\u201334, 137\u201338, 229.  See also postracialismcommunism, 67\u201369, 76\u201379; in Disco Elysium, 70, 74, 80\u201381, 83n17Consalvo, Mia, 39, 179, 188n11, 220Consentacle (Clark, 2018), 18, 90, 98\u201cconsole cowboy\u201d fantasy, 6, 193, 202consoles, 38, 184, 279, 284, 286, 302, 312; Amiga, 180; Atari, 180; Microsoft Xbox, 28, 219, 283; Nintendo 3dS, 251, 254, 260; Nintendo 64, 64, 283; Nintendo dS, 254, 259; Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), 5, 180; Nintendo Famicom, 90; Nintendo Gameboy Color, 270; Nintendo GameCube, 283; Nintendo Switch, 153, 251, 293, 299, 301; Sega Dreamcast, 165, 283; Sega Gen-esis, 83; Sony PlayStation, 28, 33, 156, 165, 219, 251, 254, 260, 283; Super Nintendo, 283Conway, Steven, 279, 288\u201389Cook, Eli, 41Counter- Strike (Valve, 2009), 18, 27, 29, 96\u201397, 155, 208, 227COVId-19 pandemic, 145n1, 193, 202, 214, 272, 291; anti- Asian racism and, 54, 56\u201357, 64, 157, 224\u201325, 240; popularity of games during, 156, 299; production of the book during, 10, 15; Wuhan city lockdowns, 275Crawford, Chris, 95Crowther,  Will: Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), 36Culler, Joey \u201cMr.\u00a0Wizard,\u201d 132cultural odor, 6, 9, 23n25, 124\u201325, 179\u201380, 187, 188n11, 189n31cute culture, 178, 195, 253cutscenes, 37, 48; in Death Stranding, 118, 120\u201322; in Metal Gear Solid series, 103, 105, 107cyberpunk, 151, 153, 192\u201393, 202356  IndexCyberpunk 2077 (Cd Projekt rEd, 2020), 92, 156cyborgs, 120, 122, 124\u201325Danico, Mary Yu, 3dating games, 239, 244\u201345, 247, 248n20, 259; biopolitics of, 232\u201337, 242, 246; character tropes in, 234\u201336, 238, 240\u201343. See also visual novelsdeaths, in- game, 40, 64, 108, 118, 236, 257, 265nn26\u201327Death Stranding (Kojima Productions, 2019), 115\u201324, 126\u201329; cutscenes in, 118, 120\u201322de Cuir, Cash, 69Delany, Samuel, 284\u201385Deleuze, Gilles, 188n9de Peuter, Greig, 60, 65, 161deracialization, 120, 122, 128, 157deterritorialization, 20, 179, 183, 187, 188n9Dhru va Interactive, 178\u201379diaspora, 32\u201333, 94, 184\u201385; Disco Elysium and, 69, 71\u201373, 76, 78, 82Dickwolves controversy, 259, 266n41Disco Elysium (zA\/uM, 2019), 83n14, 83n17, 83n20, 84n30, 84n32; model minority  stereotypes and, 68, 70\u201377, 81\u201382, 83n13; psychedelic counterculture and, 67\u201371, 76\u201380Dishonored (Bethesda Softworks, 2012, 2016), 84n29Divinity: Original Sin 2 (Larian Studios, 2017), 313\u201315Dobbs v. Jackson  Women\u2019s Health  Organization (2022), 234Dodo codes, 293, 301Donald, Dwayne, 159\u201360, 163Doom (id Software, 1993), 29, 227Dosekun, Simidele, 253\ufffd\u1ed7, Toby, 89, 91, 93, 95\u201396; Grass Mud  Horse (2019), 18, 90, 97Dragon\u2019s Lair (Bluth and Dyer, 1983), 37Du Bois, W.\u00a0E.\u00a0B., 83n20, 83n22Dungeons and Dragons (d&d) (Tactical Studies Rules Inc. 1974; Wizards of the Coast\u00a0\/\u00a0Hasbro, 1997\u2013), 50, 270; d20, 46\u201347Dunning, Eric, 141Dyer, Richard, 119\u201320Dyer, Rick: Dragon\u2019s Lair (1983), 37Dyer- Witheford, Nick, 16, 60, 99\u2013100educational games, 296\u201ce- girls,\u201d 1\u20132Eglash, Ron, 281Electronic Arts (EA), 156; Apex Legends (2019), 219\u201320, 223, 225\u201327; The Sims se-ries (2000\u20132023), 293\u2013 94, 305n6. See also Mass Effect trilogyElias, Norbert, 141\u201342Eliza (Zachtronics, 2019), 27, 32\u201333emotional  labor, 257\u201358ergodic texts, 35eroticism, 11, 17, 54, 60\u201361; homoeroticism, 59, 84n24, 119\u201320, 208; othering through, 8, 63, 212, 237\u201338, 311\u201312Erzberger, Tyler, 201esports, 38, 136, 138, 231n30; game about, 90, 96; League of Legends, 1\u20132, 57, 191, 193, 196\u2013200, 202\u20133; professional gamers, 31, 179, 190\u201392, 195\u2013203, 217; South  Korea and, 5, 19, 145, 190\u201391, 193, 195\u2013203; white-ness and, 1\u20133, 6, 191\u201394, 196\u201399, 202ethnic studies, 10, 12, 14\u201316, 73Eurocentrism, 68, 173; in game theory, 163\u201364; in postcolonial theory, 159\u201360Evans, Adrienne, 262Everett, Anna, 279, 287, 307Evolution Championship Series (EVO), 132\u201335, 145, 285fan fiction, 84n24, 91, 252, 264Far Cry 4 (Ubisoft, 2014), 176\u201377, 182\u201383, 187, 270Fate\/extra (Aksys Games, 2011), 250, 266n43feminization, 40, 119, 122, 128, 188n14, 195, 253Fickle, Tara, 23n30, 44, 73, 162\u201364, 180, 224, 228\u201329; on ludo- orientalism, 6, 