In “Splendid Journeys: the Board Games of a Late Qing Scholar,” Rania Huntington examines the late Qing scholar Yu Yue (1821-1907)’s two board games, “A Map of Splendid Journeys” and “A Map of Splendid Journeys on West Lake.” Both are racing games, with players rolling dice and moving markers around a path with different consequences for landing on different squares. Yu based his games on earlier models, though with considerable expansion and alteration. Although the games are playable it is uncertain they were ever played: rather they are thought experiments allowing him to consider journeys, character roles, geography, the function of money, interconnection, and probability. He constructs his new maps manipulating a shared legacy of allusions, allowing for narrative variations with familiar stock characters. Throughout Yu’s collected works he displays confidence that his erudition qualifies him to improve on a wide range of popular cultural products, including lists of flower spirits, a martial arts novel, and divination systems, as well as games. How do his games relate to his other adaptations and inventions? His games can also be fruitfully compared to games of the same type gaining popularity worldwide at this time. Was there a growing global late nineteenth-century culture of leisure, progress, and chance?
In “Erotic Games in Ming-Qing Literary and Visual Representations,” Jie Guo examines the term, “erotic books” which Robert Hans van Gulik uses to refer to erotic literary works and erotic print albums. The term points to the close linkages between late imperial verbal and visual works. By examining “erotic games” as a convention in Ming-Qing erotica, Guo explores the ties and mutual infusion between verbal works (e.g., fiction and medical manuals) and visual works (e.g., erotic print albums and book illustrations). By comparing homoerotic encounters as “games” in fiction with their visualizations in book illustrations and print albums, Guo argues that homoerotic encounters, male or female, have a marginalized yet firm presence in late imperial erotica. Second, their inclusion both as a firmly established convention and as one of many erotic “games” showcased in the work, partly has to do with late imperial authors’ and artists’ obsession of putting on display a variety of sexual acts, a tradition shared by verbal and visual representations; third, the intense playfulness deployed around same-sex encounters unambiguously points to, and tactically reinforces, their peripheral status in a world dominated by heteroerotic practices and arrangements. Finally, Guo looks into the asymmetry between male and female homoerotic “games.”
Li Guo’s study “Women’s Literary Drinking Games in 19th century Chinese Fiction” focuses on women’s literary experiments with drinking games in several seminal nineteenth century fictional works. Reminiscent of the drinking game “Choosing the Flower” in Story of the Stone, women’s drinking games in these later works engage roleplaying and creations in broad varieties, including puns, allusions, alliteration, rhyme-redoubling, linked verse, historical figures, herbal names, labeled tunes, or jokes and riddles. In the fictional realm, drinking games reflect women’s shared cultural interest with men, endorse women’s erudition and artistic creativity, or even allow heroines means of self-representation. Whereas drinking games invented by literati scholars provided the cultured and the common shared joys, women’s drinking games invite an engaged study on gender, writing and play. How do literary drinking games reconfigure our understandings of gender, readership, and the pleasure of storytelling? Could women’s drinking games create for the unconventional heroines a space of self-expression in the inner chambers? Could women’s invention through drinking games transform the boundaries of class, upbringing, vocation, or social inscriptions of gender? In what aspects could literary drinking games be considered as gendered responses to cultural sensibilities and sentimentalities of the time?
Paize Keulemans, in “Written in Stone: Database, Characters, and Narrative as Game in SUIKODEN/SHUIHUZHUAN,” studies a popular re-mediation of the novel Outlaws of the Marsh, the Konami-produced video-game series “Suikoden.” Outlaws of the Marsh depicts 108 heroes who band together to fight official corruption from their hide-out in the marshes of Mount Liang. In the 16th-century novel characters are firmly embedded in a narrative that poses the initial assembly and final disbanding of this group of heroes as inevitable. To reconceptualize these characters, Keulemans investigates the 2001 “Suikoden Card Games,” which circulated both as video-game and set of collectible playing-cards. Focusing on this contemporary iteration of this classic, Keulemans explores the tensions between materiality and digitality as card and video-game, between the desire for completion (crucial to collecting) and repetition (essential to play), as well as the strategic tension between financial calculation and playful wastefulness typical of games in late-capitalist societies. By juxtaposing video-game with earlier versions of the classic, most notably 19th-century ukiyo-e prints as well as the 17th-century deck of playing-cards by Chen Hongshou, Keulemans asks whether the principles of play can question some of our assumptions about the classic text, thereby seeking a redefinition of the “novel.”