(demo unavailable on mobile)
arrows — move
space — toggle implant
(play with sound up)
A video game proposal for EMR 157: Techno-Orientalism
Demo description | Game proposal | Metacommentary | Footnotes
A very short playable demo is displayed aboveincluded in the desktop version of this page. “Very short” might still be overselling it: it takes probably 10 seconds to perform all possible actions, namely walk to the right and toggle an overlay. Since techno-Orientalism is in large part an aesthetic framework, I decided to focus on making this demo detailed at the expense of length. Still, it took around eight hours to develop, between creating sprites, recording music, and learning how to use Godot. [1] (This project was built using Godot, Photoshop, and Logic, and includes audio from jsfxr and Freesound under a Creative Commons 0 license.) In the rest of this statement, I will describe the demo in detail, outline a proposal for a full video game from which this scene could have been taken, and comment on the design choices that informed the proposal.
This is a 2D sidescrolling scene rendered in low-definition pixel art. The player character is a woman with light skin and black hair, wearing a white tank top, blue jeans, and pink bracelet. She is standing on a road or sidewalk at the bottom of what appears to be an overpass, the side of which is covered in ivy and graffiti. The sky is deep pinkish red; maybe it’s sunset. A UI overlay lists the player’s current savings ($20.35), active quests (none), and the in-game time (7:32 p.m.). Chill lofi beats play in the background. The player can use the arrow keys to walk back and forth across the scene. Pressing the spacebar triggers a number of changes: the UI disappears; the sky fades to a bluish gray; the player’s bracelet turns brown; and the music shifts in genre, keeping the structure and chord progression but removing the drums and bass, adding an additional piano, and replacing the vinyl crackle with an urban soundscape. Additionally, in this mode, the player’s footsteps are audible when walking. Pressing the spacebar again reverses all these changes.
SAN AMARO is a narrative adventure game about the gig economy. Jess is a 24-year-old Chinese American woman who has just moved to San Amaro, a suburb in the eastern San Francisco Bay Area. When the job she moved for falls through, she starts working as a hero, an independent contractor position for an unnamed private corporation that spans the food, transportation, care, and service sectors. Heroes use chips implanted in their brains to receive information about available gigs, called quests, and to navigate active quests through visual metadata overlaid on the real world in a manner similar to VR. Being a hero is stressful, dangerous, and potentially fulfilling, if you like that sort of thing. Jess sleeps during the day and works at night, trying to get to know her new roommates and the people in her neighborhood. But hours are long, money is short ... and they’re building something big out by the harbor.
The town of San Amaro, a fictional suburb in the East Bay. San Amaro is a sprawling semi-industrial area with a diverse, mostly working-class population. Over the last decade, gentrification in some of the nicer cities in the Bay has forced longtime residents of those places to move here. Plus, artists looking for cheap rent and transplants who commute to Silicon Valley. The transit system is underfunded, but you can get around by bus if you’re willing to walk for a while. The nicer high-speed rail system is subscription-based, so most people don’t use it.
Jess is illegally subletting the garage of a house she shares with four roommates. The game takes place both in this house, where she returns after work every night, and in the parts of San Amaro where her job takes her. (In addition to residential and commercial districts, some such places might include the local state prison, an abandoned naval shipyard, and the historic Chinatown block that was burned down in the late 19th century.) Later in the game, a high customer rating subsidizes the HSR subscription so that Jess can access better-paying quests in larger cities.
SAN AMARO is set in a world very similar to ours except Neuralink works.
Mechanically: a combination of adventure game, visual novel, and job simulator, interspersed with one-off minigames. Narratively: a combination of science fiction, bildungsroman, and political satire. Tone: alternately funny and serious.
Many of the gameplay elements are actually diegetic, the result of Jess’s VR-like neural implant being turned on. As shown in the linked demo, when Jess is looking for gigs (i.e., not at home or in an active quest), she has the ability to toggle her hero implant on or off. Having the implant on causes a number of cosmetic changes, including the addition of a UI overlay, the lofi-ification of background music, the removal of environmental sound effects, and the vaporwave-ification of certain aesthetic elements like the sky. There are some elements that the player can only interact with in a particular implant state. For example, some characters cannot be spoken to while the implant is on; and the player cannot complete or navigate quests while the implant is off.
