Mixed Connections

Abstract

The first of five roundtables of four game makers each, this roundtable seeks to understand the textured, global understandings of race depicted in games. The eclectic roundtable features Minh Le, the creator of Counter-Strike; the games writer Matthew Seiji Burns; the fighting game champion Patrick Miller; and the indie game maker Emperatriz Ung. The discussion asks how games, despite their lack of Asian American representation, operate as hybrid Asian/American aesthetic and mechanical products that allow Asian Americans themselves to feel at home in gaming. This roundtable opens the collection’s part 1, “Gaming Orientalism,” by enhancing and expanding the frameworks of Asian American studies and game studies to produce new theoretical variations.