Bio: Jiayi Chen is an assistant professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses on early modern Chinese literature and culture, particularly their intersections with games, theater, visual and material culture, and the history of books and reading. Her current book project, tentatively titled The Early Modern Ludic: Gaming and Literary Culture in China, studies how the critical potential of games to model reading, learning, and thinking, thereby cultivating new epistemological perspectives for navigating reality. Her other research interests include early modern Chinese discourses on immersion, magic, and cultural exchanges in East Asia.
Project description: My project, which belongs to part of my book manuscript tentatively titled The Early Modern Ludic: Gaming and Literary Culture in China, explores how gaming with a series of word puzzles known as “brocades” (jin) reconceptualized the history of writing, printing, and reading in early modern China and beyond. By integrating archival research and cross-disciplinary methods from literary studies, game studies, media studies, and book history, my project examines the culturally and historically specific role of gaming for understanding the interaction between text, knowledge, and technology in a pre-digital era.
I trace the intricate transformation of the “brocade” puzzles from a hands-on game played across social echelons that required one to see the words and touch them with fingers; to a word diagram, animating which mimics the cosmological movement; and finally, to a word-only notational system encoding coordinates for chess pieces on a Go board. Reading thus emerges as both material (engaging tactility) and algorithmic (encoding and decoding coordinates), ontological (reflecting on the act of reading itself) and epistemological (reading as a means of knowing the order and movement of the phenomenal world), simultaneously engaging with both the visible textual surface and the underlying structure.
My project contributes to Global Studies by situating early modern Chinese reading practices within a broader, transhistorical dialogue on text and technology. It reveals how early modern Chinese reading practices resonate with contemporary digital reading, where texts are equally visual, tactile, semantic, and algorithmic Additionally, it seeks to contribute to cross-disciplinary dialogues in game studies and culture studies that reveal games’ critical capacity in modeling, exploring, and alternating social, political, and cultural issues—here, with a specific focus on the enduring complexity of how societies engage with text as both an artifact and a tool for knowledge, a fundamental practice across cultures and times.
