IntroductionGameplay in Chinese and Sinophone Worlds

Contesting Game and Play

Methodologically, it is important to distinguish between game and play. In Western game studies, game entails play, but play can occur outside the scope of a game. Play is an activity required for the experience of a game, whereas a game is an object that at minimum requires procedures (rules) and materials that can be manipulated, whether those are words, sticks, balls, cards, game boards, or avatars residing in digital worlds. As anthropologist David Graeber argues, play can be improvisational, generating new rules and creating games, whereas a game is based on stabilized and highly visible rules, within which actions are well governed.⁸ In Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga argues that play is both free (not a means to any other end) and meaningful. Play is separate from everyday experience and takes place in its own separate space, delineated by what he calls the “magic circle”—the creation of a space set apart from the rest of the world that exists only for the purpose of play and only as long as it is needed for that purpose.⁹ Game designers see the magic circle as the context that provides the boundaries for a specific game, whereas game studies scholars debate whether the circle is created by the players or the designers, or simply demarcates the differences between a game and its surrounding context.¹⁰ For our purposes, games are both bounded and purposeful, and, unlike play, games have rules. Play is separated from the real world. Both play and games are demarcated by boundaries that enforce this separation.¹¹ This volume explores how games that arise from various temporal and cultural contexts allow circulation of cultural practices to wider audiences.

In Homo Ludens, Huizinga considers three Chinese terms for play, starting with wan, “in which ideas of children’s games predominate,” but that semantically originates from “handling something with playful attention” or “to be lightly engrossed.”¹² Huizinga notes that wan is not used for games of skill, contests, gambling, or theatrical performances, for which Chinese has to resort to other terms (such as cheng and sai for contests).¹³ Today, the most common terms used for “play” in Chinese are youxi and youwan, with youxi covering a broader scope of the meaning of play.¹⁴ Both compounds include the concept you, which is rooted in both Confucian and Taoist canonic texts and cultural traditions. The historical usage and modern development of the terms you and youxi expand Huizinga’s discussion of Homo ludens. Understanding these terms is necessary to see the features of game culture in China as it relates to Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist traditions in Chinese culture. Although Western game studies scholars distinguish the concepts “game” and “play,” in Chinese they are not differentiated, as you and youxi can refer to both.

The Confucian concept you yu yi, fundamental to discussions of aesthetic and educational traditions, is also productive in the search for philosophical roots of social features of games and play in China. Usually translated as “arts,” yi includes a broad range of activities that require skill and know-how, which can be pursued seriously or recreationally, including games. You yu yi involves games or play performed in a playful state of mind. As Confucius explains, he was skilled in yi because he was politically unsuccessful in his lifetime and invested his passion in play.¹⁵ Play in Confucius’s world is positioned as an alternative to political engagement. After Confucius, you yu yi became a lifestyle for generations of scholars who experienced frustration with their political ambitions, providing an avenue for the increased cultural importance of games.¹⁶ For these literati, the link between play and life often manifested through writing as playful or recreational activity. Not only is writing-as-art, namely calligraphy, one of the yi that you yu yi refers to, but playful writing is also often an essential part of games played by educated men and women.

In the Taoist tradition, you is a central concept of Zhuangzi and arguably the core of Zhuangzi’s answer to the question of how to live in the world. While the basic meaning of you refers to wandering, you is employed to describe xiaoyao you, the free and easy wandering of the enlightened individual. The notion of you also refers to a form of wandering of the heart and mind, you xin: “through all of creation, enjoying its delights without ever becoming attached to any one part of it.”¹⁷ Zhuangzi turns to the analogy of craftsmen to describe this “wandering with freedom.” One famous story he recounts is about a skillful butcher who has been using the same knife for nineteen years without sharpening it because “there are spaces between the joints” and thus there is always room for the blade to play about in.¹⁸ The expression derived from this story, you ren you yu, is still commonly used today, meaning to play with a knife with ease. The cook explains that the key to his success lies in his care about the Way, which goes beyond skill (ji)—the skill in this case echoes the yi in the Confucian example.¹⁹ This relationship between the Way and the skill in Zhuangzi does not conflict with Confucius. Zhuangzi’s you xin can be understood as an elaboration on the freedom and ease of you represented in Confucius’ you yu yi.²⁰