The game progresses in a day/night cycle; the fact that the above gameplay elements are diegetic is not revealed until the end of the first day, during which the implant has been turned on by default and cannot be turned off. Upon loading the game, the player is prompted to customize their character. However, this selection does not meaningfully impact the experience of playing the game — this screen is also diegetic, and the choices correspond to different ways a worker could engage with the hero position, e.g., as a full-time gig, or a side hustle. A tutorial sequence then guides the player through the act of quest work. At the end of the workday, the player is prompted to turn the implant off, at which point they are allowed to take the bus home, beginning the night.
A more accurate term might be “evening cycle,” since thanks to the vaporwave shader the implant imposes on the world, everything always seems to be happening at sunset. During this sequence, Jess can explore or travel between neighborhoods. Available quests appear in the UI overlay along with their payout and the location where the player can accept them. Traveling to that location and accepting the quest triggers a quest sequence.
Quests have different kinds of gameplay corresponding to their type; they are more menial than skill-based. For example, a quest where Jess shops for a customer’s groceries might require the player to search the store for the right type and number of items, and a quest where Jess assembles a customer’s furniture might require the player to complete a jigsaw-like puzzle. Jess usually has conversations with customers during quests that reveal something about the customer’s life, interest, or ideology. At the end of each quest, the player receives the specified payout and may receive an additional tip.
During the day cycle, Jess can speak with other characters in the area, who may recur or change locations from day to day. Characters may only be interactive in certain implant states. For instance, Jess cannot speak to pedestrians or loiterers while the implant is on; and she cannot speak to other heroes or customers while the implant is off. Some of these conversations may trigger further sequences during the night. Narratively, Jess has to complete a required minimum number of daily quests because she has to pay rent, and cannot complete more than a set maximum number so that the algorithm controlling the hero network can ensure that all of its contractors receive quests. [2] Once the player has completed the minimum number of quests, they are prompted to return to the bus stop that will take them home.
Although Jess earns money and has to pay bills, this activity is handled for the player automatically. Instead, the night cycle takes place in a different kind of game entirely, more like a visual novel than a job simulator. At home, Jess can talk to and spend time with her roommates, friends, and other acquaintances. Some of these scenes are triggered by optional actions during the day: for instance, Jess might run into a friend at the grocery store and decide to get drinks with them later, or ask someone out on a date. Some scenes are always available regardless of the player’s daytime actions. Other scenes are mandatory and determined by the number of days that have progressed. This is the period in which most of the game’s major narrative arcs unfold.
Jess is trying to balance her work life with an unstable living situation and a tenuous social circle. The city around her is actively changing: some residents are being forced out, while former residents of other areas are being forced in. Someone has been buying up a lot of properties along the bayfront for unknown reasons, and locals are wary and skeptical of this development.
Some of this precarity is reflected in her job. Jess’s interactions with customers, while not inherently benign or antagonistic, may reveal something about the customer’s ideology. For instance, a customer might disclose that Jess looks or behaves differently than they imagined from her profile in the client-side interface of the hero system; or they might compliment her efficiency; or they might remark that she is more polite than other heroes whose services they have employed; or they might proposition her.
Additionally, the quests that Jess is offered begin relatively analogous to real-life gig app work (e.g., driving someone somewhere) but become more dangerous and surreal as the game progresses. She might be assigned by the algorithm, for instance, to dress up as a clown for a party; provide therapy to a person in crisis; take pictures of someone’s ex; provide customer support to a different hero experiencing software problems; have sex with a client; or clear a homeless encampment. While the outcomes of these gigs does not affect the gameplay, narratively, Jess becomes stressed and increasingly dissociative as her job progresses.
