Collecting Heroes: Remediating "Outlaws of the Marsh" as a Video Game

• In Event: Old Tales, New Media: The Transmediation of Vernacular Classics in Contemporary Chinese Culture

Abstract

The Ming-dynasty vernacular novel “Outlaws of the Marsh” famously tells the tale of 108 heroes who band together to fight official corruption from their hide-out in the marshes of Mount Liang. In the classic, 16th-century novel these characters are firmly embedded in a narrative that poses the initial assembly and final disbanding of this group of heroes as inevitable, but can we also think of these characters outside of the necessity of plot and the demands of fate? This paper examines these questions through one of the most popular remediations of the “Outlaws,” the Konami-produced video-game series “Suikoden.” Specifically, the paper will investigate one particular iteration, the 2001 “Suikoden Card Games,” which circulated both as video-game and set of collectible playing-cards. In doing so, this paper will question some of the central tensions in the contemporary iteration of this classic, the tension between materiality and digitality as card and video-game, between the desire for completion (crucial to collecting) and repetition (essential to play), as well as the strategic tension between financial calculation and playful wastefulness typical of games produced in late-capitalist societies. By juxtaposing the contemporary video-game with some of the earlier versions of the classic, most notably 19th-century ukiyo-e prints as well as the 17th-century deck of playing-cards by Chen Hongshou, this paper will also ask whether the principles of contemporary play can question some of our assumptions about the classic novel, thereby seeking to redefine the genre of the “novel” itself.

Author

• Paize Keulemans, Princeton University