The concept of gameplay has been richly articulated in Chinese religious traditions, as demonstrated by the expression youxi in Buddhist scripture. The Sanskrit text Lalitavistara, one of the most sacred texts in Mahāyāna Buddhism, has been translated into modern Chinese by Huang Baosheng as Shentong youxi (Divine gameplay). The title can mean either “extensive account of play” or “divine play,” with play referring to the Buddha’s playful actions to enlighten humans as well as to the plays staged by human beings in praise of Buddha’s actions.²¹ The phrases shentong and youxi frequently appear together in Buddhist sutras. One of the earlier Chinese translations, Fangguang dazhuangyan jing—yiming shentong youxi, translated by Divākara in 683 CE, includes the two phrases in the subtitle to make sure no ambivalence in the meaning is lost.²² The Avataṃsaka Sūtra (Hua yan jing) lists ten types of gameplay practiced by boddhisattva in book 56, also rendered in Chinese as youxi.²³ Like its Confucian and Taoist counterparts, youxi here does not refer to any particular games nor games in general, but a playful manner in which boddhisattvas enlighten and save lives.²⁴ You yu yi and you xin represent a place and space where Confucius and Zhuangzi are in agreement, a common space of you where traditional scholars unsuccessful in their societal pursuit retreat to—a space of play enacted via games. This place is broader than the actions of play itself: thus, games become the vehicles for the playful attitude or the spirit of play. Corresponding with and complementing this playful attitude is the Buddhist idea of shentong youxi.

An Early History of Games in China

Archeological findings of toys for gameplay in China date to between six and seven thousand years ago. One of the earliest examples of children’s toys is a set of three stone balls found in a four-year-old girl’s tomb in the Xi’An Banpo Neolithic settlement. At another Neolithic Age site in Jingshan, Hubei, archaeologists discovered another toy, the taoxiang qiu (earthen sound ball), a hollow earthen ball containing stone pebbles or pellets that make sound when shaken.²⁵ Made for children’s play, it could also be used as a simple musical instrument. These toys for gameplay display techniques in mold-making in the late second and early first millennium BCE. During the Spring and Autumn Period (770–476 BCE), Mo Zi was the alleged inventor of many toys, including a wooden bird that could fly in the air for three days. The master carpenter Lu Ban was the attributed inventor of the Lu Ban lock (Lu Ban suo), a toy made of six interlocking wooden sticks using traditional mortise and tenon techniques. During the Warring States period (475–221 BCE), the puzzle “nine linked-rings” (jiu lianhuan) was invented, an advanced game device that requires mathematical analysis to solve. The materiality of ludic practices—ranging from earth, stone, wood, to (later) jade and metal—demarcate the player’s ludic experiences and signal the player’s age, gender, class, personal taste, and background (from an ordinary household or an aristocratic family).

Among ancient games of contest, a popular one is six sticks (liubo), a two-person board game with each party holding six pieces, including a piece designated as a commander (zhushuai).²⁶ By casting dice on the board, the players make advances with their pieces; the player who takes the opponent’s commanding stone wins the game. “Strategies of Qi” (Qi ce) in Intrigues of the Warring States (Zhanguo ce, third to first century BCE) records that in the Kingdom of Qi, in the affluent and prosperous Linzi, everyone took to the games of six sticks and kickball (taju).

Ludic activities during the Song and Yuan dynasties flourished thanks to the development of commerce and trade. Molded objects were in demand, particularly painted clay figurines and toys in the southern cities of Suzhou, Hangzhou, Yunzhou, and Zhenjiang.²⁷ A popular toy was the Moheluo doll, an infant-shaped figurine made of wax or mud. The name of the doll is allegedly a transliteration of the Sanskrit name Mahākāla, the Buddha’s son.²⁸ The popular genre of painting during the Song provided illustrations of children’s toys.²⁹ The famous Portrait of the Gift Peddler (Huolang tu) by Li Song (1166–243) illustrated several dozen children’s toys, many of which (kites, pellet drums, wind spinners) remain popular today. Further, there appeared diverse games emphasizing skill and competition. During the Song dynasty, a collection of ways of playing tangram puzzles, Diagrams of Banquet Tables (Yanji tu, 1194) was compiled by Huang Bosi (1179–118).³⁰ A Game Manual for Shuanglu (Pushuang) was compiled by Hong Zun (1120–174); shuanglu is a race game similar to European backgammon.³¹ It “began in Western India and arrived in China during the Wei dynasty of the Cao family (220–65), and flourished during the Liang, Chen, Qi, Sui, and Tang dynasties.”³² The multiple variants of this game in China and Japan exemplify a case of ludic circulation in which gameplay was reinvented through cross-cultural exchanges.

Studies of ludic cultures necessitate a scholarly reflection on the researcher’s own position in an ongoing process of remaking game history. Gina Bloom suggests that readers of ludic traditions are engaged in a “metagame” in that they enjoy a game-like process and are enabled to “recognize the ways their own historical moment, their own contexts for engagement with history, shape their understanding of the past.”³³ A core concept in Bloom’s study of staged games in early modern British theater is the notion of “enskillment,” that is, the process in which participants in both games and theater have repeated exposure to routines and practices as games “showcase the degree to which embodied knowledge may be produced and communicated beneath the horizon of consciousness.”³⁴ This notion of enskillment through the experience of gameplay is not exclusive to early modern Britain. An early example of gameplay as enskillment is the rustic game jirang (to strike the earth) during the reign of mythical Emperor Yao (2356–2255 BCE), which could be a practice for hunting.³⁵ The popular game pitch-pot (touhu), which involved shooting arrows into a pot, can be traced back to ancient shooting and hunting practice. The aforementioned Confucian concept of you yu yi entails a process through which disciples enhance cognitive skills and potencies through learning. According to The Analects, “The Master said, ‘I set my heart on the Way, base myself on virtue, lean upon benevolence for support and take my recreation in the arts.’”³⁶ The path to moral self-fulfillment entails learning to enjoy artistic endeavors. Moral consciousness and the spirit of art coexist as elemental parts of a fulfilling life.