36, 39, 101, 143, 179, 194, 222; roundtable moderator, 29\u201330, 34, 97, 152, 210\u201311, 213fighting game community (fGC), 3, 19\u201321, 28\u201331, 59\u201360, 201, 278; Black nerd (Blerd) identity and, 282\u201389, 298n8; commentat-ing in, 280\u201381, 284, 287\u201389; Evolution Championship Series (EVO), 132\u201335, 145, 285; masculinity in, 3, 133\u201334, 137\u201340, 280\u201381, 284, 289; sexual misconduct in, 132\u201333, 138Fight the Traitors Together (unknown, 2019), 296\u2013 97Final Fantasy series (Square Enix, 1987\u2013), 91, 160, 169\u201370, 251, 259, 309; nuclear discourse in, 126, 167\u201368Fink, Eugen, 144first- person shooter (fpS) games, 29\u201330, 47\u201348, 91, 99, 185, 219, 221\u201322, 227, 296.  Index 357See also  battle royale (Br) shooter games; individual gamesFisher, Mark, 66\u201369, 71, 82n8Fisher, Stephanie, 254Flower, Sun and Rain (Suda51, 2001), 52Floyd, George, 305n6Fnatic, 197Foglesong, Kira, 296Fontanez, Victor \u201cSpooky,\u201d 284\u201387. See also Team Spookyforever foreigner trope, 3, 36, 44, 104, 222, 229, 258Foucault, Michel, 21, 68, 186f.r.E.E. games, 52Freeman, Elizabeth, 236Friedman, Thomas, 179fujoshi trophy, 252, 260\u201363, 266n48, 266n51Fukuyama, Francis, 66, 77Fu Manchu, 5, 234Fung, Catherine, 124Galloway, Alexander, 23n36, 227Game Awards, The (@thegameawards), 83n15; Disco Elysium, 69Game Developers Conference, 94\u201395Game Developers of Color Expo, 28game industry, 3, 6\u20138, 12, 21, 62, 67, 138, 197\u201398, 308, 310; in China, 90, 149\u201353, 185, 200, 218, 227, 270, 274; Filipina\/o identity in, 32, 55, 150, 153\u201355, 209, 241, 269\u201371, 274; in Hawai\u2018i, 19, 55, 149\u201351, 154\u201356; of Indian subcontinent, 177\u201379, 183\u201385, 188n6; in Japan (see  Japanese game industry); maker roundtable discussions, 5, 15, 27\u201334, 89\u201398, 149\u201357, 207\u201315, 269\u201376; neurodi-vergence in, 209, 214\u201315; queerness in, 97, 208\u201315, 233, 243, 269; in South  Korea, 8, 153, 173, 185, 190, 200, 202; trans identity in, 209, 214\u201315; triple- A studios, 27, 89, 153, 157, 178, 185, 208, 236, 253\u201354;  women in, 92, 150, 154\u201355, 209, 254game jams, 16, 270Game Makers club (Cal Arts), 91gamer death, 136, 144, 179. See also addiction, gaming; player burnout#GamerGate, 11\u201312, 23n34, 308Gamers and Gaming Meets Philippines (GnG), 272gamers, professional, 31, 179, 190\u201392, 195\u2013203, 217. See also esportsgame studies, 23n30, 23n34, 35, 99\u2013100, 173, 178, 228, 253, 274, 279; critiquing bias in, 9\u201317, 21, 24n27, 24n32, 24n36, 159, 161\u201363, 194, 308\u201310, 315\u201317gamic orientalism, 134. See also orientalism; techno- orientalismgaming  houses, 191\u201392, 198\u2013200Gandhi, 181\u201382, 187Ganzon, Sarah Christina, 235Gao, Yuxin: Out for Delivery (2020), 20, 270, 272\u201375Gates, Henry Louis,\u00a0Jr., 287Gauntlet (Atari, 1985), 40Gee, Domini, 92, 94\u201396; Camera Anima (2020), 18, 89, 91genre, 20, 41, 53, 61, 77, 94\u201395, 97, 164; dating games and, 233\u201335, 248n10, 260\u201361; fight-ing games and, 137\u201338, 278; role- playing games and, 311\u201312; shooter games and, 29\u201330, 217, 227\u201328Genshin Impact (miHoYo, 2020), 153, 311\u201313Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru, 1995), 124Ghost of Tsushima (Sucker Punch, 2020), 92, 94Gill, Rosalind, 252\u201353Glasspool, Lucy, 259Glissant, \u00c9douard, 314Glorious Mission ( Giant Interactive Group, 2011), 227Goggin, Joyce, 194gold farming, 122, 194, 228Google Earth Vr, 164Goto- Jones, Chris, 134\u201335, 138, 142, 145n7Graham, David \u201cUltradavid,\u201d 133 Grand Theft Auto V (gta) (Rockstar Games, 2013), 302Gray, Kishonna\u00a0L., 162, 279Greater East Asia (Dai T\u014d- A) ideology, 168Greene, Brendan \u201cPlayerUnknown\u201d: Player-Unknown\u2019s Battlegrounds and, 217\u201318, 223, 225, 227Grieve, Gregory Price, 183Grusin, Richard, 196Guattari, F\u00e9lix, 188n9Guttmann, Allen, 141h\u0101fu (biracial foreign subject), 102\u201310, 112, 113n28Hakuoki series (Aksys Games, 2014; Idea Fac-tory International, 2017 and 2018), 250\u201351, 266n43; choice in, 254\u201358, 263, 265nn23\u201330; localization and, 252, 258\u201364, 264n2, 264nn20\u201321, 265n22, 265n24; sexism in, 252, 254, 257, 260\u201363Hamad, Hannah, 253358  IndexHan- Tani, Melos, 271\u201372, 275; Anodyne series (2013\u20132019), 