Sleeping Dogs Shouldn't Still Be The Best Mainstream Game About Asian American Identity
Asian American pop culture has exploded in popularity over the past few years. Music collectives like 88rising and films like Everything Everywhere All At Once are dominating the Western media zeitgeist, something that was almost unthinkable ten years ago. Even one of America’s most famous celebrity chefs, David Chang, is Asian American.
Despite this collective progress in other media and wider society, Asian Americans are scarcely noticeable in video games, an industry that generates more revenue than movies, sports, music, and so much more.
In fact, the last major game with a fully realized Asian American protagonist doesn’t even stem from this decade. It’s Sleeping Dogs, a game released in 2012 by the new defunct United Front Games and Square Enix.
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Asian American is a term borne more out of the need for political power than any shared cultural identity. It’s a term that foregrounds a distinct type of Asian American experience — typically Chinese, Japanese, and Korean — over others, such as Cambodian or Laotian. It also sometimes includes a broad swathe of people from the Pacific Islands, which were often colonised by Asian empires. It is a rich, broad spectrum to draw from, and yet the last time video games seriously looked at it came a decade ago.
Sleeping Dogs isn’t a game primarily concerned about identity. You are first and foremost an undercover cop in Hong Kong with a fondness for extrajudicial justice and an attitude towards women that on reflection is startlingly misogynistic. It does, however, recognize how profoundly important identity is to the game’s protagonist and the people he meets along his journey.
You play as Wei Shen, a
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