This article examines several genres of role-playing games in terms of their procedural logics of... more This article examines several genres of role-playing games in terms of their procedural logics of racial management as an attempt to understand how game logics can express varying and often contentious ways of enacting “diversity.” It argues that games themselves can help answer one of the most persistent questions about games today: “how do we make games more diverse?” We proceed by defining the racial logics—the “diversity rules”— structuring the Mass Effect series (BioWare, 2007–), Genshin Impact (miHoYo, 2020), and Divinity: Original Sin 2 (Larian Studios, 2017). These games respectively place the player in the role of multicultural manager, racial empath, and divine avatar. These games show us the many logics, strategies, and appropriations that can occur when diversity itself is treated not as a complex process toward building social justice, but as an obtainable asset, and as the sole win condition in making and selling a game. Attending to these racial logics can open paths to new disciplinary directions in game studies by pushing beyond established domestic boundaries, liberal multiculturalist definitions of diversity, and ultimately into revealing our regional attitudes and particular ways of defining and practicing “diversity.”
The editors of the special issue on Aiiieeeee! locate the seminal anthology within the history of... more The editors of the special issue on Aiiieeeee! locate the seminal anthology within the history of Asian American literature as a scholarly discipline and contextualize contributor\u27s responses to the personal and cumulative effects of Aiiieeeee! on the Asian American literary landscape
During the COVID-19 pandemic, universities were among the first institutions to shift to an onlin... more During the COVID-19 pandemic, universities were among the first institutions to shift to an online model. As they did so, nascent collegiate esports program lost access to campus spaces and in-person connections, potentially destabilizing this rising industry. Conversely, universities also worked to provide students remote access to resources, and many components of esports already occur online. Therefore, collegiate esports may have adjusted to distancing measures, potentially strengthening their footholds on US campuses. This paper draws on in-depth interviews with collegiate esports players, student employees, program directors, and administrators to address different programs’ reactions to the pandemic, specifically the challenges and opportunities they faced. Overall, interviews reveal how COVID-19 shifted the understandings of and practices around gaming and esports, highlighted the intermittent relationship of online and offline spheres, and presented various possibilities an...
"Serious Play: Race, Game, Asian American Literature," argues that games are narrative ... more "Serious Play: Race, Game, Asian American Literature," argues that games are narrative fantasies of perfectly equal opportunity that can help us reconceive of what it means to be a minority in contemporary America. Race's idiomatic evolution into a "race card" points not just to identity's growing immateriality and "virtualization" but to its increasingly intimate relationship with the ludic. Asian American authors in particular have seized upon the possibilities of transforming identity into an object of play, in part because gameplay opens up a space to challenge stereotypes about the group's "Tiger Mother"-esque obsession with work and apparent allergy to "frivolous" endeavors. Rereading Asian American literature through its literal and proverbial games, from the convivial mahjongg club at the center of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club to the game-theoretical model of the "prisoner's dilemma" captured in Japanese American internment novels, "Serious Play" reveals that it is not the Asian American ability to work but to play that offers the most cogent insight into identity formation as a simultaneously personal, political, and ludic pursuit.
ABSTRACT:Departing from the “Tiger Motheresque” tendency in Asian American literary criticism to ... more ABSTRACT:Departing from the “Tiger Motheresque” tendency in Asian American literary criticism to dismiss adolescent play as an extravagance rather than a necessity, this article resituates Asian American child’s play as a racialized phenomenon. Readings of historical, ethnographic, and literary texts, including Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter, build on Sau-ling Wong’s influential argument of the “Asian American Homo Ludens” (1993) to reinterpret scenes of play in Asian American literature as sites of racial formation. The article tracks the ways that Asian American adolescents’ participation in family businesses and their oftentimes liminal position in recreational spaces produce a unique perspective on the artificiality of the work/play binary we frequently take for granted. The essay demonstrates how racialization has “worked” in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America not only through designated sites of labor but through the fraught and contested intersection between work and play.
MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 2014
The sensational commercial success of Amy Tan’s debut novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), and the bo... more The sensational commercial success of Amy Tan’s debut novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), and the book’s subsequent cultural ubiquity led Karl Taro Greenfeld of The Paris Review to comment recently that “if Oprah Winfrey had had a book club in 1989 she surely would have selected it” (13). Yet it is perhaps precisely because that powerful arbiter of middlebrow taste did not yet exist that The Joy Luck Club became as much of a sensation as it did, for in many ways, the book club and the novel fulfill similar functions. Just as Oprah’s Book Club has been lauded for its remarkable ability to transform obscure novels into overnight bestsellers and expose its largely white middleto upper-class female demographic to a plethora of so-called minority works, The Joy Luck Club has been praised in both the popular and critical milieux for its ability to foster a “sister-centered” (Welsch 29) sense of community both within and beyond the text itself. Yet it is this very same talent that has earned both Tan and Winfrey the derision of numerous literary critics; Scott Stossel, the editor of The Atlantic, remarked that “[t]here is something so relentlessly therapeutic, so consciously self-improving about [Winfrey’s] book club that it seems antithetical to discussions of serious literature. Literature should disturb the mind and derange the senses; it can be palliative, but it is not meant to be the easy, soothing one that Oprah would make it” (qtd. in Minzesheimer). In similar fashion, Asian American literary critics have, on the whole, taken umbrage at Tan’s penchant for constructing a bridge to and among her “predominantly white and female” readership (Wong 180), resulting in a loyal following that Sau-ling Cynthia Wong has derisively dubbed a “sugar sisterhood” (181). Like Stossel, Wong and many like-minded Asian American critics have argued that Tan’s novels are far too “soothing” to be “serious”: their “exoticizing” (191) depictions of China and traditional Chinese culture, in particular, “enable Orientalism to emerge in a form palatable to middle-class American readers” (181). The aim of this essay is neither to endorse nor refute such perspectives. What strikes me as especially interesting about the extremely polarized response to The Joy Luck Club is rather its persistent preoccupation with the serious and the playful—whether defined as the popular, the “easy,” the “palatable,” or the ......
This article interrogates the limits of the “playful” genre that Timothy Yu has recently defined ... more This article interrogates the limits of the “playful” genre that Timothy Yu has recently defined as Asian American experimental or avant-garde poetry. Through the work of John Yau, Brian Kim Stefans, Fred Wah, and others, I demonstrate the centrality of Wittgensteinian poetics to the aesthetic innovations of contemporary Asian North American poets whose language games challenge normative assumptions about the relationship between language, literature, and identity.
This chapter uses games of chance to illustrate the overlooked kinship between the appeal that ha... more This chapter uses games of chance to illustrate the overlooked kinship between the appeal that hardworking Asian Americans held for white sociologists and the appeal that gambling held for Asian Americans. In other words, the chapter emphasizes again the formal symmetry between the way both parties were using gambling to try to rationalize larger paradoxes in cultural theories of race and economic mobility by reframing immigration and social mobility as a risk-taking opportunity. Gambling served an ideational narrative function that is made clear through its representations in both literary and journalistic fictions of the model minority. The model minority myth was, from that perspective, essentially a racialized version of the gambling narrative, wherein Asian Americans modeled a new way of representing and explaining the relationship between past and future, merit and heredity.
This chapter uses the mobile game Pokémon GO as a case study of how video game developers have su... more This chapter uses the mobile game Pokémon GO as a case study of how video game developers have successfully harnessed the self-centering power of ludo-Orientalism, using augmented reality and GPS technology to construct virtual spaces ripe for playful exploration as well as economic exploitation. In focusing on Nintendo’s sophisticated marketing and aesthetic strategies to erase all signs of Japanese “cultural odor” from its games, scholarly appraisals of the Pokémon franchise have largely followed the traditional reduction of race to an explicit visual or linguistic feature of games. This chapter instead uses Pokémon GO’s seemingly inadvertent exposure of U.S. racial fault lines as an opportunity to explore how race is not erased but rather embedded in the game’s disorienting technology. It reveals the unacknowledged legacy of Japanese racial ideologies, imperialist ambitions, and atomic history that lurk beneath the game screen. The chapter argues that this illusion of ahistorical...