Military practices and political actions may inspire the invention of games. Games arising from military drilling exercises include the ancient game of kickball (cuju) and “dragging the hook” (qiangou), an antecedent of tug-of-war. A recent example is Japanese Sugoroku games in the early twentieth century, the “imperial jingoism” that came to dominate the mass media during Japan’s colonial era. Their visual culture suggests some ways in which “the process of mobilization left … an imprint” of empire on “the domestic landscape,” primarily on the minds of children who learned to imagine themselves as military heroes, colonial elite, and the winners of the global race for empire.³⁷ The process of gameplay, by engaging the players in practices of enskillment, may facilitate the transmission of specific geopolitical imaginations.

Redefining Ethical Gameplay

A study of ludic cultures from the premodern to the contemporary invites recontextualization of game ethics through interdisciplinary examinations, including visual studies, narratology, gender, leisure, and everyday life. In the Chinese context, games with entertainment purposes were considered morally corruptive in pre-Qin periods. The philosopher Chunyu Kun (fourth century BCE) admonished King Wei of the Qi Kingdom (378–320 BCE) that excessive folk fascination with drinking and games like touhu and liubo could lead to the kingdom’s collapse.³⁸ Several chapters in this volume study the art of weiqi and illustrate that the players’ heightened awareness of the ethical stakes of the games endorses them as advanced players and makes gaming empowering. Game players’ ethical deliberations on rules lead to creative endeavors to re-create the game without breaking the boundaries that condition the elasticity of game playing.

The growing influence of the Mystery School (Xuanxue) in the Wei, Jin, and Southern and Northern Dynasties transformed the ludic cultures of the time in important ways. The Neo-Daoist philosophers Ruan Ji (210–63) and Ji Kang (223–62) advocated for “surpassing the doctrine of names and entrust their self-so [spontaneous nature].”³⁹ During this period, games with strong entertainment elements were popularized. A New Account of the Tales of the World (Shishuo xinyu, fifth century) records a popular dice gambling game, chupu, favored by literati scholars of the Wei Jin period. According to “Rhapsody on Chupu” (Chupu fu) by Ma Rong (79–166), the game could have been invented by the Daoist philosopher Lao Zi for the people as entertainment so that they might not worry about the wars.⁴⁰ Stories about elite scholars Huan Wen (312–73), Wang Xianzhi (344–86), and Yuan Dan (fourth century) playing chupu show that a game player’s skill could indicate his personal traits, character, or even political philosophy. In the Tang dynasty, the game evolved into a simpler dice game and gained popularity among common people. The game eventually raised moral questions and was outlawed in the Song dynasty because of the large number of people addicted to it.

The rise of Neo-Confucianism in the Song and Yuan dynasties induced the return of Confucian discourses of gameplay. One example is the game of chuiwan (literally, “ball-hitting”), which is a golf-like game that could be traced to the Tang dynasty that enjoyed increasing popularity in the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties. The game was favored by emperors and court officials, as well as aristocratic men and women, though not popular among common civilians.⁴¹ Resonating with the revival of Neo-Confucianism, the game rules of chuiwan emphasized “etiquette, courtesy, honesty, and wisdom.”⁴² Confucian game ethics emphasize the cultivation of one’s own moral character rather than competition with others. Developed from a stick-and-ball game bu da qiu (literally, “step play ball”), chuiwan required players to play with their own ball, with the objective of hitting the ball into holes on the ground, which made the game more a competition with oneself.⁴³

The banning of certain games during specific historical periods could reflect the evolving nature of discourses about ethical gameplay. During the Song and Yuan dynasties, moral discourses about games and gameplay were reinforced with state sanctions. An example is the banning of women’s wrestling (xiangpu) games, in which female players bared their upper bodies. Women’s wrestling was appreciated in the palace and practiced among commoners as a festival activity during the Song dynasty; however, Sima Guang (1019–1086) composed a memorial to the court strongly opposing the practice of women wrestling in public: “Making the scantily dressed women perform in front [of such an audience] is by no means of a way of ratifying the rituals and rules and showing them to the country.”⁴⁴ The memorial expresses moralistic concerns about female wrestling as a gendered spectacle and women’s spectatorial pleasure in watching the gameplay.