I could write a separate essay on the historical/geographical/political factors that informed the setting of San Amaro, but to keep this section digestible I want to focus on the game mechanics themselves. Why make this project a video game, rather than a work in any other medium? My initial motivation came out of the observation that real-life gig apps obfuscate their exploitative functions by gamifying the labor experience for workers as well as for customers. For instance, Instacart shoppers “choose” which orders to accept through the in-app notification system, which requires a shopper to notice and accept a high-paying order within milliseconds before someone else scoops it up. This allows the corporation to claim that their contractors have the agency of setting their own hours while ensuring that any order will be picked up by the contractor willing to be paid the least for it, keeping labor costs low.
I wanted to critique this dynamic by pushing it to an extreme: instead of a gamified app, the player experiences this relationship to labor through a literal game. Jess, the player character, works as a “hero” (gig employee) who embarks on “quests” (errands for customers using the equivalent of an app like DoorDash). These word choices felt like an ironic conflation of techno-utopian corporatespeak and the standard conventions of video games, as well as an implicit critique of the ways that corporations rhetorically praise their workers to avoid materially enriching them. I wanted to subvert the player’s expectations by presenting the first part of the game as though the entire game was just a gig economy simulator, then revealing that the job simulator was only one part of a larger story-based game, whose protagonist spends a significant chunk of her life working.
I have this vivid memory of opening the Instacart Shopper app a couple years ago and noticing that the UI had been redesigned to be sleeker, minimal, and cutesy; the banner at the top of the screen said something like, “You’re working late, Bea! Hang in there 🌙.” This is self-evidently dumb and bad, and it felt like an aesthetic rich with potential for satire. As mentioned above, corporations like Uber sidestep labor regulations by classifying their employees as “independent contractors,” whose ability to “set their own hours” and “be their own boss” supposedly affords them a level of agency that a traditional job might not. [3]
These factors informed my decision to make a cutesy lofi aesthetic the constitutive feature of the in-game implant view, that is, the version of the world Jess and the player see when her implant is turned on. There’s a fucked-up neon/pastel musical triangulation of vaporwave, lofi, and city pop that feels like a particularly Gen Z expression of techno-Orientalism. Cat Zhang discusses this in detail in her 2021 Pitchfork critique of city pop: For Zhang, city pop — which experienced a stunning revival on YouTube in the pandemic era — allows mostly white American teenagers to inhabit a fictive nostalgic/utopian version of 1980s Japan, one that combined Western luxury with Eastern mystique in retrofuturist synthesis. [4] Borrowing from José Muñoz, utopia is inherently futurist. To play a YouTube mix called “RAINING IN KYOTO 10 HOUR LOFI BEATS TO STUDY TO” is to wish that you could one day be there, in Japan, or whenever; Zhang cites a YouTube commenter who wrote under a city pop mix, “I miss the future.” Crucially, one of the primary uses of lofi music is functional, not aesthetic: it encourages its listeners to be productive. You listen to the genre to trick yourself into enjoying work, like people might in China, Japan, and Korea.
It is also crucial that the lofi version of the world Jess experiences while working is not the “real world.” This decision was inspired by Tara Fickle’s description of ludo-Orientalism in her 2019 book The Race Card. The book opens with the example of Pokémon Go, which killed an Asian American grandfather who followed the app’s directions too close to a country club, where he was shot for alleged trespassing. [5] Fickle uses this to illustrate the potentially fatal tension between the safe, putatively raceless interface of Pokémon Go’s VR layer and the dangerous, heavily racialized real world onto which the VR layer maps. In SAN AMARO, the cozy, immersive way that Jess experiences being “online” collapses anywhere where it brushes up too close against the violent material world: for all that the tech corporations overseeing the hero system claim otherwise, a gig might be physically taxing, a quest location might be dangerous, or a customer might speak or act in a violating way. For instance, a customer who compliments Jess on her efficiency might be doing so under a subconscious ideological framework that treats Asian women as servile and robotic. (Or they might not be; arguably the distinction is unimportant.)
