Games & Play in Chinese & Sinophone Cultures is a pioneering work, one that significantly contributes to Chinese studies, game studies, and other humanities and social science disciplines. A collection of an introduction and thirteen essays, the anthology factually and theoretically demonstrates the feasibility of and need for studying ludic China, a research topic that has yet to be comprehensively and systematically explored.
The Introduction to the anthology, collectively authored by Li Guo, Douglas Eyman, and Hongmei Sun, presents a panoramic view of ludic China, mapping its realities, and probing various issues. The essay not only defines games and game-playing with methodologies and theories that Roger Caillois, David Graeber, Johan Huizinga, and other leading scholars of games studies have established, but also pinpoints distinctive Chinese concepts, such as you yu yi, a Confucian tenet that gave rise to “a lifestyle for generations of [Chinese] scholars who experienced frustration with their political ambitions, providing an avenue for the increased cultural importance of games” (4). To illustrate Chinese games, the Introduction surveys Burr puzzle (luban suo), pitch-pot (touhu), and other practices, including their game rules and ecologies. The essay ends with three sketches: a review of late Qing and Republican Chinese tabloids about contemporaneous games and entertainments, a survey of “Games and Gaming as Digital Culture” in twenty-first century China, and a guide to the chapters.
Each of the thirteen chapters examines a specific aspect of ludic China, offering a wealth of historical or ethnographic details and theoretical arguments. Topically, the articles fall into four overlapping groups: Chinese games in historical context (Chapters 1–3); literary writings as games and their analysis (Chapters 4–6); the role of game players and agency (Chapters 7–9); and globalized Chinese digital games (Chapters 10–13).
The first group begins with “Groups on the Grid: Weiqi Cultures in Song-Yuan-Ming China” by Zach Berge-Becker. Nuancing the elitist claim that weiqi is a game with cosmological import that gentleman play to cultivate themselves, the essay culls stories from a selection of historical documents from Song China on the board game, and demonstrates that commoners and swindlers also played it (29–32) and that some writers dismissed it as a vice (33). Next comes César Guarde-Paz’s essay, “Newly Discovered Game Board Rock Carvings in Hong Kong: Apotropaic Symbolism or Ludic Culture?” Describing carvings as physical relics, and interpreting them in the context of historical sea trade between Europe and Asia, the essay ends with a broad but meaningful argument: when leisure pursuits and international contacts converge, they generate a common ground that extends “beyond the limitations and specificities of East and West, of men and women, and creating a fictional yet necessary dimension where differences dissolve into a crucible of cultural and gender undifferentiation” (52). The argument underscores the anthology authors’ collective call for a regional/international study of Chinese games and play. Guarde-Paz’s essay is followed by Rania Huntington’s “Splendid Journeys: The Board Games of a Late Qing Scholar” (58–77). Analyzing the production history and technical features of two board games created by the celebrated late Qing scholar Yu Yue (1821–1907), Huntington highlights the ways players’ biographies, their personal creativity, game rules, and play traditions shaped Chinese leisure culture and history.
The second group of articles in the anthology begins with “Exclusive Pleasures on the Cheap: Yuan Dynasty Sanqu Songs on Courtesan Kickball” by Patricia Sieber. It discusses sanqu, not only as a genre of Chinese poetry but also as a literary game played by Chinese commoner and elite poets such as Guan Hanqing (ca. 1220–after 1279), Deng Yubin (fl. 1294–97), and Sadula (jinshi 1327). Sieber argues that by describing their kickball games with expressive and technical words, the poets project for themselves and their readers not only playful sportsmanship but also sensual pleasures and social rights that they could not readily enjoy in their quotidian lives. Sieber’s argument illuminates the Chinese concept of you yu yi that closely connects Chinese life and play. What is connected can be erotic in nature, a fact addressed in Jie Guo’s essay, “Games in Late Ming and Early Qing Erotic Literature.” Analyzing representative samples of erotic literature from Ming and Qing China with Roger Caillois’s theory that play is “free, separate, uncertain, unproductive, governed by rules, and make believe” (100–101), Guo argues that Ming–Qing authors present games, and in particular those involving cross-dressing/gendered role-play, in their erotic novels to “generate sex content and enrich the overall variety of sexual acts and themes for the pleasure of the reader” (101); reading such erotic texts, they enter a make-believe reality of gaming, where they can act freely and even transgressively. Guo makes his case with idiomatic translations and insightful analyses of revealing passages from the Langshi (History of a libertine), Chundeng nao (Festive spring lanterns), Ruo Putuan (Carnal prayer mat), and other celebrated Ming and Qing erotic novels. Interrelations among Chinese games, literature, and eroticism are further explored in the next essay, Li Guo’s “The Courtesans’ Drinking Games in the Dream in the Green Bower.” Evoking Caillois’s four types of game, Guo analyzes Yu Da’s (d. 1884) realistic portrayal of courtesans and scholars drinking and playing erotic games, highlighting the ways their play skills and knowledge crisscross their actual and fictional lives.
