Race, Queerness and Gaming While Asian

Professor Edmond Y. Chang (English, Ohio University) will present featured topics from his recent essay, "Gaming While Asian," in Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) about Us (2024, Duke UP). The presentation will weave together an analysis of cultural and gamic tropes and stereotypes of Asian bodies, identities and narratives in games; close playings of a range of analog and video games and an autotheoretical account of growing up as a queer, Asian American gamer in mostly straight, white, normative spaces. Chang takes up the call made by scholar-gamers like Kishonna L. Gray and David J. Leonard, who argue in the introduction of Woke Gaming about the need for games to make clear and just interventions in racist norms, to embrace resistance and in their case, to center Blackness. His presentation imagines and interrogates what the centering of Asian American identities and experiences offers the study, development, consuming and the playing of games and reveals the personal, representational and ludic ramifications of “gaming while Asian.”

Edmond Y. Chang is an Associate Professor of English at Ohio University. His areas of research include technoculture, race, gender and sexuality, queer game studies, feminist media studies, popular culture and 20/21C American literature. He and Timothy Welsh are the co-authors of Video Games, Literature, and Close Playing: A Practice Guide (Routledge, 2025). He and Suzanne Richardson are the co-editors of Rolling with Advantage: Creative, Collaborative, and Critical Responses to Dungeons & Dragons (Play Story Press, 2025). Other notable publications include “Looking for Asianfuturism: Asian American Science Fiction and Digital Games” in Techno-Orientalism 2.0; “Why are the Digital Humanities So Straight?” in Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities; and “Queergaming” in Queer Game Studies. He is the creator of Tellings, a high fantasy tabletop RPG, Archaea, a live-action role-playing game, and a forthcoming collaborative, “semi-auto-poetic” card game called Archaea: Bane. He is also the incoming Editor-in-Chief for Analog Game Studies and a contributing editor for Gamers with Glasses.

This event is free, open to the public and welcoming to everyone. RSVPs are requested: 

RSVP here. 

Co-sponsored by the Center for Ethnic Studies, the Department of East Asian Languages and Learning and the Humanities Institute.