Book Reviews

loss that players can experience as they
invest time and resources. It shows gamedesigners the moves they might wish to
avoid when introducing loss into their
game to avoid an overly strong reaction,
like regret—that is, players will more
likely avoid situations in which they have ahigher chance for regretting their decision.
This gives game designers a way to think
about how they present choices in theirgames, ensuring that players can avoid
such excessive responses where possible.
Competence, as well, plays into such calculations, since the author suggests that theless informed about any situation players
are, the more often they become skepticalwhen making a choice. This should leaddesigners to present choices that players feel
more comfortable making. Taken together,
these principles offer a tool kit that can help
designers better understand the choices
they create when designing a game.
Engelstein’s timely work advances
the discussion on player psychology ingames and further explores the nuancesof how players react when they encounter
failure—a topic upon which MIT Press’s
Playful Thinking series (see Jesper Juul,
The Art of Failure) was launched.
Over the last decade, game researchers and designers have become increasingly interested in player psychology
and exploring the ways in which games
encourage us to think, react, and feel theways designers intended. Achievement
Relocked is a great read for game designers, researchers, or enthusiasts looking tounderstand player experiences around loss
and reward.
—Craig G. Anderson, University of California, Irvine

Open World Empire: Race,
Erotics, and the Global Rise ofVideo GamesChristopher B. Patterson
New York: NYU Press, 2020. List offigures, introduction, acknowledgments,notes, references, index, and about theauthor. 344 pp. $35.00 paperback. ISBN:
9781479802043
If “queer game studies” as a field has grown
substantially in the last decade, OpenWorld Empire in no small measure offersa much-needed queer-of-color intervention that presents exciting new challenges
and avenues for study in the field of gamestudies as a whole. At its core, Open World
Empire is a methodological text, pushing
the boundaries of how to do game studies, one that offers a compellingly welltheorized and well-executed framework.
Christopher B. Patterson provides crucial
insight into a deeper, more compelling
future for analysis and theory in gamestudies, merging thoughts from Americanstudies, Asian American studies, and postmodern, poststructuralist, and queer theories. Open World Empire’s interventions ingame studies are plentiful and potent.
Patterson invites us to rethink andreimagine the core tenets of game analysis through the language of race, erotics,and globalization. In this two-part text, heencourages us to shift our perspective fromthe rules and mechanics of game design
and from ideological critique of games’
content and cosmetics to the experiencesof play as “intimate” encounters with others—racial, cultural, linguistic, technological. Patterson constructs an analyticalframe that not only acknowledges but
makes central the experiences of pleasure

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P L AYin play, ironically often undertheorized or
poorly analyzed in much of previous gamestudies literature. Compellingly, OpenWorld Empire does so without suggesting that social science methods—that is,
ethnographic or observational approachesof players—are necessary to account forpleasure, erotics, and play. Instead, eachchapter produces a set of tools and useful
vocabulary for game analysis that is stillsquarely within critical theory, textual
analysis, and cultural studies. Pattersonpresents this new vocabulary through theillustration of each concept’s empiricalorigins and its value in case application.
Open World Empire is divided into
two parts, each comprised of three chapters. The first half, “Asiatic,” works toprovide a foundation for games criticism
that takes central politics of globality, race,and pleasure. In chapter 1, Patterson lays
the foundation for this new game studiesapproach by introducing analytical vocabulary: “global game,” “dizzying diversity,”“Asiatic,” and “race as play.” Each is presented through a powerful blending of
playful autoethnography, critical theory,and close reading of games both as text
and experience. Positioning video games
as the quintessential media of global andpostmodern empire, and a media form
unquestionably intertwined with Asiatic
imaginaries, Patterson highlights theinefficacy of games critique that fails toaccount for the global reach of the games
industry—both in terms of production
and consumptive play. This chapter applies
such a stance in the exploration of pleasurable play experiences with the multinational, multicultural casts of Street Fighter
II, League of Legends, and Overwatch.
Understood through the queer aesthetics

of camp, the seemingly stereotypical characters of these games are instead figured as
exaggerated sites of pleasurable meaning
making and intimacy with the other.
Chapters 2 and 3 extend this approach,offering two methods for “playing erotically”: “ludophilia” and “aphrodisia.”
Chapter 2 explores the messy dynamics ofgames authorship, influenced heavily bydiscourses and imaginaries related to Asia,and highlights how the author function
across three types—the Japanese auteur,the invisible American (non-)author, and
the Asian American author—each invites
players to become erotically ludophilic, toseek pleasure in play rather than in representation, critique, or comprehensive
understanding, in noticeably differentways. Chapter 3 addresses role play, which
Patterson describes as an anonymized
form of play characterized by undeniable
power relations. In this chapter, Patterson
incorporates Foucault’s later writings on
self-care and ars erotica to explore how“power play” is erotic under conditions ofboth self-care and care for others.
The second half of the book aims toextend earlier questioning of the limits
of ideological critique, both broadly andspecifically in the context of video games.
Patterson extends Alexander Galloway’s
mid-2000s work, in which he elaborates
on the limits and failings of ideologicalcritique in working through complex systems such as internet protocol or video
game simulations. While Galloway turns
to Deleuze in developing a new form ofcritique, “protological” or “informatic”
critique, Patterson follows Sedgwick’s leadin shifting to erotic encounters—of touch,pleasure, affect, and the body—and resisting the “paranoid position” or “hermeneu-

Book Reviews

tics of suspicion.” Chapter 4 explores thisin relation to bodily posture, in horror
games generally and most specifically toAlien: Isolation, in which the player’s postures invite new sensations, affect, andpleasures. Chapter 5 explores the pleasuresof repetitive action, such as shooting in theFar Cry series, as such repetitive action
takes place in the context of global empire.
The book closes with chapter 6 providing
elaborations on the text’s main theoretical underpinnings, furthering Patterson’s
exploration of erotics and the other andsolidifying that erotic play lays bare theintimate, pleasurable relationships wehave with others, broadly defined, underempire.
Open World Empire follows theconventions of intersectional feminist
writings, queer of color critique, Asian
American studies, and postmodern
theory: often, the book invites us to sit
with uncomfortable tensions and contradictions. Moving away from absolutist
claims—whether something is or is not

racist, what constitutes a game, and thelike—we are asked to engage with games
and play as if they are intimate encounters and accept the vulnerability and particularity of such intimacy. As such, OpenWorld Empire is a call for more rigorous,
deeper, and perhaps messier explorations
in game studies, but that call is punctuated with analytical vocabulary, wellhistoricized and empirical genealogies
of such vocabulary, and substantial evidence of the efficacy and utility of an erotic
approach to games analysis.
Invigorating the field with a languagethat fully recenters the politics of pleasurein games and play offers a promising new
direction for game studies. I wholly recommend this text as a foundation for thenext stage in video game analysis, both forseasoned scholars and rising academics inthe field.
—Evan W. Lauteria, University of California, Davis, CA109