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CFP: Geemu and media mix: theoretical approaches of Japanese video games

Geemu and media mix: theoretical approaches of Japanese video games

Edited by Martin Picard and Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon

http://www.kinephanos.ca/2012/geemu-media-mix/

Kinephanos is a bilingual web-based academic journal. Focusing on questions involving cinema and popular media, Kinephanos encourages interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. The journal’s primary interests are movies and popular TV series, video games, emerging technologies and fan cultures. The preferred approaches include cinema studies, communication theories, religion sciences, philosophy, cultural studies and media studies.

Theme

Despite the global impact of games and series such as Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985-2012), Final Fantasy (Square Enix, 1987-2012) or Pokémon(Nintendo, 1995-2012), the theoretical stakes of Japanese video games (terebi geemu or simply geemu in Japanese) has managed to only capture the interest of a small group of fans of Japanese popular culture. At first glance, it may be difficult to identify specificities in video games made in Japan other than with the use of some loose categorisations ( J-RPG for example). But are there differences between games coming from particular countries or socio-cultural contexts? If one admits dissimilarities between Japanese and American or European games, what could these be and what could they mean for the gamers?

One way to better identify Japanese video games’ specificity could be to put in perspective their broad integration to an extremely dynamic media environment, the media mix (media mikkusu). While acknowledging video games’ strong ties to manga and anime, one might thus start by investigating this media mix itself, and subsequently, video games’ place within it in order to achieve this goal. Media mix, as Marc Steinberg demonstrates in Anime’s Media Mix (The University of Minnesota Press, 2012), is a popular culture and industry term that has evolved considerably from the 1960s understanding of various media being used in accordance with an advertising goal towards the practice of releasing interconnected works for a wide range of media ‘platforms’ (manga, anime, movies, etc.) and commodity types, generally through the promotion of a main character (kyara) and an attractive fictional world. From their introduction in this media environment at the beginning of the 1980s, Japanese video games are now increasingly getting both integrated and shaped by this system while still being understudied in regard to the ways in which its different modes of production and distribution affect gamers (not only in the actual play activity, but also in their consumption modes and cultural practices), and games’ content.

Therefore, this special issue aims to fill a lack present both in theories and analyses of (trans)national and (trans)cultural aspects of video games in the game studies community, as well as in interdisciplinary studies about the Japanese media culture. Admittedly, video games and popular culture are increasingly becoming subjects of interest within academia. Nevertheless, very few publications and researches have dealt with an examination of video games from a Japanese perspective, or even taken into account the possible specificities of Japanese video games. Since a theory of Japanese video games is cruelly lacking in the academic sphere, papers for this special issue would be an invaluable contribution to the fields of game and media studies, as well as Japanese studies.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

- Japanese video games and Japaneseness
- The specificity of video games within the media mix
- Aesthetics and game design in Japanese video games
- Analyses of contents, themes or recurring motifs in Japanese video games
- Japanese video games and otaku culture
- History of video games in Japan and study of its home market (Japanese video game industry; geemu sentaa [game centers]; cultural practices and preferred genres of Japanese gamers, etc.)
- Transmedia circulations in the media mix
- Amateur media mix productions (doujin geemu)

While Kinephanos privileges publication of thematic issues, we encourage writers to submit papers exceeding the theme, which will be published in each issue.

How to submit?

Please send an abstract of up to 1000 words, in English or French, by February 1st, 2013, to:

picard.martin@gmail.com and jeremie.p.gagnon@gmail.com

The abstract must include the title, the topic and the object(s) that will be studied. Please include bibliographical references, your name, email address, and your institutional affiliation.

Following our approbation sent to you by email (2-3 weeks after the deadline), please send us your completed article by July 1st, 2013.

Editorial rules

Kinephanos is a peer-reviewed Web journal. Each article is evaluated by double-blind peer review. Kinephanos does not retain exclusive rights of published texts. However, material submitted must not have been previously published elsewhere. Future versions of the texts published in other periodicals must reference Kinephanos as its original source.

