32 – Fickle – The Race Card

Tara Fickle's The Race Card traces how gaming technologies, metaphors, and infrastructures function as raced operating systems that shape cultural meanings and political practices. Moving across historical and contemporary case studies—from Chinese exclusion-era gambling tropes and WWII Japanese American internment to Pokémon Go, gold farming, and discourses of internet addiction—Fickle shows how ludic language and systems produce and circulate Orientalist and racialized logics. The book pairs chapters thematically to reveal recurring figurations and develops the concept of ludo-Orientalism to describe the co-constitution of games and Asianness. Fickle also critiques foundational game studies theory (e. g. , Huizinga, Caillois) for reproducing orientalist assumptions, urging a more historically and politically attentive game studies.

In Gaming the Stage, Gina Bloom explores how the commercial theater of early modern England served as an early form of playable media by staging popular games. She investigates how staged performances of card games, backgammon, and chess trained audiences to understand and engage with the theater. The book examines plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, revealing how games shaped audience expectations and transformed spectator consumption into a mode of production. By linking early modern theater with contemporary digital games, Bloom offers new insights into the history of media and the nature of interactive play. Her analysis highlights the theater's role in teaching audiences how to interpret complex narratives and engage with staged representations.

Published in 1963, 'Beyond a Boundary' is neither a traditional cricket memoir nor an autobiography. It blends discussions of cricket matches, the history of the game in Trinidad and England, and its cultural significance. James argues that cricket is an art form that embodies and dramatically expresses the collective aspirations of a society. The book explores the intersection of sports, culture, and politics, particularly in the context of colonial West Indian society and the decolonization movement.