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. The restoration of imperial power in explicit reference to the monarchies of Europe, including the dramatic successes of Queen Victoria in England and Emperor William I of Germany, was part of this project. The newly empowered imperial family took a strong hand in producing a new Japanese Aesthetic project for the series of world’s fairs that took place during the end of the 19th century; this intentional project sought to preserve Japanese culture not through isolation but by subsuming the Western aesthetic tradition within a newly phrased Japanese tradition. The emergence of “Japonisme” across Europe and America signaled the success of that project and the continued importance of Japanese art within global culture. 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.

Video 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) were historically adopted by Video Games Studies without questioning the Eurocentric foundations upon which these theorizations rest–a particularly troubling trend considering the foundational role that Japan plays in the video game industry. 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: The Global (Dis)continuity edited by Anthony Y.H. Fung (2013), and Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) About Us edited by Christopher B. Patterson and Tara Fickle (2024). This critiques have shed light on the importance of the Asiatic within video games such as Patterson claim that “video games shed light on the hierarchies built by information technology across the globe while also creatively reimagining spaces in Asian and North America through a frivolous style of playful protest, an ‘erotics of play,’ wherein social meanings are constructed through pleasure, passion, and intimacy” (13). Likewise, Tara Fickle (2019) calls attention to the import of Ludo-Orientalism in gaming and race-making “wherein the design, marketing, and rhetoric of games shape how Asians as well as East-West relations are imagined and where notions of foreignness and racial hierarchies get reinforced” (3). 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, the long-form game projects of 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. We seek 15-20 minute paper presentations from academics at any stage of their career that address Japanese perspectives and critiques of Western worlding within video games. We ask for abstracts that contend with, but are not limited to, the following ideas:

• Aesthetic reflections on the reception of Western worlding. How has the Western video game industry enacted a worlding process? How are Japanese games engaging with and critiquing the Western worlding that Japan has continuously been subject to? 

• The histories of reference within video games to global literary, historical, and philosophical traditions. How has Japan’s place in cultural and political history informed these references? How have these references often gone undiscussed?

• Communities of interpretation around the globe and global communities of interpretation. What are the overlaps, divergences, and communications between English-speaking and Japanese gaming communities? How are these anticipated or produced by the games around which these communities form?

• Subversion, détournement, and Machinima in and around Japanese games. What strategies are employed to undermine Western ideological structures? How do games allow for these critiques in a broader community?

• The Japanese Asiatic in video games. How does the Asiatic inform gamic critiques of empire, imperialism, and colonialism? How are these critiques enacted through ludic aesthetics? 

Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words and a CV to DA Hall and Austin Anderson (DarksoulsMLA25@gmail.com). The Modern Language Association’s Annual Convention (MLA 2025) is being held from January 9-12, 2025 in New Orleans, LA. Deadline for submission: 20 March 2024. All participants must be MLA members by 7 April 2024.