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 and respectability for minorities and women in sexist and racist gaming cultures is the cruelest kind of optimism … meritocratic ways of thinking about freedom from racism and sexism within 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