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nicity, for instance, is (predictably, sadly)
horrifying for both the images that used tograce the art of our most popular games
but also for how far we have yet to comewith truly equitable representations. Chapters on gender and sexuality are equallyshocking (and equally predictable, forcultural studies scholars). I could imagine pairing the bulk of the chapters in thisbook with more contemporary versions ofthese games in the classroom as a discussion tool or having students engage in similar rhetorical analyses of the mass-market
games they have in their own homes. As
ever, it is important to reflect on the way
particular representations affect people,
and Patkin’s discussion over a range ofidentities helps reinforce the influencethat any popular culture product—massmarket board games included—can haveon players’ conceptions of themselves.
On the other hand, the narrow focus
on game art often remains (if you willpardon the pun) superficial, and at times
I wonder how some of the claims would
stand up under ethnographic methodologies. Do players always play games the way
the box art intends? Popular culture studies argues that readers are always active,
creating their own meanings from theirexperiences with popular culture. So,
while Mystery Date undoubtedly presents a sexist, outdated image of girlhood,sexuality, and dating, do its players always
unconditionally accept this type of play?
I suspect there is more player resistancethan what Who’s in the Game assumes.
The exception to this critique is thefinal chapter 9, which contains the meatof the book’s analysis. Tying together thedifferent “identity” areas from the otherchapters, “Intersectionality and Identity”

delivers a thoughtful, nuanced inquiry onsocial identity, marketing, popular culture,sociology, and play. While it concludes thebook, readers would benefit from reading
it first and then going into each middle
chapter for specific examples of topics thatparticularly interest them.
Finally, the book would also havebenefited from some images, especiallywhen discussing the specifics of gamecharacters’ changing over time (I suspect
this largely falls on the publisher rather
than the author). However, the wealth ofmaterials that Patkin was able to examine
is a boon for game and media scholars,
and her tireless focus on the importanceof mass-market games—the most popularand most played games in our history—in
the cultural landscape is a crucial step forward in developing an understanding of
this board game renaissance.
—Paul Booth, DePaul University, Chicago, IL

The Race Card: From Gaming
Technologies to Model
Minorities
Tara Fickle
New York: New York University
Press, 2019. List of figures and tables,
introduction, acknowledgments, notes,
bibliography, index, and about theauthor. 288 pp. $30.00, paper. ISBN:
9781479805952
Tara Fickle’s The Race Card: From Gaming
Technologies to Model Minorities unearths
the ludo-Orientalist logics that structure
not only Asian racialization, but game playitself. Fickle defines ludo-Orientalism as

Book Reviews

processes wherein “the design, marketing,and rhetoric of games shape how Asians
as well as East-West relations are imagined and where notions of foreignness
and racial hierarchies get reinforced” (p.
3). Tracing the history of ludo-Orientalism
from nineteenth-century anxieties about
Chinese American gambling to contemporary anxieties about Chinese “goldfarming” in massive multiplayer online
games, The Race Card dazzlingly explores
the social and historical forces that havemade “playing the race card” such a takenfor-granted concept in American culture.
In addition to offering an important
corrective to the marginalization of playin Asian American studies, The Race Card
shifts reigning paradigms in game studies
by turning from racial representations to
the deeper structures that connect games
and race. Rather than simply critique
Orientalist representations of Asian people in contemporary video games, Fickle
explores how gaming is racialized even in
the absence of racial representations. To
illustrate, Fickle considers the example
of Pokémon GO, an augmented-reality
mobile game that enables players to catch
imaginary “pocket monsters” on theirphones. Not long after this game took off
in summer 2016, its “lamination of virtualand real spaces” became entangled in theracial segregation of our physical geographies: people of color were racially profiled if they wandered into predominantly
white neighborhoods, and white children
were warned against playing in supposedly“dangerous” neighborhoods inhabited bypeople of color (p. 1). As Fickle points out,
Pokémon GO’s first casualty was a Chinese
American grandfather killed by an armed
security guard while catching Pokémon

