Acknowledgments

The conception of this coedited volume on games and play in Chinese and Sinophone cultures started in spring 2019 at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association in Chicago. Drawing from colleagues’ research presentations at the conference, the editors proposed a special session on games and play in Ming and Qing Chinese culture for MLA 2020 in Seattle, and simultaneously developed a call for proposals for this volume in spring 2020. We are grateful for the generous suggestions and sustained support from many mentors and colleagues who have served on the MLA Ming and Qing Forum, Pre-14th-Century Forum, and East Asian Forums, and to the broad scholarly community at MLA over the last four years, particularly Tina Lu, Michael A. Fuller, Jack W. Chen, Paize Keulemans, S. E. Kile, Mark Bender, Guojun Wang, Ariel Fox, and others. The development of this volume is much indebted to published scholarship on Chinese and Asian game studies by Marc Moskowitz, Andrew Lo, Lin Zhang, Bjarke Liboriussen, Paul Martin, Colin MacKenzie, Irving Finkel, Dal Yong Jin, Alexis Pulos, Seungcheol Austin Lee, Larissa Hjorth, Dean Chan, and others.

We are indebted to the meticulous editorship of Lorri D. Hagman and Caitlin Tyler-Richards at the University of Washington Press. Thanks to their rigorous review and generous support, our contributors’ work could appear in polished form and meet the demands of a broad readership in Sinology, Asian studies, games research, and global China studies. We are sincerely thankful for the two anonymous reviewers of this volume for their incisive comments and fruitful suggestions. We are grateful to Marcella Landri and the UWP design team for guiding us through the final revisions of the manuscript before it entered the production stage. Joeth Zucco and Laura Keeler have provided substantial feedback during the final copyediting process of this manuscript. We thank Beth Fuget for her important work and valuable advice in facilitating grant applications for the open access publication of this volume, which led to successful outcomes from multiple funding venues and institutions.

This volume has received generous and timely open access funding from the following institutions: James P. Geiss and Margaret Y. Hsu Foundation, Utah State University College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Utah State University Center for Intersectional Gender and Sexuality Research, Utah State University Department of World Languages and Cultures, George Mason University Department of Modern and Classical Languages, and Mandarin Education Fund of the George Mason University Foundation. Thanks to their support, our contributors’ scholarship will be accessible to a global readership, including teachers, researchers, and students at various institutions.

Finally, we are thankful for the National Palace Museum in Taiwan for granting us the free use of the cover image through their Open Data platform.