208, 214, 270Haraway, Donna, 122, 125Harper, Todd, 7, 134\u201335, 137, 146n16, 287Harvey, Alison, 254Hasegawa, Kazumi, 251, 257hashtag activism: #LiberateHongKong, 304; #MeiSupportsHongKong, 298; #Stand-WithHK, 304Hatoful Boyfriend (Moa, 2011), 232\u201333, 246\u201347, 248n23, 249n28, 249n33; mechan-ics of, 241\u201342; themes of contamination in, 235, 237\u201340Hawai\u2018i, 55, 151, 154\u201356Hayles, N. Katherine, 231n41Hearthstone (Blizzard Entertainment, 2014), 31; 2019 Grandmaster Finals for, 295heteronormativity, 59, 233\u201334, 254, 281\u201382; in dating games, 235\u201336, 238, 242, 245\u201346; in Hakuoki, 251\u201352, 257, 259, 262\u201363high- tech orientalism, 7, 191\u201393, 195\u201398, 201. See also orientalism; techno- orientalismHindpere, Helen, 68\u201369, 83n14, 83n20Hinduism, 176, 182, 184, 313hip- hop, 1\u20133, 277\u201378, 280\u201389Hjorth, Larissa, 23n27Hochschild, Arlie, 257Holland, Patricia, 312homoeroticism, 59, 84n24, 119\u201320homophobia, 39, 133, 138, 243. See also #GamerGateHong Kong, 29, 31\u201332, 52, 60, 177, 223, 226, 270; Federation of Students, 294\u201395; Liber-ate Hong Kong, 295\u2013 97; pro- democracy protests in Overwatch, 296, 298; protests emerging from Animal Crossing, 21, 290\u201394, 299\u2013304, 305n3, 305n6, 306n23; Umbrella Movement, 295Hong Kong Polytech University, 299HoSaiLei (@hkbhkese), 302\u2013 3Hot Pot for One (Li, 2020), 20, 208\u20139, 213\u201314Huang, Betsy, 5Huizinga, Johan, 10\u201311, 23n30, 39, 61, 143, 163\u201364Hutchinson, Rachael, 8, 101, 111, 123, 125\u201326, 179, 188n14hypervisibility, 7\u20138, 31, 38, 92, 104, 108, 191Idea Factory International, 251, 260. See also HakuokiIfC Yipes, 280\u201381, 287\u201388Igarashi, Yoshikuni, 116, 118\u201319, 126imperialism, 33, 133, 159, 174n6, 230, 233, 235, 246\u201347, 308, 310; animal significance to, 239\u201340; the Asiatic and, 19, 60, 63\u201364, 182, 227, 316; British, 21, 159, 172, 239\u201340; con-cept of play and, 140, 142, 144;  European empire as  measure for Asian colonialism, 159; in Final Fantasy, 167\u201368; history in game production and, 3\u20134, 14; Japan and, 101\u20132, 152, 154, 161\u201368, 170, 174n26; in Metal Gear Solid series, 99\u2013102, 170\u201372; Western gaze and, 192, 245 independent games, 53, 68\u201369, 89, 154, 184\u201385, 208, 233, 235, 272, 295\u201397, 305n16; experimentation and, 213, 274, 308; New York City community for, 28. See also indi-vidual gamesIndian subcontinent, 176\u201377, 180\u201382, 186\u201388; game industry of, 178\u201379, 183\u201385, 188n6Indigeneity: game makers and, 15, 41, 150, 153\u201354, 156\u201357, 173; in games, 107, 151, 167, 170\u201371, 311; games as civilizing force, 140\u201344internationalism, 104, 134, 137Intimate, Infinite (Yang, 2014), 47\u201349invisibility, 31, 92, 100; of  labor, 7\u20138, 38, 120\u201325, 128\u201330, 257, 270\u201371, 316\u201317iSlaves, 64. See also  laboritch.io, 91, 97, 236; #StopAsianHateJam Game Jam (2021), 16Iwabuchi, Koichi, 6, 9, 23n25, 124\u201325, 179Iwamura, Jane, 67Jackson, Sarah, 304James, C.\u00a0L.\u00a0R., 14Jameson, Fredric, 66, 68Japan and Japa neseness, 112n11, 188n14, 300; Ainu  people, 160, 171, 173; Allied Occupa-tion of (1945\u20131952), 102, 104\u20135, 119, 159, 161, 163, 170, 172; anime aesthetics, 20, 52, 95, 97\u201398, 238, 250; Asian hands myth and, 135, 144, 192, 199, 201\u20132; Bakamatsu period, 254\u201355, 264n20;  Battle Royale (Br) games and, 217, 223, 225\u201326; as colonizer, 19, 64, 101\u20132, 118, 125, 153, 159\u201363, 166\u201373, 240\u201341, 275; cultural odor and, 6, 9, 23n25, 124\u201325, 179\u201380, 187, 188n11, 189n31; dating games and, 232, 234\u201341, 248n10; in Death Stranding, 19, 115\u201316, 118\u201320, 122\u201330; in Disco Elysium, 72\u201373, 78; game industry (see  Japanese game industry); Greater East Asia (Dai T\u014d- A) ideology, 168; h\u0101fu and konketsuji identities, 102\u201312, 113n28; in  Index 359Hakuoki, 250\u201352, 254\u201364, 265n26; inter-secting with Black culture, 20\u201321, 31, 60, 73, 101, 104\u20135, 111, 227, 277\u201388, 289n8; in Metal Gear Solid series, 18, 99\u2013112, 112n6, 113n17, 113n31, 170\u201372, 188n11; in Paradise Killer, 52\u201353, 60, 62; postwar discourse and, 118\u201320, 123\u201328, 170, 174n25; Shinsengumi in games about, 251, 254\u201355, 258, 262, 264n21; Tokugawa period, 160, 