Mechanization DA – The relationship between Asianness and “gaming” is inextricably tied to the racialized history of Asian American experience – their characterization of the asian subjectivity as always driven by “competitive incentives” in order to imagine debate as a game in a universe of perfect competition follows the racializing tropes of the model minority

That Asian American success has traditionally been characterized in terms of economically-productive capitalist labor practices rather than “purposeless” play is in some sense unsurprising, for historically, the group has often been defined exclusively in terms of its capacity for work.1 But insofar as Asian Americans continue to be culturally cast as “good workers: industrious, focused, dependable, accommodating, serious-minded, eminently useful” (Wong 210, emphasis omitted), it is more important than ever to recognize how their identities as good players have been and can be used to either challenge or reinforce the domesticating and disciplining discourse of the model minority stereotype. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has observed that the seductive capacity of games lies in their ability to create an “imaginary universe of perfect competition or perfect equality of opportunity . . . without heredity or acquired properties . . . so that at each moment anyone can become anything” (241). The stereotypical immigrant fantasy that, as the main character in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club puts it, “you could be anything you wanted to be in America,” is thus simultaneously the game player’s fantasy. And in the American cultural imagination, as Viet Nguyen and others have observed, Asian Americans have proven themselves to be some of the most accomplished game players out there: the stereotype of the model minority, after all, is of an individual who, unlike other non-white communities that “would demand changes from the system,” instead “strive[s] to succeed by [that system’s] rules.”2

Serious Play asks after the terms of this fundamental relationship between games and racial difference by exploring a host of mainly Asian American literary works which, across a multitude of genres, grapple with J.C. Friedrich von Schiller’s famous assertion that “man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays” (Letter XV). For those who have historically been treated as less than human—and especially in the case of Asian Americans and African Americans, for whom, as David Eng has pointed out, questions of ontology so often get cast as questions of masculinity3 —playing, whether in the realm of aesthetics, athletics, or parlor games, is always something more serious than “mere” child’s play. Serious Play therefore considers gameplay not merely as a literary trope but as a formal and thematic vehicle that allows minority authors to articulate their relationship to the American nation-state, to history, to language, and to what it actually means, as a racialized subject, to be “in the game” at all.

The Formalization of Play

While Asian American Studies has historically defined its objects of study in terms of labor, the field has in recent years begun to apprehend the ways in which play, as the counterpart rather than the antithesis to work, might underwrite the Asian American experience in equally significant and complex ways. Sau-Ling Wong was one of the first to suggest, in 1993, that Asian American play (by which she meant mainly artistic innovation) might, in the Kantian tradition, be understood as a kind of aesthetic “purposiveness” that “may bear a suspicious resemblance to ‘art for art’s sake,’ but read in context it points to a ‘conscientious aestheticism’ or ‘interested disinterestedness’ . . . strategically deployed to counteract the diminishment of being that has historically been assigned the Asian American” (Wong 186). Revisiting several canonical twentieth century Asian American works through the dichotomy of “Necessity” and “Extravagance”—the former meant to capture the profit-maximizing, frivolity-minimizing perspective traditionally associated with the Asian immigrant parent and the latter its creativityseeking, pleasure-driven counterpart—Wong concluded, in a compelling chapter entitled “The Asian American Homo Ludens,” that “play too is a need of survival—a Necessity, no less, only differently characterized and designated, and therefore customarily separated from work as if by an unbridgeable gulf” (189).

Wong’s provocative insights have arguably found a receptive audience in the recent work of Mark Chiang and Timothy Yu, who, while only tangentially invoking the term “play,” have attempted to rethink Asian American self-expression through the Bourdeauian concept of cultural capital and the innovative poetic techniques of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school, respectively. For Chiang, the very act of identifying as an Asian American is a fundamentally agonistic pursuit. As he points out, disparate individuals and groups are held together under the Asian American designation only by an interest. This interest, however, is not a ‘common’ one insofar as that implies a unitary and homogeneous subject. Instead, it is a competitive interest signifying by acting against but also with others in the pursuit of some object or end, which in this instance is the specific capital of the Asian American field, or what I call the political capital of representation. (14, emphasis original) Yu, in a slightly different vein, argues instead for a set of “common” interests shared by Asian American poets like John Yau and their Caucasian counterparts like Gary Snyder and Charles Bernstein. Both groups, Yu suggests, shared Bernstein’s faith in the potential of playing with, and hence disrupting, hegemonic cultural discourses by experimenting with language in order to manufacture what Steve McCaffery called “a crisis within the semantic economy” (205) through which “minority” and “mainstream” identities get defined.

But while all three of these critics make a compelling case for resituating play as a central concept in Asian American literary studies, their insights have in some ways been obscured by, or reinterpreted within, what Colleen Lye has recently dubbed the field’s “new formalist turn.” This paradigmatic shift towards form is often explicitly framed as a rejoinder to the field’s selfdeclared representational crisis, one which Susan Koshy famously articulated in 1996; namely, the fact that Asian American Studies could no longer adequately “represent” the vast internal diversity of its critical demographic in terms such as class, ethnicity, language, or country of origin.4 The initial responses to this state of emergency, throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, largely took the form of attempts at ever-greater inclusiveness: scholars like Lisa Lowe, Rachel Lee, David Eng and King-Kok Cheung called our attention to the discourses of gender, sexuality, transnationalism and hybridity as a means of expanding, while still maintaining, the strategic viability of the Asian American designation.

