Deadline Extended to 30 April 2025

Nintendo was founded just three years after the beginning of the Meiji era in 1889; 100 years later, the company dominated the global game market, having rescued the U.S. video game market in the wake of the 1983 crash. Considering Japanese cultural identity as isolated from a global context misunderstands a long history of active construction of that identity as global and globalizing. Yet, 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. There has been a recent rise in edited collections and academic manuscripts that seek to centralize the importance of Asian identity, Asian labor, and “the Asiatic” within video game culture (Patterson 2020). These include Open World Empire by Christopher 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 Patterson and Fickle (2024). 

Likewise, Japanese Game Studies has emerged as a sub-discipline specifically attuned to the cultural project of Japanese video games. Rachael Hutchinson, one of the central voices in the field, aptly points out that “Japanese games are often treated as mere export products, analyzed for how they mitigate cultural content for smoother global distribution” (162), but she has shown there are “deep-seated Japanese attitudes and values are not only visible in the content of [Japanese] videogames, but can also be experienced first-hand by the gamer, giving great insight into Japanese culture” in her monograph Japanese Culture Through Videogames (1). Other scholars like Benjamin Whaley, Mia Consalvo, Martin Picard, and Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon have explored the specific aesthetic practices and cultural critiques of various Japanese games. 

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. This collection calls for a 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 submissions that address Japanese perspectives and critiques of Western aesthetic traditions within video games. These might 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? 

In particular, we are interested in long-running game series that have had a major impact on game culture due to their popularity while simultaneously representing and critiquing the Western world. Though not comprehensive, we have provided a list of examples of the kind of game series we are interested in:

• Dark Souls/Bloodborne/Elden Ring 

• Metal Gear

• Legend of Zelda

• Final Fantasy

• Silent Hill

• Kingdom Hearts 

• Resident Evil

• Persona/Shin Megami Tensei

• Fire Emblem

• Castlevania

• Dragon Quest

• Chrono Trigger

• Nier

We would also be interested in submissions that consider artistic projects that are not contained to a single series, but are connected by particular artists or studios, i.e. the works of Fumito Ueda or games developed by Atlus co. This could also include more comparative submissions looking at lineages or genre traditions, including non-Japanese games that engage with Japanese game projects. In addition, we are open to submissions that examine the relationships between games and other media forms such as manga, anime, and analog games, and the longer media and genre histories that inform Japanese video game cultural production.

Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words and a CV to DA Hall and Austin Anderson (Japanesegamestudies@gmail.com) by 30 April 2025. 

The author/s of chapters selected for inclusion will be notified before 15 May 2025, and the first drafts of chapters will be due by 30 November 2025. The complete draft should be between 6000-8000 words, excluding abstract, references, and other information.