Concerns about harnessing women’s social presence and activities caused changes to the circumstances of gameplay. During the Song dynasty, swinging (qiuqian) was relocated to the backyard and became a “game in the inner chambers,” corresponding to a constraint on women’s social practices under the influence of Neo-Confucianism.⁴⁵ The debates about game ethics in a premodern context draw attention to the interaction and relocation of power between game objects, gameplayers, and spectator-participants of the game. Discourses about ethical gameplay are shaped by gender norms of the time. Leisurely, aesthetic, or sociable games induce queries about risks of dissolving morality, or contrarily, can be transformed to reinforce certain ethical norms, even at the cost of playability and entertainment.

Gender Performances and Ludic Heroines

The controversies related to women’s wrestling in the Song dynasty illustrate how discourses of gender norms and roles could shape the subject’s participation in gameplay and the social reception of game practices and performances. Marc Moskowitz’s study of weiqi delineates how the game persists in a contemporary era, incorporating attributes of Confucian masculinity in its imageries, reflecting male familial identities, social bonds, and gendered discourses of virtue.⁴⁶ A similar male-coded game is elephant chess (xiangqi), which gained popularity during the Ming and Qing. Though similar to Western chess, Chinese chess is “based on military tactics, [and] for the reason that women are not supposed to go to war, there is no queen.”⁴⁷ These ludic subjects are negotiated with social and moralistic norms of their times in gameplay practices. As this book presents, early modern women could be considered as ludic heroines who reconfigure game cultures through simulation, appropriation, and negotiation.

A historical review of game cultures in China indicates that female gameplayers invented and actively practiced games considered distinctively feminine, such as the aforementioned qiqiao, and also shared the space of gameplay with their male counterparts in a wide range of games that were not gender-confined, such as pitch-pot, hit ball, wrestling, kickball, card games, and board games.⁴⁸ Women of the Tang dynasty enjoyed games including maqiu (polo), step play ball, boating, and tug-of-war. Governing-class women played the largely male-dominated game weiqi. The History of the Southern Dynasties relates that Lou Cheng, daughter of a professional weiqi player, disguised herself as a man and took to playing weiqi in public. Later she even took a relatively high-level local official’s position.⁴⁹ This historical case, which Judith Zeitlin describes as “dislocation of gender,” shows how playing weiqi allowed a woman to obtain a literatus’s identity in social life.⁵⁰ Elite women of the Tang dynasty, from the favored consort of Emperor Xuanzong Yang Yuhuan to the wife of poet Du Fu, enjoyed weiqi as entertainment.

Such undertakings also persisted in the following centuries. A poem by Emperor Shenzong of the Song describes his hobby of watching his consorts and palace maids playing weiqi. Female weiqi players were not only gendered spectacles of male approval and connoisseurship; they also frequently played with men at weiqi games. Some women players gained eminence and even achieved the level of guoshou (literally, “national hand”). In the Southern Ming (1644–1662), two nationally acclaimed female weiqi players included guoshou Lady Guan and Zheng Hui. Elite women also composed prolific writings about games and gameplay. Late Ming authors Yao Shu and Gu Ruopu (1592–1681) composed weiqi-themed poems, integrating a gender-specific voice into poetic expressions.⁵¹ Poet Li Qingzhao (1084–1155) favored a board game called dama (capture the horse), on which she produced a rhapsody, a “preface” to a preexisting handbook on the game, and thirteen short verses on game strategies and outcomes.⁵² Literary texts about games and gaming subjects construct diverse forms of ludic subjectivity through illustrations of gendered codes of conduct and self-expressions, diverse modes of sexuality, and spectatorial exchanges. The ludic heroine in dynastic China is a subject-in-process at the margin of diverse social, cultural, and literary imaginaries and undergoes constant reconstruction and reinvention.

Games and Gaming as Digital Culture

In contemporary discourse, the term youxi has lost its nuanced historical forms and now almost exclusively refers to video games (as a shortened form of dianzi youxi). The history of video games in China follows a trajectory that is quite similar to that of video games in the United States, albeit starting about a decade later. As in the West, the first widely available games were arcade games, which became popular when introduced to China in the 1980s. As Lin Zhang notes in her history of video games in post-reform China, “The number of game arcades surged in the fall of 1985, taking over parks, residential neighborhoods, shops, and theaters.”⁶⁴ Consoles were introduced in the late 1980s, primarily imported from Japan; however, the imports were subject to high taxes imposed by the Chinese government, which resulted in a thriving trade in pirated hardware and games.⁶⁵ The first Chinese-produced console was introduced by Xiaobawang as both a gaming console and an educational technology, as it came with a keyboard and could run educational software.⁶⁶ By the end of 1993, over 60 percent of secondary-school students in Beijing owned a gaming console.⁶⁷ After 1995, the Chinese PC games industry grew rapidly, alongside the increase in home computer ownership in Chinese cities.⁶⁸ Object Software, the first Chinese business dedicated to game design, was launched the same year.⁶⁹

