![]() ![]() This proposal will tackle these new enquiries by suggesting that interpretation from both players and producers alike is highly influenced by the segmentation of gameplay preferences as well as the sociological hierarchization that it’s at play in the medium. Moreover, it highlights the importance that interpretation has whenever Japaneseness is brought up as a significant component of a videogame’s character. These works are useful to approach Japanese videogames as multi-faceted commodities, but also open new questions pertaining to their behavior and reception depending on the context that they operate on. With this goal in mind, authors like Picard (2013), Pelletier-Gagnon (2015) and Navarro-Remesal and Loriguillo-López (2015) propose the usage of local terminologies to describe the elements that set apart Japanese gēmu from the rest of their counterparts. A huge portion of that work has been dedicated to assessing the proper impact of Japanese videogames in the world, both as culturally neutral (or mukokuseki) products and as pieces of a particular media environment that is unique to Japanese pop culture. In recent years, a huge amount of research has been undertaken to properly assess the development of the videogame medium on both a global and a local scale, with works that attempt to frame its history as a transnational process first and as a set of locally distinct frameworks of production and consumption second. Finally, we will analyze its current influence on the development of the modern image of Japan, both in gamer consumer culture and the overall gaming industry today. Throughout this paper, we will explore the main elements that characterize this paradigm, including the concept of explicit narratives, and their manifestation on specific games. More so than that, it has been integrated within a bigger cultural discourse that identifies several forms of cultural artifacts as extensions of Japan into Western popular culture. However, its presence has been reduced significantly today, to the point that it has become representative of games developed exclusively by the Japanese video game industry, even though it might be found outside that region. This model also encompass semiotic elements that are either textually related to other forms of Japanese media or have been used almost exclusively on Japanese video games. This paradigm was also highly influential in creating other genres that are ubiquitous in the medium today, specially during the era of the Japanese industrial dominance of the 80's and 90's. This paradigm can be distinguished from the one prevalent in the West because it has usually favored games that rely more heavily on the use of what we call “explicit narratives” to contextualize their rules, which have been solidified into several known “game genres” like the JRPG (Japanese Role Playing Game), the “Visual Novel” and others. In the case of Japanese video games, we argue that several design conventions on the part of Japanese game designers have led to a paradigm that is unique to their cultural context. However, this paper argues that these differences aren't just formed due to specific cultural images or economic reasons, but mainly because of the formation of an identity discourse on the industry that has ghettoized specific formulas of player engagement to some cultural regions or supposedly minority groups. ![]() ![]() Most of the time, the reasons that have been made to explain this difference within the medium have relied on either essential cultural differences or market determinism based on historical preferences. In the history of the medium, this differentiation was initially established because some semiotic and mechanic elements were identified to identifiable Japanese or American market tastes. The following abstract is aimed to put into question how both the Japanese and Western gaming industries have differentiated themselves so much today, offering game systems and narratives that vary widely from each other. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |