Oh, Crap: A Potty Training Game [in progress]
Come. It’s time to pee.
A Tamagotchi-PacMan mashup about the horror of potty-training a toddler.
Made in Asia/America: Why video games were never (really) about Us (Duke UP, 2024)
“Pushes the study of games in exciting new directions by bridging theory and practice, foregrounding dynamic conversations between game designers.” – Bo Ruberg, author of Video Games Have Always Been Queer
“Brings together gamers, designers, developers, and scholars who lay out the stakes of (not) being seen as Asian in the gaming industry.” – Betsy Huang, author of Contesting Genres in Contemporary Asian American Fiction
Open Access. Read here.
The Race Card (NYU Press, 2019)
Winner of the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award
“An original and timely intervention that at last accounts for the dominant representation of Asian Americans as both the hard-worker and the obsessed gamer.” ~Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
“Witty, controlled, righteously outraged, inspired and incredibly persuasive, The Race Card sets a new bar for understanding the role of games and play, broadly defined, in the struggle of race relations.” ~Soraya Murray
Learn more about The Race Card, including a look at primary documents, images, and teaching recommendations.
Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian American Writers (Third Edition, University of Washington Press, 2019)
Re-issued, with a new foreword and digital archive (in progress) by Tara Fickle
“That ‘whole voice’ which speaks so eloquently in Aiiieeeee! is an amazingly versatile voice. It is a voice that makes one believe in writing again. . . .”- Rolling Stone
“When it comes to Asian American fiction…you can’t talk about the genre without talking about Aiiieeeee!…the first of its kind and a “key book” that reintroduced forgotten texts and writers when it was first published.”- New York Magazine
Read Fickle’s foreword in The Paris Review
Inside the Japanese American Internment
An Educational Gamebook
Concept and Writing by Tara Fickle. Art by Marissa Louise.
A work of interactive fiction (aka text-based game) highlighting the serious and educational possibilities of play. Introduces students to the complex, painful decision-making dilemmas involved in mass incarceration of Japanese Americans, most of them citizens, many of them young children. Based on non-fiction, court cases, and fictional works by Asian Americans such as John Okada’s No-No Boy.
Read my essay about the challenges of representing history accurately and empathetically through games.
View my digital exhibit about the significance of No-No Boy to Japanese American readers, created following the Penguin copyright controversy.
You on the Market: An A-to-Z guide to the academic job market
Open-access website aimed at first-generation academics
Aimed at demystifying the opaque process of the academic job market. Created in 2014, regularly updated. Organized as a series of concrete “how-to”s, with especial attention to issues facing marginalized and underrepresented marketers.
