So China is still pretty crazy, is just about what I got from this book. It looks like we’re still delving into how imperialism, the West, and otherwise Modern influences helped to remake China into a weird, scary place. Especially in that modern movements pushed China towards viewing bodies, and especially women’s bodies, as devices…

Go Nation was a fairly enlightening, but, like with many things China, really depressing to read about. Perhaps the most striking thing to me about weigi‘s use in China was its integral place within the idea of masculinity. In that, weiqi, which reflected certain ideals of culture, was also a major cultural product of China, making it…

While I can’t say if I really enjoyed the reading this week it did bring up an interesting portion of games that is often overlooked, and definitely isn’t something we’ve really talked about in class, how games can be a powerful means of self expression. Though the creation of games is obviously an expressive action,…

Player constructed rules are really interesting to me from a designer as well as player stand point for a variety of reasons, most notably the ways in which self or locally imposed rules influence the personal meaning or culture within or surrounding a game. And while I have one particular instance of self imposed rules…

I feel like this book is difficult to expand on, but was quite interesting. It’s really neat how the history and politics of each region chess reached changed it to more fit the history and culture of the area. But I almost feel that’s almost all you can say about it, as the notion that…

If this image is any indication, pachisi seems pretty darn important if they are willing to put deific (?) figures in the art depicting its play. It’s also interesting that many of the pachisi illustrations depict women playing the game, which seems to say that women often had leisure time, the game was gender neutral,…

Between ‘Playing the American Dream’ and ‘How Japanese is Pokemon’ there is an interesting through line of games as both reflections and perpetuations of the culture that makes them. I’m genuinely happy that we got to read some material that brought that up, as it very much validates the analysis of games. That being said,…