Week 3 - Playing in Public

This week's readings focus on a few of the institutions that make the basic of the fabric of in urban entertainment in Japan: pachinko (and gambling in general), purikura and game centers.

Plotz’s account of the pachinko industry is vey vivid and interesting to read. Not much is known of this industry despite being so omnipresent in Japan, but Plotz informs us of the many intricacies of this business and the dissonance of the general discourse on the non-existence of gambling in Japan and how it actually is everywhere. It should be noted though that the pachinko industry and the video game industry should not always be seen as competitors. Indeed, one of the major pachinko machine manufacturer, Sammy, and the video game publisher SEGA have joined hands in the later half of the 2000s to create SEGA Sammy holdings, a major player in both the gambling industry and the game center industry.

On the other hand, the text depicting the subculture of purikura in Japan might be considered a little bit out-dated. While the importance of purikura for high school girls’ socialization remains the same and the basic principles explaining its subcultural appeal still hold, the machines have now evolved into photo-taking apparatuses that go beyond the framed-portrait photo-booth and might question our understanding of the pictures that actually come out of those machines. Considering how the machines now radically alter the subjects of the picture through the process of ‘automatic photoshopping’, can we really read purikura as simple photographs anymore? Also, following the hint of Kato Hiroyasu’s research on this subject, the arrival of the new digital photograph-enabled cellphones has drastically transformed the primary basic purpose of the purikura machines. It is now very easy to take digital pictures and exchange them with friends. Considering this, we should probably look for other reasons to explain why purikura machines are still popular today; what other needs to they fill? Maybe the ‘fun’ factor of those machines has been understudied in comparison of the social use they have.

Finally, Eickhorst’s account of the game center industry is interesting. While it does not cover the current trends in arcade game design or subculture, his description of the history of game centers is very valuable. Another good introduction of game centers is the documentary 100 Yen – The Japanese Arcade Experience, it focuses more on specific game genres that evolved in the arcades as well as on the subculture that developed within this institution.

Additional Reading

Katô, Hiroyasu. Gêmu centâ bunkaron: media shakai no comunikeshon (Treatise on the Culture of Game Centers: The Communication of Media Society). Tokyo: Shinsensha, 2011. Print.

Week 2 - Are AIs Videogames?

The second chapter of Newman’s book Videogames introduces several of the fundamental concepts developed by some of the most important academic figures that investigated the notion of play in the past. In particular, he focuses on the writings of Roger Caillois’s basic notions of paida, ludus, aigon, alea, illinx and mimicry so as to bring a basic framework that would allow the academic critic to delve deeper into the nature of videogames. Of those concepts, it seems that the ones that could be used to enlight our understanding of the early history of videogames such as described in this week’s other readings are the notions of paida (free play) and ludus (challenge or goal oriented play activity). While most games developed in the 1970s and 1960s unbounded play experiences (Pong, Spacewar, ...), Space Invaders allowed the player to engage the game with a very clear objective: beating the machine’s highscore. While this goal was not inscribed in the game’s diegesis per se, it was one of the first game to offer feature that allowed space for a ludus-oriented play session. This probably adds up to the list of reasons explaining the epoch-making success of Space Invaders in Japan.

Another striking finding in the second chapter of Newman’s book is—after carefully examining different definitions of the nature of videogames and exposing how open-ended the range of available frameworks really is—how easily he rejects AI-based toys such as AIBO or Furby from his definition of what constitutes the corpus of videogames. While I understand his point—videogames need at least a form screen to display the video part of the object—, I am not sure this would completely apply to the conception of what videogames are in Japan. Notably, author Masuyama Hiroshi’s perspective on the media derives from the idea that videogames are mainly AIs providing some kind of playful communication. Therefore, he sees game playing as a form of dialogue between the software—providing settings and inital conditions—, and the player—responding with input. This provides the basic framework for Masuyama to state that videogames are not necesssarily confined to the screen, but could also acquire an artifical body mimiking those of human beings, allowing for more forms of playful communication. This interpretation was also recently echoed by Masayuki Uemura in his keynote talk in the 2013 edition of the International Japanese Video Game Studies Conference when he explained that the appearance of the Famicon marked the movement from asobu dôgu to asobu aite—from play tool to play partner. Could this gap between Newman and Masuyama’s perspectives direct us to an answer in our investigation of the specificity of Japanese game design?

Caillois, Roger. Les Jeux et les hommes; le masque et le vertige. Édition revue et augmentée. ed. Paris: Gallimard, 1967. Print.

Masuyama, Hiroshi. Terebi gêmu bunkaron : intarakutibu media no yukue (Treatise on Video Game Culture: Towards an Interactive Media). Kôdansha Gendai Shinsho. Tokyo: Kôdansha, 2001. Print.

