Video games vastly outpace all other entertainment media in revenue and in global reach. On the surface, games do not appear ideological, nor are they categorized as national products, yet their very existence has been conditioned upon the spread of militarized technology, the exploitation of already existing labor and racial hierarchies in their manufacture, and the utopian promises of digital technology. Like literature and film before them, video games have become the main artistic expression of empire today and thus form an understanding for how war and imperial violence proceed under the ... More

Video games vastly outpace all other entertainment media in revenue and in global reach. On the surface, games do not appear ideological, nor are they categorized as national products, yet their very existence has been conditioned upon the spread of militarized technology, the exploitation of already existing labor and racial hierarchies in their manufacture, and the utopian promises of digital technology. Like literature and film before them, video games have become the main artistic expression of empire today and thus form an understanding for how war and imperial violence proceed under the signs of openness, transparency, and digital utopia. To understand games as such, this book uses Asian American critiques to discusses games as Asian-inflected commodities, with their hardware assembled in Asia, their most talented e-sports players of Asian origin, and most of their genres formed by Asian companies (Nintendo, Sony, Sega). Games draw on established discourses of Asia to provide an “Asiatic” space, a playful sphere of racial otherness that straddles notions of the queer, the exotic, the bizarre, and the erotic, reminiscent of the works of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Eve Sedgwick. Thinking through games like Overwatch, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Shenmue II, and Alien: Isolation, Patterson reads against the open world empire by playing games erotically, as players do—seeing games as Asiatic playthings that afford new passions, pleasures, desires, and attachments, with grave attention to how games allow us to tell our own stories about ourselves.