Japanese Video Game Research Articles

Toward a Gameic World: New Rules of Engagement from Japanese Video Games

Toward a Gameic World: New Rules of Engagement from Japanese Video Games

Early Discourse About Video Game Music in Japan

Japanese video game music has received considerable attention in ludomusicological research, but the broader culture and public perception of game music in Japan has received relatively little scholarly scrutiny. The article addresses this gap by examining how video game music has been conceived as a distinct genre in early Japanese media discourse, namely writings in Japanese gaming magazines and mainstream media from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. Drawing upon a constructivist perspective on mediated discourses, the article considers discussions in media as active agents that contribute to the formation of perceptions of the surrounding world. Through this process, media discourse can potentially influence how audiences experience and evaluate video game music as well as how practitioners create music or identify themselves as composers. The data reveals three particularly prominent interconnected categories: (1) game music as children’s music; (2) the conception of game music as transitioning from “background music” to “real music”; and (3) using authorship as a legitimacy marker. Especially the Dragon Quest (1986–) series and its composer, Kōichi Sugiyama (1931–2021), played a prominent role in shaping these categories. While generally presenting game music in a positive light and contributing to a conceptualization of video game music as a distinct genre, all three categories effectively distance game music from its original context within the game. Instead, they incorporate aesthetic judgments, wherein the value of the music is assessed in relation to preexisting musical styles and genres outside the gaming context. Early Japanese discourse thus exhibits a limited comprehension of the audiences and functions of this genre. These observations nevertheless broaden an understanding of the history of game music as well as its public position in Japan and elsewhere.

Analysis of the Reasons for the Choice of Chinese and Japanese Electronic Game Products: Based on the Different Strategic Perspectives of Chinese and Japanese Game Enterprises

In recent years, Japanese video games have caused a wave among Chinese young people, but in contrast, Chinese video games from local manufacturers seem to struggle to do the same. Accordingly, this paper will analyze from external causes: This paper analyzes the different strategic perspectives of Chinese and Japanese game companies on the market. Taking FROM SOFTWARE, a Japanese game developer, and its games, and Softstar Technology (Beijing) Co., LTD., a Chinese game developer, and its games as examples, it explores the factors that enterprises attach importance to game development, such as the diversity and innovation of games. This paper analyzes its positive influence on young people, and further analyzes the success of Japanese game developer enterprise strategy and the shortcomings of Chinese game developer enterprise strategy, so as to provide experience for the future development of Chinese game enterprise.

The Eclectic Case of Japanese Video Game Music

Japanese video game music often features a degree of eclecticism that is not common in Western soundtracks. Such compositions blend elements originally belonging to different styles in a peculiar way, capable of giving life to a new musical language in which the diversity of its components does not seem to necessarily symbolize a specific alterity or an idea of otherness. Instead, in this language eclecticism becomes the new norm, a “natural and neutral” way of expressing whatever the soundtrack needs to express, regardless of the national and musical origins of the single stylistic features that are being used. This article compares the foundation of this new eclectic neutrality with the idea of mukokuseki (statelessness) and with other kinds of music (especially anime music), in search for the cultural factors that motivate the widespread persistence of a uniquely eclectic musical language. Four factors are analyzed: the hybridity of Japanese postmodern culture, the eclecticism of popular (and anime) music in Japan, the influence of specific Western artists and genres, and the role of technological affordances. The multifactorial solution to the problem highlights the necessity of searching the reasons behind eclectic Japanese video game music not only (and maybe not primarily) in contingent factors motivated by single games, but also in structural factors motivated by the peculiarities of contemporary Japanese culture.

