Influential Game Designer Book Series by Jennifer deWinter
Influential Game Designers is a book series published by Bloomsbury/Continuum and edited by Jenni... more Influential Game Designers is a book series published by Bloomsbury/Continuum and edited by Jennifer deWinter and Carly A. Kocurek. It is the first series to take seriously the role of the game designer. By profiling game designers who have shaped contemporary video gaming, this series provides insights into the practice, history, and artistry of game design. This series responds to a growing interest in the artistic and cultural value of games and an increased focus on the practice of game design.
This is the first book in the Influential Game Designer Book Series and is about one of the best ... more This is the first book in the Influential Game Designer Book Series and is about one of the best known of game designers, Shigeru Miyamoto, the mastermind behind such iconic and long-standing game franchises as Donkey Kong, Mario Bros., and Zelda. I argue here that even when we are talking about complicated systems of production and distribution, it’s imperative to think about how human agency plays out. Thus, as the field of game studies develops the historiography of games, I provide a focus on design through the lens of the designer. Miyamoto, then, is a particular provocative subject because of his involvement in both the design of game software and game hardware. Further, his career, dating from the 1970s, spans much of the history of video games. His influence can be seen throughout the game industry—he has created and defined a number of game genres—and throughout popular cultures at large. Miyamoto’s games and systems show up in other forms in movies, television, magazines, books, orchestras, schools, dance clubs, rap music, and children’s lunch boxes.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Forward
1. The Father of Modern Video Games
2. Spatial Narratives: Characters in their Worlds
3. From Games to Experiences: Designing for User Freedom and Unique Expression
4. Revolutionizing Gameplay: Casual Games and Mature Audiences
5. In His Own Words: Transcript of Miyamoto's 1999 Game Developer Conference Keynote
6. A Continuing Legacy
Gameography
Works Cited
Index
Read excerpt here: http://issuu.com/bloomsburyacademic/docs/shigeru_miyamoto_widget
Edited Collections by Jennifer deWinter
In opening up new lines of inquiry into video game policy, we asked authors to contend with the f... more In opening up new lines of inquiry into video game policy, we asked authors to contend with the following questions:
• What are the national policies affecting video game production, circulation, or consumption?
• What are the local politics and policies and how do these affect the computer game complex?
• How does the international nature of the market affect video games and policies?
• What are the policies that govern access to play, which include distribution policies, social network policies, store policies, and so on?
• What are key court cases and how have they created policy? How are those policies enforced?
• How do rating systems enact industry or government policies? How do these systems affect the production, circulation, and consumption of games?
• What are the policies that dictate intellectual property and ownership? How do companies and consumers navigate this, what are the effects?
Each of the essays in this book addresses one or more of these intersections. We’ve organized the book into four sections: Intellectual Property, Privacy, and Copyright; Rating Systems and Cultural Politics; Violence in Video Games; Politics and Regulations, although readers will find significant overlap between each of these.
This book analyzes the effect of policy on the digital game complex: governments, industries, cor... more This book analyzes the effect of policy on the digital game complex: governments, industries, corporations, distributors, players, and the like. Contributors argue that digital games are not created nor consumed outside of the complex power relationships that dictate the full production and distribution cycles, and that we need to consider those relationships in order to effectively "read" and analyze video games. They show how policy, that is to say the rules governing the production, distribution and consumption of digital games, has a tangible effect upon our understanding of the digital game medium.
Taking as its point of departure the fundamental observation that games are both technical and sy... more Taking as its point of departure the fundamental observation that games are both technical and symbolic, this collection investigates the multiple intersections between the study of computer games and the discipline of technical and professional writing. Divided into five parts, Computer Games and Technical Communication engages with questions related to workplace communities and gamic simulations; industry documentation; manuals, gameplay, and ethics; training, testing, and number crunching; and the work of games and gamifying work. In that computer games rely on a complex combination of written, verbal, visual, algorithmic, audio, and kinesthetic means to convey information, technical and professional writing scholars are uniquely poised to investigate the intersection between the technical and symbolic aspects of the computer game complex. The contributors to this volume bring to bear the analytic tools of the field to interpret the roles of communication, production, and consumption in this increasingly ubiquitous technical and symbolic medium. Included here is the flyer with the table of contents of contributors. Also included on the Academia.edu page is the introduction and my chapter on in-game training
Taking as its point of departure the fundamental observation that games are both technical and sy... more Taking as its point of departure the fundamental observation that games are both technical and symbolic, this collection investigates the multiple intersections between the study of computer games and the discipline of technical and professional writing. Divided into five parts, Computer Games and Technical Communication engages with questions related to workplace communities and gamic simulations; industry documentation; manuals, gameplay, and ethics; training, testing, and number crunching; and the work of games and gamifying work. In that computer games rely on a complex combination of written, verbal, visual, algorithmic, audio, and kinesthetic means to convey information, technical and professional writing scholars are uniquely poised to investigate the intersection between the technical and symbolic aspects of the computer game complex. The contributors to this volume bring to bear the analytic tools of the field to interpret the roles of communication, production, and consumption in this increasingly ubiquitous technical and symbolic medium.
