Researching Daizhong

One of the major projects I work on for Tephra is Daizhong. It's the Asian steampunk setting for the game. As a result, it strongly features many aspects of East Asian culture and tradition, filtered through the elseworlds lens of steampunk.

Faithfully representing Asian culture in a fantasy game is a difficult task. While I'm Chinese, I grew up in America. Some of my perspective is based in Chinese tradition, but I lack the understanding that immersion can bring. I am still at least partly on the outside, looking in. So research is important. In addition to the obvious refreshers on Asian history (History of Chinese Science and Technology was one of my majors in college), it's also good to see how other games have made the effort. This allows me to see what gaps remain to be filled so Daizhong can differentiate itself and avoid being labeled, "Just another expansion for anime fans."

Overall, the results of my look into various Asian-themed games have been disappointing.

First, the majority of games dealing with Asian culture are fantasy ones in nature. This is likely due to the types of games that comprise the market - fantasy ones dominate the field in numbers. That immediately means that the aspects of Asian culture selected for inclusion are limited in much the same way as the elements selected from western culture. Non-fantasy elements, and often non-violent aspects, are left out in favor of flashier combat oriented ones.

The shared basic elements can be summed up as mysticism/superstition, martial arts, and maybe some cultural mores (like ancestor worship). But that's it. There is rarely anything deeper or more expansive.

The one aspect that bothers me the most that is present in almost all of these games is their basic approach to establishing Asian culture is to stress the "other-ness" of it. "Mysterious," "strange," "unusual," and "exotic" are all common adjectives. By itself, this wouldn't be too much of an issue - feeling out of place on entering a setting you're unused to is a normal human emotion.

Where it becomes a problem is in the regular and steady emphasis on how technologically "backwards" or "inferior" their Asian culture location is. This propagates the widely held misconception of medieval Asia being inferior to Europe. Even when not actively portraying an Asian setting as technologically lesser, there is rarely, if ever, a mention of East Asian science or technology - even if the game tries to mention science in a western context. Basically, for most games, science is purely a western concept and one that should be left out of Asian settings, because "science" doesn't feel "Asian."

To put it in different terms on how annoyingly shallow this is: imagine if every game you came across had a Greek culture expansion. However, they only used the Spartans from "300," portraying every Greek as warriors who wanted to die gloriously for their pantheon of gods. Oh, sure, the characters you get are cool - but they always leave out Euclid, Pythagoras, and all the other things that made ancient Greece what it was. That's how Asia is done in most games.

I make "raising the bar" one of my goals with Daizhong. I want to not only make the link between East Asian culture - especially that of China - and human's scientific progress a central theme, I want to model that science in a way consistent with how they saw the world. I don't want to have Chinese inventions and Chinese developments presented with western methodology. Steampunk is an abstract concept that can be applied to any civilization while retaining the fundamental aspects of that culture. I seek to make Daizhong not a "Chinese flavored London" (as many game developers would do), but "Nanjing experiencing its own steampunk revolution."

Daizhong will exemplify steampunk born, not of Britain, but from those who invented the steam engine: the Chinese.