UPCOMING TALK: “Gaming While Asian,” University of Georgia, 11/3, 4:30 PM

I am honored and excited to be giving a talk for the Department of English at the University of Georgia this week on November 3, 2021 at 4:30 PM in Park Hall 265. This will be my first in-person talk in two years, definitely since the pandemic started. I am presenting a version of my “Gaming While Asian” essay, which will appear in Made in Asia/America edited by Christopher Patterson and Tara Fickle. Here is the talk’s abstract:

“Gaming While Asian: Race, Gender, Queerness, Play”
Building on Tara Fickle’s astute assertion in The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities that “Asian American representation itself is a game,” this presentation weaves together an analysis of cultural and gamic stereotypes of Asian bodies, identities, and representation in games, close readings of a range of analog and digital games, and autotheoretical accounts of growing up and playing as an Asian American “other.”  In other words, how might games to challenge norms and tropes, to embrace playful resistance, and to center representations and players of color?  How might players, developers, and scholars attend to the ways games are algorithmically, mechanically raced, gendered, and normed?  This presentation imagines what the foregrounding of Asian American identities and experiences offers the study, development, and playing of games and reveals the ludic, representational, personal, and political ramifications of “gaming while Asian.”  

Many thanks to Dr. Joshua Hussey and the Department of English for the invitation and opportunity to share my current writing and work in Asian American games and games of color.