164\u201365, 169, 264n20; US bombing of, 99, 167\u201368 Japanese game industry, 5\u20136, 52, 95, 101, 159, 178\u201379, 185\u201387, 188n11, 188n14, 278; dating games in, 232, 234\u201341, 248n10; game mak-ers and, 30\u201331, 89\u201390, 92\u201397, 115, 152\u201354, 160\u201362, 232, 275;  Japanese role- playing games (jrpGs), 91, 96, 126, 160, 167\u201370, 251, 259, 309; localization in, 33, 235, 250\u201352, 254, 258\u201364, 265n22, 265n24; media mix in, 234, 248n6, 251, 259; otaku culture, 21, 135, 251, 260\u201361, 266n51, 282\u201389; otome games, 235\u201336, 251, 255, 257\u201361, 263\u201364, 264n2, 266n51 (see also Hakuoki)Javier, Paraluman (Luna), 150, 153\u201354, 156\u201357Jiang, Sisi, 90\u201396; lionkiller (2020), 89, 91, 96Joseph, Ralina, 254Kaizen Game Works, 64n1. See also Paradise KillerKawai, Yuko, 102Kijima, Yoshimasa, 278, 282Kim, Se Young, 22n7, 136King of Fighters, The (SNk Corporation, 1994\u2013), 165\u201366Kirby, 12, 212\u201313Kittaka, Marina Ayano, 91, 209\u201310, 212, 273; Anodyne series (2013\u20132019), 208, 214, 270Kobo, Abe: Nawa (The Rope), 116Kojima, Hideo, 93, 99\u2013101, 108, 170, 172, 175n36; Death Stranding, 115\u201324, 126\u201329. See also Metal Gear Solid seriesKojima Productions: Death Stranding (2019), 115\u201324, 126\u201329Konami, 153; Metal Gear Solid series (1998\u20132015), 93, 99\u2013112, 112n8, 113n22, 115\u201316, 126, 130, 160, 163, 170\u201372, 188n11Kondo, Dorinne, 4, 13, 61konketsuji (biracial  Japanese subject), 102\u201312, 113n28Korean Exodus of 2014, 199\u2013200Koreanness, 52, 72, 83n22, 92, 135, 173, 188n14, 251; esports and, 5, 19, 145, 190\u201391, 193, 195\u2013203; Seoul and, 72\u201373, 75, 78.  See also South  KoreaKotaku . com, 177Kurvitz, Robert, 68, 83n14 labor, 3\u20134, 10, 18, 33, 61, 115, 118, 171, 211, 293;  behind streaming, 286\u201387; as cheap-ened by Asian  stereotypes, 22n7, 22n16, 63\u201364, 222\u201325, 228; emotional, 257\u201358; in esports, 179, 191, 193\u2013201; invisible, 7\u20138, 38, 120\u201325, 128\u201330, 257, 270\u201371, 316\u201317; mi grant workers, 116, 123, 199, 223\u201325, 274\u201375; outsourcing, 5, 155, 178\u201379, 185, 187, 271\u201372; of players, 132, 193\u201394, 199\u2013201, 222, 224, 228, 300\u2013303, 310Lakshya Digital, 178Lam, Carrie, 290\u2013 92, 305n3Latinx in Gaming, 32League of Legends (Riot Games, 2009), 1\u20132, 57, 191, 193, 196\u2013200, 202\u20133Lee, Martin, 296Lefty Paradox Plaza (Facebook Group), 84n31Le, Minh, 28, 30, 34, 96; Counter- Strike (2009), 18, 27, 29, 96\u201397, 155, 208, 227Li, Rachel, 207\u20138, 211; Hot Pot for One (2021), 20, 208\u20139, 213\u201314Liberate Hong Kong (Liberate Hong Kong Game Team, 2019), 295\u2013 97#LiberateHongKong, 304Lin, Zhongxuan, 293, 295Lineage II (NCSOfT, 2003), 228lionkiller ( Jiang, 2020), 91, 96Littler, Jo, 139\u201340localization, 9, 55, 150\u201353; of  Japanese games, 33, 235, 250\u201352, 254, 258\u201364, 265n22, 265n24LoL Champions  Korea (LCk) league, 197.  See also League of LegendsLost Arcade, The (Vincent, 2015), 285\u201386Lovecraft, H.\u00a0P., 59, 63ludo- orientalism, 6, 36, 39, 42, 163, 191, 194\u201395, 202, 222, 226. See also orientalismLye, Colleen, 177\u201378, 180Magdalinski, Tara, 140magic circle of play, 10\u201311, 39, 61, 163\u201364Malkowski, Jennifer, 102, 307Mamoru, Oshii: Ghost in the Shell (1995), 124Mangiron, Carmen, 252Martens, Todd, 184Martin, Paul, 101, 162, 164360  IndexMarvel vs. Capcom 2 (Capcom, 2000), 280\u201381, 287\u201388masculinity, 7, 99, 212, 243, 252, 262, 308; at arcades, 137\u201338, 279\u201381, 289; biracial, 102, 106; Black, 2\u20133, 60\u201361, 279, 281\u201382, 288\u201389; \u201cconsole cowboy\u201d fantasy, 6, 193, 202; in esports, 2, 19, 193\u201395; in fight-ing game community, 3, 133\u201334, 137\u201340, 280\u201381, 284, 289; #GamerGate and, 11\u201312; heteropatriarchal, 59, 80, 191;  Japanese, 251, 259\u201360, 262; remasculinization of Asian men, 254, 260, 263; white, 11, 38\u201339, 41, 72, 100\u2013101, 118\u201320; \u201cwhite man\u2019s burden,\u201d 119, 182\u201383Mass Effect trilogy (BioWare, 2007, 2010, 2012), 84n29, 92\u201393, 309\u201311, 313massively multiplayer online role- playing games (MMOrpGs), 122, 228\u201329, 302.  