"Do They See Me as a Virus?": Imagining Asian American Environmental Games

Abstract

"Do They See Me as a Virus?":Imagining Asian American Environmental Games Edmond Y. Chang Night Flyer. By Mike Ren Yi. 2020. Even The Ocean. By Melos Han-Tani and Marina Krittaka. 2016. Pandemic 2020. By Chanhee Choi. 2020. Given the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic, the national racial reckoning and spike in anti-Asian hate, and the ever-present consequences of climate change and environmental precarity, three recent independent games—Night Flyer (2020) by Mike Ren Yi, Even the Ocean (2016) by Melos Han-Tani and Marina Krittaka, and Pandemic 2020 (2020) by Chanhee Choi—engage the interactions and intersections of game studies, environmental studies, and Asian American studies. All three games demonstrate the power and potential of video games as environmental worldbuilding, environmentalist interventions, and ecocritical play; they imagine and engage players' relationship to and even problematic exploitation of their environments, both natural and built, embodied and virtual, utopian and dystopian. As Alenda Y. Chang argues in Playing Nature, these games are "environmental texts," referencing Lawrence Buell's criteria in The Environmental Imagination, and therefore an environmental game: "the ideal environmental text [and game] produces involvement. It brings the nonhuman world into equal prominence with the human, exposes humanity's moral responsibility to and participation in the natural world, and portrays the environment as fluid process, not static representation" (32). Moreover, beyond the ecocritical values and ideals [End Page 145] that frame and underpin each, these three games raise additional questions and provocations concerning other norms, identities, structures, even feelings that interact or intersect with their obvious and thematic environmental concerns. These designers and games provide an opportunity to contingently conceive of a growing body of Asian American games to 1) highlight Asian American contributions to environmental studies and game studies, 2) make legible Asian American games as part of environmental literature and media writ large, and 3) creatively articulate what I am calling an Asianfuturist imagining of the environment that points to critical utopian possibilities. The close readings and close playings of the following games and responses from the game-makers themselves contribute to the growing body of Asian American game studies already underway such as the recent work by Tara Fickle, whose The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities addresses the "ludo-Orientalist" infrastructures of literature, games, citizenship, and nation. Fickle defines "ludo-Orientalism" as the "design, marketing, and rhetoric of games" that "shapes how Asians as well as East-West relations are imagined and where notions of foreignness and racial hierarchies get reinforced" (3). An extension of techno-Orientalism,1 ludic Orientalism not only engages the digital, computational, or mechanical aspects of video games but also foregrounds the ways that "gaming, both digital and analog, is used in everyday life to provide alternative logics and modes of sense making, particularly as a means of justifying racial fictions and other arbitrary human typologies" (9). In other words, Fickle and the work of others like Christopher Patterson and Dean Chan deploy games as theory in order to examine the ways that games not only render race as mere pixels and representation, but they also enact and are embedded with racialized norms, logics, and mechanics. Night Flyer, Even the Ocean, and Pandemic 2020 and their respective designers theorize their own work, their relationship to their identities and positionalities, and the potential for Asian American games. Moreover, the games and designers presented below bridge more traditional environmental studies, Asian American ecocriticism, and the recent environmental turn in video games studies. Robert T. Hayashi, in his essay "Beyond Walden Pond: Asian American Literature and the Limits of Ecocriticism," argues for understandings of nature that are not centered on or by whiteness, to expand the definitions of the environment that does not replicate the "historical assumption that nature is equivalent to environment," and most importantly, to consider "how ethnic/racial minorities have defined, experienced, apprehended, and represented" nature and the environment (61). Hayashi reimagines "how the study of Asian Americans relates to dominant notions of the natural world" (Hayashi "Environment" par. 7). He calls for a consideration of "a wider range of texts, disciplinary approaches, and epistemological assumptions" (Hayashi, 61) regarding the links between social and natural domains, particularly...