![]() This paper intervenes in existing Esports Studies literature by examining an esports research object through an Asian/Americanist critique. Now that I identify more fully as multiracial Korean/American, the SC2VN is a messier cultural knot that I want to start untangling. However, others, like my own Koreanness, seemed foreign and far from my fingertips. By orienting myself in that way, I could sink into my surroundings, and many subjective possibilities seemed reachable (Ahmed, 2007). As a multiracial Korean/American, I had the privilege of often passing White. The game asks the same question I grappled with in my fandom, but it looked at South Korean esports much the same way I looked at my own Koreanness back then. Looking back, six years later, my perspective has changed. Playing SC2VN made me feel seen, especially as a North American esports fan trying to figure out why my favorite teams and players were being waxed by South Korean opponents in international play. The StarCraft 2 Visual Novel’s (Team ElevenEleven, 2015) full title line on Steam-Valve Corp’s digital game sales and social management platform-is, “SC2VN-The Esports Visual Novel.” When this game was released, I remember being ecstatic because I was not familiar with any other works of fiction that dealt directly with esports subject matter. The result is an essentialized Koreanness in esports contexts that has epistemic effects on Korean/American subjectivation. By analyzing the aesthetics and deployment of the game’s most frequent setting, this paper historically situates the SC2VN and examines techno-Orientalism and high-tech Orientalism’s manifestations in the game’s setting and narrative, outlining both Whiteness’s influence over esports discourses and its processual re-orientation to the perpetuation of its own privilege there. SC2VN attempts to re-humanize Korean players through its characters and story, but it does so with set pieces that fall back on techno-Orientalist tropes that make esports’ Koreanness recognizable and sensible to a presumed Western audience through specific arrangements of bodies, technologies, and places. While the course of the novel investigates the resonant mental battles of trying to turn your favorite video game into your job and the precarity of professional gaming in the mid-2010s, the game’s setting choices and aesthetic design reveal an embeddedness in Western techno-Orientalist discourses surrounding Korean esports’ success in international play. The StarCraft II Visual Novel (2015 SC2VN) is a fish-out-of-water story following a white, nominally North American or European, StarCraft II (2010 SC2) player who goes to South Korea to try and make it as a professional gamer in the world’s most competitive country for SC2 play. Highway to the Golden Zone(fire): PC Bangs and Techno-Orientalism in the StartCraft II Visual Novel ![]()
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