One early western-developed game featuring an Asian protagonist is 3D Realms’ 1997 first-person shooter Shadow Warrior. Perhaps, in part, as a response to earlier representation. But why the lack? It’s a difficult question to answer, but there is a shift happening. There’s a clear lack of Asian representation in these games, which could easily account for this dissatisfaction. What’s surprising about the study is that 49% of Asian-American respondents are dissatisfied with racial representation in games, compared to roughly 21% for other groups. So, since the western industry has become the dominant force in game development, how has it come to represent Asian peoples and cultures in their video games? Is that representation able to be boiled down to marketing bullet points? A Nielsen study conducted with Caucasian, Hispanic, African-American, and Asian-American subjects found that Asian-Americans are the most dissatisfied with racial representation in video game characters. That is to say that, on face, they feature the same sorts of protagonists and settings the west has already become comfortable with through exposure to years of other media, like movies.īut in recent years, the Japanese video game industry has declined. These eastern-developed games focus on generalized concepts of life in the east that appeal to a western market. This is not always true, of course, but the presence of stereotypical portrayals of whole cultures is undeniable. The number of influential games with Asian protagonists is even more limited, especially when considering that a fair number of Asian-developed games don’t see a release in western territories. But despite the large output of video games from Japan, China, and Korea from the 1980s into the 2000s, actual representation of Asian cultures has been fairly minute in games that have either been developed in the west or localized for a western audience. Modern video games owe a lot to the Asian continent, from the revitalization of the industry after the crash of 1983 to the oft-used gimmick of “eastern mysticism,” the idea that being from an Asian country connects a person to a spiritual and/or magical force that conveniently moves a plot along. His work focuses on the strange and powerful connections we feel to media and celebrities, including his breakout collection I’ve Been A Prisoner All My Life (And I Can Say To You). David Cole is a poet and writer from Wayne County, Kentucky who has spent his entire life playing games.
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