In the last decade or so, the disciplinary turn towards a more “subjectless discourse,” pace pandice Chuh’s 2003 monograph imagine otherwise, has at times meant substituting a biologically-defined Asian American essentialism for an institutionally-defined one, oftentimes by asking, as the editors of a recent special issue of Modern Fiction Studies did in their call for papers, “what other ways might Asian Americanists approach, categorize, and consider their objects of study . . . if existing rubrics of Asian American literature problematically collect texts under the eye of biology?” The editors clearly seek to transcend the limitations of defining race as a biological category, yet their method of widening that classification relies on an essentialism of a paradoxical nature: not a singular object of study, but a singular type of practitioner, the “Asian Americanist,” is imagined to exist before the literary text does. Much Asian American criticism has found itself trapped in a version of this tautology, which, if it does not attempt to dismiss the author’s biology in favor of their politics or aesthetics only to re-locate the Asian American body in the academic, it tends towards a disciplinary essentialism, which substitutes a biological body for an institutional one.

Concurrent with this attempted relocation of Asian American identity into the body of the minority academic has, as suggested earlier, been its transference into the body of the minority text. Colleen Lye’s calls to treat race “as form rather than as formation” (“Racial Form” 98), like Jinqi Ling’s efforts in Narrating Nationalisms and Stephen Sohn’s in Racial Asymmetries, have accordingly sought to recast Asian American literature, and redefine racial identity, through a set of formal literary techniques (rather than biological “givens”) which negotiate the historical and intertextual conditions of the genre’s emergence in uniquely Asian American ways. As a result, play in the Asian American context has effectively become synonymous with, and often reduced to, aesthetic and political concepts of “negotiation” and “innovation,” such that the disciplining of play, via “formalism,” has become the newly preferred means of taking Asian American literature “seriously” as a distinct and historically-situated genre.

American Games

If critics in Asian American Studies have tended to treat the literary and the ludic as antagonistic if not mutually exclusive domains, their counterparts in North American and European literature departments have, for at least the last forty years, been almost too ready to embrace those intersections. Robert Rawdon Wilson, in reviewing for a 1985 special issue of the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature the wide net of influence that concepts of play and game had cast over critical discourses ranging from philosophy to mathematics, even suggested that these concepts had at the time become so beguiling that “once one has [them] firmly in hand it may appear unnecessary to talk about anything else and, for that matter, anything else can be talked of in precisely those terms” (“In Palamedes’ Shadow” 181-82). According to Wilson, this was especially true for Anglophone literary criticism, which, in embracing the terms, had produced such an increasing amount of “loose talk” (“Three Prolusions” 79) in the field that anything even remotely resembling play in a novel was now considered fair game for making larger claims about literature as a whole’s inherent “gamefulness.” He sums up the seductive quality of this apparent affinity in a passage worth quoting at length: the concepts of play and game have always appealed to writers and students of literature who see literary texts as both self-referential and self-contained, governed by their own distinctive rules. In this sense, works of literature may be considered as games since they follow from certain assumptions (which, with more or less precision, one may call “rules” or “axioms”) that are not necessarily those of the outside-the-text world. The axioms of a fictional, or “possible,” world may be said to correspond to those of a game (or: literary conventions “equal” the rules of a game) in that they restrict what may happen, delimit action, and make certain other things (characters, events or moves) possible with a disregard for what may be the case outside the fiction. (“In Palamedes’ Shadow” 184) The self-castigation of Wilson and his counterparts like Bernard Suits and Jacques Ehrmann5 would, by the late 1990s, evolve into a full-fledged debate between “ludology” and “narratology,” the primary bone of contention being whether games ought to be interpreted as texts in the literary sense (with a focus on their narrative functions) or as an entirely different animal. While in some sense, the rapid technological outgrowth of the console and computer game industry effectively decided the question in favor of the ludologists, the concept of narrative has in many ways remained a cornerstone of contemporary game studies, as suggested by the enthusiastic praise that continues to surround Jesper Juul’s critical monograph Half-real, in which he makes an argument for games’ liminal existence “between real rules and fictional worlds.”

While Sau-ling Wong argued that the Asian American “Homo Ludens” (a neologism coined by Johan Huizinga in his eponymous 1938 study of the “play-element” in culture) was fundamentally distinct from its Anglophone counterpart, such that the insights of Huizinga, Roger Caillois and Ehrmann were only partially relevant, my own impression is that their theories, and the work of contemporary video game and new media theorists like Juul, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Henry Jenkins, are in fact enormously relevant to the Asian American context for three reasons. First, while I, like Wong, focus in this dissertation almost exclusively on literary texts rather than video games, critical approaches to the latter offer an extremely compelling framework for thinking about how racial difference might function as an algorithmic constraint that determines how characters develop their identities, navigate the world around them, and respond to obstacles and challenges while being confined to a rigid set of governing rules.

Second, game theory—whether in its contemporary “digital” form or in its earlier Cold War Era mathematic iterations—offers an opportunity to attend to play’s structural and formal components rather than reductively treat it as a diffuse or purely frivolous activity; the concept of “game,” in other words, captures the nuances of what Roger Caillois considered to be play’s distinctly structural qualities. Caillois famously distinguished between types of games by classifying them, first according to their elements of chance (alea), competition (agon), mimicry, and vertigo (ilinx), and secondly along the two poles of ludus and paidea, the former being defined as “arbitrary, imperative, and purposely tedious conventions” and the latter “a kind of uncontrolled fantasy . . . frolicsome and impulsive exuberance” (13). Treating rule-governed games and “freeplay” not as antithetical states but, following Caillois, as two poles along a spectrum, Serious Play accordingly considers the concepts of “game” and “play” to index a complementary rather than concentric or interchangeable relationship. As Ludwig Wittgenstein reminds us, “there is probably no single characteristic which is common to all the things we call games. But it can't be said either that ‘game’ just has several independent meanings (rather like the word ‘bank’). What we call ‘games’ are procedures interrelated in various ways with many different transitions between one and another” (75).