Usually, being a video game protagonist indicates something about agency: a protagonist has at least the time, money, and resources to do something interesting. Unless a game devotes most of its runtime to narrative (e.g., a walking simulator or visual novel), this makes it difficult to tell stories about someone who spends most of their time in school, at work, or at a different obligation; or someone whose work is uninteresting (for example, a detective’s waged job might still make for interesting gameplay); or, arguably, someone who exists under capitalism (under which none of us have agency!). [6] This excludes many prospective gamers from seeing themselves represented onscreen. In thinking about how to represent gig work through game mechanics, I considered several other games that have attempted to do something similar, noting the places I wanted to deviate from them.
I played through the 2022 survival adventure game Citizen Sleeper at Professor Fernandez’s recommendation. Citizen Sleeper also follows a gig worker — a “sleeper,” a human mind replicated into a robot body and leased to a corporation for labor. The player character has escaped onto a space station, where they have a limited amount of energy each day to spend on any number of tasks: acquiring food, acquiring doses of the medication all sleepers need in order to live, making enough money to do either of those things, exploring the space station, and helping its other inhabitants. Citizen Sleeper is written with beauty and obvious care. The first part of the game, when resources are scarce, forces the player to make difficult sacrifices in order to survive: Maybe you don’t eat today to have time to make money to be able to eat tomorrow, or maybe you skip out on a potential gig to help a struggling father take care of his daughter. However, the balance collapses by the midgame — once you have some resources stored up, it’s trivial to get more, and money, luck, and hunger cease to be serious impediments to your survival. This gameplay feature (that you can save up enough money to comfortably meet all your needs) betrays the narrative argument Citizen Sleeper is making about economic mobility (that it’s a myth). This dissonance was one of the factors that motivated me to separate the mechanics governing Jess’s work from the mechanics governing her non-work: In SAN AMARO, although completed quests pay out money, this money is spent automatically for the player, limiting the “game” experience to Jess’s gamified job. To me, it felt more useful to portray emotional impacts of gig work such as stress and precarity through narrative features like dialogue than by hoping the player would feel stressed while playing. However, I’m not sold on this choice, which limits the unique empathetic capacity that video games can create, and an alternative might be to carefully balance SAN AMARO’s financial system such that a player cannot easily accumulate too much money (rendering the critique of the gig economy toothless) or too little (ending the game abruptly before its narrative conclusion).
Similarly, in a 2021 article, Michael Iantorno et al. survey eight games that follow working-class protagonists in their jobs: firefighter, janitor, cab driver, and bartender. These depictions, which alternately critique, empathize with, and satirize the jobs in question, offer a variety of ways to think about representing work through game mechanics. [7] While some of these provided interesting ways to subvert gaming tropes that I ended up trying to incorporate — for instance, the fact that there are adventurers and vendors in Diaries of A Spaceport Janitor, but they look down and harass the titular character, often in a gendered way, inspired the fact that Jess can only interact with certain characters while her implant is in a certain state — I wanted to expand the scope of SAN AMARO so that the protagonist’s work is not the only part of her life represented onscreen.
Finally, I wanted to talk briefly about my motivations for focusing on gig work in the first place. In expanding the types of gig that Jess takes on from the kinds of app-based gig work that workers face today, such as food delivery, to kinds that they do not, such as policing and sex work, I wanted to satirize the decentralized/unaccountable role occupied by tech corporations while also extending my critique into a speculative techno-Orientalist dystopia. Uberification has hit sectors like nursing (e.g., ShiftKey) and counseling (e.g., BetterHelp) while destroying the restaurant and taxicab industries in the process; tech billionaires declare that the future of all labor is app-based gig work. Other apps like Citizen delegate to civilians the role of inflicting state violence against the underclass. This massive expansion and deregulation of labor has particular implications for the racialized, feminized workers who make up the majority of the gig workforce. It’s not just that the player character Jess is an Asian woman who faces racism and sexism as a result; the racism/sexism she experiences is mediated through the framework of her job. We’ve talked extensively about how Orientalism and techno-Orientalism spring from white xenophobic labor concerns, such as the infamous Meat vs. Rice pamphlet or 21st-century depictions of Chinese factory work. In the same way, in SAN AMARO, the rupture between the gamespace and real space — and between Jess’s triple role as a gamified character, invisibilized worker, and Chinese woman — allows ornamentalist damage to burst through the cracks. [8]