Asian or Oriental? Jade Empire

That dude in Jade Empire is white. I'm sorry. He's white. It's like Camel advertising with camels whose snouts look like a bunch of phalluses. Here, you have an Asian theme but end up using a hero character that can appeal to the masses -- if your idea of the masses is uniformly European.

But why is it so problematic?

Well, it ties into a history of imperialist depictions of Asian people in western culture. The Deathly Embrace by Sheng-mei Ma is a great source to brush up on some of the theories about this.

But I'll explain it differently. A psychological analysis of the relationship between a medium and its consumer produces two kinds of pleasure -- scopophilic and voyeurisitc. In the former, the consumer identifies with the characters. In the latter, the consumer merely watches, reveling in the sensory.

Let's ignore the voyeuristic for now. Scopophilia is the main point here as I can't come up with a reason to do an Asian-themed game with a decidedly Caucasian-looking hero other then appealing to the consumer's ability to identify with a character. The best pop culture example is casting David Carradine instead of Bruce Lee in Kung Fu.

Jade Empire isn't the first video game to be scopophilic -- Dynamix hit the jackpot with both Rise of the Dragon and Heart of China (both feature Caucasian heroes, Yellow Peril-stylized bad guys and, in the latter, a Chinese ninja who dies with the great "AIEEEEEE!") -- and certainly won't be the last with a sequel in the works.

The game itself is enjoyable, if imperialist according to Frank Chin's rubric. Much like their classic game, Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire tracks the good and bad deeds of the player, which determines how other characters perceive you and what kind of skills you can learn.

As RPGs go, there aren't a lot of options with equipment. No armor, no weapons and certainly no medical kits or antidotes. There are power-ups instead -- glowing spheres that appear from the fallen bodies of enemies foolish enough to battle your character, a special breed of being called a "spirit monk."

And the epilogue was anticlimatic, similar to the ending of Quest for Glory 4 in being purely text with negligible emotional investment and character development.

In many ways, the game reminded me of an old matinee or an old Flash Gordon strip. An enjoyable, if incredibly imperialist, trifle to experience with popcorn.