An online event hosted last weekend by Wizards of the Coast, the company behind the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, included for the first time a panel designed to educate players on sensitively portraying Asian cultures and stories.

Moderating the Weaving Asian Stories panel at D&D Celebration 2020 was Daniel Kwan , a Toronto-based game designer and one of the hosts of the Asians Represent Podcast , which celebrates the contributions of Asian creators in the role-playing game industry. He was joined by podcast co-hosts Steve Huynh and Ammar Ijaz , as well as Pam Punzalan , a game designer in the Philippines, and Ahmed Aljabry , who lives in Saudi Arabia and has translated D&D material into Arabic.

The panelists urged D&D players to avoid the tropes and broad generalizations that previously appeared in the games depictions of fantasy realms influenced by real-world Asian cultures, including fixations on honor and people speaking with stereotypical accents. They encouraged players of color to represent themselves by swapping the typical Caucasian rendering of fantasy species, such as elves, for more multiracial portrayals and recommended scholarly works such as Orientalism, a 1978 text written by Edward Said that analyzes the exoticization of Asia, North Africa and the Middle East by Western countries.