Images of Chopin in, and through, Japanese Video Games

This article examines the use of Chopin’s music in video games created by Japanese developers. While, as William Gibbons and others have documented, classical music has been used throughout the history of video games, a surprising number of Japanese games have used Chopin’s music. Sometimes this music is presented as a straightforward performance of a piece by Chopin, while others remix, vary or interpolate Chopin’s musical materials in new compositions. Chopin’s music here stages many of the tensions and possibilities found in the video game medium. In that sense, it ‘thematises’ video games. The article focuses on three aspects of Chopin in games. The first is sentimentalism (both in association with death, the supernatural and the morbid, and in association with sexual romance and romanticism more broadly). Secondly, Chopin’s music is associated with virtuosity, intertwining emotion and physicality. Finally, Chopin’s music is used as an agent for postmodern juxtaposition, in the process problematising a divide between art and mass culture. These three trends are interlinked and draw upon longstanding historical images and connotative values in relation to Chopin. The discussion builds on antecedent research concerning Chopin’s reception by Lawrence Kramer, Jim Samson, Charles Rosen and Stephen Downes, critical perspectives on games and/as musical interfaces by David Sudnow and Roger Moseley, and discussions of classical music in popular culture by Andreas Huyssen and Mina Yang. Key case studies include Space Adventure Cobra, Clock Tower 3, Eternal Sonata, Gran Turismo, Pop’n Music, Catherine and a selection of visual novels. Chopin’s music in Japanese games serves as a way to understand the meanings of that music in a modern pop-culture context. Besides that, however, such a study uncovers how the issues central to the discourse of Chopin are manifest and (re)configured in a medium and context of production very far removed from the music’s origins.

Global TV Horror

Global TV Horror

Nihon Goes West: Exploring the Non-Translation of Honorifics in the English Subtitles of a Japanese Video Game

Japan has a long tradition when it comes to graphic novels, animated series, films, and, more recently, video games. This popularity has gained international attention in recent decades, creating a market for Japanese-to-English translation. An example of such translations is the localized version of the video game Yakuza 0. Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Lawrence Venuti in his footsteps, argue that there are fundamentally two ways of translating: domestication and foreignization. However, what we find in the translation of Yakuza 0 is a hybrid way of working, which demonstrates that the issue is not as black and white. This paper focuses on the aforementioned game to draw examples and discuss the impact of honorifics on socio-cultural markers and relationship dynamics. First, an overview of the Japanese system of honorific characters is provided in order to understand why translators would choose to retain them in their subtitles. Second, we aim to discuss possible factors that lead translators and localization professionals to retain honorifics in their translation. Finally, we contribute to the broader discussion of ideological and cultural factors that influence the dynamics between source and target culture, by pointing to possible shifts in this relationship, in view of Venuti's critique of Anglo-American translation.

Изобразительные источники образов мифологических существ в видеоигре Nioh

The purpose of this article is to review the characters in the two-part Japanese video game series Nioh so as to identify their origins and artistic relationships with the visual arts. Based on the names and appearance of the characters created in the game, the author attempts to perform a comparative analysis of the images in the game and those known in Japanese art. The subject of the research is identifying and studying the connection between the art of the past and modern video game character design on the example of the Nioh video game series, using the methods of art analysis. Modern researchers consider video games to be one of the forms of interaction between modern culture and cultural heritage. Therefore, this study is relevant as it reveals the cultural significance of video games and demonstrates the method of working with the artistic heritage in building game worlds. The article provides a comparative analysis of the characters yoki and one-eyed oni, kappa and kamaitachi and the pictorial sources of the 8th–12th and 17th–19th centuries. The author comes to the conclusion that the video game Nioh is a modern catalogue of Japanese demonology, based on well-known pictorial and written sources.

Politics of fun and participatory censorship: China’s reception of Animal Crossing: New Horizons

This paper discusses China’s ban of the hit Japanese video game Animal Crossing: New Horizon. Situating the ban in the context of Chinese digital economy, this paper investigates the politics of fun as it intersects with censorship and popular nationalism in China today. Drawing on user-generated content and social media discussions of the game and its ban, the paper discusses two outcomes deriving from China’s precarious environment for gameplay, where fun could be easily confiscated by authorities: the first is the emergence of participatory censorship where netizens voluntarily and collectively set the limit for self-expression in an effort to depoliticize gameplay; the second is the convergence between fun and nationalism, which transforms gameplay into a vessel for expressing and strengthening official ideology. In doing so, the paper reconsiders the thesis of digital democratization by shedding light on the regulated processes of digital self-making.

The Unsung Kingdom Translation Project Designing an Effective and Sustainable Classroom Activity for a Japanese Video Game Translation

This paper presents the experience of the design of a didactic activity for the translation of a Japanese video game in Italian, carried out in 2020 during the first year of the Japanese language course of the Master’s Degree Programme in Language and Civilisation of Asia and Mediterranean Africa at Ca’ Foscari University. The described protocol allows the design of video game translation sessions as a teaching activity, overcoming some typical technical and organisational problems. One important issue this paper addresses involves the possibility of reviewing the translation within the game, which is fundamental to understanding how to translate texts for this medium. The paper will also give an overview of the translation issues that students encountered during the activity and of how they solved them. Finally, the results of a survey will show whether the implemented protocol and classroom activity were satisfactory for the students and how they can be improved.

