Videogames Grow Up: Offline Issues in East Asian Gaming

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

This interregional panel traces the relations between contemporary videogames and sociocultural issues across several regions and gaming cultures in East Asia, from youth gameplay practices in Korean mobile gaming, to issues of bullying and marginalization in networked play, to racializing discourses and the representation of natural disasters in Japanese console games. As 2015 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the debut of the Nintendo Entertainment System in North America, this timely panel takes as its premise the understanding that videogame design is indebted to political, ethical, and cultural ideologies, and that gameplay is an effective prism for looking at social relations at the local and transnational levels.

This unique collection of papers analyzes both the content and real-world ramifications of different kinds of videogames from a variety of methodological approaches. Dal Yong Jin utilizes interviews to take a broad survey of the rise of smartphone use in Korea and its effect on local youth gaming practices. Florence Chee’s comparative ethnographic fieldwork elucidates some of the effects of this social gaming with regard to bullying in Korean and Japanese online play. Rachael Hutchinson analyzes the racialization of Korean characters in Japanese games, while Ben Whaley discusses how the earthquake simulations in the Japanese game Disaster Report (2002) helped real-life victims of the 3.11 Fukushima disaster. With a particular attention to translingual and transcultural linkages, this panel aims not only to apprehend the complex social narratives of videogames, but also to articulate the critical stakes of what happens when the game switches off.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing

Session Organizer

• Ben Whaley, University of British Columbia

Chair

• Ben Whaley, University of British Columbia

Individual Presentations

• The Gamification of Mobile Communication: A Socio-Cultural Analysis of Korean Mobile Gaming in the Era of Smartphones - Dal Yong Jin, Simon Fraser University

• A Room of One’s Own? Explorations of Korean and Japanese Networked Play in Public Spaces - Florence Chee, Loyola University Chicago

• The Korean Other in Japanese Videogames - Rachael Hutchinson, University of Delaware

• Virtual Earthquakes and Real-World Survival in Japan’s Disaster Report Videogame - Ben Whaley, University of British Columbia

Discussant

• Hyung-Gu Lynn, University of British Columbia