Skins Deep: Race, Gender, and Nationality in eSports

Abstract:

Since the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985, Asia has remained the center of the manufacturing of video game hardware (China and Southeast Asia), the center of game innovation and the birthplace of most game genres (Japan), and the largest reliable resource of consumers (nearly half of game players reside in Asia). Dr. Fickle asks how video games, in being inextricably tethered to Asia, continue to produce new racializations of Asians around the globe, and the varied impacts games have had on Asian diasporas in North America through forms of digitization, “gamic” worlds, and play itself. The talk will explore a range of relevant contemporary topics in Asian/American gaming, such as esports, visual novels, racial representations, gender, labor and industry culture.

This event is part of the “ADE for Game Communities: Enculturing Anti-Racism, Decolonization, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (ADE) in Games Research and Creation” series from the ADE Committee of the Games Institute, University of Waterloo, and is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

This event will be held in a HYBRID format. Please join us in-person at the Games Institute, EC1 on the University of Waterloo campus or online through Microsoft Teams.

Speaker: Tara Fickle (Associate Professor of English at the University of Oregon)

Dr. Tara Fickle is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Oregon, and an Affiliated Faculty member in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies, the Center for the Study of Women in Society, and the Center for Asian & Pacific Studies. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and her B.A. from Wesleyan University. Dr Fickle’s research interests include Asian/Asian American literature, Game Studies, the Digital Humanities, and Comics Studies. Her first book,“The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities,”(NYU Press, 2019, winner of Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award), explores how games have been used to establish and combat Asian and Asian American racial stereotypes. Dr Fickle’s critical and creative work has appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, MELUS, and various public humanities portals.