From the production of arcade video games in the 1970s to the development of E-sports in the early 2000s, East Asia has been a driving force in the global video game industry. In 2016, China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have collectively generated more than 40% of the global games market revenues. 1 As of 2016, the global video game industry is a $101.6 billion industry, 2 while current global box office film sales are a $38.3 billion industry, 3 making video games one of the most profitable entertainment industries of the twenty-first century. While these numbers highlight the influence of the region on game sales, they do not cover the complexity of the video game industry. Current video game platforms offer more styles of games, game-playing demographics are more varied and wider than ever, âand games are now large, small, polished, experimental, two-dimensional, three-dimensional, text-based, gestural, genre-specific, or mashed upâ (Consalvo 2016, 2). There is therefore no single context, industry, or community of games but a diverse multitude of game structures that have shaped the cultural milieu of video games in the region. Due to the intra-regional and transnational flow of content, East Asia is not only recognized as a historic global gaming center but is âmarked by diverse consumption and production patterns of gaming, mobile and broadband technologies, subject to local cultural socio-economic nuancesâ (Hjorth and Chan 2009, 3). Moreover, in the historical and contemporary contexts of East Asia, video games have given rise to new forms of identity formation, social interaction, and virtual colonization that blur national boundaries and create transnational practices of interaction. From this multifaceted context and cultural flow of information across historical and regional boarders, East Asia is an automatic âmustâ when studying the global contexts of the video game industry.
Despite its importance in the global video game market, East Asia has not received sufficient scholarly attention. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the research into video games has increased in size to cover topics like game economies (McAllister 2004; Castranova 2005), player cultures (Turkle 2005; Flanagan 2009), gaming spaces (Wark 2007; McGonigal 2011), game rhetoric (Bogost 2007, 2008), and transnational relationships (Hjorth and Chan 2009; Jin 2010; Consalvo 2016). The rise in scholarship has given new credibility to the medium and spurred new interests in the field. However, much of the research listed here focuses on European and American contexts, and besides Hjorth and Chanâs (2009) edited collection, there is no other collection that adds to the mapping of this region. Some notable work including Jin (2010) focuses on a specific nation rather than the transnational context. Thus, there remains a need to examine the multiple and intertwined issues in cultural transformation, glocalization, and transnationalism in the region of East Asia.
To address this necessity, the two books in the current East Asian Culture Series examine the development and prominence of East Asian video games within historical, industrial, cultural, and global contexts, highlighting: (1) the current state of video games in East Asia; (2) the developing production and consumption practices of East Asian game industries and players; (3) the ways video games function as a cultural medium in local and transnational contexts; and (4) the roles that video games have played in intercultural and international settings. Across the two books, these topics are addressed through a wide range of interdisciplinary work, written by scholars in diverse academic fields, to offer a comprehensive overview of the socio-economic, socio-material, and socio-cultural context of video games in the region.
The current volume consists of three interconnected socio-economic and socio-material contexts of the video game industry. Part I presents a history of the technological developments that have led to industry trends and transformations in the region. The provided history serves as a platform for the contemporary landscape of gaming technologies. Part II therefore examines the recent industry trends in social mobile games and the globally connected relationships that arise out of the developer and player interactions in this new gaming sphere. Through an investigation of the cultural impacts of games on players, and their communities, Part III builds on the cultural conversation started in Part II by discussing the social concerns over playing games. Through these chapters the reader is provided with an overview of the East Asian game industry that calls attention to the complex practices of and concerns over this transnational medium.
Part I
Part I works to compliment the previous literature on East Asian game history that has covered the development of game companies (Gorges and Yamazaki 2012), specific consoles (Parish 2016), the console wars (Harris 2015), the history of nationally sponsored gaming infrastructures (Jin 2010), and the rise of E-sports (Taylor 2012). To add to this conversation, Part I calls attention to the social history and technological material that has influenced the game industry. The second chapter written by Mariko Koizumi provides an overview of the historical development of the Japanese video game industry, focusing on how the unique industrial structure, business practices, and consumer preferences in Japan sparked the growth of video game industries. By tracing the development of console systems from the Famicom (released in North America as the Nintendo Entertainment System) to handheld gaming systems, the chapter works to first contextualize the influence and sales of gaming systems on Japanese markets. To complement the market analysis, Koizumi investigates the developing technologies that have given rise to online and mobile social games. By analyzing the sales and life of a product alongside the technological development, this chapter details the ways industry trends should be analyzed.