Although online games, consoles, and PC games are all still popular in China, the extensive adoption of cell phones has led to a meteoric rise in the availability and popularity of mobile games. Over the past decade, Chinese companies have come to dominate the global mobile game market. Much of the scholarly consideration of mobile gaming in China focuses on psychological impacts of play (both positive and negative) or China’s role in the mobile game market, which leaves a significant gap for game studies scholars to fill.⁷⁰

The Chinese government since the mid-1980s has vacillated between condemning games as sources of antisocial behavior (Internet addiction) and championing games as vehicles for state values and ideologies.⁷¹ As early as the introduction of arcade games, Chinese media argued that gaming “distracted from study, work, and healthy leisure.… Consequently, arcade games were labeled ‘unproductive’ leisure, and the arcade a potentially ‘pathological’ space to be regulated and policed.”⁷² Negative stereotypes of gamers and gaming continued throughout the development of PC, online, and mobile games, with serious concern about whether gaming (and Internet use in general) might be addictive. The government had been so concerned with the potential adverse effects of games (particularly on youth) that they instituted a series of laws limiting school-age children to a maximum of three hours of play per week, with no gaming allowed after 10 p.m. This concern has even led to the establishment of Internet addiction treatment centers, as documented by Yichen Rao’s chapter in this volume.⁷³

Much of the literature about gaming by Chinese scholars dismisses games as “hedonic”—that is, designed purely for pleasure, and thus serving as a distraction from healthier endeavors or productive work that benefits society. The term hedonic frequently appears as a kind of standard adjective, without explication of why and in what context games should be designated as such. Keren He’s chapter shows how some senior game players use games to resist the state’s insistence on productivity and also as a eudaimonic activity: meaningful play as opposed to the purely pleasurable hedonic approach.

Paradoxically, the Chinese government has also championed gaming as a means of celebrating Chinese culture. In the mid-2000s, the rise of South Korea as a leader in the development of online games prompted a number of legislative and policy acts designating online gaming as a key industry for China’s Internet economy.⁷⁴ Addressing the tension surrounding discourse around digital games, Cao Shule and He Wei analyzed every mention of games in the People’s Daily newspaper from 1981 to 2017.⁷⁵ They identified six key themes and graphed the ebb and flow of each over time: games as an integral part of computer technology; games as an emerging cultural style or form of entertainment; games as toxic (particularly to youth); games as objects of regulation; games as key economic products; and games as officially recognized esports. As of 2017 at least, both games as “poison to youth” and as a positive new form of entertainment were again on the rise.

Ludic Ecologies: A Chapter Guide

This collection is organized chronologically, from prehistoric rock carvings to recently released mobile games. Chapters on “ludic circulations” explore board games in three historical and cultural contexts, focusing on the function of game boards, their ludic participants, and player-game relationships. Zach Berge-Becker recontextualizes the discourse of weiqi in Song-Yuan-Ming China (960–1644). By exploring the distinct cultures of gentlemen who enjoyed weiqi in their leisure hours and gentlemen who disdained it as a pernicious art, as well as occupational players and gamblers, Berge-Becker reveals how weiqi served as a game for those of high and low status to enjoy or dislike in their own ways. César Guarde-Paz examines newly discovered game board rock carvings in Hong Kong that are considered Neolithic symbolic representations. Guarde-Paz considers the apotropaic and symbolic aspects of these games, exploring the games’ ludic manifestations and their enhancement of transcultural communication. Rania Huntington examines scholar Yu Yue (1821–1907) and his invention of two board games. Huntington considers how Yu’s game designs enrich the textures of allusions, create linked spaces in gameplay, and recreate microcosms on the boards.

Several chapters consider game participants as gendered ludic subjects and gameplay as a means of gendered appropriation and transgression. Patricia Sieber considers representations of female kickball players by three male yuanqu songwriters and examines how their songs about the game illustrate alternative models of femininity. Women players and their technical and aesthetic expertise in sanqu contribute to “the privileged currency of an alternative economy of play.” Jie Guo draws from Roger Caillois’s reflections on games and play to examine games in Ming-Qing erotica, in which the narratives induce transgressive pleasures through erotic scenarios and uphold or reinforce orthodox gender and sexuality norms by inflicting severe punishment on participants in erotic games. Li Guo’s chapter examines courtesans’ drinking games in The Dream in the Green Bower by Yu Da (?–1884), a captivating social tableau of game, leisure, and entertainment. If drinking games could enact ostensible egalitarianism, the courtesans who constructed gendered spaces of leisure also reconfigured such ludic spaces through creative gameplay.

Four chapters explore the role of players and their agency over the rules of the game. Jiayi Chen’s chapter on gambling games and deception in Ming-Qing short stories demonstrates how diverse modes of narrative circumvention undermine the moral message against gambling that is claimed as the exigence for the tales. Hongmei Sun uses gameplay as a rhetorical method of literary analysis, focusing on the ways in which the narrative of Journey to the West can be seen as the account of a game whose players (from the Buddha to the Monkey King) constantly transgress the game’s rules. Yichen Rao illustrates how young “game addicts” in a disciplinary treatment camp create their own games by incorporating characters, roles, and rules from institutional life into the game. Gamification for the players becomes a form of resistance, achieved by blurring the line between game and real life. Keren He shows that senior citizens’ gaming modes and practices in Hong Kong and Taiwan challenge ageism and ableism in game culture.

