Power Play: Games, Politics, Culture – serie

Made in Asia/America explores the key role video games play within the race makings of Asia/America. Its fourteen critical essays on games, ranging from Death Stranding to Animal Crossing, and five roundtables with twenty Asian/American game makers examine the historical entanglements of games, Asia, and America, and reveal the ways games offer new modes of imagining imperial violence, racial difference, and coalition. Shifting away from Eurocentric, white, masculinist takes on gaming, the contributors focus on minority and queer experiences, practices, and innovative scholarly methods to better account for the imperial circulation of games. Encouraging ambiguous and contextual ways of understanding games, the editors offer an “interactive” editorial method, a genre-expanding approach that encourages hybrid works of autotheory, queer of color theory, and conversation among game makers and scholars to generate divergent meanings of games, play, and “Asian America.”Contributors. Matthew Seiji Burns, Edmond Y. Chang, Naomi Clark, Miyoko Conley, Toby Đỗ, Anthony Dominguez, Tara Fickle, Sarah Christina Ganzon, Yuxin Gao, Domini Gee, Melos Han-Tani, Huan He, Matthew Jungsuk Howard, Rachael Hutchinson, Paraluman (Luna) Javier, Sisi Jiang, Marina Ayano Kittaka, Minh Le, Haneul Lee, Rachel Li, Christian Kealoha Miller, Patrick Miller, Keita C. Moore, Souvik Mukherjee, Christopher B. Patterson, Pamela (Pam) Punzalan, Takeo Rivera, Yasheng She, D. Squinkifer, Lien B. Tran, Prabhash Ranjan Tripathy, Emperatriz Ung, Gerald Voorhees, Yizhou (Joe) Xu, Robert Yang, Mike Ren Yi

Settler colonial studies and Indigenous studies are often assumed to be the same intellectual project. In Indigenomicon, Jodi A. Byrd examines the differences between the two fields by bringing video game studies and Indigenous studies into conversation with Black studies, queer studies, and Indigenous feminist critique. Byrd theorizes “the image of the law of the Indigenous” as structuring dispossession in games including Assassin’s Creed, Animal Crossing, BioShock Infinite, and Demon Souls. They demonstrate how games and play might reveal histories of slavery, genocide, and theft of Indigenous lands even as their structures obscure Indigenous spatial and embodied practices that prioritize relationships with land, water, plants, and spirits. With ground and relationality defined as key concepts, Byrd centers Indigenous visions of dystopias to reveal how game spaces encode settler structures of governance even as the design of games might yet provide vital modes of resistance to Indigenous erasure.

Made in Asia/America explores the key role video games play within the race makings of Asia/America. Its fourteen critical essays on games, ranging from Death Stranding to Animal Crossing, and five roundtables with twenty Asian/American game makers examine the historical entanglements of games, Asia, and America, and reveal the ways games offer new modes of imagining imperial violence, racial difference, and coalition. Shifting away from Eurocentric, white, masculinist takes on gaming, the contributors focus on minority and queer experiences, practices, and innovative scholarly methods to better account for the imperial circulation of games. Encouraging ambiguous and contextual ways of understanding games, the editors offer an “interactive” editorial method, a genre-expanding approach that encourages hybrid works of autotheory, queer of color theory, and conversation among game makers and scholars to generate divergent meanings of games, play, and “Asian America.”Contributors. Matthew Seiji Burns, Edmond Y. Chang, Naomi Clark, Miyoko Conley, Toby Đỗ, Anthony Dominguez, Tara Fickle, Sarah Christina Ganzon, Yuxin Gao, Domini Gee, Melos Han-Tani, Huan He, Matthew Jungsuk Howard, Rachael Hutchinson, Paraluman (Luna) Javier, Sisi Jiang, Marina Ayano Kittaka, Minh Le, Haneul Lee, Rachel Li, Christian Kealoha Miller, Patrick Miller, Keita C. Moore, Souvik Mukherjee, Christopher B. Patterson, Pamela (Pam) Punzalan, Takeo Rivera, Yasheng She, D. Squinkifer, Lien B. Tran, Prabhash Ranjan Tripathy, Emperatriz Ung, Gerald Voorhees, Yizhou (Joe) Xu, Robert Yang, Mike Ren Yi

Settler colonial studies and Indigenous studies are often assumed to be the same intellectual project. In Indigenomicon, Jodi A. Byrd examines the differences between the two fields by bringing video game studies and Indigenous studies into conversation with Black studies, queer studies, and Indigenous feminist critique. Byrd theorizes “the image of the law of the Indigenous” as structuring dispossession in games including Assassin’s Creed, Animal Crossing, BioShock Infinite, and Demon Souls. They demonstrate how games and play might reveal histories of slavery, genocide, and theft of Indigenous lands even as their structures obscure Indigenous spatial and embodied practices that prioritize relationships with land, water, plants, and spirits. With ground and relationality defined as key concepts, Byrd centers Indigenous visions of dystopias to reveal how game spaces encode settler structures of governance even as the design of games might yet provide vital modes of resistance to Indigenous erasure.

First released in 1974, Dungeons & Dragons revolutionized game design and interactive media by allowing players to create and perform their own fictional characters in a fantasy world as expansive as their imaginations would allow. That freedom, and the rules that governed it, weren’t a creative coincidence. In How Dungeons & Dragons Changed the Way We Play, Aaron Trammell excavates the game as an artifact of a burgeoning counterculture obsessed with individualism as well as quantification. Mapping the world onto a grid, building characters whose every trait is assigned a point value, and advancing the game’s narrative through dice throws—countless core mechanics are tied to numbers. Putting the game design of D&D into dialogue with the social and political tensions of the 1970s and 80s, Trammell illuminates how the integrated quantification in the game design led to reductionism, reinforced oppressive gender and racial norms, and accustomed generations of players to the bigoted, xenophobic mores of the Cold War era. He delivers a history of both how games can shape players and how players, united by their own shared values, can shape games in turn.

First released in 1974, Dungeons & Dragons revolutionized game design and interactive media by allowing players to create and perform their own fictional characters in a fantasy world as expansive as their imaginations would allow. That freedom, and the rules that governed it, weren’t a creative coincidence. In How Dungeons & Dragons Changed the Way We Play, Aaron Trammell excavates the game as an artifact of a burgeoning counterculture obsessed with individualism as well as quantification. Mapping the world onto a grid, building characters whose every trait is assigned a point value, and advancing the game’s narrative through dice throws—countless core mechanics are tied to numbers. Putting the game design of D&D into dialogue with the social and political tensions of the 1970s and 80s, Trammell illuminates how the integrated quantification in the game design led to reductionism, reinforced oppressive gender and racial norms, and accustomed generations of players to the bigoted, xenophobic mores of the Cold War era. He delivers a history of both how games can shape players and how players, united by their own shared values, can shape games in turn.