Reading Interactive Chinese Characters in Playable Media

This extended abstract, presented at the Chinese DiGRA 2018 conference, proposes a framework for analyzing how readers construct meaning from Chinese characters (Hanzi, Kanji, and Hanja) when they appear in interactive and playable media such as installations, computer games, and interactive advertising. Its central argument draws on Strehovec's concept of the "vanishing text," in which digital writing is deliberately rendered unstable or only conditionally legible, and extends it to the specific visual and linguistic properties of East Asian characters. The paper positions itself as a corrective to existing scholarship, which has tended either to focus on static, non-digital visual poetry or to treat interaction as a single undifferentiated category.

The paper surveys two prior typological efforts. Cosima Bruno's model of Chinese visual poetry distinguishes etymo-visual texts, iconotexts, and beyond-lexical texts according to whether characters remain symbolic signs or become iconic or indexical, though it sets aside poetic content and addresses only static works. Pei-chen Yeh's analysis of calligraphy and performance art identifies removal of linguistic value, deconstruction and reconstruction through human interaction, and stacking, but groups all forms of interaction together. The author argues that differentiating interaction methods is necessary, and the paper's analysis proposes that the degree of user freedom in manipulating characters is the key variable shaping how textual meaning is interpreted.

To illustrate this, the paper examines two case studies: Miyamoto's Kanji-based vertically scrolling shooter Geki 1.06 (2005) and Chika and Tsukada's Tetris-like art game Character, Character, Character (2017). The examples are used to generalize the range of possible human-character interactions in games and to show how differing levels of player agency produce different conditions of textual interpretation. The author notes that language is frequently neglected in game design, and suggests that this framework may support the development of games with possibilities specific to the Chinese-language context. The abstract is presented as a preliminary contribution rather than a finished empirical study.