Gaming Cultures and Place in Asia-Pacific

Larissa Hjorth, Dean Chan, Larissa Hjorth, Dean Chan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135843168
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatik
• Subtopic: Soziale Aspekte in der Informatik

This collection explores the relationship between digital gaming and its cultural context by focusing on the burgeoning Asia-Pacific region. Encompassing key locations for global gaming production and consumption such as Japan, China, and South Korea, as well as increasingly significant sites including Australia and Singapore, the region provides a wealth of divergent examples of the role of gaming as a socio-cultural phenomenon. Drawing from micro ethnographic studies of specific games and gaming locales to macro political economy analyses of techno-nationalisms and trans-cultural flows, this collection provides an interdisciplinary model for thinking through the politics of gaming production, representation, and consumption in the region.

1
Locating the Game

Gaming Cultures in/and the Asia-Pacific

Larissa Hjorth and Dean Chan

The Asia-Pacific region is a geo-political and economic construct. Spanning East and South East Asia as well as countries in the southern Pacific Ocean and Pacific Rim, including Australia and New Zealand, the collectivizing of such disparate nations and cultures perhaps only largely makes sense as a post-World War II political and economic imaginary, as opposed to a purely geographic cartography. Yet, at the same time, the magnitudes of thinking through what Jen Webb characterizes as “the Asia-Pacific effect” is essential. Although created “in language by … national and geopolitical entities … there is an effect of Asia-Pacific which allows us to talk about it as a Real thing.”¹ Webb argues that the space for agency created by the Asia-Pacific effect enables regional cultural producers and organizations to represent themselves, both individually and collectively, “rather than be represented by old colonialist patterns and practices” and they can thereby “claim a legitimated voice … and challenge the hegemony of ‘Euramerican’ narratives, values and aesthetics.”²

The Asia-Pacific effect provides a valid polemical and pedagogical framework to assess the production, circulation and consumption of gaming within the region. Specifically, we propose that any nuanced study of Asia-Pacific game cultures has the capacity to also disrupt and serve as a critique of the residual Techno-Orientalism³ in many Western approaches to understanding the region’s historical and contemporary prowess in post-industrial discourses such as gaming.

With sites such as Tokyo fully placed in the global gaming imaginary and with locations such as Melbourne boasting one of the most active independent gaming scenes, the Asia-Pacific provides an exemplary case study on one of the most buoyant and yet culturally divergent regions in the world. Our aim in locating this study in the region is two-fold: firstly, to situate the depth and diversity of games culture (which we broadly define to include games, game play, and gaming communities) in this region; and secondly, to consider how these gaming cultures in turn provide a lens to view and examine salient geo-political and socio-cultural developments within the region.

Such an approach to the study of gaming cultures provides acuity into the region’s reshaping in the imagery of global popular cultures. As Brian Sutton-Smith observes, gaming cultures are social cultures, thus through the games we play we can learn much about the localized notions of play and community.⁴ The study of gaming cultures not only allows readers to gain new approaches to the region’s increasingly technological and economic power and how this has translated into global soft power, but also the various contested and transnational gaming communities in the region. We are interested in tracking both the continuities and the disjunctures. While we are not claiming to offer a definitive or exhaustive portrait of Asia-Pacific gaming in this chapter and via this collection of essays, we do instead aspire towards a partial and provisional mapping of some key debates and hallmark characteristics within the region.

In sum, we first and foremost place an emphasis on negotiating the situated diversity and interdisciplinarity of gaming cultures. The appreciation of plurality in and of itself just will not do because it is arguably limited in both its rhetorical reach and pedagogical function. Concomitantly, our focus in this collection is equally on examining the continuities between, and interfaces among, as well as the co-evolution of game industries—cultures—communities within the region. At stake here is the task of simultaneously studying the variegated constituencies of regional gaming cultures and using gaming cultures to map the political, economic, social and cultural dis/connections within the Asia-Pacific.

THE LOCATIVE POLITICS OF PLACE: A LUDIC MAPPING OF THE ASIA-PACIFIC

The games industry has matured from a subcultural activity partaken by the likes of otaku (media-obsessed fans) to become what is now an integral part of global popular cultures: a phenomenon highlighted by the fact that the games industry revenue now surpasses that of the film industries. Over the preceding couple of decades, and especially since the beginning of this century, the rigor, interdisciplinary nature and depth of gaming scholarship has aptly addressed many issues around new media, narratology, interactivity and active audiences bringing depth to approaches towards creative industries, global studies and the rethinking of popular culture.