Style shifts in Japanese video game commentary monologues

Honorific markers play an integral role in many languages, but their purpose and meaning are still widely debated. Ide (1989) claims a one-to-one relationship between social rank difference and linguistic form, but Cook (1997, 2011) proposes that honorifics are used to display a ‘disciplined self,’ which further indexes a variety of social meanings. This study examined style shifts between the honorific and plain form in Japanese video game commentary monologues. We found that instances of honorific form can be grouped into four categories regarding their contextual functions: to make an announcement, to indicate seriousness, conventionalized formulae, and to quote others. This conclusion supports Cook’s proposal.

Foreign Yet Familiar: J. L. Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings and Other Cultural Ferrymen in Japanese Fantasy Games

This paper considers J. L. Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings as a vector for the cultural transfer of folkloric, mythological, religious, and literary motifs from foreign cultures to Japanese video games and collectible card games. My analysis relies upon Michel Espagne’s cultural transfer theories and discusses not only the Book of Imaginary Beings but also other vectors of transfer, such as the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons. I focus on four specific motifs from different cultural spheres, whose introduction to Japanese video games can be retraced to Borges’ bestiary: The carbuncle, the catoblepas, the peryton, and Kujata. Thus, this paper presents a case study of the cross-cultural influence of literary works on games. Furthermore, it underscores the need for a deeper consideration of the cultural influences found in games and of games as agents of cultural transfers.

From Cool Japan to Cold Japan: grime cyborgs in Black Britain

This article examines the overlooked phenomenon of how black British grime music artists intentionally and selectively remix Japanese pop cultural artifacts to carve out a hybrid cultural space that gives voice to their urban realities and articulates counterhegemonic black subjectivities. From the early 2000s, at the same time as state-centered discourses of ‘Cool Japan’ emerged to explain the global rise of Japanese pop culture, grime artists were already on their own terms sampling Japanese video games and anime to articulate emergent feelings of ‘coldness’, which reflects their sense of alienation on the margins of British society. The author introduces ‘Cold Japan’ as the other Cool Japan, and a way of understanding this fundamentally intertwined mode of cultural hybridity and being that forms the essence of black Britain’s grime. This article uses the cyborg figure to disclose how grime artists transform Cold Japan into a site of countercultural resistance to subvert their oppression by self-generating and embodying transgressive posthuman identities. Examining how selected ‘cold’ Japanese pop cultural elements and technologies entangle with urban black life and identity formation in 21st century Britain, the article contributes to discussions on the impact of transnational flows of Japanese pop culture and cultural hybridization.

Japanese videogames in English translation: a study of contemporary subtitling practices

This article examines the ongoing development of translation norms in the field of Japanese popular culture texts, focusing on the translation of Japanese video games into English. In the first part, the article describes particular translation norms that have emerged in the field, before presenting a case study of the translation of the Japanese video game series Yakuzain order to illustrate how video game companies have begun to successfully integrate fan-translation norms into commercial products.

Organizational Ambidexterity and Firm Performance: Effect of Two Types of Exploitation on Japanese Video Game Industry

Organizational Ambidexterity and Firm Performance: Effect of Two Types of Exploitation on Japanese Video Game Industry

Indirect innovation management by platform ecosystem governance and positioning: Toward collective ambidexterity in the ecosystems

This study outlines the implications of ecosystem governance and positioning regarding the indirect control of complementors’ incremental and radical behaviors in goods development and successful innovations. The study tested how the degree of openness as an indicator of governance and the degree of distinctiveness as an indicator of the positioning influenced the direction and sales performance of complementary goods by employing 9,780 samples of Japanese video game software. The statistical results showed that an increase in both openness and distinctiveness facilitates radical-oriented behavior, while the sales of complementary goods rise as openness increases at the medium level of distinctiveness. Consequently, this study indicates that high openness and appropriate distinctiveness contribute to securing ambidexterity on the platform ecosystems to facilitate balanced software development and larger sales performance.