One of the challenges facing game designers and producers is simply teaching players how to play ... more One of the challenges facing game designers and producers is simply teaching players how to play a game. This step in gameplay is vitally important; if players do not understand what to do and why they are doing it, then they will not play the game. This paper explores the transition from manuals to in-game training, focusing specifically on four types of in-game training: 1) tutorial levels; 2) integrated stepped tutorials; 3) integrated narrative tutorials; and 4) adaptive messaging. In-game tutorials are a way to mediate the complexities between hardware, game mechanics, player desire, and designer vision. The tutorials normalize, in many ways, an approach to gameplay that adheres to traditional motivations: a desire to play well and to win.
Journal Special Issues by Jennifer deWinter
We seek proposals for manuscripts of 6,000-8,000 words (25-33 double-spaced pages, including refe... more We seek proposals for manuscripts of 6,000-8,000 words (25-33 double-spaced pages, including references and notes) that attend to the intersection of games and technical communication. See CFP for full description
This special issue of the Syllabus Journal offers a multi-disciplinary approach to video game stu... more This special issue of the Syllabus Journal offers a multi-disciplinary approach to video game studies. We have organized it with three different categories:
1. Teaching About Games: These syllabi attend to teaching the skills and theoretical frameworks common in video game programs—those programs dedicated to creating and engaging with game culture writ large.
2. Teaching With Games: These syllabi see games as a useful text to teach diverse topics, such as history, creative writing, and rhetoric and composition. Games become an important medium to convey information or concepts important in non-game-specific disciplines.
3. Toolbox: These are short assignments that use games or teach game concepts. Some are meant for only a day and some are two-week units. They have been written to be easily incorporated into any course syllabus.
This is our introduction to the special issue that Carly Kocurek and I co-edited for Journal of G... more This is our introduction to the special issue that Carly Kocurek and I co-edited for Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds. Our final paragraph is probably the strongest abstract statement:
Taken together, the articles in this special issue offer a strong indictment of gamification and the underlying cultural ideologies that have been under- explored by game studies. We do not mean to insinuate that games shouldn’t teach; rather, we see in these essays a common thread that games do teach, but they teach ideology through the schooling of intellectual and manual labour, and it is this ideology that should be made visible for discursive inter- rogation. We hope that these essays will spark a discussion in the game stud- ies community and encourage those in disciplines that employ gamification to consider the quotidian and conditional rhetorics of gamification as both a historical and contemporary practice.
Game Studies by Jennifer deWinter
Included here are page proofs. Abstract:
The challenge with Cool Japan as a media policy that enc... more Included here are page proofs. Abstract:
The challenge with Cool Japan as a media policy that encompasses film and television is that it is, at heart, a descriptive policy that attempts to harness the success of Japanese youth cultures abroad. The challenge with reconceptionalizing film policy within a Japanese context is that film and television is part of a transmedia landscape, and the policies of games, for example, define the policies for anime. Further, this is made more complicated by the fact that traditional film policies such as censorship and classification are often not considered in international trade policies, that those encapsulated by Cool Japan. What quickly becomes apparent is that media policies are not monolithic expressions of cultural needs and mores. They are, instead, often uncoordinated and changeable policies that react to domestic markets and demands, national politics, international politics and economies, trade strategies, and sometimes just idiosyncratic leaders. At the same time that Japan is promoting its film, television, and other media abroad, it is also trying to regulate those same media in its own national borders. Mainstream Japan has an uneasy relationship with its own liminal youth cultures (Daliot-Bul 2014), yet exporting those same cultures for international consumption acts to normalize what is internally seen as undesirable and even deviant behaviours. Finally, as Japan aims to leverage Cool Japan as cultural diplomacy via film and other media, the top-down approach has started to identify objects and practices from traditional culture such as food and traditional crafts and tack those onto a policy that centralized the economic success of the pastiche and sometimes subversive media and practices of its youth cultures. And finally, the NHK, or Nippon Housou Kyoukai (日本放送協会)—Japan’s premiere public broadcasting system, modeled after the U.K.’s BBC—created the television program Discovering Cool Japan (Cool Japan 発掘：かっこいい日本) appropriating it to market Japan to itself and foreign tourists, yet the politics of the broadcasting network has become a conservative voice that enacts invisible policies that are directly opposed to the voices and themes that underlie Cool Japan media. In exploring these above tensions, I aim to highlight the intense cultural ambivalence surrounding media policies in general and Cool Japan in particular as they pertain to film policy and practice within transmedia strategies and national branding practices.
