Recently, I read an article on Racialicious about race and video games. As with movies and tv shows, it’s getting to where I can’t even enjoy my video games without thinking about race and stereotypes. What’s a person to do? Perhaps, I should give up gaming as a form of stress-release and take up jogging.
For several weeks now, I’ve been humming the Gary Jules version of “Mad World” which is the theme song of the Gears of War trailer. I’ve been anticipating the game’s release ever since the trailer was featured on Xbox Live. I rarely buy a game before it goes on sale and figured it’d be months before I’d be able to get my hands on a copy. Coughing up sixty bucks for a new game seems just plain crazy. Fortunately due to a bet between two people other than myself, I was able to acquire one. (Don’t ask, it’s complicated.)
As I work my way through the different checkpoints, enters Lieutenant Minh Young Kim. Hey there’s an Asian guy in the game. But wait, what’s up with the name? Is he Vietnamese? Korean? Both? Or…did someone just pick some common Asian names at random and stick them together thinking no one would notice? The character bio doesn’t say anything about ethnicity. At least he was given the strong characteristic of being a “a proud, dedicated and ambitious soldier”. He’s a model minority kind of “Gear” despite his “run of bad luck” and having to lead the “misfits of Delta squad”.
So I start looking more closely at the cd cover. Hmmm…no ambiguously Asian dude there. I see Marcus Fenix, Dominic Santiago, and a masked Private Carmine. Maybe he’s been relegated to the back instead. Hmmm…nope not there either, just Fenix, Dom, Damon Baird and “Cole Train” (eh? more stereotypes anyone?). Poor Token-Generic-Asian-Man, you don’t even get a place on the cover. Could it possibly get any worse?
I continue to work my way through the game thinking that at least he’s there. Despite everything, I’m comforted by his presence. Never mind that I’m killing and maiming my way through the game as a big, hairy white guy. Lieutenant Kim is my man, my brother-in-arms and we’re going to save the world together. I feel the urge to give him a virtual hug as we reach the end of Act 1 and await the King Raven helicopter that’s coming to evacuate us.
Begin cinematic sequence (warning: contains violent scenes that some may find offensive). Noooooo! I watch helplessly as Kim is ruthlessly skewered by General RAAM. WTF?! He didn’t even make it past Act 1?! No wonder he wasn’t on the cover. I suddenly felt the need to whip out my lancer assault rifle and get in some serious chainsaw action on my Gears of War cd.
So now I must go on to save the world, a small Asian woman in a big, white dude’s body without my bald, Asian-fusioned, shallowly bio’d, expendable comrade. It’s a mad, mad world indeed.
[...] Disappointing arrogance: Alice Walker “I’m not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many men will take in seeing you choose to chain yourself” and “Use some of this time not just to be on the defensive but to interrogate your own culture and see how much of it you really believe yourself in your heart and how much of it you can let go of. You don’t have to be a prisoner of your religion.” Gears of War and the Expendable, Token Generic-Asian: So now I must go on to save the world, a small Asian woman in a big, white dude’s body without my bald, Asian-fusioned, shallowly bio’d, expendable comrade. It’s a mad, mad world indeed. [...]
Hi sume – I just found your blog and I don’t know if you’ll even get this comment as it’s on such an old post, but I love your writing!
I read this post in particular with interest, and thought I’d recommend to you Jeffrey Ow’s work on Asian stereotypes in video games, especially “The revenge of the yellowfaced cyborg: the rape of digital geishas and the colonization of cyber-coolies in 3D realms’ Shadow warrior” in Race in Cyberspace. One of the editors of that collection is Lisa Nakamura, and her work on race, with a focus on Asian identity, in the digital world is also extremely good.
Anyhow, I’ll keep reading!
Hey JJ,
Thanks for reading. Luckily, WP has email notification for comments.
Thanks for the recommendations. I’ll definitely check those out and your blog, too!
“a small Asian woman in a big, white dude’s body”
lol i see the reverse all the time
Lol I felt the exact same way you did, so I did a google search to see if anyone else felt similarly. Glad to know someone agrees. Maybe one day one of the thousands of Asian game programers will actually design a badass Asian American game hero. Hell, Star Wars doesn’t even have any Asian chracters in it even though the whole thing is based on Asian culture.