See also  battle royale (Br) shooter games; role- playing games (rpGs)Matheson, Calum Lister, 126\u201327Mawani, Renisa, 239\u201340McGray, Douglas, 277\u201378McRobbie, Angela, 252\u201353Mehta, Uday Singh, 144Meier, Sid: Civilization series (MicroProse, 1991\u20132016), 161, 181\u201382Melty Blood (Type- Moon, 2002), 280, 284\u201385meritocracy, 14, 133\u201334, 137\u201343, 145Metal Gear Solid series (Konami, 1998\u20132015), 93, 112n6, 113n17, 113n22, 113n31, 160, 163, 170\u201372, 188n11; antiwar rhe toric in, 99\u2013101, 103, 109\u201311, 123, 126; konketsuji and h\u0101fu identities, 102\u201312, 113n28Meteor- Strike! (\ufffd\u1ed7, 2018), 90, 96microaggressions, 72, 155, 273, 316Microsoft, 29; Geopo liti cal Review, 31\u201332; Xbox, 28, 219, 283Milburn, Colin, 23n36, 61, 64Miller, Christian Kealoha (\u201cSilver Spook\u201d), 153, 155, 157; Neofeud (2017), 149\u201352, 156Miller, Patrick, 27\u201328, 30\u201331, 33Milner, Anthony, 186misogyny, 70, 77, 133, 184, 243; #GamerGate, 11\u201312, 23n34, 308. See also sexismMissing: Game for a Cause (Flying Robot Studios, 2016), 184Moa, Hato: Hatoful Boyfriend (2011), 232\u201333, 235, 237\u201342, 246\u201347, 248n23, 249n28, 249n33mobile games, 150, 153, 157, 183, 187, 270, 296, 312; Yellow Face, 20, 43\u201344, 269, 273modding, 208, 218model minority  stereotypes, 3, 6\u20137, 18, 22n16, 38, 124, 128, 222; in Disco Elysium, 68, 70\u201377, 81\u201382, 83n13; in esports, 38, 191; Indian subcontinent and, 179\u201380, 182Montgomery, R.\u00a0A., 41Moore, Keita, 93, 123, 128\u201329, 175n36Morley, David, 192Morris, Lucy, 251Morse, Margaret, 224Moskvina, Olga, 69Mukherjee, Souvik, 6, 9, 313mukokuseki, 23n25, 125\u201326. See also odorlessnessmulticulturalism, 8, 55, 102, 104, 199, 263, 309\u201311, 315multiracial identities, 30, 92, 111, 284, 310; biraciality in Metal Gear Solid series, 18, 93, 99\u2013100, 102\u201312, 113n22, 113n28, 113nn30\u201331, 123, 171\u201372; game makers and, 15, 32\u201333, 55, 209; konketsuji and h\u0101fu, 102\u201312, 113n28. See also biracialityMu\u00f1oz, Jos\u00e9 Esteban, 57, 70, 83n17Murakami, Ryu, 277Murakami, Takashi, 283Murray, Janet\u00a0H., 221Murray, Soraya, 11, 111\u201312, 126, 163Muscular Chris tian ity movement, 139\u201340 music, 165, 184, 193, 226, 250, 302\u20133; hip- hop, 278, 281, 283; in Paradise Killer, 52\u201354Musser, Amber Jamilla, 57Nakamura, Lisa, 6, 39, 42, 54, 122, 139, 145, 188n14, 221, 228, 307, 311nationalism, 16\u201317, 44, 210, 262\u201363; animacy and, 233, 239\u201340; Chinese, 220, 227, 298;  Japanese, 101, 104, 165, 170, 179, 240, 253, 257\u201358Nawa (Kobo), 116Nehru, Jawaharlal, 181Neofeud (Silver Spook Games, 2017), 149\u201352, 156neoliberalism, 9, 41, 55, 68, 77, 190\u201392, 199\u2013200, 202, 222; colorblindness and, 229; masculinity and, 195, 254, 262; postfemi-nism and, 252\u201354neurodivergence, 209, 214\u201315Next Level Arcade (Brooklyn), 280, 286Nguyen, Tan Hoang, 8\u20139Nintendo, 28, 210; 3dS, 251, 254, 260; Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020),  Index 361290\u201394, 299\u2013305; dS, 254, 259; Famicom, 90; Gameboy Color, 270; GameCube, 283; Nintendo 64, 64, 283; Nintendo Entertain-ment System (NES), 5, 180; Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), 283; Switch, 153, 251, 293, 299, 301Nishime, LeiLani, 100, 111\u201312Niu, Greta\u00a0A., 5Nobunaga\u2019s Ambition series (Koei, 1983\u2013), 164Noon, Derek, 99\u2013100North American League of Legends Champion-ship Series (NALCS), 200\u2013201nuclear discourse, 116, 126\u201328, 167\u201368, 181;  resistance to, 99\u2013100, 103, 111, 123Obama, Barack, 283, 287objectification, 3, 6, 118\u201320, 122, 161, 212, 252, 257, 311Ocasio- Cortez, Alexandria, 299odorlessness, 6, 9, 23n25, 124\u201325, 179\u201380, 188n11, 189n31O\u2019Hagan, Minako, 252opacity, 314\u201315orientalism, 9, 14, 41, 43, 49, 93, 143, 259, 313; Asian hands myth, 133\u201336, 142, 144\u201345, 199\u2013202, 212; differentiated from the Asiatic, 54, 57; Disco Elysium and, 67\u201369, 71, 73, 75\u201378, 81\u201382; Eurocentrism and, 161\u201364, 177\u201378; high- tech orientalism, 7, 191\u201393, 195\u201398, 201; Indian subcontinent and, 162\u201363, 174n15, 177\u201378, 182\u201383, 187; ludo- orientalism, 6, 36, 39, 42, 163, 191, 194\u201395, 202, 222, 226. See also techno- orientalismotaku culture, 21, 135, 251, 260\u201361, 266n51, 282\u201389otome games, 235\u201336, 251, 255, 257\u201361, 263\u201364, 264n2, 266n51. See also HakuokiOut for Delivery (Gao, 2020), 20, 270, 272\u201375outsourcing, 5, 155, 178\u201379, 185, 187, 271\u201372paidia\/Ludus distinction, 143Palumbo- Liu, David, 4, 79Pande, Rukmini, 264Pang, Laikwan, 295Paradise Killer (Kaizen Game Works, 2020), 52\u201354; Asiatic world- making of, 58\u201359, 61\u201364; end- game trial of, 55\u201358pathologization of gaming, 4, 144Patterson, Chris, 38, 162, 164, 167, 174n6, 179\u201380, 188n11, 222, 235, 309; on the \u201cAsiatic,\u201d 68, 78, 178, 182, 186, 218, 227; roundtable moderator, 32\u201333, 93\u201394, 151, 210, 213Paul, Christopher\u00a0A., 139Penix- Tadsen, Phillip, 24n37 People\u2019s Republic of China (PRC), 193, 212, 291, 294, 298\u201399, 300, 303. See also China and ChinesenessPhilippines, 160, 163, 240\u201341; game design and, 32, 55, 150, 153\u201355, 209, 269\u201372, 274, 276Phillips, Amanda, 230playable deniability, 101\u20133, 111, 130player burnout, 197\u201399, See also addiction, gaming; gamer deathplayer choice, 11, 35, 37, 48\u201349, 58, 84n29, 236; Choose Your Own Adventure books and, 40\u201342; in Disco Elysium, 70\u201374, 77\u201378, 84n27; in Hakuoki, 254\u201358, 263,\u00a0265nn23\u201330; in Hatoful Boyfriend, 241\u201342; in Mass Effect, 310, 313; in Metal Gear Solid series, 100, 102\u20133, 108\u201311; myth of centrality to game design, 95\u201396;\u00a0in Tusks, 243\u201345; in Yellow Face, 43\u201345player gaze, 116\u201320, 123, 246PlayerUnknown\u2019s Battlegrounds (pubg) (Bluehole, 2017), 217\u201318, 223, 225, 227Playland (New York City), 280, 285Play without Apology, 272Pok\u00e9mon (Niantic, 1996\u2013), 95, 125, 153, 164, 270, 278, 283pornography, 97\u201398, 312postcolonialism, 125, 159\u201364, 172\u201373, 184postcolonial studies, 17, 159\u201364, 173postfeminism, 20, 250\u201364postracialism, 10, 100, 252\u201354, 263. See also colorblindnessPrater, Tzarina, 124prerational play, 133, 141\u201345protests, 17, 20, 270, 275\u201376; in Animal Cross-ing, 21, 290\u201395, 299\u2013304, 305n3; Black Lives  Matter (BLM) movement, 56, 133, 273, 293\u2013 94, 305n6; Liberate Hong Kong (2019), 295\u2013 97; #LiberateHongKong, 304; #MeiSupportsHongKong, 298; #Stand-WithHK, 304; #StopAsianHateJam Game Jam (2021), 16psychedelic counterculture, 67\u201371, 76, 80, 183. See also acid communismPunzalan, Pamela, 269\u201372, 274; Asian  Acceptance (2020), 20, 275\u201376362  IndexQiu, Jack Linchuan, 64queerness, 18\u201320, 39, 47\u201350, 83n17, 84n27, 251, 264, 312, 314; aesthetics and, 53\u201360, 180; of the Asiatic, 17, 54\u201363, 68, 234; dat-ing games and, 235\u201339, 245\u201347; game mak-ers and, 89, 97, 208\u201315, 233, 243, 248n10, 269, 272; in game studies, 12, 15, 308; gay characters, 74, 76, 84n27, 208, 210\u201312, 235, 242; homoeroticism in games, 59, 84n24, 119\u201320; homophobia and, 39, 133, 138, 243; popularization of, 262\u201363Queerness and Games Conference (QGCon), 209racial capitalism, 9\u201310, 68, 171, 193\u201395, 201, 230. See also capitalism;  labor; racism; white supremacyracism, 2, 18, 39, 63, 188n11, 212, 243, 258, 309, 316; anti- Chinese, 122\u201323, 157, 218\u201320, 225\u201326, 229, 233; Black nerd identity as challenge to, 279, 282; during COVId-19 pandemic, 54, 56\u201357, 64, 157, 224\u201325, 240; in fighting game community, 132\u201333, 138, 145; game makers and, 31, 92, 151, 156\u201357, 176\u201377, 181; #GamerGate, 11\u201312, 23n34, 308; Genshin Impact and, 311\u201312; procedural, 219\u201322, 226, 229; racist love, 7; Yellow Face critique of, 43\u201345, 269. See also Asian hands myth; orientalism; white su-premacy; xenophobia; individual  stereotypesRaji: An Ancient Epic (Nodding Heads, 2020), 184Ramirez, Ryan \u201cFChamp,\u201d 133Rao, Rajesh, 179real, the, 21\u201322, 126, 300, 314realism, 67\u201369, 77, 81, 126, 180, 227real- time strategy (rTS) games, 30, 164, 299Reddit forums, 84n32, 138, 305n6; anti- Chinese discourse in, 218\u201320, 225, 227; Hong Kong protests and, 296, 298, 304, 306n20, 306n23Reddy, Chandan, 16Reedus, Norman, 116\u201318, 122remasculinization, 254, 260, 263Ren\u2019py, 236Ren Yi, Mike, 270\u201374; Yellow Face, 20, 43\u201345, 269, 273Resident Evil 5 (Capcom, 2009), 101, 162, 164Riley, Sarah, 262Rivera, Takeo, 6, 83n13, 243Robins, Kevin, 192Roh, David\u00a0S., 5role- playing games (rpGs), 47, 74, 76, 83n18, 95, 311, 313, 315; computer role- playing games (CrpGs), 71, 96;  