UC Irvine

The gaming landscape of Southeast Asia, dubbed by prominent market reports as “the world’s fastest growing games region,” has undergone profound transformation due to globalization since the late 1990s. Southeast Asia, however, remained an understudied region in game studies. Conversely, videogame as a medium is largely overlooked by scholars in Southeast Asian studies. Due to this gap, mainstream discourses about Southeast Asia vis-à-vis gaming are driven by industry rhetoric that frames the region as a new frontier to be exploited, neglecting the agency of Southeast Asians in shaping their own gaming culture and history.

To remedy this issue, this project charts the evolution of Southeast Asian gaming culture from the perspective of Malaysia and Singapore between the 1990s and 2010s occasioned by the region’s integration into the global gaming economy in ways that foreground the agency of local entities, including players, developers, private companies, and state agencies. In particular, the late 2000s is an important turning point which marks the intensification of endeavors to formalize gaming activities from within the region. The elevation of videogames into an essential cultural and economic sector within the region, while brought on by foreign impetus, is increasingly driven by Southeast Asian entities, especially state governments invested in strengthening their positions in the global digital economy.

This project proposes that Southeast Asia can serve as a framework to remap the globalization of videogames through the lens of regional integration, which allows for an alternative mode of knowledge production that recenters Southeast Asian autonomy. I name this framework the “Inter-Asian Gaming.” Inspired by Kuan-Hsing Chen’s “Asia as method,” Inter-Asian Gaming aims to decenter the West by focusing on regional gaming economy, including intra-regional cooperation within Southeast Asia and inter-regional exchanges with East Asia. I posit that a study of Southeast Asian gaming culture that centers on regional interconnections holds the potential to generate alternative understandings of non-Western gaming histories in relation to neighboring spaces instead of imperialist centers.