Production demands

All texts must be written in MLA style. 6,000 words maximum (excluding references but including endnotes) with 1.5 spacing, Times New Roman 12pt fonts. Footnotes must be inserted manually in the text as follows : … (1) and references must be placed within the text as follows (Jenkins 2000, 134). Please include a bibliography with all your references, and 5 keywords, at the end of the text.

For the editorial guidelines, refer to the section Editorial Guidelines.
http://www.kinephanos.ca/politique-editoriale/

Kinephanos accepts papers in English and in French

 

Call for Papers: Media, Fans, and The Sacred: Neoreligiosity Seeks Institution

Call for paper proposals

The deadline for submissions for this issue is August 1st, 2012
Edited by Marc Joly-Corcoran and Vincent Mauger

Kinephanos is a bilingual web-based journal. Focusing on questions involving cinema and popular media, Kinephanos encourages interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. The journal’s primary interests are movies and popular TV series, video games, emerging technologies and fan cultures. The preferred approaches include cinema studies, communication theories, religion sciences, philosophy, cultural studies and media studies.

Theme

Kinephanos’ fourth issue aims to explore the relationship between the sacred, the mythological motifs in modern popular fictions, and fandom. Our goal is to understand how the sacred, a pure human emotion, is disembodied from the ‘official’ religious institutions – at least in the Western countries – in order to be reinvested in secular cultural activities like ‘going to see a movie’ or ‘playing a video game’. Eliade wrote: “Movies, a ‘factory of dreams’, are highly inspired by countless mythological motifs, such as the struggle between the Hero and the Monster, battles and initiation ordeals, figures and exemplary patterns” (freely translated from Le sacré et le profane, 174). These mythological stories, highly symbolics, exist since ancient times. However, we would like to address the following issue: how the immersive experience in a work of fiction, now facilitated with various technological media forms (movies, videogames, television shows, etc.), changes our own relationship with the emotion of the sacred sparked in people’s life.

We propose to identify this emotion with the term “neoreligiosity”. An English scholar of fan culture, Matt Hills, says in this regard: “Neoreligiosity implies that the proliferation of discourses of ‘cult’ within media fandom cannot be read as the ‘return’ of religion in a supposedly secularised culture” (Fan Culture, 2002, 119). Indeed, putting side by side the experience of the fan with the religious experience might seem appropriate. Due to a lack of words, needed by fans to describe their own affective experience with their favorite movies, the use of religious terminology seems logical, without calling upon religious institutions structure. Hills quotes Cavicchi: “(…) fans are aware of the parallels between religious devotion and their own devotion. At the very least, the discourse of religious conversion may provide fans with a model for describing the experience of becoming a fan” (2002, 118). This issue of Kinephanos proposes to explore how the sacred, the religiosity, and the neoreligiosity play out in modern popular fictions, and with those who experience it : the fans.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to;

• Sacred and reappropriation (fans creations : fanfics, fanfilms, etc.);
• Social network, sharing interests through Internet;
• Reception, modern and contemporary myths (Star Wars, Matrix, Lord of the Rings, etc.);
• Cinema and religion, displacement of the sacred;
• Videogames, replayability as a tool of self-exploration (Mass Effect, Heavy Rain, morality system, etc.);
• Revelation, epiphany, and the fan’s experience;
• Cinema and videogames, mythological motifs between the lines; vestiges of the sacred;
• Repetition viewing as a ritual, ‘cult fandoms’ and television shows (Star Trek, Doctor. Who, etc.);
• Archetypal figures in the modern mythologies (Order and Chaos, Lovecrafts’s Great Old Ones, the hero’s journey (monomyth) in Hollywood movies, etc.).

While Kinephanos privileges publication of thematic issues, we strongly encourage writers to submit articles exceeding the theme which will be published in each issue.

How to submit?

Abstracts of 1000 words including the title, the topic and the object(s) that will be studied. Please include bibliographical references, your name, email address and your primary field of study.

Send submissions (in French or English) by August 1st, 2012 to:

marc.joly@umontreal.ca and vincent.mauger@arv.ulaval.ca

Following our approbation sent to you by email (2-3 weeks later after deadline), please send us your completed article by December 1st, 2012.