Japanese (jrpGs), 91, 96, 126, 160, 167\u201370, 251, 259, 309; mas-sively multiplayer online role- playing games, 122, 228\u201329, 302; protests in, 296\u2013304, 305n3, 305n6, 306n23; tabletop games, 46, 50, 90, 95, 272, 274. See also  battle royale (Br) shooter games; first- person shooter (fpS) games; individual gamesRoof, Judith, 281Rostov, Aleksander, 70\u201371, 83n14Roy, Samya Brata, 182Ruberg, Bo, 311Russell, Legacy, 314\u201315Russworm, TreaAndrea\u00a0M., 102, 279, 307\u20138SAArC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation), 187Said, Edward, 57, 162, 177Sakai, Naoki, 134Salter, Anastasia, 235Scheiding, Ryan, 164Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 12, 68, 186Sega, 278; Dreamcast, 165, 283; Genesis, 83Seth, Roshan, 180settler colonialism, 10, 12, 160, 171, 224.  See also colonialismsexism, 39, 243, 253; Dickwolves controversy, 259, 266n41; #GamerGate, 11\u201312, 23n34, 308; in Hakuoki, 252, 254, 257, 260\u201363.  See also misogynysexualization, 3, 6, 9, 118\u201320, 161, 212, 252, 257, 311sexual misconduct, 132\u201333, 138Shafer, Jon, 181Shah, Nayan, 56, 225Shangri- La myth, 183Shapiro, Michael\u00a0J., 127Sharif, Solmaz, 13Shaw, Adrienne, 8, 13, 23n32, 183, 307\u20138Shenmue (Suzuki, 2001), 52Shibusawa, Naoko, 9\u201310Shields, Duncan \u201cThorin,\u201d 197\u201399shoryuken . com, 136Sicart, Miguel, 100, 102Silver Spook Games: Neofeud (2017), 149\u201352, 156Sims series, The (EA, 2000\u20132023), 293\u2013 94, 305n6Singh, Julietta, 57Skolnik, Michael Ryan, 279, 288\u201389 Index 363slash fiction, 84n24. See also fan fictionSobel, Lonnie, 280, 285\u201386Sohn, Stephen Hong, 134Somewhere (Studio Oleomingu, 2015), 184sonno- j\u014di, 165, 174n26Sony Interactive Entertainment and Endeav-our (rTS), 132Sony PlayStation, 28, 33, 156, 165, 219, 251, 254, 260, 283SoulCalibur series (Bandai Namco Entertain-ment, 1995\u20132018), 32, 160, 163\u201367, 188n14South  Korea, 136, 144, 160, 163, 177, 188n14, 217, 226, 251; capital of esports, 5, 19, 145, 190\u201391, 193, 195\u2013203; game industry in, 8, 153, 173, 185, 190, 200, 202; Korean Exodus of 2014, 199\u2013200; Seol, 72\u201373, 75, 78.  See also KoreannessSpariosu, Mihai\u00a0I., 141\u201342speed- hacking, 218Spigel, Lynn, 257\u201358Squinkifer, Dietrich (Squinky), 209, 211; Dom-inique Pamplemousse (2013), 207, 213\u201314Stand with Hong Kong, 302Stang, Sarah, 253Stanley, Eric, 317n21StarCraft series (Blizzard, 1998), 30, 179, 191, 193, 195, 208Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (Bio-Ware, 2003), 84n29Steinkuehler, Constance, 218, 228#StopAsianHateJam Game Jam (2021), 16Street Fighter series (Capcom, 1987, 1991, 1997, 2016), 33, 59, 160, 162\u201363, 165\u201366, 180, 278, 283, 285; Patrick Miller on, 29\u201331Striking Vipers game (Black Mirror), 59\u201361sublime, the, 116, 126\u201328Sun- Yat- Sen, 186tabletop games, 46, 50, 95, 152, 272, 274Tagore, Rabindranath, 186T\u00e1\u00edw\u00f2, Ol\u00faf\u00e9mi O., 312Taylor, Diana, 247Taylor, Emily, 235Team Spooky, 287;  Battle by the Gazebo (BBG) tournaments, 280, 284\u201386techno- orientalism, 5\u20136, 8, 22n7, 36, 227, 234; Western gaze and, 23n27, 38, 60, 63, 71, 123, 134, 161, 191\u2013202. See also orientalismTencent, 153; Game for Peace (2019), 227the- Score eSports, 200Toma El Paso\u00a0\/\u00a0Make a Move (Tran, 2014), 152Tom Clancy\u2019s Ghost Recon Predator (Ubisoft, 2010), 182Tony Hawk\u2019s Pro Skater (Activision, 1999), 212Tosca, Susan, 252Tran, Lien\u00a0B., 152, 154\u201355, 157; Toma El Paso\u00a0\/\u00a0Make a Move (2014), 152transcreation, 252, 254, 258\u201363trans game makers, 15, 207, 209, 214\u201315translation, 113n21, 123\u201324, 140, 151\u201352, 175n34, 251\u201352, 260\u201362, 313, 317n21trans repre sen ta tion, 15, 20, 210, 322trauma, 127\u201328, 160, 184, 276, 316; of war in Japan, 116\u201318, 120, 125\u201326Trinh\u00a0T. Minh-ha, 186triple- A (AAA) game companies, 27, 89, 153, 157, 178, 185, 208, 236, 253\u201354Trump, Donald, 56, 64, 229\u201330Tsing, Anna, 16Tsuji, Izumi, 282Tufekci, Zeynep, 299\u2013300, 302Turay, Abdul, 83n22Tusks: The Orc Dating Sim (Alexander, 2017), 233, 235, 242\u201347Tuulik, Argo, 68Twitch.tv, 133, 231n30, 280, 284, 286, 288, 296Ubisoft, 272; Assassin\u2019s Creed series (2007, 2012), 33, 111, 270\u201371; Far Cry 4 (2014), 176\u201377, 182\u201383, 187, 270Ultimate Fighting Gamer 8, 