This chapter radically revises our understanding of game studies’ conceptual foundations by revea... more This chapter radically revises our understanding of game studies’ conceptual foundations by revealing the Orientalist assumptions embedded in Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938) and Roger Caillois’s Man, Play, and Games (1958). These founding fathers’ discussions of play as a liberating “magic circle” have been endlessly cited, excerpted, and romanticized, most recently by popular and academic rhetoric extolling video games as the cure for a “broken” and alienating twenty-first-century reality. Unsurprisingly, contemporary scholars have regarded the patronizing and exotifying references to Japan and China which crop up nearly from the very first pages of these tomes as embarrassing but irrelevant signs of the times. Recontextualizing these early chapters within the longer and rarely read remainders of both monographs, however, reveals that those initial ludic schemas were in fact the raison d’être for an elaborate ethnocentric sociology that rationalized the cognitive and cultural i...
To speak of Asian American literature in the 1950s is to speak of something which did not yet exi... more To speak of Asian American literature in the 1950s is to speak of something which did not yet exist, and would not for over a decade hence. This is not to say that there were no literary works by people of Asian descent being written or published in America during this time – there were, and had been since at least the turn of the century – but rather to acknowledge how significantly the task of reading and analyzing such texts is shaped by how we perceive their relationship to a literary genre and academic discipline which would not take shape until the late 1960s, and to acknowledge also the multiple “afterlives” which these texts have enjoyed (or, in some cases, suffered through) in the decades since. The “birth” of Asian America as a political consciousness during the 1960s and 1970s was in many ways a direct outgrowth of the civil rights and antiwarmovements in which African Americans in particular played an influential role. The emergence of Asian American literature as a reco...
This chapter uncovers the influential role of gambling in the passage of late nineteenth-century ... more This chapter uncovers the influential role of gambling in the passage of late nineteenth-century immigration laws barring Asian laborers. Although historians have long treated Asian American gambling as a minor phenomenon or exaggerated stereotype, gambling was a significant source of recreation and revenue for Chinese American communities and, further, took center stage in exclusion debates. Exclusionists depicted Chinese Americans as “inveterate gamblers” and dissolute cheaters whose “cheap labor” constituted not only unfair competition for other immigrant laborers but an affront to the “fair play” on which U.S. democracy was ostensibly founded. This chapter analyzes the congressional and literary record of these debates to show how ludo-Orientalist rhetoric crucially elevated economic arguments to the transcendent realm of ethics and ideals. By aligning (white) American values with ludic ideals and Asian immigrants with the degradation of these ideals, exclusionist rhetoric weapo...
This chapter argues that the lay understanding of games as fair and unbiased allowed World War II... more This chapter argues that the lay understanding of games as fair and unbiased allowed World War II military officials to invoke game theory to resolve the thorny contradictions of imprisoning American citizens on racial grounds. A branch of applied mathematics which would eventually form the backbone of U.S. Cold War foreign policy as a “scientific” means of predicting enemy behavior, game theory has often been considered a defining discourse of Cold War America. Juxtaposing internment-era novels and military correspondence alongside game theory textbooks and popular media accounts, this chapter reveals, however, that a decade before it was applied to the “red menace,” a prefiguration of game theory amplified and then neutralized the threat posed by the “inscrutable intentions” of one hundred thousand Japanese Americans by reframing their fervent claims of U.S. loyalty as little more than a bluff.
This chapter uses games of chance to illustrate the overlooked kinship between the appeal that ha... more This chapter uses games of chance to illustrate the overlooked kinship between the appeal that hardworking Asian Americans held for white sociologists and the appeal that gambling held for Asian Americans. In other words, the chapter emphasizes again the formal symmetry between the way both parties were using gambling to try to rationalize larger paradoxes in cultural theories of race and economic mobility by reframing immigration and social mobility as a risk-taking opportunity. Gambling served an ideational narrative function that is made clear through its representations in both literary and journalistic fictions of the model minority. The model minority myth was, from that perspective, essentially a racialized version of the gambling narrative, wherein Asian Americans modeled a new way of representing and explaining the relationship between past and future, merit and heredity.
