Race and Orientalism in E-Gaming with Tara Fickle

In this episode, we engage with Tara Fickle, an associate professor of Asian American studies at Northwestern University. Tara delves into the concept of "ludo-orientalism," exploring how racial and cultural dynamics shape gaming and digital culture. The conversation highlights the historical and contemporary intersections of race, gender, and gaming, examining how these elements influence perceptions and practices within the gaming industry. Tara also discusses the role of digital skins in gaming, the impact of anime aesthetics, and the broader implications of these trends on global gaming cultures. Through her insights, Tara challenges existing narratives and encourages a more inclusive and reflective approach to understanding race and technology.

Tara Fickle is an Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at Northwestern University whose research sits at the intersection of race, gaming, and digital culture. She is the author of The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities (NYU Press, 2019), the award-winning book that traces how games and game logic have been used to shape and contest racial stereotypes in the United States. Tara’s work brings together critical race theory, game studies, and cultural analysis to show how play, competition, and game structures have been entangled with national narratives about race, belonging, and identity. She is also co-editor of Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) About Us (Duke University Press, 2024), a collection of essays exploring the historical and cultural entanglements of video games with Asian and American racial formations. At Northwestern, Tara teaches courses on Asian American culture, gaming, comics, and digital humanities, and her research continues to push conversations around race, technology, and play in new and provocative directions.

Reading list:

• Ecogames: Playful Perspectives on the Climate Crisis https://www.routledge.com/Ecogames-Playful-Perspectives-on-the-Climate-Crisis/Beke-Werning-Farca/p/book/9789463721196

• Roger Caillois in Man, Play and Games (1961) https://books.google.com.ph/books/about/Man_Play_and_Games.html?id=bDjOPsjzfC4C&redir_esc=y

• Fiscal Orientalism: China Panic, the Indebted Citizen, and the Spectacle of National Debt https://muse.jhu.edu/article/633396/summary#:~:text=Access%20options%20available:-,Fiscal%20Orientalism:%20China%20Panic%2C%20the%20Indebted%20Citizen%2C%20and%20the,historically%20specific%20form%20of%20indebtedcitizenship

• Raising the Stakes by T. L Taylor https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4420/Raising-the-StakesE-Sports-and-the

Transcript:

Kerry McInerney (00:57)

In this episode, we talk to Tara Fickle, an associate professor of Asian American Studies at Northwestern University, about race and gaming. Tara introduces us to the concept of Ludo-Orientalism, or the way that racial stereotypes and categories about Asians and Asian Americans are constructed through games and gaming. We discuss how race shapes the way that gameplay is perceived, and in particular, how East Asian gamers are understood as being too serious, hardcore, or robotic in our play. Tara also explores how these racial stereotypes shape perceptions of Chinese creativity, as epitomized by the response to the release of DeepSeek AI's large language model back in January earlier this year. We also talk about how gender shapes e-sport culture and why anime aesthetics are increasingly popular in global gaming franchises. We hope you enjoy the show.

Kerry McInerney (01:49)

Brilliant. Thank you so much for joining us here today. It really is such a pleasure. We've been super looking forward to this conversation. Suggest kicking us off. Could you tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and what's brought you to thinking about feminism, gender, and technology?

Tara Fickle (02:02)

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really pleased to be here. So I'm Tara Fickle. I am an associate professor of Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. And I research and teach on race and gaming and other forms of digital culture. So, for me, I grew up really playing a lot of games, digital and otherwise, and really enjoyed them as an activity, but never really thought about them as something that could be studied or had larger political or cultural value.

At that moment, I was in graduate school, and of all things, I was reading Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, which has a kind of mixed reputation. A scene in it in which one of the mothers is describing immigration and assimilation through the metaphor of chess. And I was really fascinated by this scene, and it really kind of resonated with me, not just in terms of other things I'd seen in Asian American literature and media. If you ever seen Crazy Rich Asians, that kind of mahjong scene. So I think that scene really helped me understand, especially how on my Chinese side, my mom, my aunts, my grandma, why gaming and gambling were maybe really central to their lives and maybe even the way that they thought about navigating the world, not just as immigrants, but also as Asian women.