Found in Translation: Evolving Approaches for the Localization of Japanese Video Games

Japanese video games have entertained players around the world and played an important role in the video game industry since its origins. In order to export Japanese games overseas, they need to be localized, i.e., they need to be technically, linguistically, and culturally adapted for the territories where they will be sold. This article hopes to shed light onto the current localization practices for Japanese games, their reception in North America, and how users’ feedback can contribute to fine-tuning localization strategies. After briefly defining what game localization entails, an overview of the localization practices followed by Japanese developers and publishers is provided. Next, the paper presents three brief case studies of the strategies applied to the localization into English of three renowned Japanese video game sagas set in Japan: Persona (1996–present), Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (2005–present), and Yakuza (2005–present). The objective of the paper is to analyze how localization practices for these series have evolved over time by looking at industry perspectives on localization, as well as the target market expectations, in order to examine how the dialogue between industry and consumers occurs. Special attention is given to how players’ feedback impacted on localization practices. A descriptive, participant-oriented, and documentary approach was used to collect information from specialized websites, blogs, and forums regarding localization strategies and the reception of the localized English versions. The analysis indicates that localization strategies for Japanese games have evolved over time from a higher to a lower degree of cultural adaptation in order to meet target markets’ expectations. However, it was also noted that despite the increasing tendency to preserve the sociocultural content of the original, the language used in the translations needs to be vivid and idiomatic in order to reach a wider audience and provide an enjoyable gameplay experience.

The Effects of Using Existing Brands in Platform Ecosystems

In platform ecosystems, the complementors' product brand management could have significant effects on both the innovation management and evolution of platform ecosystems. By contrast, use of existing product brands could have long-term negative effects on platform ecosystems: generation of excessive bias in sales results among complementary goods and reduce variety, decrease of the possibility of radical innovation caused by suppression of the creation of new brands. This study tested how facilitating existing brand use influences these indicators, through an empirical agent-based simulation using a dataset of Japanese video game markets. The results showed that although there are positive effects of using existing brands to acquire a large installed customer base, there are also some negative effects. This study indicated that the influence of the facilitation of brand management is largely determined by the platform owner’s capability for development of complementary goods. When the platform owner is capable of being a market leader in software development, the facilitation of existing brands may have negative effects for these two indicators, even if the brand facilitation is implemented in conjunction with complementors. By contrast, when brand facilitation is implemented by platform owners without market leader capability, these two factors are improved.

Eclectic Religion: The flattening of religious cultural heritage in videogames

ABSTRACT Religious icons and representations increasingly appear, in the West, as cultural heritage rather than active subjects of religious practice. While churches become tourist landmarks rather than places of worship; religions’ stories and characters – their intangible cultural heritage – survive as rich bases for popular media alongside their traditional use of mediating divinity. This paper studies one form of such popular media – Japanese videogames, using the Final Fantasy series as a case study – to ask which religions, folklores, cultures and their divinities are represented in videogames? (All of them, flattened non-hierarchically.) How are these divinities mediated in videogames? (Together, juxtaposed eclectically.) And what are the implications for including what are normally mutually exclusive mediations of divine worship into popular media together? (It re-introduces them to a practice common outside of Abrahamic, protestant conceptions of world religion, by freely combining cultural heritages and religious practices in what are called ‘multiple religious belongings’). While these representations of eclectic religion may seem to trivialise traditions by making them interchangeable, it also manages to de-objectivate them and reveal their fictional, artefactual origin as cultural heritage, while leaving them intact as contemporary practices.

Dynamic Demand for New and Used Durable Goods without Physical Depreciation: The Case of Japanese Video Games

For information/digital products, the used goods market has been viewed as a threat by producers. However, it is not clear if this view is justified because the used goods market also provides owners with an opportunity to sell their products. To investigate the impact of the used goods market on new goods sales, we collect a unique data set from the Japanese video game market. Based on the data, we develop and estimate a new dynamic structural model of consumers’ buying and selling decisions. The estimation results show that potential buyers' consumption value deteriorates by 50% from the release week to the second week, and game owners' consumption value deteriorates by 22-49% after the first week of ownership and the rate depends on game characteristics. Examination of the cross-price elasticities suggests that the elasticities tend to be high especially when the used-game inventory at retailers is low, but they quickly decrease as the inventory is accumulated. Using the estimates, we quantify the impact of eliminating the used game market on publishers' profits and consumer welfare. We find that this policy would increase publishers' profits by 2%, but reduce the consumer welfare by 19% if publishers do not adjust their prices. However, if they adjust prices optimally, it would increase the profits by 79%, and also the consumer surplus by 141% due to lower new prices.