Gamifying Race: Play as Apparatus and Ludic Asianness as Diffracted Realities

This paper argues that video games and players come into epistemic existence through Karen Barad's concept of intra-action, such that the act of play transforms programs, codes, and audiovisual materials into "video games" and transforms those who play into "players." Drawing on Barad's Agential Realism and Donna Haraway's notion of diffraction, the author rejects the presumption of a pre-existing, separate player and instead treats game and player as ontologically inseparable, mutually constituted through play. The work seeks to move beyond definitional debates about what video games are and toward an account of how they come to exist as phenomena.

The argument is applied to the case of "ludic Asianness," a concept building on Christopher B. Patterson's idea of ludic race as a form of virtual identity tourism. Four games set in East Asia are examined, including Kowloon's Gate, Sleeping Dogs, Detention, and Ghost of Tsushima, though only some were produced by local developers. The analysis proposes that "Digital Asia" is constructed through engagement with traumatic history and everyday life. Detention and Ghost of Tsushima are read as historical reimaginations inviting restorative and nostalgic gazes, while Kowloon's Gate and Sleeping Dogs are read as canonizing Asian experience through serialized popular cultural tropes and repetitive mundane tasks. The author contends that ludic Asianness is not intrinsic to players but is gradually produced through ludic design that interpellates players as Asian protagonists.

The paper's central conclusion is that the criteria typically used to define "Asian games," such as production locale, developer background, or setting, are less useful than examining how ludic race, video games, and players are jointly configured through play. The work is theoretical and interpretive, situated within game studies and draws on a range of prior scholarship on player agency, game narrative, and the cultural memory of Hong Kong and East Asian settings.