This book uncovers popular games’ key role in the cultural construction of modern racial fictions. It argues that gaming provides the lens, language, and logic—in short, the authority—behind racial boundary making, reinforcing and at times subverting beliefs about where people racially and spatially belong. It focuses specifically on the experience of Asian Americans and the longer history of ludo-Orientalism, wherein play, the creation of games, and the use of game theory shape how East-West relations are imagined and reinforce notions of foreignness and perceptions of racial difference. Drawing from literary and critical texts, analog and digital games, journalistic accounts, marketing campaigns, and archival material, The Race Cardshows how ludo-Orientalism informs a range of historical events and social processes which readers may not even think of as related to play, from Chinese exclusion and the Japanese American internment to Cold War strategies, the model minority myth, and the globalization of Asian labor. Interrogating key moments in the formation of modern U.S. race relations, The Race Cardintroduces a new set of critical terms for engaging the literature as well as the legislation that emerged from these agonistic struggles.

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 and challenges for different stakeholders during the global pandemic.

No abstract

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 inferiority of nonwhites by ranking them according to the “primitivity” of their play. Showing how these theorists legitimized their taxonomies by naturalizing fantasies of a ritualized, stagnant East and an innovative, rational West, this chapter demonstrates that Orientalist discourse was not tangential but essential to the seemingly global theories of play that form the basis of modern game studies.

No abstract