Japan

Gamevironments, 2016

This paper reveals an affective and nostalgic foundational component of the “Japanese Role-Playing-Game (JRPG)” video game genre through an investigation of its history and use as seen on gaming blogs, forums, and videos. As a result of new technology, like the Microsoft Xbox Console, hitting the market in the early 2000s, the term JRPG started becoming popular as consoles and computers gained the capacity to play games that were previously exclusive to either one or the other. Prior to that, the dominant producer of video game consoles was Japan. As Western-made RPGs, which were generally made for computers, became increasingly more available for console play as a result of console-computer convergence, the term “JRPG” became a way for gamers to distinguish games that “felt” similar to RPGs made for Japan-made consoles in the 80s and 90s. Now the “Japan” aspect of the genre’s name is a way of negotiating identity and memory in a rapidly changing technological landscape, rather than being used specifically to identify a game’s country of origin. This genre, which runs counter to typical genre organizational schemes based on either game-play mechanics or narrative themes, further illuminates how memory and nostalgia can affect how players categorize their gaming worlds.

Video gaming is one of the fastest growing sectors in the global market. The international games market will reach USD $110 billion by 2017. Although the economic scale of video gaming is continually increasing in Turkey, the country has few gaming companies. Turkey has the ability to be a competitive player in the global video gaming market; however it faces a number of challenges. This article analyzes the current status of the Turkish video gaming sector, including examining its inherent problems and proposing some solutions. The findings are based on a national survey conducted in 2012. Turkey has a large youth population, presenting a good market for gaming companies. The paper finds that there is an urgent need to develop an entrepreneurial ecosystem within Turkey. Pre-incubation centers would play a central role in such developments.

Digital Gaming Industry in less than 40 years has grown immensely. In less than a decade electronic games industry has grown to a 40 billion dollars global industry. This is a huge share of the global market. The impacts of it on business models are non-deniable; many of the global companies are using electronic games in their campaigns even sponsoring indie games. Digital games are in everyone’s life’s no difference of age, and various programs and micro markets in games give people the opportunity to start businesses or make a living from the games or items in game they have created. Gaming industry has an impact on global scale to any market you can imagine, researches show that the people and companies are more involving in this industry. In future, digital gaming industry will be more and more involved in our lives also in markets and nearly everyone will be involved in some way to this industry. Market like music industry is already involved in gaming industry also film industry has started to be more involved in games like actors are actually acting in-game. Reason for this review is that to create the foundation to find the answer that the Digital Gaming Industry’s impact and also the future in world market. The amount of jobs this Industry creates and revenues that it generates for countries economy.

In cultural studies, the center – periphery (CP) model of information flow is used to describe culture and media imperialism, and most commonly to visualize the relationship between the West and other regions of the world. Culture and media imperialism, as defined by John Tomlinson, is the unidirectional flow of culture from the dominant to the dominated (Parks & Kumar 2002). However, in the digital age when things are changing quickly as more people get access to the Internet, the model is not always true. A critical difference between traditional and new media, represented by the Internet, is that the consumers are no longer passive (Jenkins 2006). This means the flow of information is no longer predictable and everyone can be a media consumer and a creator at the same time. Within new media, video games are a topic that generated many news, discussions and user-generated contents. Similar to social networks, music and other forms of digital media, video games are influenced by various factors such as culture, economy or even politics. To evaluate whether the CP model remains valid in the digital age, the essay will analyze these case studies of Japanese video games. The analysis is divided into 3 parts: Japanese cultural influence, Japanese cultural barrier and the cultural development created by new media, with the focus on Japanese video games as they play a big part in developing the gaming industry and culture. Naturally, these games have significant effects on the flow of information in the digital age.

During the post-9/11 era we have witnessed the rise of war-themed digital games, which are increasingly produced and distributed on a massive global scale. This new form of 'militainment' re-formulates ‘the military-entertainment complex’ industrial model, and by repeatedly simulating historical/present/fictional war events and adopting militaristic stories, creates an adrenaline-pumping interactive gaming experience that the global gamers find very difficult to resist. Before 2011 the most iconic war-themed first-person-shooter (FPS) digital game, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, achieved a new milestone of more than 20 million copies sold globally. After the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops, the Facebook COD group became one of the top 20 fastest growing Facebook communities in 2010. At the time of writing this thesis, this network community had already attracted more than 10 million fans worldwide. Besides the well-known Call of Duty series, other FPS titles like Medal of Honor, Fallout, and Battlefield series are all fed into the global gamers’ growing appetite for this so-called ‘shoot’em’all’ genre. Within academia, scholars from different research disciplines also realized the importance of gaming and have been trying to approach this conflict-based digital game culture from various angles. The war-themed genre FPS is frequently challenged by people’s negative impression towards its unpleasant essence and content; questioning its embedded political ideologies, the violent sequences involved in the gameplay and its socio-cultural influences/effects to individual and community etc. However, the wide range of critical debates in this field has reflected the growing interest of scholars in the complex political relationship between military and entertainment sectors and industries, and the embedded P.R. network that is running behind the games’ industrial structure and cultural production (see Wark 1996, Herz 1997, Derian 2001, Stockwell and Muir 2003, Lenoir and Lowood 2005, Leonard 2007, Turse 2008, Ottosen 2009). Despite widespread academic interests in the subject, few researchers have paid attention to the gamers who are the ones truly engaged themselves to this genre. If we look at the research within game studies today, less analysis is primarily focused on this unique shooter-gamer culture. In this regard, this research adopts qualitative research methods to explore the gamers’ feelings, attitudes, and their experiences in the war-themed FPS genre. In terms of the research methods used, an online questionnaire was launched to collect responses from 433 gamers across different countries, and 11 in-depth face-to-face interviews with a community of COD gamers were also conducted in Taiwan between 2010 and 2011. The data which has emerged from the two research methods reveals gamers’ perceptions about war games’ time narrative and realism. Based on the interviews, the research analyses East Asian gamers’ construction of meanings in this ‘western genre’ and provides some theoretical reflections about their transnational FPS gameplay experience.

2012

Mobile phones have been game-enabled since 1997. However, it seems that mobile phone games are only taking off now, in the 2010s. With mobile phones and, specially, smartphones, reaching critical mass games, in their mobile form are accessible to more and more people, young and old, men and women. Angry Birds, first released for iOS in December 2009, was the best-selling mobile game in 2011 (Reisinger 2011). In order to understand who is playing Angry Birds, how, and why, the author conducted a series of interviews with a group of Angry Birds players. The results of those interviews are here analyzed according to perspectives arisen from those conversations. Two main axis of analysis resulted from the interviews: gender gap and gaming background. This study should be relevant to broaden the thinking about mobile games as meaningful experiences to players in different demographic groups.

The Video Game Explosion (edited by Mark J.P. Wolf, Westport, Conn. Greenwood Press), 2008