Current Events > Stupid article: How Cyberpunk 2077 Uses Asian Culture as Window Dressing.

(+) Yeah! (+)

Excerpts:

The gameplay itself looked rather fun and engaging, but something kept bothering me: the treatment and usage of Asian culture. East Asian culture was being used to simply dress up the world in a shallow way in the demo, which is troubling since it is using and discarding a small part of a real culture without giving it the respect and representation it deserves.

This leads to an incomplete picture of Asian culture in the West. Overall, it is the view that the East is an exotic place that is mythologized but simultaneously not accurately portrayed.

The gameplay reveal was full of random smatterings of Chinese and Japanese language strewn about in the world. You can hear a few NPCs speaking Japanese and Chinese around the game. Regardless of what theyre actually saying, Asian languages are posited as cool and exotic and are a cheap way to invoke a futuristic universe.

The most egregious example of this misuse of an Asian language is when the protagonist V passes by an advert for some soda brand and it screams in Japanese that most of its Western audience wont understand. This usage of Japanese culture just further reinforces Japanese stereotypes and packages it for a Western audience to regurgitate ad nauseam without ever considering what Japan really is like.

The usage of Samurai iconography in Vs apartment is also alarming. You can see space for katanas in her armory and the jacket she equips is part of a brand called Samurai. The brands logo blends the iconography of Terminator and Japanese Men-yoroi (facial armor worn by feudal Samurai).

This is a perfect example of the games apparent colonialist attitude: take a piece of East Asian iconography that has deep meaning and cultural context, mesh it with something that fits in the wider western culture as a whole, and market it based on its exoticism and vague link to how cool Japan is.

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https://www.gamerevolution.com/features/423453-how-cyberpunk-2077-uses-asian-culture-as-window-dressing

Methinks the author has no idea what a cyberpunk setting is and is trying to project their idea of what the genre should be like (in their mind) on CDPR.
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but black dynamite I sell drugs to the community

It'll reach the point where you're not allowed to use any other nationalities.

Then it'll be left with that nebulous term of "white culture" so unless they want nothing but A+ shooting of brown people, kicking out Jews and inventing things that make the first more efficient then they may want to shut up and let us have neon and moon runes.
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soulunison2 posted...

but black dynamite I sell drugs to the community

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Couldn't you blame a lot of shit on doing that if you wanted to? Not just Cyperpunk 2077?
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Meanwhile, actual Japanese people don't give a single shit about this.
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Sephiroth1288 posted...

Meanwhile, actual Japanese people don't give a single shit about this.

only white people care about what other races should be offended by
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St0rmFury posted...

East Asian culture was being used to simply dress up the world in a shallow way in the demo, which is troubling since it is using and discarding a small part of a real culture without giving it the respect and representation it deserves.

Does person ever actually say how a developer would go about "giving it the respect and representation it deserves", or is using elements of a culture not in its original setting just auto-racist.
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