(Early) Modern Forms of Chinese Literary Play: Database, Interface, and Iconic Characters in Outlaws of the Marsh and Gensō Suikoden

The Ming-dynasty novel Outlaws of the Marsh famously tells the tale of 108 heroes who band together to fight official corruption from their hideout in the marshes of Mount Liang. In the sixteenth-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 Outlaws, the Konami-produced Japanese video game series Gensō Suikoden. To do so, this study draws on terms often associated with contemporary digital culture—database, interface, and algorithm—to question our assumptions about the novel, in particular the way we have prioritized the structure of plot over the charismatic attraction of characters, whether as individuals or as a group of 108.