Week 1 - Introduction and the Challenges of Japanese Video Game Studies

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword was born out of pragmatic necessity. The necessity to understand the Other in times of immediate crisis. To accomplish this goal, Ruth Benedict was given the task to provide the leaders of her country an ethnographic treaty that would help understand and deal with Japan, then an enemy nation. However, the truly fascinating aspect of this story is how she was able to partly decipher the Japanese cultural codes mainly through the analysis of texts while staying in the United States. This is not unlike what I understand to be the project of this seminar, that it investigating contemporary Japan through one of its major international export, video games.

What comes off the readings this week seems to emphasize two sets of questions during the course of this seminar. The first one has to do with the difficulty of understanding the specificity of video games as a media. Paul Newman makes clear that video games— and games in general for that matter—have been considered unworthy of academic attention for very long and that we are just discovering their potential as a form of art and education tools even though they are becoming an ubiquitous part of modern life. However, video games are now officially out of the closet and we have moved beyond a uniquely negative perspective perspective (Jenkins and Cassell, Mori) and started to acknowledge them in a more favourable light—and even perhaps to a fault (McGonigal).

The second challenge brings us back to the tradition of ethnography and the heritage of Ruth Benedict. The question would be to evaluate to what extend we can consider an object as a window of understanding towards a foreign culture in all of its complexity and divergent points of tension. Can we read Japan through its video games? Can an understanding of Japan help us read its video games? Since Edward Said published his highly influential book Orientalism and that the field of post-colonial studies started to re-evaluate the value of centuries’ worth of writing on the Orient—essentially a process of trying to cope with the Other as he is, not as the West has imagining it to be—, we are better equipped in term of both renewed sensibilities and theoretical tools to attempt a global understanding of a foreign culture. It seems to me that we are moving away from a tradition that isolate, constructs and apply normative cultural codes to a population towards investigations of a more direct human experience. However, Japanese elites have a history of pandering in claims of self-exoticization. Without citing the entire corpus of the Nihonjinron or Theory of the Japanese, one could be very tempted to find easy answer to big questions regarding the Japanese national character (Nakane), its biology (Tsunoda) or even essentialist claims linked to the Japanese landscape (Watsuji). Tessa Morris-Suzuki provides an enlightening overview of the extend of this type of literature. The field of video game study doesn’t seem to try distance itself from this tendency and, already, we are confronted to authors pointing to a specific essence of Japanese games design (Masuyama Hiroshi states that the success of Japanese games are due to a unique sensibility to affordance design) and journalist/gamer discourse that adopt a similar position (1-Up).

Clearly, we want to get a sense of what space video games occupy in Japan, but, considering this week’s readings, this should be done while being aware of the problems that have plagued the study of Japanese culture in the past. The video game industry is now a major player in the global network of cultural product circulation and our perspective on the media can be blurred by many aspects such as corporate interests (the articulation of japaneseness by Square-Enix), longing for national prestige (the Cool Japan campaign) or issues of language (manipulation of meaning through the process of localization). Studying Japanese game culture is an incredibly stimulating endeavour, but one that is also riddled with challenges and walls of all sorts that we will try to overcome in the coming months.


Additional Sources Cited

1-Up. Clash of the Cultures. Accessed online. <http://www.1up.com/features/clash-cultures>.

Jenkins, Henry. and Cassell, Justine.  From Barbie to Mortal Kombat : Gender and Computer Games. Edited by Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins. MIT Press Cambridge, 1998. Print.

Masuyama, Hiroshi. Terebi gêmu bunkaron : intarakutibu media no yukue (Treatise on Video Games: Towards an Interactive Media). Kôdansha Gendai Shinsho. Tokyo: Kôdansha, 2001. Print.

McGonigal, Jane. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. Print.

Mori, Akio. Gêmu Nô no kyofu (Fear of the Game Brain). Nihon Hôsô Shuppan Kyôkai. Tokyo: Seikatsujin Shinshô, 2002. Print.

Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. Re-inventing Japan : time, space, nation. Japan in the modern world. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1998. Print.

Nakane, Chie. Tate Shakai no Ningen Kankei (Human Relationships in a Vertical Society). Tôkyô: Kôdansha Gendaishinshô, 1967. Print.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. Vintage Books, 1978. Print.

Tsunoda, Tadanobu. Nihonjin no Nô (The Brain of the Japanese). Kakuda Chûshin: Tôkyô. 1978. Print.

Watsuji, Tetsurô. Fûdô Ningengakuteki Kôsatsu (Fûdô: Anthropological Investigations). Tôkyô: Iwanami Shôten. 1935. Print.