More recently, with the rise of crossplatforming and convergent media through Web 2.0, the role of online communities and localized socio-cultural practices such as massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) like Lineage and World of Warcraft have given emergence to empirical, ethnographic and area studies approaches to gaming communities. Through the lens of gaming cultures we can gain insight into emerging transnational communities as well as helping redefine nation-state boundaries and enclave alliances. Increasingly, the role of locality influences the types of games that are consumed and the types of nation-state associations with certain types of game play. For example, Japan has long had a history of what Testuo Kogawa calls “electronic individualism”⁵ which manifests in Nintendo DS and Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP). As historically one of the global gaming centers, Japan has long attracted worldwide interest. However, its significance has started to be challenged by the rise of MMOs particularly prevalent in South Korea.

As a region, the Asia-Pacific is marked by diverse consumption and production patterns of gaming, mobile and broadband technologies, subject to local cultural and socio-economic nuances. Two defining locations—Seoul (South Korea) and Tokyo (Japan)—are seen as both “mobile centers” and “gaming centers” in their representation of a possible future for media practices. Unlike Japan, which pioneered the keitai (mobile) IT revolution and gaming consoles such as PlayStation2, South Korea—the most broadbanded country in the world (OECD 2006)—has become a center for MMOs and attendant industries such as e-sports.

Adorned with over 20,000 PC bangs (PC rooms) in Seoul alone and with professional players (Pro-leagues) making over a million US dollars per year, South Korea has been lauded as an example of how gaming can occupy a mainstream position in everyday life. In a period marked by convergent technologies, South Korea and Japan represent two opposing directions for gaming—South Korea emphasizes online MMO games played on stationary PCs in public spaces (PC bangs) while Japan pioneers the cult(ure) of mobile (privatized) convergent devices. These two distinct examples are a product of various technological, economic, political, social and cultural factors, which are variously examined in this collection in chapters by Dal Yong Jin and Florence Chee (Chapter 2); Jun-Sok Huhh (Chapter 6); Christian McCrea (Chapter 10); Ingrid Richardson (Chapter 12); and Larissa Hjorth, Bora Na and Huhh (Chapter 14). Gaming cultures provide insight into the ever evolving and contesting formations of the region.

With the introduction of Web 2.0 and as the convergence between SNS (social networking systems) and online games burgeons, it is the Asia-Pacific that can highlight much about twenty-first century formations, transnational communities and socio-cultural enclaves. Through gaming cultures, we can gain insights into the social, cultural and political dimensions of new technologies and media—impacting on how we conceptualize and practise new media and online/offline co-presence.

Furthermore, with key international research associations such as Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) hosting the 2007 Situated Play Conference in Tokyo, along with the rise in pervasive location-aware mobile gaming in which online/offline relationships and communities are traversed, the role of place and locality has gained much focus in Game Studies. This reflects some of the broader theoretical concerns around globalization and the “mobility turn” in sociology, anthropology, philosophy and media studies. In general, the role of place has taken on increasing significance as transnational cultural flows of various forms of mobility and immobility of people, capital and media form and transform.

At the same time, however, this is an important juncture in creating and archiving scholarly knowledge on this field. The particular role of the region in the rise of gaming industries is known and yet, due in part to linguistic and socio-cultural differences, much of the discussions have yet to filter into English language global gaming discourses. Many “Western” preliminary studies in the 1990s on the burgeoning field of Asian-Pacific gaming—particularly its online incarnations—took the form of industry reports and marketing forecasts produced by private American and European consultancies for commercial purposes. Accordingly, not only was this information highly specialized, public access to it was limited. Many of these reports did not position gaming within broader socio-cultural and techno-national frameworks. A case in point is the widespread failure to properly anticipate and account for why so many American online games like EverQuest would fail at launch in East Asian gaming territories during this period due to a failure to recognize and negotiate myriad culturally-specific protocols informing the seemingly “neutral” aspects of local business practices and game play preferences.

Game studies has gained much attention from researchers as a device that is an integral part of contemporary culture. It seems hard to avoid the ubiquity and pervasiveness of game studies and the games industry. However, much of the research has been directed from an American or European perspective, neglecting one of the most distinct and growing markets globally, the Asia–Pacific. By exploring gaming cultures in the region, insight c...