in a country club parking lot. In this way,although Pokémon GO features cute fantasy creatures and contains few readily
identifiable racial markers, it illustrates
how virtual and real spaces intersect inthe operations of racial discriminationand violence.
Ludo-Orientalism is key to understanding the ties between gaming andracialization because Asian Americans
have been integral to America’s self-conception as a nation built on fair play. Just
as games of chance and skill often purport
to provide equal opportunity to all players, the United States has imagined itself
as a meritocracy in which race does not
represent a significant barrier to upward
mobility. Within this framework, AsianAmericans have been cast as a model
minority to augment the illusion of theUnited States as a place where anyone canfiguratively win at the game of life. The
stereotype of Asian Americans as champion gamers who pursue even their leisureactivities with extreme dedication exemplifies this nexus. Accordingly, Fickle challenges game studies’ dominant approachof treating “gaming rhetoric as distinct
from ‘real’ games” by putting these “realgames” in conversation with the gamification of racial politics (p. 10). In doingso, she shows how play and games cannot
be extricated from the histories of racial
exclusion and global conflict that haveshaped Asian American history. Further,
she reveals how ludo-Orientalist fantasies
say as much or more about the UnitedStates as they do about Asia.
In one of the book’s many acts of playful brilliance, The Race Card assumes theludic order of a pair of six-sided dice inwhich opposing faces add up to the num-387

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ber seven: 1+6=7, 2+5=7, 3+4=7. In otherwords, in a book that unfolds in a looselychronological sequence, chapters 1 and6, 2 and 5, and 3 and 4 each complement
one another to demonstrate how ludoOrientalism has reverberated across spaceand time. For example, chapters 1 and 6
together illustrate how Asia has long been
associated with “the ‘dark’ side of gaming”(p. 178). In chapter 1, Fickle examines how
gambling served as a device for framing
Chinese Americans in the nineteenth century as threats to the ostensibly “honest”
labor of the white working class. Chapter 6
identifies an echo of this history in the discourses surrounding Chinese gold farmers
accused of undermining the putative fairness of massive multiplayer online gamesby playing for profit.
Similarly, chapters 2 and 5 serve as acomplementary pair: Chapter 2 looks at
how ludic metaphors of strategy and probability became rationales used to justify
Japanese American incarceration, while
chapter 5 studies how Pokémon GO transformed the threat of the Japanese empire
into the soft power of a kawaii (“cute”)
game based on virtual conquest. Finally,
chapters 3 and 4 together form the heartof the book’s argument. In chapter three,
Fickle illuminates how the same gambling
logics that fed nineteenth-century Yellow Peril discourse helped construct themodel minority myth in the midtwentieth century. During this time, the idea of
Asian Americans as consummate gamblers was reworked into the myth’s glorification of Asian immigrants who “risk itall” to achieve economic success in a newcountry. If chapter 3 thereby reframes themodel minority, chapter 4 reframes playtheory by exposing its Orientalist founda-tions. Here, Fickle casts light on how Johan
Huizinga and Roger Caillois relied on“Orientalist notions of the mystical Eastand rational West” to structure their theories of play as a “magical circle” marked offfrom everyday life (p. 25).
Altogether, The Race Card is agroundbreaking book that makes profound contributions to game studies,
Asian American studies, and global Asianstudies. Fickle reaches across wide-ranging historical phenomena to connect more
obvious examples of ludo-Orientalism toinstances in which the discovery of playproves far more surprising. For scholarsof play, The Race Card models a uniquemethod of analysis that attends to thespecificity of distinct media forms while
casting light on how they reflect surrounding cultural discourses. Moreover, given
the prominence of Asia and its diasporas
to the rise of gaming technologies today,
this book is an important read for anyone
desiring to understand better the racial
politics in which games are necessarilyenmired.
—Erica Kanesaka Kalnay, University of
Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI

Gamer Trouble: Feminist
Confrontations in Digital
CultureAmanda Phillips
New York: New York University Press,2020. List of figures, introduction,
acknowledgments, notes, bibliography,index, and about the author. 247 pp.
$29.00, paper. ISBN: 9781479834921