Gamer in Asia: fellow white male game journalists, we need to talk

Being white is awesome. That’s not to say that white people are awesome, far from it, but let’s face it, nobody has it better than guys like me.

I didn’t realise how good until I moved to China and for the first few months I spent my whole time thinking that Chinese people were the friendliest people on Earth. And they were, to me. To each other, not so much, to anyone of darker complexion than themselves, not at all.

I think the best parable for this comes from David Foster Wallace’s amazing commencement speech (watch it here), the story goes like this:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

Sounds trite, but it’s true. As a white male, I will never truly be aware of the stream I swim in, and it will always cloud my judgement. Always.

So what does that have to do with gaming? Well actually it has a hell of a lot to do with gaming, and that’s something I only realised recently, by working with the incredibly multi-cultural bunch of misfits that populate Games in Asia. Just yesterday my editor Mary-Anne wrote an eye-opening piece about the IeSF’s infamous male-only tournaments from her perspective as an Asian female gamer. While I don’t agree with everything she says, I can understand why she is rankled by the aggressive reaction from Western media, which neither understands nor wants to understand the culture that surrounds Asian female gamers, focusing on catchy anti-sexist headlines as oppose to actual cultural understanding.

(See: Sexism in Asia is the real reason IeSF decided on gender-separate tournaments)

This is a problem that many white male games journalists (and we are the majority) suffer from, because we simply don’t understand what’s going on outside our water. We mostly grew up with education that focused on gender equality, and as a result we have a strong belief that this should be the case everywhere. We also can’t help but attack these problems from a perspective of privilege, which often comes across as being arrogant, or at its worst, domineering.

And I’m as guilty as anyone. A few months ago I wrote an article using Conception II to discuss sexism in Japanese culture. While I still think I had a valid point, I failed to actually interact with anyone from the other side of the argument, and made very little effort to understand their ideas.

(See: Conception II could be the perfect example of everything that’s wrong with Japanese gaming culture)