The Race Card. Tara Fickle
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 transhumanism through a violent interplay of Asian bodies and cybernetics,” a trend made familiar through film productions like Blade Runner yet made especially problematic, Rivera notes, 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