Numbers at Play: The Logic of Quantification in Early Modern Chinese Games and Literature

Why do numbers feel so essential to gaming experience?
From health bars visualizing characters’ life force to scoring systems monitoring players’ performance and progression, contemporary gaming culture reflects our deep investment in converting abstract actions and experiences into numerical data. But this practice of what Ben Egliston calls “quantified play”—using data to track, condition, and reshape gaming behaviors—is not confined to digital interfaces. This talk traces how early modern Chinese game designers and authors used numbers to reframe random acts of dice and coin tosses in both actual play and literary imaginations of games of chance. In official promotion games like Han guan yi 漢官儀 (Han Dynasty Bureaucracy), the numerical logic embodied in dice translates unquantifiable human behaviors and reorganizes historical narratives into a quantified knowledge system, inviting players to reflect on tensions between human agency and institutional order. This quantification logic extends beyond actual games into narrative forms that mirror gaming structures.