Spoiling This Wonderful Falsehood: Japanese Video Games and Critiques of Western Worlding

Hall, David; Hall, David

Japan has been historically situated as uniquely isolated from the broader world. Yet, the Meiji era (1868-1912) of Japan was defined by intentional efforts on the part of the Japanese government to respond to the pressures of global capitalism such that Japanese cultural identity was preserved not against but through a process of modernization and industrialization. This project sought to preserve Japanese culture not through isolation but by subsuming the Western aesthetic tradition within a newly phrased Japanese tradition. Nintendo was founded within this context, just three years after the beginning of the Meiji era and 100 years later dominated the global game market after rescuing the U.S. video game market in the wake of the 1983 crash. In other words, considering Japanese cultural identity as isolated from a global context misunderstands a long history of active construction of that identity as global and globalizing.

Game Studies has often come from a decidedly Euro-centric perspective that regularly frames Japan as an isolated monoculture rather than acknowledging the global existence of Japan and its cultural products. Foundational theories of play like Johan Huizinga’s “magic circle” (1938) and Roger Caillois’s “taxonomy of play” (1961) have been historically adopted by Game Studies without questioning the Eurocentric foundations upon which these theorizations rest. There has been a recent rise in edited collections and academic manuscripts that seek to centralize the importance of Asian identity and “the Asiatic” within video game culture (Patterson 2020). These include Open World Empire by Chistopher Patterson (2020), The Race Card by Tara Fickle (2019), Asian Popular Culture edited by Anthony Y.H. Fung (2013), and Made in Asia/America (2024). However, less attention has been paid to the complex aesthetic projects produced within Japan that reflect on this material history and a relationship with the West. In particular, long-form game projects such as FromSoftware’s Soulsborne series, Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear series, Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda series, and Square Enix’s Final Fantasy series represent important interventions into a Western aesthetic tradition.

This proposed special session calls for more nuanced scholarship that considers Japanese video games as globalized cultural products that are informed by Japan’s unique history while simultaneously existing within the broader globalizing networks of contemporary society. Each presentation will last 12 minutes followed by 15 minutes of Q&A.

David Hall will serve as presider and will begin with a discussion of the radical multiplicity of perspective that defines fan participation in the archive of the Dark Souls series, emerging from the intentional and historically-informed reckoning with and critique of a received Western aesthetic tradition, titled “Aye, Siwmae: Participatory Vision and Situated Knowledge in the Dark Souls archive.”

"‘We are thinking on the basest of planes’ Bloodborne as Critique of Global Racialization and Capitalistic Expansion” by Austin Anderson argues the game is an artistic statement about how capitalism is dependent on the creation of a perpetual underclass that is rationalized through racialization that, in turn, creates and maintains a racial hierarchy of power. This racialized hierarchy of power simultaneously positions economically independent women as antithetical to order and thus the state must regulate this disorder by enacting harsh and gratuitous violence against the female body through a regime of perpetual forced reproduction

“They Played Us Like a Damn Fiddle: Noble Suffering and the Spectacle of Torture in the Maintenance of American Empire in Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes” by Evan Manzanetti looks at Hideo Kojima’s representation of Guantanamo and argues that the game treats Guantanamo, and therefore America, as an inescapable prison that exists to remind the world of American imperial power, presenting a non-American view of a uniquely-American place.

“Re:mediating Disney Myth” by Luna Loganayagam argues Kingdom Hearts demonstrates a global interruption of Disney’s aggressive Western assertions of power, remediates the American mythos of Disney within a Japanese framework, and decentralizes the Western subject from the object of play.

“The Vampire Prince/ss: Escaping the Reincarnated Cycle of Gender Binary in Saga Frontier” by Jakapat Koohapremkit examines the 90s cult classic JRPG, Saga Frontier, and argues the character Asellus’ quest for identity as a distinctively Buddhist conception of gender and sexuality through the lens of the western vampire and reads Asellus as both a sapphic and trans figure, whose identity reclaims yet resists both Eastern and Western understandings of gender and sexuality.

Our panel brings together emerging voices within Japanese Studies and Game Studies that bring to bear a diverse set of expertise and backgrounds, including Queer Studies, Postcolonial theory, Black Studies, and Ecofeminism.

339 Spoiling This Wonderful Falsehood: Japanese Video Games and Critiques of Western Worlding: Calls for Papers