My work on Japanese games (so far)

This past academic year, I was invited to a workshop at the Université libre de Bruxelles on National Identities and the Youth in East Asia: Popular Culture, Political Mobilisation, and Digital Spaces. This made me realize that what had been a personal interest of mine and, at best, a transversal element of my research, had slowly gained some entity and shape. In other words, I could finally talk of a subset of my scholarly work dedicated not only to Japanese games, but to Japanese games as Japanese, whatever that meant.

The pieces of this through line are slowly coming together and I plan on further assembling them to hone my inquiry on gēmu as gēmu. For this purpose, here’s a list of what I’ve done so far (which I hope to update as I advance):

· The paper What makes gêmu different? A look at the distinctive design traits of Japanese video games and their place in the Japanese media mix, coauthored with Antonio Loriguillo-López and published in the Journal of Games Criticism.

· The chapter Goddesses in Japanese Videogames: Tradition, Gameplay, Gender, and Power, included in the book Dialectics of the Goddess in Japanese Audiovisual Culture, edited by Lorenzo J. Torres Hortelano.

· The conference talk Beyond the fourth wall: transdiegetic characters, distancing effect, nesting narratives, and opposite texts in gēmu, presented in the panel Beyond the Label of Commerciality: Approaching Narrative Complexity in Contemporary Light Novels, Anime and Gēmu, organized by Antonio Loriguillo-López at the EAJS2017 15th International Conference of the European Association for Japanese Studies.

· My presentation at the aforementioned workshop at ULB, entitled Mangêmunime. Media mix, player identities, and performing Japaneseness in videogames. (I also presented an extended version of this talk in Spanish, under the title Media Mix. Jugadores y la interpretación de la japonesidad en los videojuegos, at UJI. I have a private recording of this talk available for whomever is interested.) I hope to turn this presentation into a written text soon.

· Besides that, I’ve dealt with Japanese games in several papers, although their Japaneseness (or the construction of it) was not the focal point of the texts: Gender, sex and romance in role playing video games: Dragon’s Dogma, Fable III and Dragon Age: Inquisition; «Does life begin or end at marriage?: Love, ethics design and directed freedom in Catherine; and Ni No Kuni: Ludonarrative bridges to the Other World of Ghibli.

If you see anything here you’d like to read, don’t hesitate to contact me!