In this chapter, we focus on that moment in which fans decide to turn over collections for resear... more In this chapter, we focus on that moment in which fans decide to turn over collections for research and professional preservation. We base this on interviews with U.S.-based fans and archivists on the issues surrounding collection-driven preservation. We interviewed seven collectors to understand their motivations for first collecting their game materials but then more importantly why they chose to donate those collections to professional archives. Further, we interviewed five archivists about their relationships with fans and how that relationship affects their collection and archiving practices. In particular, we consider the point at which fan-cultivated collections are sold or donated to institutional archives and what motivates this divestment of a personal col- lection. We also consider the role fans play in preserving, in particular, the material culture of videogames, including items frequently dismissed as paratexts (ie, packaging, promotional materials, and ‘feelies’ – those additional materials packaged with the game that often act as paratexts to the digital game experience). In speaking with archivists, we explore the extent to which fan actions have become part of the strategies and methods of preserving game culture and to what extent archives cultivate relationships with fan communities as a collections strategy. We have interviewed multiple donors who have recently turned over their collections, and we have also interviewed archivists working with the Strong National Museum of Play, the Learning Games Initiative (LGI) and the Stanford University Libraries, all professional archives that have bene ted from this practice. What emerges is a complex emotional decision and set of actions that affect and will continue to effect game preservation. We argue, then, that game preservation relies on a variety of different constituents with different motivations, and thus game preservationists must understand the emotional, economic, and cultural complexities that are visible in that moment of transfer.
Carly Kocurek and I originally wrote this chapter after #1reasonwhy to interrogate the game indus... more Carly Kocurek and I originally wrote this chapter after #1reasonwhy to interrogate the game industry's resistance to women in the workforce. We look to the discursive practices around women as consumers, as journalists, and as producers of content to define cultural practices of exclusion as well as economic and social oppression. Shifts in the industry, we argue, need to first engage with these discourses and ideology to see positive change and workplace equality.
In the game industry, community managers engage in social and emotional labor as they split their... more In the game industry, community managers engage in social and emotional labor as they split their loyalties between game communities and game companies. Community managers do not fully represent the interests of one group, and their intermediary role puts particular stresses on the types of emotional labor that they are called upon to enact. Further, community managers must also participate in social labor—work that builds and exploits social connections for monetary gain. Most of this labor, however, is undervalued and in some instances is simply uncompensated " free " labor carried out by members of a fan community. Ultimately, we argue, casting the role of the community manager as a social and emotional laborer feminizes this work, monetarily devaluing it while isolating workers in these roles from the communities that they ostensibly serve.
RapeLay, while reprehensible in content, is not abnormal in the Japan PC game market, which is th... more RapeLay, while reprehensible in content, is not abnormal in the Japan PC game market, which is the platform for most sex-simulation games. Indeed, this 2006 game did not garner much interest until 2009 when the Belfast Telegraph ran a short report that summarized the game and pointed out that people in Ireland and the U.K. could buy the game on Amazon (Fennelly 2009). Suddenly, RapeLay, Illusion, and the Japanese game industry were open to international scrutiny, subject to pressure from international human rights organizations, and became a topic on national politics outside of Japan. Yet Illusion broke no domestic laws; the company adhered to regulation and classification guidelines that govern the Japanese game industry. What this case highlights, however, is challenges brought forward by international markets and third party
2
distribution. In this chapter, I consider the pressures brought to bear on national politics and video game classification systems by international markets, and in doing so, I complicate discussions of game classification, production, and consumption within intended and unintended markets. Games move in international markets as either commodities that can be purchased in traditional distribution centers (such as stores or online retailers), third-party distributors, or as code that can be downloaded anywhere. Circumventing rating and classification systems through alternative distribution brings games that are intended for limited distribution within particular markets into larger discourses. Thus, questions arise about the rights of nations to dictate their own policies and how those rights are challenged within international forums and markets. As such, in this chapter, I argue that the case study of RapeLay highlights high-stakes conversations concerning the dangers of cultural imperialism when public morals are used to pressure national industries acting in international markets. Further, within this context, corporate, public, and political policies arise in tense dialectic with international actors that must be accounted for when studying video game policy.
