ABSTRACT

Of what relevance are video games to Asian American Studies? Besides the fact that a significant portion of the video game-playing community is Asian American, 1 and that some Asian American literary forms have recently been characterized as gameic or ludic (Fickle 2014), North American video games have had a long, contentious history with regard to Asian racialization. With varying degrees of epistemic violence, Asian racialization is present in the grotesquely racist Shadow Warrior, the techno-orientalist cyberpunk Deus Ex series, the essentialist and stereotypical portrayals in Sid Meier’s Civilization series and Alpha Centauri, the comparatively benevolent but romanticizing Jade Empire, and the redemptive but masculinist Sleeping Dogs (to name but a handful of easy examples). Because of this, an Asian American Studies lens is imperative for critically scrutinizing video games.