This article examines several genres of role-playing games in terms of their procedural logics of... more This article examines several genres of role-playing games in terms of their procedural logics of racial management as an attempt to understand how game logics can express varying and often contentious ways of enacting “diversity.” It argues that games themselves can help answer one of the most persistent questions about games today: “how do we make games more diverse?” We proceed by defining the racial logics—the “diversity rules”— structuring the Mass Effect series (BioWare, 2007–), Genshin Impact (miHoYo, 2020), and Divinity: Original Sin 2 (Larian Studios, 2017). These games respectively place the player in the role of multicultural manager, racial empath, and divine avatar. These games show us the many logics, strategies, and appropriations that can occur when diversity itself is treated not as a complex process toward building social justice, but as an obtainable asset, and as the sole win condition in making and selling a game. Attending to these racial logics can open paths to new disciplinary directions in game studies by pushing beyond established domestic boundaries, liberal multiculturalist definitions of diversity, and ultimately into revealing our regional attitudes and particular ways of defining and practicing “diversity.”
The editors of the special issue on Aiiieeeee! locate the seminal anthology within the history of... more The editors of the special issue on Aiiieeeee! locate the seminal anthology within the history of Asian American literature as a scholarly discipline and contextualize contributor\u27s responses to the personal and cumulative effects of Aiiieeeee! on the Asian American literary landscape
During the COVID-19 pandemic, universities were among the first institutions to shift to an onlin... more During the COVID-19 pandemic, universities were among the first institutions to shift to an online model. As they did so, nascent collegiate esports program lost access to campus spaces and in-person connections, potentially destabilizing this rising industry. Conversely, universities also worked to provide students remote access to resources, and many components of esports already occur online. Therefore, collegiate esports may have adjusted to distancing measures, potentially strengthening their footholds on US campuses. This paper draws on in-depth interviews with collegiate esports players, student employees, program directors, and administrators to address different programs’ reactions to the pandemic, specifically the challenges and opportunities they faced. Overall, interviews reveal how COVID-19 shifted the understandings of and practices around gaming and esports, highlighted the intermittent relationship of online and offline spheres, and presented various possibilities an...
"Serious Play: Race, Game, Asian American Literature," argues that games are narrative ... more "Serious Play: Race, Game, Asian American Literature," argues that games are narrative fantasies of perfectly equal opportunity that can help us reconceive of what it means to be a minority in contemporary America. Race's idiomatic evolution into a "race card" points not just to identity's growing immateriality and "virtualization" but to its increasingly intimate relationship with the ludic. Asian American authors in particular have seized upon the possibilities of transforming identity into an object of play, in part because gameplay opens up a space to challenge stereotypes about the group's "Tiger Mother"-esque obsession with work and apparent allergy to "frivolous" endeavors. Rereading Asian American literature through its literal and proverbial games, from the convivial mahjongg club at the center of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club to the game-theoretical model of the "prisoner's dilemma" captured in Japanese American internment novels, "Serious Play" reveals that it is not the Asian American ability to work but to play that offers the most cogent insight into identity formation as a simultaneously personal, political, and ludic pursuit.
ABSTRACT:Departing from the “Tiger Motheresque” tendency in Asian American literary criticism to ... more ABSTRACT:Departing from the “Tiger Motheresque” tendency in Asian American literary criticism to dismiss adolescent play as an extravagance rather than a necessity, this article resituates Asian American child’s play as a racialized phenomenon. Readings of historical, ethnographic, and literary texts, including Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter, build on Sau-ling Wong’s influential argument of the “Asian American Homo Ludens” (1993) to reinterpret scenes of play in Asian American literature as sites of racial formation. The article tracks the ways that Asian American adolescents’ participation in family businesses and their oftentimes liminal position in recreational spaces produce a unique perspective on the artificiality of the work/play binary we frequently take for granted. The essay demonstrates how racialization has “worked” in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America not only through designated sites of labor but through the fraught and contested intersection between work and play.
MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 2014
The sensational commercial success of Amy Tan’s debut novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), and the bo... more The sensational commercial success of Amy Tan’s debut novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), and the book’s subsequent cultural ubiquity led Karl Taro Greenfeld of The Paris Review to comment recently that “if Oprah Winfrey had had a book club in 1989 she surely would have selected it” (13). Yet it is perhaps precisely because that powerful arbiter of middlebrow taste did not yet exist that The Joy Luck Club became as much of a sensation as it did, for in many ways, the book club and the novel fulfill similar functions. Just as Oprah’s Book Club has been lauded for its remarkable ability to transform obscure novels into overnight bestsellers and expose its largely white middleto upper-class female demographic to a plethora of so-called minority works, The Joy Luck Club has been praised in both the popular and critical milieux for its ability to foster a “sister-centered” (Welsch 29) sense of community both within and beyond the text itself. Yet it is this very same talent that has earned both Tan and Winfrey the derision of numerous literary critics; Scott Stossel, the editor of The Atlantic, remarked that “[t]here is something so relentlessly therapeutic, so consciously self-improving about [Winfrey’s] book club that it seems antithetical to discussions of serious literature. Literature should disturb the mind and derange the senses; it can be palliative, but it is not meant to be the easy, soothing one that Oprah would make it” (qtd. in Minzesheimer). In similar fashion, Asian American literary critics have, on the whole, taken umbrage at Tan’s penchant for constructing a bridge to and among her “predominantly white and female” readership (Wong 180), resulting in a loyal following that Sau-ling Cynthia Wong has derisively dubbed a “sugar sisterhood” (181). Like Stossel, Wong and many like-minded Asian American critics have argued that Tan’s novels are far too “soothing” to be “serious”: their “exoticizing” (191) depictions of China and traditional Chinese culture, in particular, “enable Orientalism to emerge in a form palatable to middle-class American readers” (181). The aim of this essay is neither to endorse nor refute such perspectives. What strikes me as especially interesting about the extremely polarized response to The Joy Luck Club is rather its persistent preoccupation with the serious and the playful—whether defined as the popular, the “easy,” the “palatable,” or the ......
This article interrogates the limits of the “playful” genre that Timothy Yu has recently defined ... more This article interrogates the limits of the “playful” genre that Timothy Yu has recently defined as Asian American experimental or avant-garde poetry. Through the work of John Yau, Brian Kim Stefans, Fred Wah, and others, I demonstrate the centrality of Wittgensteinian poetics to the aesthetic innovations of contemporary Asian North American poets whose language games challenge normative assumptions about the relationship between language, literature, and identity.
This chapter uses games of chance to illustrate the overlooked kinship between the appeal that ha... more This chapter uses games of chance to illustrate the overlooked kinship between the appeal that hardworking Asian Americans held for white sociologists and the appeal that gambling held for Asian Americans. In other words, the chapter emphasizes again the formal symmetry between the way both parties were using gambling to try to rationalize larger paradoxes in cultural theories of race and economic mobility by reframing immigration and social mobility as a risk-taking opportunity. Gambling served an ideational narrative function that is made clear through its representations in both literary and journalistic fictions of the model minority. The model minority myth was, from that perspective, essentially a racialized version of the gambling narrative, wherein Asian Americans modeled a new way of representing and explaining the relationship between past and future, merit and heredity.
This chapter uses the mobile game Pokémon GO as a case study of how video game developers have su... more This chapter uses the mobile game Pokémon GO as a case study of how video game developers have successfully harnessed the self-centering power of ludo-Orientalism, using augmented reality and GPS technology to construct virtual spaces ripe for playful exploration as well as economic exploitation. In focusing on Nintendo’s sophisticated marketing and aesthetic strategies to erase all signs of Japanese “cultural odor” from its games, scholarly appraisals of the Pokémon franchise have largely followed the traditional reduction of race to an explicit visual or linguistic feature of games. This chapter instead uses Pokémon GO’s seemingly inadvertent exposure of U.S. racial fault lines as an opportunity to explore how race is not erased but rather embedded in the game’s disorienting technology. It reveals the unacknowledged legacy of Japanese racial ideologies, imperialist ambitions, and atomic history that lurk beneath the game screen. The chapter argues that this illusion of ahistorical...