This chapter provides an overview of the Japanese video game industry (published in Wolf's _Video... more This chapter provides an overview of the Japanese video game industry (published in Wolf's _Video Games Around the World_). Sections include Sections in this chapter include:
• Challenges to Studying Computer Games in Japan
• Who Plays Computer Games?
• Japan’s Early Game Industry: SEGA, Namco, Taito, and Nintendo
• Home Consoles and Handheld Devices: A Nation That Plays Games
o Nintendo
o SEGA
o Sony
• Game Centers, Game Parlors, and the Performance of Gaming
• Social Gaming in Japan: DeNA, Gree, and Mixi
• Censorship and Rating Systems
• “Our Game Industry Is Finished”: The Present and Future State of Computer Games in Japan
This chapter from »The cake is a lie« Polyperspektivische Betrachtungen des Computerspiels am Bei... more This chapter from »The cake is a lie« Polyperspektivische Betrachtungen des Computerspiels am Beispiel von ›Portal‹ considers the intense identification with Chell precisely because she offers players a female avatar who is ethnically ambiguous. Further, the trope of the mute female in media is considered to account for increased player identification.
This assignment was designed as a final project for a class entitled “Storytelling in Interactive... more This assignment was designed as a final project for a class entitled “Storytelling in Interactive Media and Games.” In order to focus on the collaborative nature of a shared story between game creators and players, we sought a more low-tech form of game, namely the alternate reality game. The paper outlines both the theory behind the assignment and initial steps in guiding the students through it. We focus on assigning roles to game creators to organize a large team, and the “Achievement” sheet which both suggests media for the students to use and point values for the use of those media.
The history of popular entertainment has seen an identifiable progression that initially began wi... more The history of popular entertainment has seen an identifiable progression that initially began with a single narrative existing in a single media format and this has evolved to a state today in which multiply themed narratives are reproduced in multiple media formats. For example, Homer's Odyssey began as an epic tale in the oral tradition, which was then transcribed into text and can now be found in multiple media forms-films, comic books, children's books, and cartoons. Within each of these media, the actual narrative changed little except where it had to adapt to the constraints of each format. Also consider Peter Pan, which began as a play, became a children's book, and was then turned into both animated and live-action formats. While the narrative stayed fairly consistent throughout these different transitions, the popularity of Peter Pan allowed the narrative to branch out in different ways. For instance, a cartoon version entitled Fox's Peter Pan and the Pirates expanded on the traditional Peter Pan narrative, adding new stories to the same time frame. There are also spin-offs that use the same world, but change the characters, such as Hook and Peter Pan: Return to Neverland. The new media format continues to use the same worlds, characters, and scenarios that were introduced in the original narrative and medium; however, because of the episodic nature of these narratives, each medium's narrative is independent of those being told in other media.
In helping students become critically engaged in the world and able to communicate effectively, i... more In helping students become critically engaged in the world and able to communicate effectively, instructors invariably teach a variety of literacies in any classroom. Such literacies include written, verbal, critical -even visual and technological literacies -and thus instructors do more than simply help students learn how to "write good research papers" or "create clear lab reports." Indeed, instructors embody that part of the modern university that opens up "access to participation in public forms of communication . . . [and imparts] understandings of and the abilities to produce culturally valued texts" (Kress 67).