Our final section consists of three chapters on contemporary digital games, each investigating the relationship between games and the political contexts in which they reside. Games and play “can have important consequences not only materially but also socially and culturally.”⁷⁶ This tension is documented in Jiaqi Li’s chapter on the popular mobile game Honor of Kings, in which the negotiation of the game’s status as either socially beneficial or detrimental takes place between the game-design company and the state. Games can be vehicles for social critique because of game culture, as shown in chapters by Florian Schneider and Douglas Eyman. Schneider uses the mainland Chinese game Chinese Parents to explore content, interface, algorithmic interactions, digital politics of play, and the broader horizon of transnational digital networks. Eyman’s chapter on World of Warcraft and Genshin Impact documents game culture as social critique and explores the results of state censorship on games designed in the West and imported to China. Providing a study on translation and appropriation of Chinese culture in video games, Eyman probes the rich interactions among policy, censorship, translation, and localization.

Notes

1. 1. Bjarke Liboriussen and Paul Martin, “Regional Game Studies,” Game Studies 16, no. 1 (2016): 1.

2. 2. Colin MacKenzie and Irving Finkel, eds., Asian Games: The Art of Contest (New York: Asia Society, 2004); Dal Yong Jin, ed., Mobile Gaming in Asia: Politics, Culture and Emerging Technologies (Dordrecht: Springer, 2017); Nina Huntemann and Ben Aslinger, eds., Gaming Globally: Production, Play, and Place (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Seungcheol Austin Lee and Alexis Pulos, eds., Transnational Contexts of Development History, Sociality, and Society of Play: Videogames in East Asia (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017); Alexis Pulos and Seungcheol Austin Lee, eds., Transnational Contexts of Culture, Gender, Class, and Colonialism in Play: Videogames in East Asia (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016); Larissa Hjorth and Dean Chan, eds., Gaming Cultures and Place in Asia-Pacific (New York: Routledge, 2019).

3. 3. One notable exception is Andrew Lo, “The Game of Leaves: An Inquiry into the Origin of Chinese Playing Cards,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 63, no. 3 (2000): 389–406.

4. 4. See Stephen West, “Jurchen Elements in the Northern Drama Hu-t’ou-p’ai 虎頭牌,” T’oung Pao 63, no. 4–5 (1977): 273–95; and “Purple Clouds, Wrong Career, and Tiger Head Plaque: Jurchen Foreigners in Early Drama,” in How to Read Chinese Drama: A Guided Anthology, ed. Patricia Sieber and Regina Llamas (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022), 52–77.

5. 5. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Boston: Beacon Press, 1949), 23–24.

6. 6. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 24–25.

7. 7. For a discussion of creolization as a method of thinking about the mixing of different values and traditions in a broader ethnocultural realm, see Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relations, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 89.

8. 8. David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2015).

9. 9. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 10.

10. 10. Jesper Juul, “The Magic Circle and the Puzzle Piece,” in Conference Proceedings of the Philosophy of Computer Games 2008, ed. Stephan Günzel, Michael Liebe, and Dieter Mersch (Potsdam: Potsdam University Press, 2008), 561–67.

11. 11. Jaako Stenros proposes three boundaries of play, including “the protective frame,” “the social contract,” and “the spatial or temporal cultural site.” See Jaakko Stenros, “In Defense of a Magic Circle: The Social, Mental and Cultural Boundaries of Play,” Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association 1, no 2 (2014): 147–85.

12. 12. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 32.

13. 13. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 32.

14. 14. Liu Mengfei, “Xunzhao youxi jingshen,” in Lixian: Kaishi youxi, ed. Li Ting (Beijing: Dianzi Gongye Chubanshe, 2014), 74–93.

15. 15. See James Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. 1 (London: Trübner, 1861), 82.

16. 16. For you yu yi as a lifestyle for Confucian scholars, see Li Shenglong, “Kongzi you yu yi sixiang chanwei,” Hunan Normal University Journal of Social Science 35, no. 4 (2006): 43–46.

17. 17. Burton Watson, trans., Chuang Tzu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 6.

18. 18. See Watson, Chuang Tzu, 46–47, for a translation.

19. 19. Watson, Chuang Tzu, 46.

20. 20. See Li Shenglong, “Sixiang chanwei”; Wu Dandan, “Kongzi you yu yi yu Zhuangzi you xin sixiang bianxi jiqi daoyi guanxi,” Guizhou Univerisity Academic Journal no. 1 (2019): 66–73.

21. 21. For a discussion of the meaning of the title Lalitavistara, see He Xi, Experiencing the Graceful and the Joyful: A Study of the Literary Aesthetics and Religious Emotions of the Lalitavisstara (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2012).

