Ars Erotica

This chapter compares narratives of digital utopia against the turgid material process of factory labor in Asia. It begins by exploring how role-playing video games like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Guild Wars 2, and others shore up evidence for digital utopia by enacting its values of liberal tolerance, freedom, and egalitarianism within a virtual realm. Yet played erotically, role playing offers new connections between the empire and its Asian provinces through playing a role, an act characteristic of the power positions of sexual role play (domination and subjugation). Using Michel Foucault’s theories of ars erotica and aphrodisia, this chapter argues that role playing bounds the gamelike, the queer, and the erotic, as all develop rule-based fantasy worlds with hierarchized avatars or roles. Role play can make explicit the transnational power differentials that function as digital utopia’s conditions of possibility.

Posture

This chapter begins a new trio of chapters that turn from modes of exposure and ideological critique to ask how the atrocities and violent consequences of empire can be perceived through erotic and reparative engagements. Playing with Eve Sedgwick’s concepts of “texture” and “touch,”this chapter examines how games position player bodies into postures ready for expression, reaction, and reception. It juxtaposes the 2016 “Men Against Fire” episode of the television show Black Mirror and the strikingly similar 2008 video game Haze to compare the mode of visual techno-paranoia with the various postures of gameplay. It then explores how the game Alien: Isolation disrupts our “plunge” postures, transforming them into postures of vulnerability and dread, which enforce new understandings of the social anxieties stoked by political and social marginalizations.

Ludophile

This chapter explores the transnational dimensions of authorship through three types of video game developers: the invisible American developer, the Japanese auteur developer, and the Asian North American game developer. The absence of Western designers in game media and advertisements allows companies to blame players themselves for a game’s violence, sexual transgressions, and virtual racisms. As Western developers gain little recognition for their work, the cults of personality around Japanese designers reinvent “the Orient” as a space of development and playful innovation. Toying with Roland Barthes’s theories of love within an “amorous discourse,” this chapter explores the player as “ludophile,” whose attention to game designers (particularly Asian North American designers) can offer erotic readings of games as objects of attachment, queer intimacy, and obscurity. The “ludophile” does not invest authority into the author so much as call attention to speculative ways of playing routed through ethnic authorship.

Loop

This chapter explores how the open world shooter video games in the Far Cry series engage players in repetitive “game loops” (jump, run, aim, shoot). Set in the tourist and war-torn destinations of Southeast Asia, these games see violent acts of stabbing, shooting, and throwing grenades at an island’s locals not as heroic or imperial but as merely “something to do,” a quick three seconds of fun made dynamic and different enough to build into thirty seconds of fun. This chapter analyzes the game loops of Far Cry through Roland Barthes’s theories of “pleasure” and “bliss,” forms of erotic play that secure and unsettle the player’s identity and social world. Whereas game loops most often facilitate a drifting pleasure that normalizes the violence of empire, loops can also create the queer and unsettling feeling of bliss that disrupts imperial discourses.

[Pause]

This transitional chapter summarizes the arguments in part 1 of the book, seeing them as renditions of debates concerning the author, the audience, and the text. Part 1 also catered to what Eve Sedgwick calls a paranoid form of reading, one reliant upon exposing the realities behind dominant discourses of empire as the primary means to create change. Part 2, in contrast, will extend these arguments by seeing games not as utilities but as objects in the world that offer erotic experiences and nourish audiences in unexpected ways. This chapter lays the groundwork for part 2, which will attempt to show how digital games, as interactive forms of storytelling and play, measure pleasures and affects, attenuate gamers to bodily perceptions, and help perceive how power takes hold of one’s conduct, body, and frailty.

E-motion

This chapter provides a conclusive stringing together of erotics, empire, and play by focusing on experiences of virtual tourism and conceiving of “the virtual other.” In video games, the virtual other places attention not onto this other but the inventor, the gazer, who has given up on obtaining a truthful and authentic access to the other and therefore sees them as virtual, somewhere between the real and the fake. Thinking through erotic methods found in the Asian confrontations of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Eve Sedgwick, this chapter argues that the modes of queer erotics in interactive media entice players to reimagine the virtual other by stepping outside of imperial forms of mapping, digital surveillance, and war. It examines discourses of virtual otherness manifested in transpacific cartography within Google Maps, the Civilization game series, and the virtual-reality experience of Google Earth.

Introduction

The book’s introduction teases out notions of openness, play, and erotics through discussions of video games. Video games train players to perceive a transnational, capitalist, and industrial form of empire, an “Open World Empire” wherein truth, openness, and digital transparency become elastic terms deployed within networks of forgetting and red herring scandals. When not seen as progressive, militaristic, or educational, gameplay emerges as a frivolous and queer practice that resists easy incorporation into state and neoliberal attitudes, as it appears as a self-indulgent waste of time. To account for the inescapability of Asian associations in games and to trace their transpacific imperial contexts, this introduction uses Asian American critique to see games as “Asiatic”: a style or form recognized as Asian-ish but that remains adaptable, fluid, and outside the authentic/inauthentic binary. The introduction discusses openness, erotic play, and the Asiatic through the history of video games and sexuality, as well as through the erotic methods developed by the critical theorists Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Eve Sedgwick, whose erotic practices emerged by comparing Western modes of thinking with those perceived to be common across Asia.

Coda

The coda briefly reiterates the book’s two main arguments: (1) that games train us as citizens of the open world empire to quantify, to tabulate, to enjoy certainty, and to be well adjusted to violence, and (2) that the playful anarchy and erotic interactions within video games tease us, test our ethical boundaries, and help us understand how our pleasures relate to imperial violence and transpacific colonial histories. The coda supplements these themes by exploring how digital games help realize the violences of empire by wedding forms of technological domination with artistic practice, combining the scientific with the aesthetic, the logical with the obscure, and the procedural with the anarchic. Through the media theories of Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Eve Sedgwick, the coda argues that interactive media’s greatest potential is in offering the virtual as a space of eros and play, where gamers can derive queer intimacy and erotic pleasure from a seemingly cold and scientific apparatus.

Global Game

This chapter argues that video games, unlike literature and film, are most often depicted as a form of global art, free of ideologies and nationalist boundaries. It examines how such “global games” reconceive of race as campy and Asiatic through experiences of play, focusing on the games Street Fighter II, League of Legends, and Overwatch. These games, conceived as “global,” contain a dizzying diversity of racial stereotypes that fluctuate between the empowering and the offensive. Exploring theories of camp sensibility (Susan Sontag), traveling erotics (Roland Barthes), and Japanese aesthetics, this chapter asks how “global games” are played as gateways into “the Asiatic,” a playful and digital form of Asian-ish representation that straddles notions of the queer, the exotic, the bizarre, and the Orientalist.