An exciting new work on digital games, Open World Empire offers a middle way between formalist questions around play and critical scholarship that problematizes the medium's ties to the militaristic and information technological regimes of contemporary imperialism. The book forwards a novel understanding of games through the pleasures of play, the titular “erotics” that give shape to entertainment both complicit within, and transgressing, Euro-American empire. Christopher B. Patterson proposes that these erotics emerge within the Asia-Pacific as an imagined “Asiatic” alterity whose presence infuses video games with racial power relations and simultaneously opens them to queer reversals, critical player engagements, and ethical questions around otherness. Composed of six chapters, the book's first half explores military techno-imperialism within gamic pleasure, while the second considers the deconstructive potentials that erotics hold for the imperial subjectivity of the player.
Chapter 1 considers the racial stereotypes found in player-versus-player fighting games. Contra scholarly critiques of racial caricatures and popular discourses of gaming as “postracial,” the book theorizes how play transforms race into a style. Common to all games, this style is the “Asiatic: a nonexclusive and nonessential racial form understood through sets of forms, rules, and styles that reimagine racial boundaries and categories” (p. 41). For Patterson, the Asiatic is ambiguous and pluralistic, an interface between the seriousness of imperialist racial regimes and a playfulness that critiques and unseats them.
Chapter 2 considers how this playfulness disrupts Asian North American creators’ self-expression within games, shifting assumptions around minority media that express experiential truths. To think through the relative prevalence of such developers, Patterson instead looks to the player as a potential “ludophile” whose desire to know or master leads to a sense of intimacy with their chosen games. Within this intimate encounter, the ludophile can speculatively recoup the identity of the Asian North American designers who have worked on otherwise pro-military games to expose the complexities of complicity in, and resistance to, empire.
Chapter 3 explores how utopic narratives of information technology embodied in the role-playing game (RPG) genre obscure the harsh realities of Asian labor. Patterson shows how the digital economies of massively multiplayer online role-playing games articulate a postlabor view of digital commodities, and how North American single-player RPGs featuring a multicultural cast of characters allow the Western player to take on the managerial role of orienting their team's labor toward a specific objective. Against these views, Patterson turns to Michel Foucault and erotic role-play as a way of rethinking play's pleasures in an ethical encounter with the other that foregrounds, rather than obfuscates, gaming's power relations.
In a reconsideration of the gamer as a passive, manipulable agent of imperial designs, chapter 4 provides an alternative analytical focus on the pleasures of the text in dialogue with Eve Sedgewick's “reparative reading.” Patterson conceptualizes the player as a “plunger,” a figure who delves into unexpected situations through the pleasure of interactive control. The reversal of this control is also embodied in the plunge, conjuring dread or vulnerability in the player. This feeling of powerlessness as pleasure acts upon the player, summoning structural questions about when and why we feel vulnerable within empire.
Chapter 5 opens vexed questions around videogame violence and reassesses them through the pleasures of gameplay “loops,” the nesting cycles of designed activity that constitute gameplay. Patterson argues that these loops recursively construct the player's role in open world first-person shooter games as beneficent imperialist intervention in the fictional chaos of postcolonial Asiatic settings. However, such games’ loops also enable Roland Barthes's notion of bliss—an ecstasy that dissolves subjectivity. This interplay of pleasure and bliss thus de/stabilizes the player in their context of normalized imperial militarism.
Finally, Chapter 6 speaks to a desire to encounter the virtual other freed from Orientalism's objectification. Within the Asiatic's indeterminate character, its “blurriness,” Patterson finds a means to critically open the Western gaze to alterity. The book explores this point through game maps and the transpacific: a contested site that emerges between the overhead visual regimes of imperialism, militarism, and capitalism, and indigenous and migrant ways of knowing and moving within space. Patterson argues that strategy games and programs like Google Earth VR playfully invert imperial visual authority, inviting the player to reconsider their own positionality as they engage these multiple epistemologies of the transpacific.
If Open World Empire has any shortcomings, it is its ambition. The book challenges scholars of digital games to take pleasure seriously, while offering reparative readings of Barthes, Foucault, and Sedgewick's late-career encounters with “Asia” for intellectual historians. Simultaneously, it speaks to the burgeoning of queer perspectives in game studies as much as it brings the insights of queer studies and affect theory into conceptualizing Asian racial formations through play. There are moments when this rich tapestry loses the balance between elements, provides distracting depth to one or two case studies, or skims over a more complex history in service of a theoretical point.
These minor critiques, however, should not detract from Patterson's achievement. Open World Empire's critical acumen, intervention within the discourses around gaming, and serious engagement with the complexities of pleasure are certain to open generative dialogues between Asian studies, Asian American studies, and game studies.
