From Tsushima to Night City: Japan in the (Video) Gaming Mind
My proposal for PCA 2024
I am going to the Popular Culture Association (PCA) Annual Meeting next April in New Orleans. It will be my third in a row. I have had a great time at the previous two, though I wish I was better at staying in touch with the cool people I’ve met there.
It’s a fantastic meeting, really. Probably the least pretentious academic meeting of that size that I’ve attended, and Game Studies panels tend to be really interesting and a great mix of more experienced scholars and people who are more new to things.
Anyway, I have a Dragon Age post coming, though I’ve been busy with my day job - and also playing Dragon Age - so I thought I’d share my proposal for the meeting. Hopefully it’s accepted; I’m looking forward to developing the talk, as well as drafting a book chapter based on this topic.
A quick bit of context: last year I gave a talk about how Japan tends to represent a vague sense of “the future” in video gaming culture; I also talked about Night City. Mostly however I was interested in how Japan as future in games demonstrates the reality of the historical context surrounding those games. The most vivid example of this, in my mind, is how Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid series reacts to Japan’s postwar realities. I reference this in my proposal below.
This year, I want to talk a bit more about the Japan we create, or that we assume developers will create for us. This is a different thing; last year I placed Japanese games in historical context, this year I want to talk more about how we effectively historicize Japan in our play. That means returning to this idea of a Japanese future, but contrasting it more directly with how we interact with different versions of Japan’s past. This is closer to the topic of my next book (“Book Three” as it lives on my laptop and online backup). At the moment I am putting together proposals for that, too. More of that in the future.
So, I hope you find this interesting. As you can see, I tend to approach conference talks with a speculative attitude. In a good way, I think! I am looking forward to meeting people and seeing people again.
From Tsushima to Night City: Japan in the (Video) Gaming Mind
Japanese creators have made video games for more or less as long as video games have existed, that have been played by Japanese people and by people all over the world. At the same time, the Japanese pop culture mode - including but not restricted to otaku - has become more and more salient in Western practice. A video game console culture that came of age, or perhaps evolved further depending on one's perspective, with the success of the first two Sony Playstations in the 1990s and early 2000s has developed a world of aesthetics, commercial incentive and interactivity that fully engages with a constructed idea of Japan. This idea incorporates concepts of Japan as a source of specific, elevated subsets of gaming culture, but also as a rich repository of subjects for video game narratives and adventures. All of this sits within an imagined mind of video gaming culture, that ascribes to Japan specific values and derives from it specific meanings. It is one thing to analyze how games position Japan: that is, how the METAL GEAR SOLID series both derives from and shapes interpretations of postwar, post-Cold War Japan. This talk looks at how Japan is created in the shared imagined mind of video games culture, one dominated by but not exclusively created by or inhabited by the West.
Japan in this imagined mind is often the future. Glistening cities disappearing into vertices in the sky, or highways something akin to American dreams spiraling and caroming through dense urban spaces. None moreso than Night City, a Gibsonesque metropolis that first came to be on the tabletop but can recently be seen in CD Projekt Red's CYBERPUNK 2077. The city is seamy and magical, a techno-orientalist dream.
Japan in this imagined mind is often the past. Sucker Punch's GHOST OF TSUSHIMA brings us an alternate view of Japanese exceptionalism: whereas Night City obliterates the senses with promises of hedonism and evidence of civilizational decay the eponymous ghost, a samurai abandoning his code to ensure survival, will pause from his labors to play the flute. Tsushima is an idyll, where violence punctures moments of tranquility, and where brave samurai are slaughtered by the alien Mongol hordes.
What Japan are we playing, here? Wondrous home to the future or guardian of a sacred past? When Japan's future lives in our imaginations it appears to belong, for good or ill, to all of us. When we look upon its past the player becomes a gleeful tourist. Like in so many other art forms in the West, Japan becomes a location of infinite possibility but also the home to a specific range of curated tastes: from the timeless past to an irresistible technological pull into the future.