Asian people, do they all know Kung Fu or Karate?

During this week’s lectures and mandatory readings we established that characters from video games are overwhelmingly represented as white, other ethnicities are have limited exposure based on Eurocentric stereotypes. What I wanted to discuss in this blog post is the representation of Asian characters within the video games, their situation is almost identical to that of black characters based on different, yet just as offensive negative attributes linked with race. A study conducted by ‘Children Now’ (a children’s advocacy group) in 2001 found that 86% of protagonists from video games were white, an indicator of the western dominance of representation within video games. This study also showed that 70% of all Asian characters of in video games were designed as fighters, reinforcing the old stereo type that all Asians must know kung Fu or karate. This leads to what was covered in lectures about the game industry’s policies on including other races who aren’t of the western white variety, that is, exclude them all……..unless situation calls for a character who fits a certain profile attached to a stereotyped minority.  What might be interesting to some is that racial stereotyping attached to Asians within videogames is also strongly linked with gender as well. Yes it seems rather unthinkable to have a male Asian character in a game unless they are a culturally ignorant martial arts expert, Yakuza, or triad. With Asian women their characters seem to be ever doomed to play a supporting role or role as a romance interest for the white protagonist. They also tend to fit western notions of being submissive, book-wormy or nerdy, mysterious, exotic, sensual, or all of the above. It must also be noted in the Asian cliché handbook that Asian Females clothing must be limited to either china dresses or kimonos.  Yup, Asians seem to be in the same boat as blacks when it comes to being represented within video games, both their character representations within video games is limited, and of the little character exposure that either race gets tends to be misleading and offensive.




I also find it interesting to note that although some of the most iconic and successful video games have been produced by Japanese developers and studios some have featured characters who are obviously white/European or with white features. Franchises and characters such as Zelda, Mario, Resident Evil or Dragon quest are such examples, whereas others such as many of the Final Fantasy games make ethnicities ambiguous. As discussed in the lecture, players will tend to view the characters based on their own cultural conditioning. This means that players will tend to associate protagonists with their own culture. Making the characters more relatable to the player can be another way to make the narrative of a video game that much easier to be intra-dietetically immersed. I would be interested to hear any thoughts on whether this done on purpose by the developers in hopes of targeting different markets. Another thought I had is it might just be a case of the Japanese developers finding parts of western culture interesting enough to appropriate parts of it into their own work, after all manga, a staple of Japanese pop culture has said to be influenced by English and French political cartoons during the Meiji period. So is it really strange that characters from Japanese videogames look kinda white?