Professor Martin Roth 

ReplaCing Japan: An argument for nuance in Game Studies

The term “Japanese Videogames” is frequently used as a shorthand for a field vaguely defined by nationally confined production, culturally specific design practices and content characteristics, or local game cultures in Japan. While such shorthand may be justified in particular cases, or appear useful for the purpose of positioning research and establishing common ground for academic discourse, it also generalizes and homogenizes diverse and complex cultural and material realities.

I argue that, in order to take our research field seriously, we need to start unboxing Japanese videogames, that is, develop more nuanced, situated accounts of these cultural and material realities that can replace general notions of “Japaneseness” and reflect on the relevance of national frameworks in each individual context instead of taking it for granted from the start.

In this talk, I make a first step towards developing a nuanced understanding of the spatial realities of the production and distribution of videogames published on dedicated consumer platforms in Japan between 1985 and 2015. Drawing on a wide range of metadata from various sources, I show how regional genre distributions, regional title availability, production geographies and changing roles relevant to game production are characterized by diverse strategies, relations, and configurations that both cater to a national framework and transgress it. An in-depth exploration of the spatial contours of FromSoftware videogame production and distribution complements and provides a contrast to the macro perspective.

Reflecting on the data-centered approach applied in this project reveals that Japaneseness is not the only box we need to unwrap: “videogames” appears to be equally or even more complicated and unstable, challenging us once again to more nuance and specificity.

Professor Melanie Swalwell

Heterodox histories of homebrew (and other practices)

In my game historical scholarship, I have been concerned not just with homebrew but with notions of heterodoxy. As well as running counter to orthodoxy, heterodoxy brings with it the potential to upset received wisdom. My experience of researching and writing on homebrew was heterodox in several ways. To mention three: homebrew was a frequently-trivialised topic that few scholars had broached (involving school children, micros, and ‘clones’); hardware hacking necessitated theorising quite a different user and model of user engagement; and the Australian/New Zealand contexts saw me engaging with regions usually considered ‘peripheral’ in game history. These qualities encouraged me to ask broader questions about the critical potential of studying homebrew, and how it might facilitate moving beyond the first draft of game history, Huhtamo’s ‘chronicle’ era.

In this paper, I will mash up my homebrew book with the argument from “Heterodoxy in Game History” (2021), envisaging extension to other overlooked practices in gaming and beyond. Borrowing from microhistory, I suggest that generalising our questions and attempting accommodations between ‘local’ case studies and more global debates can not only disrupt what we thought we knew, but enable the writing of more connected (and heterodox) histories.