encountered a “real-life” Pikachu and the fact of their own incomplete, “virtual” humanity in the very same moment.2 For, like the Pokémon themselves, who only appeared on the game map when the player was within sufficiently close range, the social meaning of race “activated,” was put into play, only once players traversed spatial borders and became aware of being “out of place,” made to feel at once threatened and threatening.
If even a cute, seemingly “colorblind” game like Pokémon GO could be said to play a role in the way race acquires its meaning in everyday American life, grasping the implications of that kinship requires a radical revision of our current assumptions about games as innocent and fantastic escapes from the demands and toil of “real life.” This book topples that myth by demonstrating how games have actively shaped Americans’ thinking about race, progress, and inequality for over a century. To play a game, this book emphasizes, is not to free oneself from but rather to voluntarily subject oneself to arbitrary constraints. Although the nascent field of game studies has begun to attend more closely to the interpenetration of games and “real-world” political and economic relations, scholars have largely continued to challenge the notion of gameplay as racially free by focusing on the level of visual representation, such as the caricatures and stereotypes reproduced in video games like Grand Theft Auto or the number of skin shades available for avatars. Yet the overt “signs” of race that have historically constituted the horizons of our study of social politics in video games are epiphenomenal, on-screen symptoms of far more entrenched racial fictions encoded within. In a non-anthropocentric game like Pokémon GO, there are virtually no visible signs of race—at least, not in the limited way we have come to think of that term through corporeal qualities like skin color, hair, body type, accent, and so forth, and especially from within a black-white binary. The Race Card extends our purview of games and play beyond that artificial binary, and below the surface, by examining the infrastructure of gaming as itself a raced project. In this respect, it builds on more syncretic “second wave” discussions of gaming representation that have emerged to resist the tendency to view representation as “pure content” separable from game mechanics, thereby loosening the grip of equally artificial binaries of aesthetics versus mechanics, image versus code, story versus game.3
The book focuses specifically on the experience of Asian Americans and the longer history of what I call ludo-Orientalism, wherein the design, marketing, and rhetoric of games shape how Asians as well as East-West relations are imagined and where notions of foreignness and racial hierarchies get reinforced. The Race Card argues that ludo-Orientalism has informed a range of social processes and policies that readers may not even think of as related to play, from the Japanese American internment to the globalization of Asian labor, while offering a window into the bigger picture of how race is played out both in and through games. That it was not a black man but an Asian American one who ultimately fulfilled Akil’s prophetic warning of Pokémon GO’s lethal consequences for nonwhite players is itself illustrative of this dynamic. For it is through the enduring Asian American experience of being made to feel like a “perpetual foreigner” regardless of birthplace or citizenship, of constantly being asked, “Where are you from?” that blackness and racial difference more broadly came to signify in Pokémon GO as a disorienting experience of spatial dislocation.4 Asian Americanness, that is, provided a model for the way minority players as a whole were made to experience their Otherness, even as the fact of the game’s Asian Otherness—its Japanese origins—receded to effective irrelevance. Such moments of doubled and occluded racial perception, in which Asianness becomes at once the most visible and the most attenuated sign of the convergence of racial and ludic fictions, constitute this book’s major sites of intervention.
Asians have had a long and equivocal intimacy with gaming in the American imagination, stereotyped on the one hand as humorless workaholics afflicted by a racial allergy to all things fun and frivolous and yet, on the other, harboring a peerless global proclivity for gambling and games of chance.5 Framed as both the hardest of workers and the most hardcore of players, play for the archetypal Asian is never “just” play: they practice violin until their fingers swell; play StarCraft until they drop dead in the middle of the internet café; consistently take home the gold, silver, and bronze at every eSports (professional video gaming) championship—and sometimes at the Olympics, too. Indeed, these ludo-racial dualities get at the very heart of what it means to be Asian in America, to be at once yellow peril and model minority, to be constantly misread through stereotypes of “all Asians looking alike.” Asian Americans and Asians are, obviously, not identical: it is, however, in being seen as interchangeable that the two labels, and the two processes of Asian American racialization and Orientalism, as Colleen Lye points out, have served similar epistemological functions, shaping the way Asian Americans are in turn made sense of at the level of both national and racial difference. Recognizing these contradictions thus requires acknowledging that they both exist as part of what Lye calls a single racial form, the coherence of which, I suggest, is itself dependent on a subtended ludic logic.6 At the same time, this book’s transnational focus underscores how deeply the fortunes and perceptions of Asians and Asian Americans are intertwined, and the extent to which U.S.-Asian relations shape what it has historically meant and continues to mean to be Asian in America.
Race more broadly is indisputably and multifariously at play in today’s video and computer gaming cultures. Indeed, as a growing body of scholars in game studies has aptly demonstrated, there is hardly an aspect of the digital game industry in which race—functioning intersectionally with gender, sexuality, class, and other categories—does not play a crucial role. It shapes the form and content of on-screen representations, online player interactions (e.g., on Xbox Live), and game modifications; the dynamics of professional game tournaments, fan communities, and player-generated artifacts; the outsourced labor of global production and the privileged position of leisurely consumption; and the historical positioning of video games as the province of white heterosexual masculinity, what Ed Chang calls their “technonormativity.”7 The Race Card contributes to such scholarly conversations, particularly part II’s readings of specific video games and labor politics, in order to advance our understanding of games as, in David Leonard’s terms, a racial compass.8 At the same time, the book demonstrates that this phenomenon is neither limited to nor the product of video games, but rather has a long and important prehistory. While remaining attuned to N. Katherine Hayles’s dictum of medium-specific analysis, this book emphasizes the striking points of ludo-racial continuity between today’s video games and yesterday’s parlor games by situating these cultural artifacts within a long century of ludic euphemisms and Orientalist fantasies.9
One of the most important and long-running of those euphemisms is that of life as a game. In his influential work Gamer Theory, equal parts manifesto and meta-commentary on digital games, McKenzie Wark describes the modern world as the quintessential “gamespace.” In Wark’s view, video games are not so much new as newly revelatory of the extent to which social reality resembles—but ultimately fails to produce the satisfaction and live up to the promises of—a massive game: “The digital game plays up everything that gamespace merely pretends to be: a fair fight, a level playing field, unfettered competition.”10 Lisa Nakamura further observes that since “the algorithms or set of rules that many Americans believe have governed access to the ‘good life’—defined as job security, a comfortable retirement, the right to be safe and secure and free from violence—have proven themselves broken, games appeal all the more because they embody this very promise.”11 In the afterword to the recent anthology Gaming Representation, Nakamura offers a fascinating discussion of this “cruelly optimistic” discourse of “procedural meritocracy” in digital games. The popular belief that players who suffer in-game discrimination or bias, particularly women and minorities, can “earn the right to question or change the rules by excelling at the game … leverag[ing] the mechanics of the game to create a win-condition for themselves and by implication for their gender, race, and sexuality,” is a deeply troubling replay of the model minority logic that has long characterized attitudes about Asian Americans. Indeed, it is no coincidence that Nakamura dubs such idealized players the “gamic model minority.” As Nakamura argues, “Believing in meritocratic play as the path to acceptance