Uploads
Influential Game Designer Book Series by Jennifer deWinter
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Forward
1. The Father of Modern Video Games
2. Spatial Narratives: Characters in their Worlds
3. From Games to Experiences: Designing for User Freedom and Unique Expression
4. Revolutionizing Gameplay: Casual Games and Mature Audiences
5. In His Own Words: Transcript of Miyamoto's 1999 Game Developer Conference Keynote
6. A Continuing Legacy
Gameography
Works Cited
Index
Read excerpt here: http://issuu.com/bloomsburyacademic/docs/shigeru_miyamoto_widget
Edited Collections by Jennifer deWinter
• What are the national policies affecting video game production, circulation, or consumption?
• What are the local politics and policies and how do these affect the computer game complex?
• How does the international nature of the market affect video games and policies?
• What are the policies that govern access to play, which include distribution policies, social network policies, store policies, and so on?
• What are key court cases and how have they created policy? How are those policies enforced?
• How do rating systems enact industry or government policies? How do these systems affect the production, circulation, and consumption of games?
• What are the policies that dictate intellectual property and ownership? How do companies and consumers navigate this, what are the effects?
Each of the essays in this book addresses one or more of these intersections. We’ve organized the book into four sections: Intellectual Property, Privacy, and Copyright; Rating Systems and Cultural Politics; Violence in Video Games; Politics and Regulations, although readers will find significant overlap between each of these.
Journal Special Issues by Jennifer deWinter
1. Teaching About Games: These syllabi attend to teaching the skills and theoretical frameworks common in video game programs—those programs dedicated to creating and engaging with game culture writ large.
2. Teaching With Games: These syllabi see games as a useful text to teach diverse topics, such as history, creative writing, and rhetoric and composition. Games become an important medium to convey information or concepts important in non-game-specific disciplines.
3. Toolbox: These are short assignments that use games or teach game concepts. Some are meant for only a day and some are two-week units. They have been written to be easily incorporated into any course syllabus.
Taken together, the articles in this special issue offer a strong indictment of gamification and the underlying cultural ideologies that have been under- explored by game studies. We do not mean to insinuate that games shouldn’t teach; rather, we see in these essays a common thread that games do teach, but they teach ideology through the schooling of intellectual and manual labour, and it is this ideology that should be made visible for discursive inter- rogation. We hope that these essays will spark a discussion in the game stud- ies community and encourage those in disciplines that employ gamification to consider the quotidian and conditional rhetorics of gamification as both a historical and contemporary practice.
Game Studies by Jennifer deWinter
The challenge with Cool Japan as a media policy that encompasses film and television is that it is, at heart, a descriptive policy that attempts to harness the success of Japanese youth cultures abroad. The challenge with reconceptionalizing film policy within a Japanese context is that film and television is part of a transmedia landscape, and the policies of games, for example, define the policies for anime. Further, this is made more complicated by the fact that traditional film policies such as censorship and classification are often not considered in international trade policies, that those encapsulated by Cool Japan. What quickly becomes apparent is that media policies are not monolithic expressions of cultural needs and mores. They are, instead, often uncoordinated and changeable policies that react to domestic markets and demands, national politics, international politics and economies, trade strategies, and sometimes just idiosyncratic leaders. At the same time that Japan is promoting its film, television, and other media abroad, it is also trying to regulate those same media in its own national borders. Mainstream Japan has an uneasy relationship with its own liminal youth cultures (Daliot-Bul 2014), yet exporting those same cultures for international consumption acts to normalize what is internally seen as undesirable and even deviant behaviours. Finally, as Japan aims to leverage Cool Japan as cultural diplomacy via film and other media, the top-down approach has started to identify objects and practices from traditional culture such as food and traditional crafts and tack those onto a policy that centralized the economic success of the pastiche and sometimes subversive media and practices of its youth cultures. And finally, the NHK, or Nippon Housou Kyoukai (日本放送協会)—Japan’s premiere public broadcasting system, modeled after the U.K.’s BBC—created the television program Discovering Cool Japan (Cool Japan 発掘：かっこいい日本) appropriating it to market Japan to itself and foreign tourists, yet the politics of the broadcasting network has become a conservative voice that enacts invisible policies that are directly opposed to the voices and themes that underlie Cool Japan media. In exploring these above tensions, I aim to highlight the intense cultural ambivalence surrounding media policies in general and Cool Japan in particular as they pertain to film policy and practice within transmedia strategies and national branding practices.