Eleanor Drage (03:16)

I'm so looking forward to hearing your answer to our good robot questions. What is good technology? Is it even possible? And how can feminism or pro-justice movements help us get there?

Tara Fickle (03:26)

It's a great question. And as you are aware, a really complicated one. Maybe I can answer this from the perspective of how I've been thinking about it. I've been really interested in the work of scholars like Alenda Chang and others who have thought about how, as a technology, like many others, it is really environmentally destructive. It is incredibly impressive to look at in terms of graphics, but as many people know, it's incredibly destructive in terms of the way that the hardware is made, how it's sourced, the materials where it's disposed of, much of which is e-waste facilities in Asia, and of course, the labor that's used to manufacture it. And so in terms of not just seeing gaming as part of this somewhat dangerous cycle of technological obsolescence, trying to make consoles faster and smaller and graphics better and greater, very similar people working on environmental game studies have thought about how, deprioritizing some of those, more graphical features and to think about what makes a good game in terms of slowness of it, the narrative, the characters, and how there are other ways to achieve this idea of flow state, which is a term often used in game development to think about how to find a kind of pleasure balance where a game is challenging enough to be exciting, but not too challenging cause anxiety. So, to hit that flow state for players and to think about how we have tended to prioritize more of an instant gratification, if other ways would be more ethical, and sustainable to achieve that.

Kerry McInerney (05:03)

That's such an interesting answer because I say, this is a very amateur gamer, but I'm trying to reclaim the gaming title. was very inspired by one of our previous guests, Caroline Sinders, who talked a lot about the fact that so many people are gamers, that we're playing games on our phones all the time and engaging in this culture, but don't see ourselves as being part of this kind of hallowed hall of game culture. So, trying to reclaim that title a little bit, but I'm really interested in what we choose to value or fetishize in gaming. I feel like at one point it was this hyper-realistic graphics. I feel like right now, it's like open-world modability. But I think there is this interesting question of scale that you've brought us back to. Which is what are the environmental costs of trying to make these bigger and bigger and bigger worlds online and in gaming? But I wanted to kind of ask you about your work specifically on the intersections between race and gaming, a really fundamental concept in Asian American studies, and across many of the episodes in our podcast, is techno orientalism, or thinking about how the fear and the fetishization of the so-called operates in and through technology. And I was really fascinated by your work because you bring this to the side of gaming through a related concept, which is Ludo-Orientalism. So, for our listeners, could you explain what Ludo-Orientalism is and how it relates to these other kinds of racism or racialization that we see operating through technology?

Tara Fickle (06:23)

So this term, Ludo-Orientalism, comes from the Latin word for “ludus”, which means “play”. And although it's a little bit of a mouthful, one of the reasons that I chose it is because it shows how our ideas about games, the way that we've thought about it, especially in an academic context, is really also deeply built in Orientalism. And what I mean by that is, in my research, what I found is that if you go back to the early 1900s, when people were first theorizing play, scholars like Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois actually were using ideas of Ludus and Paidia, what they contrasted it to, to categorize different civilizations, essentially, according to what kind of play they engaged in. And they reproduced racial hierarchies that we think of now as part of a kind of eugenic or scientific racist hierarchy in which the most civilized of groups are those who played in a logical competition, and other forms of play were degraded, and seen as so-called “primitive games”, having to do with disorientation or simulation and mimicry or even chance. So for me, Ludo-Orientalism was a way both to explain how many groups, in this case Asians and East Asians, are racialized according to their play styles. And how they're often seen as having a kind of unnatural relationship to play, right? They're either playing too hard or not able to play, too obsessed with work. But also, how games in that sense are actually really culturally important as a way of categorizing different groups of people into different types of play styles.

