Join the IHGC's Games Lab for a talk by Paize Keulemans "Immersion without Mimesis: Romance of the Three Kingdoms as 15th-century Novel and 21st-century Video Game," Monday, March 31, from 2:00 - 3:30 in Wilson 142.

From the viewpoint of producing virtual experiences, games represent a curious contradiction. Though they fully immerse the player in a world of make-believe, games do not necessarily depend on mimesis to do so. No player of chess would ever mistake a horse on the board for an actual horse, nor does the chess queen need to look anything like an actual queen to function. Yet this absence of verisimilitude does not diminish the magical attraction of the game. In this presentation, I will employ the curious contradiction found at the heart of games—immersion without mimesis—to shed new light on the ways in which late-Ming Chinese vernacular literature produces imaginary worlds. Focusing on one of the most famous novels, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and comparing it to its contemporary video game remediation, Dynasty Warriors, this presentation will shed light on late-imperial literature, early-modern print-culture, as well as contemporary (and premodern) ideas of digital play.

Paize Keulemans (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 2004) is Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. His research focuses on the role the senses play in late-imperial Chinese literature (most notably sound, as explored in his book Sound Rising from the Paper: Nineteenth century Martial arts fiction and the Chinese Acoustic imagination), informal Chinese information networks in the 17th-century, and most recently the way the “Four Great Novels” of the Ming Dynasty have been remediated as contemporary video game.