Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling: Representation of Asians in Film, TV, and Gaming was the first con panel I ever attended, so when I heard they were bringing it back for a fourth edition, I was thrilled.
This year’s #GGCPandas included archeologist-turned-illustrator-and-costume-designer Meris Mullaley, former Japan-based sports journalist and current writer, baker, and cosplayer Tony Loiseleur, GGC Twitter Administrator and self-proclaimed media binger Kristine Hassell, blogger and gamer Sonja Marcus, and former Virginia Tech professor and current video game creator and GGC Manager of Editorial Services JC Lau.
I have played video games since I was three years old, when my mother brought home an Apple IIe computer, and loaded up Pac-Man for me. From there, I went from playing a range of games like Tonk in the Land of Buddy-Bots and the Monkey Island series, to console titles such as Grand Theft Auto, Assassin’s Creed and Halo.
But here’s one thing I’ve noticed: my favorite games will, more often than not, have a protagonist that looks nothing like me. Where games have a single playable character, that playable character is likely to be a man. A white man. Maybe he has a beard, maybe not. He’s probably also straight–perhaps he also has a wife or child or someone close to him who’s died or been kidnapped at the start of the game as a plot device, and he’s probably armed with some sort of gun or melee weapon or both.
Written by GeekGirlCon Manager of Editorial Services Winter Downs.
2014 is in the rear-view mirror, so perhaps now we can answer the question posed at GeekGirlCon last year by LeiLani Nishime and Kristine Hassell: “Is 2014 the Year of the Asian?” Whether or not it was, can we take the improvements made in pop culture depictions of Asian people, and continue to build on them in 2015 and beyond?
The two panelists picked their title because, as LeiLani observed, many conversations about the future of Asian Americans in media were all about the new season of TV. But before digging into why people are so excited about the new shows, the panel took us on a retrospective of the depictions of Asian and Asian American people over the past few decades.