Eleanor Drage (07:58)

There are many different ways that race shapes games. And the two ways that I think people know most about are representations of people of color in games and the demographics of gaming communities. But what other ways does race shape gaming? But please do also refer to those ways as well, just so that people have some context.

Tara Fickle (08:16)

Yeah, absolutely. So the way that I think we've kind of historically seen race talked about in gaming is in terms of stereotypes, or when we're talking about live action characters, how white or how diverse the video game cast of characters were, and settings as well. And in the early days, this tended to refer to really blatant racist caricatures in even early games like Street Fighter. And then later, in terms of the broader inclusion in games like The Last of Us. And what's become clear, and this is not true just in gaming, but in media more broadly, unfortunately, even as diversity and inclusion have gotten better, representation has gotten better in terms of numbers, it still hasn't necessarily fully shifted the needle in terms of progressive media and technology.

So what's clear is that the representation issue is a canary in the coal mine, but also that it is revealing something about the way in which games are produced. So my work has increasingly turned to industry and talking to people in industry. And it's clear that insofar as the people who are making the decisions, greater diversity at the table really is important. That's the people who are writing, who are making decisions, who are casting, and who are ideating need to be more diverse. But in terms of my work and where it started in terms of thinking about how race is baked into gaming and gaming technology, thinking about how games are symptomatic of racial thinking, one of the ways that I was always struck was, going back to the question of Asian play styles, East Asian players in particular were often talked about as playing in kind of robotic ways. So not risk-taking, not courageous, not daring, but the way that they played was often seen as kind of grinding or farming. And I remember being struck by how this extended more broadly into the idea of playing music, and that the way that Asians play was characterized as often too technical or wouldn't be. 

So how race was even becoming a lens for how people were evaluating other kinds of play is, I think, something that is much more abstract and built into the gaming world, but is a way that we can see why certain people are or are not playing games, not only in terms of race, but also gender. And the way that certain kinds of games, genres of games, so-called “cozy games” or “mobile games”, are often seen as “less serious”, “casual”, which in many cases is a euphemism for women's or girls' games, and seen as not serious, not “hardcore”.

Kerry McInerney (11:05)

I actually want to kind of jump off this point that you raised around playstates, play styles, and both of these questions. Because I think the tension that you draw out here, around East Asian people being seen as “too serious”, “too hardcore”, I would argue that there's kind of this racial construction of almost a freakishness around any Asian creativity in general. Like, I think of the way that East Asian musicians get treated, there's often this obsession with the Asian child prodigy, which gets very tied into these nationalist imaginaries of East Asian geopolitical dominance somehow, and child prodigy-ness when it comes to things like music and mathematics. But then it's also seen as a perversion of creativity, of yes, the robotic stereotype you mentioned, but also this idea of there's no real meaning, joy, or playfulness in these activities anymore. And I think it was really interesting to see the way that you tied this to gaming. But I was wondering more broadly, how do you see this particular tension playing out in relation to technological innovation and creativity? Say, for example, in the way that people talked about the creation of DeepSeek, the large language model by a Chinese company that was launched in January this year, I believe.

Tara Fickle (12:21)

Yeah, absolutely. I also wanted to say that the issue of scale that you're connecting is a really important one. In other words, geopolitical stakes of how, let's say, China is always seen not as an innovator but a “copycat”, a sort of “stealer of ideas” and sort of “deceitful” and “individual”, let's say, Chinese people in the States, whose gambling back in the late 1800s was seen as a source of moral decrepitude, but also as a sign of cheating and also their, “cheapness” in terms of their labor, the unreliability and unfairness of it. So I thought DeepSeek was a really fascinating example because, on the one hand, it sort of flew in the face of these longstanding racial stereotypes. Not only was it done open source, which seemed to fly against the idea of innovation, freedom, access, against stereotypes of a sort of historically authoritarian China, but it was also done cheaper, which I think was really the thing that startled people, that although it was innovation, it was also seemingly done at a much larger scale with much fewer resources. And so it was seen as maybe more environmentally sustainable.