286\u201387UltraChenTV, 133Undertale (Fox, 2015), 84n29Ung, Emperatriz, 27\u201329, 32universalism, 9, 115, 120, 124, 162, 193; in game theory, 12, 143, 161, 314\u201315Untitled Goose Game ( House, 2019), 237UStream, 284utopia, 50, 64, 77, 289, 295; adjacency and, 67\u201368, 76, 82, 83n17Vanderhoef, John, 253Vincent, Kurt: The Lost Arcade (2015), 285\u201386Virtua Fighter (Sega, 1993), 166, 188n14Virtual Ninja Code, 134, 139, 144visual novels, 52\u201353, 94\u201396, 233\u201334, 254, 260, 282. See also HakuokiVo, Linda Trinh, 3wallhacking, 218wan (idle contemplation), 143Wark, Mc Ken zie, 23n36, 45364  IndexWeChat, 209Weibo, 209Weisenfeld, Gennifer, 127whiteface, 125whiteness, 34, 38\u201339, 41, 46, 49, 56, 62, 171, 243; adjacency to, 3, 6, 67\u201368, 71, 78; arcades and, 279, 288; Death Stranding and, 115\u201325, 128, 130; Disco Elysium and, 71\u201374, 83n20; esports and, 1\u20133, 6, 191\u201394, 196\u201399, 202; game makers and, 32, 92\u201394, 96, 155\u201356, 176, 209, 212, 272\u201376; of game studies, 10\u201311, 308;  labor and, 115\u201325, 128\u201330, 224, 228; Metal Gear Solid series and, 93, 100\u2013103, 105, 109\u201310, 130; \u201cwhite man\u2019s burden\u201d myth, 119, 182\u201383; in Yellow Face, 43\u201345white supremacy, 8, 31, 68, 120, 192, 240, 310; #GamerGate, 11\u201312, 23n34, 308whitewashing, 71, 124Williams, Dmitri, 186Williams, R. John, 67\u201368 women game makers, 92, 150, 154\u201355, 209, 254 women gamers, 2, 235\u201336, 251\u201354, 257\u201364, 272, 276, 314Wong, Joshua, 290\u201392, 295\u201396Wong, Mou- Lan, 35\u201336world- making, 13, 21, 233, 291, 294, 307, 316\u201317; distinguished from world- building, 4\u20135; Paradise Killer and, 61\u201364wuxia games, 97xenophobia, 63, 157, 223, 240\u201341. See also rac-ism; white supremacyXu, Joe Yizhou, 149\u201353, 155Yamamoto, Atsuhisa, 106, 108yandere character archetype, 236, 241\u201342Yang, Bowen, 1\u20132Yang, Robert, 207\u20138, 210, 212\u201313, 311; Inti-mate, Infinite (2014), 47\u201349Yano, Christine Reiko, 9, 125, 253yaoi games, 248n10, 260Ye, Josh, 296\u2013 97Yee, Nick, 228Yellow Face (Ren Yi, 2019), 20, 43\u201345, 269, 273Yellow  Future fantasy, 191, 196\u201397yellow peril  stereotypes, 3\u20134, 10, 22n16, 54, 56, 63, 123, 157; Asian gamers and, 191, 196\u201397, 224; represented in games, 7, 40, 71, 179\u201380, 182yogi  stereotype, 180YouTube, 52, 109, 133, 157, 197, 219\u201320, 223, 226, 280, 287\u201388, 295yuri games, 248n10Yu, Suzuki: Shenmue (2001), 52Zaimont, Mike, 133zA\/uM, 68, 75, 79, 81, 83n14, See also Disco ElysiumZen, 67Zuckerberg, Mark, 156","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"http:\/\/www.europeana.eu\/schemas\/edm\/hasType":[{"value":"Book","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"http:\/\/www.europeana.eu\/schemas\/edm\/isShownAt":[{"value":"10.14288\/1.0441268","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"http:\/\/purl.org\/dc\/terms\/language":[{"value":"eng","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"https:\/\/open.library.ubc.ca\/terms#peerReviewStatus":[{"value":"Reviewed","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"http:\/\/www.europeana.eu\/schemas\/edm\/provider":[{"value":"Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"http:\/\/purl.org\/dc\/terms\/publisher":[{"value":"Duke University Press","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"https:\/\/open.library.ubc.ca\/terms#publisherDOI":[{"value":"10.1215\/9781478059264","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"http:\/\/purl.org\/dc\/terms\/rights":[{"value":"Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International","type":"literal","lang":"*"}],"https:\/\/open.library.ubc.ca\/terms#rightsURI":[{"value":"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-nd\/4.0\/","type":"literal","lang":"*"}],"https:\/\/open.library.ubc.ca\/terms#scholarLevel":[{"value":"Faculty","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"http:\/\/purl.org\/dc\/terms\/title":[{"value":"Made in Asia\/America : Why Video Games Were Never (Really) about Us","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"http:\/\/purl.org\/dc\/terms\/type":[{"value":"Text","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"https:\/\/open.library.ubc.ca\/terms#identifierURI":[{"value":"http:\/\/hdl.handle.net\/2429\/87734","type":"literal","lang":"en"}]}}