Haru Nicol/Game Revolution here is a news flash for you, the prevalence of aspects of Asian culture in the Cyberpunk genre is pretty much a staple for the genre since the very beginning. And has become an integral part of its setting, but 5 minutes in Google would have shown you this. But honestly why go through the effort right? Just checking out the writers of this articles Twitter profile and you will know as to why this article was written.
If you did even the most basic of research you would have known that Asian influences in cyberpunk go back to movies like Blade Runner, The Fifth Element and The Matrix and over half a dozen other popular movies and video games. I don’t know if people like you have gotten the memo yet, but when various cultures interact with each other they exchange ideas, food, music etc and that is a good thing. Culture is a living breathing thing, it is always changing never staying static. Culture isn’t something you put in a glass box in a museum unless that culture is dead. It is impossible to prevent the interaction between different cultures and ideas unless you keep them separated.
So we should keep our cultures and such totally separate? No mixing of culture? Sounds a lot like racial segregation to me, something we have been fighting to abolish this entire time. You cannot own culture. The fact that your culture originated something doesn’t give you eternal right to declare it off limits to Video Game developers and people who enjoy said video games. It also does not magically allow you to tell people whether or not we are allowed to enjoy it or not. Nothing is original anymore everything is being nfluenced by something or someone else, we call that a cultural melting pot. And developers should be allowed free reign when it comes to designing and creating video games.
Your “feelings” and political agendas should not be part of any of the creative processes in video games ever. I have spoken too many Asians fans of this blog and on my Facebook page, and they have mentioned on many occasions that when they see none Asian people loving their culture in things like video games and movies fills them with a sense of pride because people love and appreciate their culture.
This single sentence basically invalidates the existence of this entire article, you basically criticized a 48 minute part of the game for representing Asian culture incorrectly or in this case in a way you did not like, and then acknowledge that you only saw a small part of the game and that there might be more. And then acknowledge that you are actually in no position to make such an analysis because you aren’t Chinese? What was the point of writing this article then? Moral posturing? Throwing your toys out the cot because a popular developer not representing Asian culture in a way you want?