2
distribution. In this chapter, I consider the pressures brought to bear on national politics and video game classification systems by international markets, and in doing so, I complicate discussions of game classification, production, and consumption within intended and unintended markets. Games move in international markets as either commodities that can be purchased in traditional distribution centers (such as stores or online retailers), third-party distributors, or as code that can be downloaded anywhere. Circumventing rating and classification systems through alternative distribution brings games that are intended for limited distribution within particular markets into larger discourses. Thus, questions arise about the rights of nations to dictate their own policies and how those rights are challenged within international forums and markets. As such, in this chapter, I argue that the case study of RapeLay highlights high-stakes conversations concerning the dangers of cultural imperialism when public morals are used to pressure national industries acting in international markets. Further, within this context, corporate, public, and political policies arise in tense dialectic with international actors that must be accounted for when studying video game policy.
• Challenges to Studying Computer Games in Japan
• Who Plays Computer Games?
• Japan’s Early Game Industry: SEGA, Namco, Taito, and Nintendo
• Home Consoles and Handheld Devices: A Nation That Plays Games
o Nintendo
o SEGA
o Sony
• Game Centers, Game Parlors, and the Performance of Gaming
• Social Gaming in Japan: DeNA, Gree, and Mixi
• Censorship and Rating Systems
• “Our Game Industry Is Finished”: The Present and Future State of Computer Games in Japan
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Forward
1. The Father of Modern Video Games
2. Spatial Narratives: Characters in their Worlds
3. From Games to Experiences: Designing for User Freedom and Unique Expression
4. Revolutionizing Gameplay: Casual Games and Mature Audiences
5. In His Own Words: Transcript of Miyamoto's 1999 Game Developer Conference Keynote
6. A Continuing Legacy
Gameography
Works Cited
Index
Read excerpt here: http://issuu.com/bloomsburyacademic/docs/shigeru_miyamoto_widget
• What are the national policies affecting video game production, circulation, or consumption?
• What are the local politics and policies and how do these affect the computer game complex?
• How does the international nature of the market affect video games and policies?
• What are the policies that govern access to play, which include distribution policies, social network policies, store policies, and so on?
• What are key court cases and how have they created policy? How are those policies enforced?
• How do rating systems enact industry or government policies? How do these systems affect the production, circulation, and consumption of games?
• What are the policies that dictate intellectual property and ownership? How do companies and consumers navigate this, what are the effects?
Each of the essays in this book addresses one or more of these intersections. We’ve organized the book into four sections: Intellectual Property, Privacy, and Copyright; Rating Systems and Cultural Politics; Violence in Video Games; Politics and Regulations, although readers will find significant overlap between each of these.
1. Teaching About Games: These syllabi attend to teaching the skills and theoretical frameworks common in video game programs—those programs dedicated to creating and engaging with game culture writ large.
2. Teaching With Games: These syllabi see games as a useful text to teach diverse topics, such as history, creative writing, and rhetoric and composition. Games become an important medium to convey information or concepts important in non-game-specific disciplines.
3. Toolbox: These are short assignments that use games or teach game concepts. Some are meant for only a day and some are two-week units. They have been written to be easily incorporated into any course syllabus.
Taken together, the articles in this special issue offer a strong indictment of gamification and the underlying cultural ideologies that have been under- explored by game studies. We do not mean to insinuate that games shouldn’t teach; rather, we see in these essays a common thread that games do teach, but they teach ideology through the schooling of intellectual and manual labour, and it is this ideology that should be made visible for discursive inter- rogation. We hope that these essays will spark a discussion in the game stud- ies community and encourage those in disciplines that employ gamification to consider the quotidian and conditional rhetorics of gamification as both a historical and contemporary practice.