The third group of articles in the anthology is launched by Jiayi Chen’s “Ghostly Dicing: Gambling Games and Deception in Ming–Qing Short Stories.” It discusses the Chinese dice and gambling game and its literary representation in three celebrated Qing novels by, respectively, Li Yu (1618–1704), Ling Mengchu (1580–1644), and Pu Songling (1640–1715). By analyzing the novelists’ story-telling strategies and their verbal descriptions of dice games, Chen reveals how the authors play their verbal games, creating fictional and deceptive characters, shifting voices, and narrative twists, and generating literary pleasure as well as social and religious anxieties for their readers. As fictionalized, winning and losing personal or familial fortunes through dice games are indulgences and vices that might invite supernatural intervention. Chen’s essay sets the stage for Hongmei Sun’s “Playing Journey to the West,” a fascinating analysis of the celebrated Chinese saga “as a game designed by the Buddhas and Bodhisattva Guanyin who formed the pilgrimage team of Tripitaka and his disciples … as the main players, and sets goals for them: to travel to the Western Heaven to retrieve Buddhist scripture” (157). Tracing game structures/rules that involve deception and role-playing, Mei shows the ways that the Dragon King, Monkey, the Jade Emperor, and other fictional characters wager and compete against one-another. Mei’s essay concludes with the observation that because of their playful nature, allegorical stories from the Journey to the West have been creatively adjusted into contemporary stories and games.
After Mei’s article come two studies with rich ethnographic data and theoretical arguments. Yichen Rao’s “How China’s Young ‘Internet Addicts’ Gamify the Disciplinary Treatment Camp” (173–91) unfolds in two parts. The first introduces the rise of teenager “internet addicts” (wangyin) and their parents’ efforts to “correct” them by sending them to disciplinary treatment camps for six months or so. The youngsters are subjected to institutionalized programs of psychological counselling, supervised exercises, health and hygiene activities, and discussions of parent–child problems. The second part of the essay shows how the youngers creatively transform camp supervisors and comrades into game characters—for example, a very talkative counselor in the camp that Rao studied becomes “Dr. Wu” in “the Base Kill,” a board game that the interned youngsters created for themselves. Evoking Geertz’s theory of deep play, Rao ends his essay with broad interpretations on games and gaming as social-political comments on, and even resistance against, hegemonic authorities and social hierarchies. Next comes Keren He’s “Gaming while Aging: The Ludification of Later Life in Pokémen GO” (192–212). Parading a wealth of ethnographic data and theoretical arguments about senior gaming in Taiwan, the essay tells a fascinating story about Mr. Chen Ching-bo, a senior man who played Pokémen GO simultaneously on multiple electronic devices. By playing the game his way, exercising his creativity, pleasing himself, and ignoring corporate designers’ logics and rules for the game, Chen shows how human creativity and playfulness shape games and gaming lives.
The last three essays in the anthology discuss twenty-first century Chinese games, game culture, and their interpretations. The first essay is “The Video Game Chinese Parents and its Political Potentials” by Florian Schneider. By analyzing Chinese Parents, an on-line game released in 2018, in the context of contemporary Chinese society and its social-political norms and values, Schneider shows how the game projects, or exploits, China’s child-rearing anxieties and practices. By describing the game’s contents and rules, the author observes how the game and its playing resist simple cause-and-effect analysis. Thus, he concludes his essay by declaring that the game Chinese Parents is a “tongue-in-cheek object lesson about the value of industriousness that can ironically only be learned by ‘wasting’ time playing” (230). With such a conclusion, Scheider nails a core problem of games studies: should games be studied as they are, or as windows to cultures and societies in which they are played, and how! Similar questions are probed in Jiaqi Li’s essay, “The Public Gaming Discourse of Honor of Kings in China” (233–246). After describing the production history of the popular Chinese video game and its content, Li discusses the process in which diverse stakeholders, ranging from Chinese governmental authorities, commercial institutions such as Tencent Holding Limited which produced the game, and individual critics and players all negotiated and adjusted game content to serve their diverse and evolving demands. Tellingly, Li exposes the commercial and global agendas/functions of the game by noting that Tencent strategically injected nationalist elements into its Chinese versions, but expediently replaced their Chinese heroes and heroines with Western and Japanese ones in the Arena of Valor, the global version of Honor of Kings. The last essay in the anthology, Douglas Eyman’s “Translation and Chinese Culture in Video Games” investigates the World of Warcraft, the Mists of Pandaria, and the Genshin Impact, three popular Chinese videogames, highlighting issues of localization, foreignization, and domestication, and the complex processes of translating/adjusting cultural, verbal, and visual contents of digital games across cultural-political boundaries.
By informing readers about and interrogating ludic China, historical and contemporary, the chapters constitute a significant contribution to game studies and to Chinese studies. Eloquently, they demonstrate the feasibility and urgency of developing Chinese game studies as a distinctive branch of scholarship on China and as a means to further advance global game studies. The anthology will be welcomed by a variety of scholars, who will hardly notice its few and trivial blemishes, such as inconsistent listing of biographical dates, missing Chinese characters in some chapters, and some opaque expressions.
Readers will be inspired to study ludic China, and will aspire to fill in factual and theoretical gaps that the anthology has exposed. They will, for example, produce thorough investigations of mahjong (a Chinese tile-based gambling game for four players), xiqu (Chinese theatre/play with songs/music), and other games that Chinese men and women, adults and children, played and still play in their private and public realities.
