Dr. Christopher Patterson and co-editor Dr. Tara Fickle (Asian American Studies, Northwestern University) have published a new book of essays called Made in Asia/America: Why video games were never (really) about Us (Duke University Press, 2024).
The collection is the first to look at games through Asian (North) American framework and explores the key role video games play within the race-makings of Asia/America. Its fourteen critical essays on games, ranging from Death Stranding to Animal Crossing, and five roundtables with twenty Asian/American game makers examine the historical entanglements of games, Asia, and America, and reveal the ways games offer new modes of imagining imperial violence, racial difference, and coalition.
“Made in Asia/America represents a truly vital intervention into the study of race, power, and play by turning much-needed attention to the narratives of racialization that surround games. It insightfully lays bare the many ways in which Asia, America, and gaming have long been intertwined. Simultaneously, it pushes the study of games in exciting new directions by bridging theory and practice, foregrounding dynamic conversations between game designers.”
Shifting away from Eurocentric, white, masculinist takes on gaming, the contributors focus on minority and queer experiences, practices, and innovative scholarly methods to better account for the imperial circulation of games. Encouraging ambiguous and contextual ways of understanding games, the editors offer an “interactive” editorial method, a genre-expanding approach that encourages hybrid works of autotheory, queer of color theory, and conversation among game makers and scholars to generate divergent meanings of games, play, and “Asian America.”
An open access PDF of the full text is available online through the UBC library.