This chapter radically revises our understanding of game studies’ conceptual foundations by revea... more This chapter radically revises our understanding of game studies’ conceptual foundations by revealing the Orientalist assumptions embedded in Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938) and Roger Caillois’s Man, Play, and Games (1958). These founding fathers’ discussions of play as a liberating “magic circle” have been endlessly cited, excerpted, and romanticized, most recently by popular and academic rhetoric extolling video games as the cure for a “broken” and alienating twenty-first-century reality. Unsurprisingly, contemporary scholars have regarded the patronizing and exotifying references to Japan and China which crop up nearly from the very first pages of these tomes as embarrassing but irrelevant signs of the times. Recontextualizing these early chapters within the longer and rarely read remainders of both monographs, however, reveals that those initial ludic schemas were in fact the raison d’être for an elaborate ethnocentric sociology that rationalized the cognitive and cultural i...
To speak of Asian American literature in the 1950s is to speak of something which did not yet exi... more To speak of Asian American literature in the 1950s is to speak of something which did not yet exist, and would not for over a decade hence. This is not to say that there were no literary works by people of Asian descent being written or published in America during this time – there were, and had been since at least the turn of the century – but rather to acknowledge how significantly the task of reading and analyzing such texts is shaped by how we perceive their relationship to a literary genre and academic discipline which would not take shape until the late 1960s, and to acknowledge also the multiple “afterlives” which these texts have enjoyed (or, in some cases, suffered through) in the decades since. The “birth” of Asian America as a political consciousness during the 1960s and 1970s was in many ways a direct outgrowth of the civil rights and antiwarmovements in which African Americans in particular played an influential role. The emergence of Asian American literature as a reco...
This chapter uncovers the influential role of gambling in the passage of late nineteenth-century ... more This chapter uncovers the influential role of gambling in the passage of late nineteenth-century immigration laws barring Asian laborers. Although historians have long treated Asian American gambling as a minor phenomenon or exaggerated stereotype, gambling was a significant source of recreation and revenue for Chinese American communities and, further, took center stage in exclusion debates. Exclusionists depicted Chinese Americans as “inveterate gamblers” and dissolute cheaters whose “cheap labor” constituted not only unfair competition for other immigrant laborers but an affront to the “fair play” on which U.S. democracy was ostensibly founded. This chapter analyzes the congressional and literary record of these debates to show how ludo-Orientalist rhetoric crucially elevated economic arguments to the transcendent realm of ethics and ideals. By aligning (white) American values with ludic ideals and Asian immigrants with the degradation of these ideals, exclusionist rhetoric weapo...
This chapter argues that the lay understanding of games as fair and unbiased allowed World War II... more This chapter argues that the lay understanding of games as fair and unbiased allowed World War II military officials to invoke game theory to resolve the thorny contradictions of imprisoning American citizens on racial grounds. A branch of applied mathematics which would eventually form the backbone of U.S. Cold War foreign policy as a “scientific” means of predicting enemy behavior, game theory has often been considered a defining discourse of Cold War America. Juxtaposing internment-era novels and military correspondence alongside game theory textbooks and popular media accounts, this chapter reveals, however, that a decade before it was applied to the “red menace,” a prefiguration of game theory amplified and then neutralized the threat posed by the “inscrutable intentions” of one hundred thousand Japanese Americans by reframing their fervent claims of U.S. loyalty as little more than a bluff.
This chapter uses games of chance to illustrate the overlooked kinship between the appeal that ha... more This chapter uses games of chance to illustrate the overlooked kinship between the appeal that hardworking Asian Americans held for white sociologists and the appeal that gambling held for Asian Americans. In other words, the chapter emphasizes again the formal symmetry between the way both parties were using gambling to try to rationalize larger paradoxes in cultural theories of race and economic mobility by reframing immigration and social mobility as a risk-taking opportunity. Gambling served an ideational narrative function that is made clear through its representations in both literary and journalistic fictions of the model minority. The model minority myth was, from that perspective, essentially a racialized version of the gambling narrative, wherein Asian Americans modeled a new way of representing and explaining the relationship between past and future, merit and heredity.
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