22. 22. Huang Baosheng, trans., Shentong Youxi (Beijing: Zhongguo Shehui Kexue Chubanshe, 2012), 1.

23. 23. Buddhabhadra, Hua Yan Jing: Avatamsaka Sutra (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018), 56:14.

24. 24. Liu Mengfei discusses shentong youxi after a survey of the idea of youxi in premodern China in “Xunzhao youxi jingshen.”

25. 25. Song Zhaolin, “Taoxiang qiu he gu qiuxi,” Shiqian yanjiu, no. 1 (1987): 71.

26. 26. Tang Yu, “Fan er sheng: Hanhua Liubo tu de xingshi yu yihan,” Art Journal, no. 5 (2019): 18–24.

27. 27. Wang Lianhai, Zhongguo wanju yishu shi (Changsha: Hunan Meishu Chubanshe, 2006), 6, 56–57.

28. 28. Meng Hanqing, “The Moheluo Doll,” trans. Jonathan Chaves, in The Columbia Anthology of Yuan Drama, ed. C. T. Hsia, Wai-yee Li, and George Kao (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 147–88.

29. 29. Zhang Xiuling, “Yingxi tu de fazhan yu shengxing,” Historical Monthly, no. 121 (1998): 49–57; Terese Tse Bartholomew, “One Hundred Children: From Boys at Play to Icons of Good Fortune,” in Children in Chinese Art, ed. Anne Elizabeth Barrott Wicks (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002), 57–58.

30. 30. Huang Bosi 黃伯思 (1179–118), Yanji tu 燕几圖, in Shuofu 說郛, ed. Tao Zongyi, series 101, seq. 60–92, https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/chinese-rare-books/catalog/49-990067619330203941.

31. 31. Hong Zun 洪遵 (1120–174), Pushuang 譜雙, in Shuofu, series 103, seq. 86–112.

32. 32. Hong Zun, Pushuang, “Preface,” seq. 86.

33. 33. Gina Bloom, Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 25.

34. 34. Bloom, Gaming the Stage, 174.

35. 35. Li Ping, Zhongguo chuantong youxi yanjiu: youxi yu jiaoyu guanxi de lishi jiedu 中國傳統遊戲研究: 遊戲與教育關係的歷史解讀 (Taiyuan: Shanxi Jiaoyu Chubanshe, 2012), 24; Ouyang Xun 歐陽詢 (557–641), Yiwen leiju 藝文類聚 (Hong da tang, 1879), juan 11, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/012202306.

36. 36. Confucius, The Analects, trans. D. C. Lau (London: Penguin, 1979), 57.

37. 37. Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 416.

38. 38. Sima Qian 司馬遷 (145–86 BCE), “Huaji liezhuan” 滑稽列傳, Sima Qian, Quan ben Shiji 全本史記, ed. Du Haihong (Beijing: Huawen Chubanshe, 2010), 423–27.

39. 39. Ji Kang 嵇康 (223–62), Shisi Lun 釋私論, in Ji Kang Ji 嵇康集 (National Digital Library of China), juan 6, 1.

40. 40. See Ma Rong 馬融 (79–166), “Chupu Pu” 樗蒲賦, in Ouyang Xun 歐陽詢, Yiwen leiju 藝文類聚 (Hong da tang, 1879), juan 74; Chi Chuen Chan, William Wai Lim Li, and Amy Sau Lam Chiu, The Psychology of Chinese Gambling: A Cultural and Historical Perspective (Berlin: Springer, 2019), 9; Li Ping, Zhongguo chuantong youxi, 13.

41. 41. Gui Yan, Zhang Tianju, and Han Liebao, “The Study of Chui Wan, a Golf-Like Game in the Song, Yuan, Ming Dynasties of Ancient China,” Journal of Sport History 39, no. 2 (2012): 283–97; Cui Lequan and Bie Peng, “The International Spread of Chinese Ancient Ball-Game Chuiwan,” Journal of Shanghai University of Sport 41, no. 2 (2017): 1–6.

42. 42. Gui et al., “Study of Chui Wan,” 289.

43. 43. Gui et al., “Study of Chui Wan,” 284.

44. 44. Sima Guang 司馬光 (1019–1086), “Lun Shangyuan ling furen xiangpu zhuang” 論上元令婦人相撲狀, in Sima Guang, Sima Wenzheng gong chuanjia ji 司馬文正公傳家集, ed. Chen Hongmou (Guilin: Guilin Chenshi Peiyuantang, 1741), juan 23, 4.

45. 45. Li Ping, Zhongguo chuantong youxi, 195.

46. 46. Marc Moskowitz, Go Nation: Chinese Masculinities and the Game of Weiqi in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

47. 47. Arnold Wright, Twentieth Century Impressions of Hongkong, Shanghai, and Other Treaty Ports of China: Their History, People, Commerce, Industries, and Resources (Provo, UT: Repressed, 2015), 317.