The challenge with Cool Japan as a media policy that encompasses film and television is that it is, at heart, a descriptive policy that attempts to harness the success of Japanese youth cultures abroad. The challenge with reconceptionalizing film policy within a Japanese context is that film and television is part of a transmedia landscape, and the policies of games, for example, define the policies for anime. Further, this is made more complicated by the fact that traditional film policies such as censorship and classification are often not considered in international trade policies, that those encapsulated by Cool Japan. What quickly becomes apparent is that media policies are not monolithic expressions of cultural needs and mores. They are, instead, often uncoordinated and changeable policies that react to domestic markets and demands, national politics, international politics and economies, trade strategies, and sometimes just idiosyncratic leaders. At the same time that Japan is promoting its film, television, and other media abroad, it is also trying to regulate those same media in its own national borders. Mainstream Japan has an uneasy relationship with its own liminal youth cultures (Daliot-Bul 2014), yet exporting those same cultures for international consumption acts to normalize what is internally seen as undesirable and even deviant behaviours. Finally, as Japan aims to leverage Cool Japan as cultural diplomacy via film and other media, the top-down approach has started to identify objects and practices from traditional culture such as food and traditional crafts and tack those onto a policy that centralized the economic success of the pastiche and sometimes subversive media and practices of its youth cultures. And finally, the NHK, or Nippon Housou Kyoukai (日本放送協会)—Japan’s premiere public broadcasting system, modeled after the U.K.’s BBC—created the television program Discovering Cool Japan (Cool Japan 発掘：かっこいい日本) appropriating it to market Japan to itself and foreign tourists, yet the politics of the broadcasting network has become a conservative voice that enacts invisible policies that are directly opposed to the voices and themes that underlie Cool Japan media. In exploring these above tensions, I aim to highlight the intense cultural ambivalence surrounding media policies in general and Cool Japan in particular as they pertain to film policy and practice within transmedia strategies and national branding practices.
2
distribution. In this chapter, I consider the pressures brought to bear on national politics and video game classification systems by international markets, and in doing so, I complicate discussions of game classification, production, and consumption within intended and unintended markets. Games move in international markets as either commodities that can be purchased in traditional distribution centers (such as stores or online retailers), third-party distributors, or as code that can be downloaded anywhere. Circumventing rating and classification systems through alternative distribution brings games that are intended for limited distribution within particular markets into larger discourses. Thus, questions arise about the rights of nations to dictate their own policies and how those rights are challenged within international forums and markets. As such, in this chapter, I argue that the case study of RapeLay highlights high-stakes conversations concerning the dangers of cultural imperialism when public morals are used to pressure national industries acting in international markets. Further, within this context, corporate, public, and political policies arise in tense dialectic with international actors that must be accounted for when studying video game policy.
• Challenges to Studying Computer Games in Japan
• Who Plays Computer Games?
• Japan’s Early Game Industry: SEGA, Namco, Taito, and Nintendo
• Home Consoles and Handheld Devices: A Nation That Plays Games
o Nintendo
o SEGA
o Sony
• Game Centers, Game Parlors, and the Performance of Gaming
• Social Gaming in Japan: DeNA, Gree, and Mixi
• Censorship and Rating Systems
• “Our Game Industry Is Finished”: The Present and Future State of Computer Games in Japan
Introduction by Jennifer deWinter and Carly A. Kocurek
Teaching about Games are syllabi for courses that teach game studies, game design, serious game design, and novel interface design (think new controllers), and include:
* Video Game Studies by Judd Ethan Ruggill
* How to Play Games of Truth: An Introduction to Video Game Studies by Bryan Geoffrey Behrenshausen
* Novel Interfaces for Interactive Environments by Robert W. Lindeman
* Educational and Serious Game Design: Case Study in Collaboration by Jon A. Preston
* Introduction to Game Design by Nia Wearn
Teaching with Games are syllabi that teach disciplinary content in multiple fields using games as a text, such as creative writing, history, rhetoric, composition, and literature. These include:
* Representing the Past: Video Games Challenge to the Historical Narrative by Stephen Ortega
* Learning Through Making: Notes on Teaching Interactive Narrative by Anastasia Salter
* Video Games as a New Form of Interactive Literature by Anne Winchell
* Writing in and around Games by Wendi Sierra
* Hints, Advice, and Maybe Cheat Codes: An English Topics Course About Computer Games by Kevin Moberly
And finally, we have collected together five toolbox entries that act as short modules (1-day to 2-week assignments) to be incorporated into classes and workshops.
* Teaching Network Game Programming with the Dragonfly Game Engine by Mark Claypool
* Root of Play: Game Design for Digital Humanists by Andy Keenan and Matt Bouchard
* Alternative Reality Games to Teach Game-Based Storytelling by Dean O’Donnell and Jennifer deWinter
* “Continue West and Ascend the Stairs”: Game Walkthroughs in Professional and Technical Communication by Stephanie Vie
* Annotated Bibliography for Game Studies: Modeling Scholarly Research in a Popular Culture Field by Cathlena Martin
peer surveillance and virality,
corporate surveillance and game iteration, and
government surveillance of suspected terrorist activities.