given that Asian American gamers constitute a significant (yet largely invisible) proportion of the online gaming community.22 These are just a few examples of the emergent, interdisciplinary scholarship building around the topological, transnational phenomenon this book refers to as ludo-Orientalism.
However, to be clear, what is meant by the “gaming technologies” of this book’s subtitle is not simply the computational medium or mechanics of video games as techno-Orientalist interfaces. Rather, The Race Card brings those insights to bear on the way that gaming, both digital and analog, is used in everyday life to provide alternative logics and modes of sense making, particularly as a means of justifying racial fictions and other arbitrary human typologies. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun has drawn our attention to the way that race signifies not only through but as technology, “a technique that one uses, even as one is used by it—a carefully crafted, historically inflected system of tools, mediation, or enframing that builds history and identity.”23 This definition of technology usefully broadens the scope of the term beyond the digital media of the contemporary moment. Gaming technologies—whether a game controller, a pair of dice, or even a metaphor like a “stacked deck”—all function as stand-alone “operating systems” that allow, and quite often require, users to operate the meaning-making machine in question without possessing detailed knowledge of its inner workings.24
This is why I bring together, under a single rubric, games like Pokémon GO, poker, and mahjong; representations of such games in literary fiction; social attitudes about games in various historical moments; and, finally, gaming metaphors and idioms. There has been strikingly little overlap between these cultural forms in existing game studies scholarship, partly due to contentious debates in the early 2000s between “ludologists” and “narratologists” over games’ uniqueness and their autonomy from literature and other media. Despite compelling arguments by scholars like Henry Jenkins, Espen Aarseth, and critics of interactive fiction and role-playing games more broadly, the reigning methodological approach in game studies has involved treating gaming rhetoric as distinct from “real” games and to view play, representation, and storytelling as distinct, or even antagonistic, concerns.25
Yet the embedded mechanics of video games and the overlooked predominance of game tropes in national culture—as the two ends of the spectrum of gaming technologies—share a far greater ideological and historical intimacy than has been acknowledged. Just as the visual, on-screen representations of race in video games are epiphenomenal to their embedded, programmatic logic, the “freedoms” that games allow us in play are only meaningful when understood in relation to what we can’t do—or rather, will not risk doing—outside of play due to socially and legally imposed constraints. Games are escapes not because they are more free, but because they are differently constrained: their rules provide a substitute for existing relations of power and systems of valorization, swapping out one set of rules for another. It is, in fact, precisely the fictions about games that we cleave to—the fantasy that games are a liberatory “exodus” from daily life rather than a “more radical simulacrum” of it, to invoke the claims of Edward Castronova and Jean Baudrillard, respectively—and the social contradictions we subsequently use the language of games to resolve that provide some of the most compelling evidence for the necessity of a more capacious definition of the term “game.”26
Such capaciousness counterintuitively offers a means of resolving certain contradictions inherent to game studies, where scholars have for decades struggled to find a precise definition for gaming. As Roger Caillois, one of the founding fathers of game studies, lamented in 1958, “The multitude and infinite variety of games at first causes one to despair of discovering a principle of classification capable of subsuming them under a small number of well-defined categories.”27 The ludic taxonomy he proposed—a four-part matrix of games divided into competition, chance, mimicry, and vertigo, which is discussed in detail in chapter 4—is instructive not only for its content but for what it reveals about the precariousness of the venture itself: for, as Jacques Ehrmann has noted, Caillois consistently falls “victim [to] his own categories” from the very moment he articulates them, forced to gloss over the contradictions and aporias they are founded on.28
The problem is not restricted to the academic study of games, which is distinguished mainly in its recognizing as a problem the broader cultural ease with which we almost as a matter of instinct are able to recognize “games” when we see them, and accordingly invoke the term to describe a dizzying variety of activities, behavioral patterns, and systems ranging from the material to the virtual, the stylistic to the conceptual, the wholesome to the illicit. The definition Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, and later Caillois, arrived at was of games as voluntary, rule-bound, undetermined (i.e., with uncertain outcome), economically disinterested activities set apart from “ordinary life.” As useful as this definition continues to be, it does not change the fact that games are, in the end, simply those things that people call games. “Game” itself, from that perspective, is essentially a classification system, a way of categorizing human activities and expressions according to the (equally nebulous) binary of “serious” and “playful.” And, like the equally artificial classification system of race with which it is intertwined—which categorizes human beings, at the broadest level, into the binary of “white” and “nonwhite” (and more specifically, “black”)—such ludic distinctions are neither natural nor neutral. Rather they are, in implicit ways we are often entirely unconscious of, a means of creating hierarchies and differential systems of value, and of disciplining and legitimizing precarious and arbitrary divisions. Asian Americans’ liminality within a black-white binary—their falling, as simultaneous “model minorities” and “honorary whites,” out of bounds of the constructed color line—is, in fact, part of why the ludic has figured so prominently in their characterization.29 And it is also, I suggest, why Asian American writers and literary scholars have repeatedly seized on the critical potential of the ludic to destabilize that larger system and expose its exceptions.30 For the literary representation of Asian American bodies is inextricable from issues of their racial representation in the American body politic as well as in the national imagination—a formal entanglement that mirrors, and is mirrored by, the ludic multiplicity we have been discussing.
The Game of Representation
“Asian American,” like “game,” is a precarious fiction: an “openly catachrestic” category, in Colleen Lye’s words, that not only amalgamates a massive range of ethnic, linguistic, class, and generational differences but is problematically intertwined with externally imposed stereotypes of Asians all looking alike.31 As Frank Chin candidly put the problem, “What if all the whites were to vanish from the American hemisphere, right now? … What do we Asian Americans, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Indo-Chinese, and Korean Americans have to hold us together? What is ‘Asian America,’ ‘Chinese America,’ and ‘Japanese America’?”32
Chin’s answer to this question? Aiiieeeee!—not coincidentally, the name of the Asian American literary anthology he co-edited and in which this commentary appears. For Asian American literature has long been the site through which these difficult questions have surfaced and been struggled with: the place, in other words, where “Aiiieeeee!” as a racist media representation of Asian American voices becomes intertwined with the Asian American authorial voice and the representational burdens of “authenticity” and stereotype busting with which these writers are encumbered. It is also where, in an effort to articulate the paradoxes and tensions of strategic essentialism—where “Asian American” becomes a category at once potentially liberating and constraining—we also find the ludic being explicitly invoked.
Take, for example, Mark Chiang’s compelling description of Asian American literary and political identity as moves in what he calls the “game of representation”:33
For Asian Americans, it is not the represented who choose the representatives but the representatives who choose one another and themselves, through a process of mutual recognition and contestation. In other words, anyone can declare himself or herself to be an Asian American
