"Where Are You From?"

I was actually in the middle of writing a different, short TTRPG when I shifted over to writing this one instead. The other game needed me to be writing with a sense of humour, but hearing recent news stories about Anti-Asian hate and attacks in the US, the UK and Europe had left me feeling the opposite of jolly.

If anything, like many other Asians living in these countries, each time I heard about another incident, I found myself painfully recollecting various times I had faced microaggressions, discrimination or harassment. While I had also encountered bigotry before more recent events, my own personal experience has been that the situation has gotten worse in the UK since the Brexit referendum, and then again with the Covid-19 pandemic, as some people have used that as an excuse to stir up or express hatred against Asians.

Around this time, I came across the Asian Devs Together #StopAsianHateJam. I browsed through the suggested list of tropes to tackle. It occured to me that perhaps I should lean into making a game about one of those, since my mind clearly wasn't on writing the other game I'd been working on. I then thought about the audience for the game, and I decided I wanted to write something for other people who have also had the experience of being percieved as a perpetual foreigner. I am an immigrant to the UK, but I lived here for a few years as a child and then have also spent my entire adult life here. I've spent more years living in this country than any other. My partner, my work, my friends are here, and I'm also now a British citizen. Yet no matter how long I've lived here, I'm often perceived as either a tourist or a student - someone who can't really be a local, or who isn't British. I can only imagine how much worse that would feel for someone who was a British-born Asian, and who still gets asked, "Where are you from?", as if you couldn't possibly be from here.

I realised what I had energy for was thinking about how to weather those microaggressions. How have I weathered them myself? When I was a child and I had to go through difficult things (like getting stitches after a bad cut), I often fell back on the thought that at least now I knew what it was like to have that experience. Growing up, I wanted to be a writer, so if I had painful experiences, that meant that I could also funnel those into something else (like if a character I was writing needed stitches, I could describe the process from my own memory.) That feeling of being able to take something inescapably difficult, and to turn it into something else creatively helped me get through some things.

That is not to say that I think there's anything intrinsically good or useful about being treated like a perpetual foreigner! No amount of being able to make something creative out of the initial bad experience takes the sting out of going through it at the time, let alone repeatedly. These things keep happening no matter what my own preferences are. These encounters disrupt my sense of my everyday life, and break up a feeling of belonging to a place, a culture, a group, and so on. Suddenly I've been singled out and made into something Other, just because I look or sound different to the majority. At the same time, creativity for me provides a kind of catharsis. Being able to turn one experience into something else in the privacy of your mind, or your home, or among supportive friends and others feels to me like a way of reclaiming something. Perhaps a sense of agency, or an assertion that you are something more than just a prop for other people's fantasies about "exotic foreigners", and so on.

So this is a game about taking that experience and playfully turning it into something else. If people unconsiously project their beliefs about "foreigners" onto me, then this is a way of projecting back, awarely, and  in a fashion that doesn't directly affect the other person. None of the people who asked me "Where are you from?" will know that I am taking the ecounter with them and using it to generate a fantasy monster - a courtesy I wish they would afford me and others by not making their assumptions my business in the first place!

From a design perspective, I wanted something immediate that you could do right after a real life enounter, which would remind you that catharsis is available later, when you have privacy and time to make up a monster. That's the business card-sized component of the game, which you can carry around with you. And then the prompts and questions will hopefully stimulate your imagination and help you come up with some kind of creature. I've given some examples from my own experiences as well, to help show what can be done.

As I say at the end of the game, this is one time when I hope a game I've written will become unplayable eventually. I would love it if this game becomes obsolete one day because people learn not to view someone from a minority culture or background as a perpetual foreginer! But that is not up to me, and until then I hope that playing with that experience will offer some relief to other people as well.