So I think what's been fascinating is to see how those stereotypes and those discourses about play and technology have been, it would seem, upset by these new technological innovations, but also how certain aspects of that narrative get refolded in. They must have stolen this. This must not actually be as great as it seems moving from the geopolitical back to the individual scale, there are actually, I think, really serious consequences for how these perverted ideas of play and creativity are applied as racial stereotypes in relation to the colloquially called “bamboo ceiling”, which is the corollary to the glass ceiling in which Asians are seen as not able to transcend certain limits, especially when it comes to corporate America or the higher echelons of white collar work. So I think you can see this in ideas of Asians as not leadership material, not creative, not risk-taking, right? And therefore not “CEO material”. But you also see it in things like admissions, where Asians are kind of across the board, scored lower on seeming personality traits that are very abstract but related to these ideas, like rated them for courage, or kindness, or integrity. And I think all of these really speak to the ways that these ludic ideas, in a broader sense, these playful ideas, are shaping the way that we think about race in more virtual spaces outside of things like appearance or biology.

Kerry McInerney (15:06)

And, it wasn't until you were answering that I really connected the way that this language of cheating, which I think is so common in tech innovation spaces, but also more broadly in terms of thinking about China as a geopolitical player. Long T. Bui has an interesting article on monetary orientalism, or fiscal orientalism, which is another term I think by Fan Yang. And Bui's article is very much about this idea of China as a global cheater on the world stage. And what I think was really striking is I never connected that as being like a ludic logic or being inherently like a gaming logic, the idea of cheating, and how that takes on such a powerful racial form in these kinds of international discourses. I actually wanted to pivot, though, and ask you about something you were describing a little bit earlier, which was the player behavior. I know they are also experts on e-sport communities in particular. And so I was wondering if you could explain to an audience who might never have played or seen e-sports before, what e-sports are? And then also tell us a little bit about how race and gender shape e-sport culture.

Tara Fickle (16:06)

Yeah, absolutely. So, e-sports, basically, means competitive video game playing as a spectator sport. So usually, before an audience. And in its earliest forms, you can trace it back to arcade play in public spaces, in, let's say, the 70s and 80s. But in its current form, it really draws on the early 2000s in South Korea and a game called StarCraft, which became so popular that matches were even televised, and individual people, very often young men, young Korean men, became kind of celebrity athletes in their own right. And that idea of video games as sports and specifically video gamers as celebrity athletes, I think, really immediately captures the way that race and gender are at play here. So, when this model of e-sports started to become global, and especially in the States and in Europe, greater investment started happening in sponsorship to build out e-sports teams as essentially professional sports teams, especially during COVID. It was clear that what was happening was these largely Asian players, because Asians really sort of dominate the scene globally, were being slotted into an existing racial hierarchy of masculinity and athleticism. That, in the States at least, has very much been a white and black binary. And many athletes have talked about this, but also many sports studies, scholars, about how that white-black binary in existing sports often happens such that whiteness is idealized as a kind of form of heart or mind, sort of love of the game, whereas, blackness is often embodied in negative ways as sort of all body, right, rather than mind, all brawn, in a kind of almost bestial way. And so where Asians were to fit into this binary was a question, in particular, when Asian masculinity has often been kind of denigrated or eliminated in the public imagination. 