The third chapter written by Arielle Goldberg and her colleagues provides a closer look at a key player in the video game history: Nintendo. Nintendo boasts a 100+ year company history that consistently presents innovative new directions for game immersion and flow. Relying on tried-and-true, iconic intellectual properties, including Super Mario Brothers, the Legend of Zelda, and PokĂ©mon, Nintendo focuses on delivering a remarkable gaming experience, in terms of the hardware with which people play. From plastic playing cards to the upcoming NX, Nintendo has a history of forcing its competitors to keep up in ways that go beyond sales numbers and graphics capabilities. The chapter provides an overview of Nintendoâs impact on the technological landscape of video games, and video gaming culture, by popularizing portable games, pushing the innovation envelope in terms of player immersion, and finally combining those two approaches by immersing players in the game world outside of the gameplay experience. The chapter ends with a discussion of whatâs next for Nintendo, including the foray into mobile game development and augmented reality games like PokĂ©mon Go.
Part II
Moving beyond the economic and technological history of the region, Part II focuses on the quickly developing mobile social game sector. Currently, East Asia dominates all other global regions with a generated mobile game revenue of 15 billion US dollars. 22 The explosion of mobile game revenues necessitates a closer investigation of the cultural impacts of mobile games on different âplayers,â including economic practices, player communities, and developer practices. In chapter 4, Akiko Shibuya and her colleagues call attention to the emerging business model of mobile in-game purchases called gacha. Gacha is similar to a toy capsule vending machine that brings out random game items, in-game currencies, or rare valuable items. Players may use those items in the game or trade them for real money. Although gacha has become a major monetization technique for many Japanese free-to-play games, it is frequently criticized by the public, the media, and government agencies for its gambling nature. As a result of the controversy, as well as a government crackdown, major mobile game companies decided to restrict a specific form of gacha called kompu gacha, where players gamble to obtain especially rare and valuable items. However, many mobile game companies still rely on similar business models, and the mechanism of their monetization technique has not received scholarly investigations. The authors address this gap through a systematic analysis of gacha techniques, including the in-game purchases and special event features of mobile social games in Japan, and the player actions tied to these techniques.
While the first section of Part II focuses on the economic practices of mobile game companies, chapter 5 examines the social interactions that develop in and around mobile games. Inspired by Robert D. Putnamâs influential work Bowing Alone, in the chapter titled Bowling Online, Hogeun Seo and Claire Shinhea Lee discuss how mobile social games develop social capital and social networks among a population that are marginalized in the traditional video game sphere: high-school girls in South Korea. High-school girls in Korea have limited opportunities to socialize with their peers face-to-face. With the penetration of smartphones, however, they started to create their own digitalized peer culture. Social games on mobile platforms became an alternative space for South Korean high-school girls for communicating with one another, developing their peer relationships, and forming their own communities. In this chapter, the authors examine what makes Korean high-school girls actively participate in the mobile social game sphere and how their mobile social gaming relates to the concepts of strong/weak ties and bonding/bridging social capital.
Chapter 6 bridges the content of part II together through an analysis of player/producer practices related to Japanese mobile game design. When it comes to creative production today, Japanâwith its multiple contents industries, concentrated urban centers, and frequent collaborative working environments in both the creative and technical fieldsâoffers a unique perspective into the ways workers organize in a variety of complex production spaces. To understand these production spaces of mobile gaming, Bryan Hartzheim takes an ethnographic approach to examine, observe, and participate in the production spaces of the Japanese media mix, or its equivalent in the west, transmedia. Specifically, the author looks into collaborative global/local production among mobile game creators in Japan and the culture of international production in a single video game studio. He discusses how production processes have reorganized through mobile social gaming, how different cultures of players choose to react to active game designs, and how collective negotiations that occur in production spaces affect the realm of mobile games.
Part III
Part III discusses the social impacts of video games in East Asia through a focused analysis on the âdark sideâ of gaming. Digital games are frequently targets of controversial issues and are often inclined to present players with difficult moral and ethical dilemmas. Mortensen and Lindrothâs (2015) edited collection calls attention to these âdark,â or morally ambivalent, choices that players are frequently presented with, while Conway and deWinter (2015) detail how the games, and the playersâ choices, are often regulated by state agencies. However, the assumption of play as a dark practice frequently removes the voice of the players that are participating in these spaces. To address this concern, Sara Liao offers new insights into Hong Kongâs net bar, also called Internet cafĂ©, youth gaming culture, and lifestyle that has emerged as unique public gaming space in East Asian countries. The social discourse toward net-bar gaming is frequently negative and is often framed as a dark place where working-class youth gather and conduct delinquent behaviors, including violence, drug dealing, and adolescent sexual intercourse. Seldom are the youth given a voice to express their own ideas toward net bar and their gaming experience. The author reveals that the net-bar dev...