48. 48. Lo, “Game of Leaves.”

49. 49. Li Yanshou 李延壽 (seventh century), Nanshi 南史, Early Ming edition (National Digital Library of China), juan 45: liezhuan 35, 16.

50. 50. Judith Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 117.

51. 51. Gu Ruopu, “Yi you ri yi Xiao shi nü sun weiqi” 乙酉人日貽蕭氏女孫圍棋, Woyue xuan shigao, juan 4, 4a–4b.

52. 52. Translations of these writings by Li Qingzhao can be found in Ronald Egan, The Burden of Female Talent: The Poet Li Qiangzhao and Her History in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), 35.

53. 53. See Stenros, “Magic Circle,” for a review of the history and use of the term in game studies.

54. 54. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 10.

55. 55. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, eds., Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 95, 93–97.

56. 56. T. L. Taylor, Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Thomas Malaby, “Beyond Play: A New Approach to Games,” Games and Culture 2, no. 2 (2007): 111.

57. 57. Sunny Han Han’s unpublished essay “Enlightenment Through Games” discusses Li Boyuan and Youxi bao’s contribution to the modern cultural market in China.

58. 58. Li Boyuan 李伯元 (1867–1906), “Lun Youxi bao zhi benyi” 論《遊戲報》之本意, Youxi bao, July 28, 1897.

59. 59. Ai Lou 愛樓, “Youxi zazhi xu” 遊戲雜誌序, Youxi zazhi, no. 1 (1913): 1.

60. 60. Wang Ying, “Lun Wan Qing baozhang youxi bagu de xingshuai: Yi Youxi bao deng wenyi xiaobao weili,” Journal of Beijing Science Technology University 28, no. 1 (2012): 141–45.

61. 61. See Yinghui Wu, “Constructing a Playful Space: Eight-Legged Essays on Xixiang ji and Pipa ji,” T’oung Pao 102, no. 4–5 (2016): 503–45.

62. 62. Jessica Conditt, “Chinese Video-Game Censorship Doesn’t End with Devotion,” Engadget, August 2, 2019, https://www.engadget.com/2019-08-02-china-censorship-video-games-tencent-mobile-pc.html.

63. 63. Patricia Gouveia, “Play and Games for a Resistance Culture,” in Playmode Exhibition Publication (Lisbon: MAAT / Fundação EDP, 2019), 14.

64. 64. Lin Zhang, “Productive vs. Pathological: The Contested Space of Video Games in Post-Reform China (1980s–2012),” International Journal of Communication 7 (2013): 2392.

65. 65. Sara Xueting Liao, “Japanese Console Games Popularization in China: Governance, Copycats, and Gamers,” Games and Culture 11, no. 3 (2016): 276.

66. 66. Zhang, “Productive vs. Pathological,” 2396; also see Anthony Fung and Sara Xueting Liao, “China,” in Videogames Around the World, ed. Mark Wolf (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 119–36.

67. 67. G. J. Yu, “Xuetong zhuanggao youxiji,” Health for the Public 3 (1994): 54–55.

68. 68. Zhang, “Productive vs. Pathological,” 2397.

69. 69. Na Li, “Playing the Past: Historical Videogames as Participatory Public History in China,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 27, no. 3 (2021): 747.

70. 70. As Bjarke Liboriussen and Paul Martin note, despite a long and rich history of games in China, most research and scholarship about games focuses on the rapid development of China’s digital game industry since 2005. Liboriussen and Martin, “Special Issue: Games and Gaming in China,” Games and Culture 11, no. 3 (2011): 227–32.

71. 71. Zhang, “Productive vs. Pathological,” 2392.

72. 72. Zhang, “Productive vs. Pathological,” 2395–96.

73. 73. For examples focused on negative aspects of gaming, see Shoa Kang Lo, Chih Chien Wang, and Wenchang Fang, “Physical Interpersonal Relationship and Social Anxiety Among Online Game Players,” CyberPsychology and Behavior 8, no. 1 (2005): 15–20; Jin-Liang Wang, Jia-Rong Sheng, and Hai-Zhen Wang, “The Association Between Mobile Game Addiction and Depression, Social Anxiety, and Loneliness,” Frontiers in Public Health 7, no. 247 (2019), https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2019.00247/full.

74. 74. Dal Yong Jin, Korea’s Online Gaming Empire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); Zixue Tai and Jue Lu, “Playing with Chinese Characteristics: The Landscape of Videogames in China,” in The Routledge Handbook of Digital Media and Globalization, ed. Dal Yong Jin (New York: Routledge, 2021), 206–14.

75. 75. Shule Cao and He Wei, “From ‘Electronic Heroin’ to ‘Created in China’: Game Reports and Gaming Discourse in China 1981–2017,” International Communication of Chinese Culture, no. 8 (2021): 443–64.

76. 76. Malaby, “Beyond Play,” 107.