So, I was also thinking about how race and gender in e-sports are fascinating to me because in South Korea, we have a very different kind of fan culture around e-sports. It's much more common and normal for your average person to know what e-sports is and to watch these games, right? And that includes a larger gender combination than you would find here, where e-sports is often thought of as a video game, generally, as a male sport. And that they would have largely male spectators. So I became really interested in thinking about how South Korean women and Asian women more broadly were being kind of co-opted into the idealization of e-sports as a kind of attractive, sexy sport, and of gamers as these. T.L. Taylor has a term called “geek masculinity”, that they were kind of newly embodied, almost sex symbols of athletes. And so I think that it was really fascinating seeing how this idea didn't quite transport to the US, but there was still this idea of women as occupying a kind of support or caregiving role in the e-sports world, not only as mascots, but even sort of within the games that e-sports was making very popular, in which they were often playing support roles, which is kind of a larger history in video games. Where these roles are seen as feminized, especially those that are related to things like healing, and complementary and kind of secondary backup caricatures to the more kind of risk-taking leaders.

Eleanor Drage (19:31)

Finally, we know that you're working on a new project that focuses on the aesthetics of anime, which is a genre of Japanese animated media, if you've never heard of it, and how it shapes digital skins. What are digital skins? And also, how are ideas of race and nationality shaping character design in global game franchises?

Tara Fickle (19:51)

Yeah, thanks for allowing me to talk about this work, which I'm really excited about and just diving into. Digital skins are essentially virtual commodities that people can purchase for real money or sometimes in-game currency. And they're intended to usually change just the appearance of a character or an item rather than changing the abilities, let's say, making someone stronger.

And these have become very popular as so-called “microtransactions”, originally. So you could buy a skin for a character or a weapon for a few dollars, a few US dollars, but they very quickly amplified into kind of prestige items that can go for up to 500 US dollars. And again, these are all sort of virtual items. So I think it still especially shocks people. Like, why would you buy something, first of all, that is not real, but also only exists in the game to alter how you look? And I'm not really interested in these skins because they've started to be released for things like Christmas, Halloween, events, but then specifically Lunar New Year, which happens in January or February each year. And it started to manifest in skins that we could kind of call “yellow face” in a way, skins that were actually sort of changing the race of characters to make them appear more Asian, not just in terms of their clothing, but also in terms of their skin, hair, and eye color. And these were, talking to industry developers, not by any means the result of thoughtless or racist intentions, but really a way of navigating a demand in the Asian market for these skins, because the Asian market, especially the Chinese market, is one of the very largest four games markets. So they're global, but they also have a very, very strong Asian market. So, although we might read them here in the States as something like an increase in desire for inclusion and diversity, really, it was about how to appeal to an Asian market. And what was particularly striking was that the analysis that was being done was to think about how different looks, usually racialized aesthetics, were appealing to different kinds of regions. And so words that I would hear again and again were about things like, “why does an Asian market like things that are 'elegant', ‘sexy', 'magical'?” And a Western audience is instead drawn to aesthetics that are “dark”, “edgy”, “monstrous”, and “gritty”. And it became apparent that the aesthetic that was seen to appeal globally, but especially to an Asian market, in that kind of elegant, sexy, vain, was what we call an “anime aesthetic”. And this is something that's coming out of Japanese animation in, let's say, the 70s and 80s, but has really become of global popularity now. And so the work that I'm doing now is drawing on work in anime studies that is thinking about how the racial ambiguity or the perceived racial ambiguity of anime characters is really central to their flexibility as a global commodity. Something is interesting… If you ask white Western viewers what race anime characters are, many will say they're white. And that's not the case in many Asian markets. So the question is, what is it about this anime aesthetic that allows it to read so differently and so flexibly across different races and nationalities? And how is that really central to the monetization models that games are using now, where you're not paying for the game upfront? You're paying to support it through small microtransactions.

Kerry McInerney (23:23)

I mean, this is just such fascinating work, and I'm so excited to watch you write more on this and present more of this work to the world. I got to hear you present this work at the Asian American Studies Conference this year, and I was just blown away by it. But also by this conversation. So, thank you so much again for joining us here today. It's really such a pleasure to hear about your work, and we can't wait to see more.

Tara Fickle (23:36)

Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Edited by: Meibel Dabodabo