games that make these things seem not rights at all, but rather privileges to be earned.”12 In other words, by carefully and critically reading today’s video games, we are able to discern the “reality” of the “real world”: its truths as well as its falsities.13
Examining how Asian Americans have been variously vilified and celebrated not only within games but in racial discourses about “fair play” and meritocracy thus illustrates how games and play are instrumental to the social engineering of race relations. Asian Americans make visible the fact that games are a double-edged sword. They can be used to advocate for the equality of opportunity absent in the real world, but also to justify the inequality of outcome in which it is already abundant. Scholars of race in both the social sciences and the humanities have rightly noted how foundational racial thinking has been to contemporary neoliberalism’s ability to naturalize economic and other structural inequalities by making them appear fair. Yet, as this book demonstrates, the ludic plays as significant a role in this process as the racial, for it provides the very definition of fairness that neoliberalism cleaves to: wherein an individual’s or group’s position can be seen as “deserved” in the same way that the winner and loser of a footrace can be said to deserve their respective lots so long as they both started at the same line. It is precisely because Asian Americans’ emergence as a “model minority” is an embodiment of this logic—with the group’s economic success being offered as proof of race’s irrelevance to one’s ability to compete—that they offer a particularly privileged terrain through which to undertake a systematic examination of American society as what sociologist Georg Simmel pithily called “the game in which one ‘does as if’ all were equal.”14
The point of this book is thus less that we need to take games seriously than that we need to recognize how serious a role they already play as a cultural episteme, in the Foucauldian sense of a general “politics of truth” for a particular epoch—and, further, to understand how games’ metaphorical saturation of every realm of “serious” social relations, from the game of warfare to romance to education to electoral politics, has, through the counterintuitive logic of cliché, allowed us to instead see them as inherently unserious, apolitical, and colorblind. For it is this tendency to overlook games that has also obscured the fact that gaming and racialization are already closely intertwined. For example, Pokémon GO’s use of GPS and AR technology is in some sense simply a digital version of a racial episteme that has served the objectives of conquest and exploitation for centuries. Colonial discourses have long interpellated nonwhite subjects through a programmatic logic that Charles Mills describes as a “circular indictment: You are what you are in part because you originate from a certain kind of space, and that space has those properties in part because it is inhabited by creatures like yourself.”15 Such is an uncannily apt description of the logic underlying the Pokémon GO universe itself. The 841 pocket monsters are divided into elemental types, each of which tend to “spawn” in specific areas or “biomes.” One has a much higher chance of encountering a Water-type Pokémon like Poliwag (a tadpole-like creature) near lakes and oceans, while a Steel-type Pokémon like Magnemite (a cycloptic metal sphere that “feeds” on electricity) can often be found near skyscrapers and railway stations. There is, in other words, an important and overlooked symmetry between the racial logic that undergirds spatialized systems of oppression and exploitation and the ludic logic crucial to securing our perception of games as games—that is, as a fantastic virtual world that is Other than the real world—and vice versa. Indeed, racialization itself might be understood as an analogously location-based technology that has been seamlessly automated into the interface of everyday life.
Pokémon GO, in short, does not so much represent race as model its run-time behavior. Race functions here as what Ian Bogost has described as the “procedural logic” of video games, whereby the algorithms that make up the game’s software “[enforce] rules to generate some kind of representation, rather than authoring the representation itself.”16 This means more than just that racialization involves the imposition of rules about where people racially and spatially belong. While all games arguably have rules, not everything with rules is a game. It is, instead, the difference between the rules of the game and the rules governing other, non-gamespaces that matters. Mills reminds us that “in entering these (dark) spaces, one is entering a region normatively discontinuous with white political space, where the rules are different in ways ranging from differential funding (school resources, garbage collection, infrastructural repair) to the absence of police protection.”17 The rules of both “dark” and “white” spaces, in other words, do not simply impose different degrees of freedom or unequal resource allocation; they differentiate the spaces themselves as “dark” or “white.” The specific content of those rule systems is in some sense less important than the way that rules as such are functioning as an instrument for boundary making, securing the borders and hence the identity of each space. The game’s rules—its ludic logic—themselves become a discursive tool: a means not simply of specifying different procedures but of interpreting difference and validating conclusions about the value of that difference.
By focusing on racialization in terms of its underlying ludic logic—the technologies that transform an imagined fiction into a social reality, a chance combination of alleles into a deterministic life course—The Race Card explains how arbitrary typologies of human difference are made to feel not only real but justified in the contemporary epoch.18 For the democratic fantasy of perfectly equal opportunity we pursue within games has its counterpart in the way we use the discourse of gaming to shore up national fictions about the United States as a “level playing field.” Indeed, gaming’s recent amelioration from social problem to social panacea—its rehabilitation from antisocial waste of time to the antidote for a “broken” reality—is only the latest example of Americans’ invocation of the ludic as a rhetorical tool to grapple with the anxieties and contradictions instigated by broader shifts in the structure of the economy and the relations among social groups within it. From the “gospel of play” used to shore up a fading Protestant work ethic in the late nineteenth century to the “fair play” of twenty-first-century neoliberalism, Americans have found in games and gaming discourse a powerful vehicle for resolving as well as exposing paradoxical cultural conceptions about the value of hard work as the key to class mobility as well as racial uplift.19
Ludo-Orientalism and Techno-Orientalism
This book’s notion of ludo-Orientalism is related but not reducible to the more well-known concept of techno-Orientalism, which has in recent years been capaciously deployed to address the fetishized, commodified intersection between technology and Asianness across a very wide range of phenomena. Scholars have used the term to explore the generic conventions of late twentieth-century science fiction or cyberpunk (and more recently, speculative and dystopian) literature; the literal mechanization of Asian bodies as cyborgs or machines; the development and manufacture of technology by Asian bodies and minds; and everything in between. In Asian American studies in particular, one finds a rich set of transnational, transmedial topics and concerns, such as those collected in the recent Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media and in contemporaneous work on science and speculative fiction, cinema, and even video games.20 Scholars like Vit Šisler, Philipp Reichmuth, and Stefan Werning have rigorously documented video games’ exotifying, functionalized representations of East Asia and the Middle East, particularly as they reflect the so-called military entertainment complex’s vision of a post-9/11 world order. Christopher B. Patterson profitably expands our understanding of techno-Orientalism as both transnational and “transethnic” while raising the visibility of Asian American game studies in a recent entry in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture.21 Steve Choe and Se Young Kim have analyzed American and European responses to the chilling phenomenon of “Asian gamer death”—players who die as a result of addiction to, and in many cases at the very controls of, online games—as an example of the “discursive powers of techno-Orientalism” and its adaptive ability to quell anxieties about the perils of virtual escapism. Takeo Rivera has deployed an “erotohistoriographic” lens to productively examine how the “vicious techno-Orientalist representations” in video game franchises like Deus Ex: Human Revolution “[invoke] fears of dystopian
