Open AccessBEWARE ASIAN SERVERS: RACIALIZED PERCEPTIONS OF CHEATING AND SKILL AMONG VIDEO GAME PLAYERS
Author(s) -
Christine Tomlinson,
Sam Srauy
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
selected papers of internet research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2162-3317
DOI - 10.5210/spir.v2021i0.12252
Subject(s) - cheating , video game , asian games , server , racism , function (biology) , sociology , media studies , internet privacy , psychology , multimedia , advertising , social psychology , computer science , gender studies , business , world wide web , evolutionary biology , biology
The resurgent interest in cyberpunk in video game cultures centersthe genre's historical and racially problematic themes. Moreover, competitive/online playand the attending toxicity, along with recent Covid-19 based anti-Asian sentiments centerthe need to theorize the discursive patterns in which these phenomena appear. Taking therecurring talk on various video game forums of isolating Asian servers because "Asianscheat" as a site of inquiry, this project argues that the sentiment of isolating Asianplayers to region locked servers relies on three entangled discourses: the on-again,off-again collapsing of various Asian identities to a monolithic Pan-Asia (Duara, 2001),Korean and Japanese "expertise" through acquired skill viz. their assumed video game"obsessiveness" (Groen, 2013), and the cheating technological Other seeking to supplantWhiteness at the privileged center of video games (see Nakamura, 2002, 2009). Byhighlighting these discourses and how they function, this project hopes to lend theoreticalnuance to understanding racism in contemporary video game cultures.