Asian Americans and Digital Games

Abstract

Asian Americans have frequently been associated with video games. As designers they are considered overrepresented, and specific groups appear to dominate depictions of the game designer, from South Asian and Chinese immigrants working for Microsoft and Silicon Valley to auteur designers from Japan, Taiwan, and Iran, who often find themselves with celebrity status in both America and Asia. As players, Asian Americans have been depicted as e-sports fanatics whose association with video game expertise—particularly in games like Starcraft, League of Legends, and Counter-Strike—is similar to sport-driven associations of racial minorities: African Americans and basketball or Latin Americans and soccer. This immediate association of Asian Americans with gaming cultures breeds a particular form of techno-orientalism, defined by Greta A. Niu, David S. Roh, and Betsy Huang as “the phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo- or hypertechnological terms in cultural productions and political discourse.” In sociology, Asian American Studies scholars have considered how these gaming cultures respond to a lack of acceptance in “real sports” and how Asian American youth have fostered alternative communities in PC rooms, arcades, and online forums. For still others, this association also acts as a gateway for non-Asians to enter a “digital Asia,” a space whose aesthetics and forms are firmly intertwined with Japanese gaming industries, thus allowing non-Asian subjects to inhabit “Asianness” as a form of virtual identity tourism. From a game studies point of view, video games as transnational products using game-centered (ludic) forms of expression push scholars to think beyond the limits of Asian American Studies and subjectivity. Unlike films and novels, games do not rely upon representations of minority figures for players to identify with, but instead offer avatars to play with through styles of parody, burlesque, and drag. Games do not communicate through plot and narrative so much as through procedures, rules, and boundaries so that the “open world” of the game expresses political and social attitudes. Games are also not nationalized in the same way as films and literature, making “Asian American” themes nearly indecipherable. Games like Tetris carry no obvious national origins (Russian), while games like Call of Duty and Counter-Strike do not explicitly reveal or rely upon the ethnic identities of their Asian North American designers. Games challenge Asian American Studies as transnational products whose authors do not identify explicitly as Asian American, and as a form of artistic expression that cannot be analyzed with the same reliance on stereotypes, tropes, and narrative. It is difficult to think of “Asian American” in the traditional sense with digital games. Games provide ways of understanding the Asian American experience that challenge traditional meanings of being Asian American, while also offering alternative forms of community through transethnic (not simply Asian) and transnational (not simply American) modes of belonging.

Factors Related to Cyber Security Behavior

“…The current study is performed through a survey, on a convenience sample of students. The questionnaire contained adapted items from previous surveys conducted by the Pew Research Centre [22], [23], [24].…”

“…The majority of the questions were adapted from the survey conducted by the Pew Research Centre in 2016 [22]. The third part of the survey measured knowledge, and we chose to use questions from questionnaires [23], [24], which were developed by cyber security experts to measure the general concepts and essential building blocks for online protection. We selected those questions which were relevant for our participants.…”

“…We selected those questions which were relevant for our participants. We chose those questionnaires because the questions were specific, in the form of a test mostly with only one correct answer, explicitly showing knowledge of lack of knowledge [23], [24].…”

“…Their report states that although the majority of Americans had experienced data breaches and did not trust modern institutions to protect their personal data, they themselves did not implement the best practices in cyberspace. In addition, the Pew Research Centre carried out two more studies into the cyber security knowledge of Americans, and their results show that a large number of participants are unclear about certain key cyber security topics, terms, and concepts [23], [24]. It was shown that while the participants are able to identify a strong password or are aware of the danger of using public WiFi, they achieved poorer results in questions with more technical details such as two-factor authentication or page encryption.…”

“…All of the aforementioned studies, with different focuses and methodologies, but each in its own way -address the complexity of the cyber security awareness phenomenon. Common to all these studies is that they have identified various factors that affect cyber security awareness and tried to explain the interconnectedness of these factors, such as perceptions [14], [17], [22]; security breaches [14], [22]; behavior [6], [12], [14], [15], [21], [22]; knowledge [6], [12], [13], [17], [21], [23], [24]; and socio-demographic characteristics -age and gender [15], [19], [20], [21], [22], [23].…”