Editorial rules

Kinephanos is a peer-reviewed Web journal. Each article is evaluated by double-blind peer review. Kinephanos does not retain exclusive rights of published texts. However, material submitted must not have been previously published elsewhere. Future versions of the texts published in other periodicals must reference Kinephanos as its original source.

Production demands

All texts must be written in MLA style. 6,000 words maximum (excluding references but including endnotes) with 1.5 spacing, Times New Roman fonts 12pt, footnotes must be inserted manually in the text as follow : … (1), references must be within the text as follow (Jenkins 2000, 134), a bibliography with all your references, and 5 keywords at the end of the text.

For the editorial guidelines, refer to the section Editorial Guidelines.

Kinephanos accepts articles in French and in English

*

New Facebook Research Project

As I sit and wait for my committee to work their way through my dissertation, I have embarked on a new research project with Dr. Mia Consalvo and Irene Serrano Vazquez. We have two projects in the works at the moment, one looking at how and why people play Facebook games with family, and the other on Facebook player’s perceptions of cheating in Facebook games. We put together a short survey combining the two projects and would love for it if you could take a few minutes (the survey does not take more than 10 minutes – we’ve tested it!), and if you could pass the link along to anyone you know who plays Facebook games, we would be really appreciate the feedback!

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/facebookgamesresearch

Titles

Coming up with a title for my dissertation seems to be harder than when I named my children. How wrong is that!? =)

A New Year: Endings & Beginnings

I started this blog during my undergrad. It started out as a place that I could ramble on about the stuff I was reading, mixed with random thoughts and sometimes incoherent babble. I have tried making this a group blog for a while, enabling friends (who blogged at the time) to blog here in an attempt to get different content and viewpoints, but that faded out. I have blogged as coursework (on other blogs) and blogged for advertising (academic advertising) but most of all, I have been blogging for myself. Blogging is the only place you can talk to yourself in public and not look crazy.

One of the things that made me sad over the years is that the further along I got in my coursework, the less I talked about the work I was doing. Over time, identity management online has changed and become a lot more of a focal point for most people in any field. Getting fired over Facebook photos, or not hired because of an opinion posted to your personal blog, these things – among other reasons – are part of the reason my blogging has waned – become guarded even.

But I really want that to stop. I am in the last weeks (I HOPE!) of writing my dissertation. I am banking on a March 1st submission deadline with BIG HOPES to defend sometime in and around May/June. My committee is in place (I believe) and my support team is set to go. I want to start blogging again. Really and truly rambling about things that matter to me – a thought, an annoyance, a great book or a promising conference. I want to read again. Books that pull me in, challenge my ideas and make me really think about the world around me.

But what I really want for 2012 – is to start playing games again. I am writing a chapter on Fable 2 for my dissertation, and have been spending a few days over the last week refreshing my memory (one of the downfalls of doing all of the playing BEFORE the writing) and – I won’t get into the flaws of the game in terms of my own personal tastes – but it really made me miss playing mmo’s. I hope to get over the “nothing will ever compare to Everquest” feeling that plagued my runs at DaoC, Lineage 2, and WoW. I want to find something that pulls me in but doesn’t hold my hand. I want to explore places and meet new people.

As someone who has been quite out of the loop mmo’ wise, besides Star Wars, anything on the horizon that I should keep my eyes and schedule open for?

 

 

Still Here

But sprinting to the finish line of my dissertation (if you can call a March 1 deposit a sprint). The world and words have been muddy – life trudges on, bringing with it its trials and tribulations that attempt to derail you from your master plan. I hope to make it to the end (which in reality, is only the beginning…). It’s almost 2012 …. crazy…

Speed of Technological Change: Rant v. 2.3

As mentioned in my last post (or two), I have been feeling quite overwhelmed with the speed that technology has been developing. Well. To be fair, I have no problems with the speed of development, just the speed of expected upgrading on behalf of the consumer. This goes for pretty all consumer products – not just tech stuff… I remember way back when we bought our first “used” appliance, a fridge – we went to a second hand store and I remember them telling me that if I wanted a fridge that would last (all eco/environment issues asides), then our best bet was to buy one that was made BEFORE 1985. Although not as environmentally sound, they were built to last forever – while the newer models are designed with a 10-12 yr life in mind so that people could ‘upgrade’ and buy more.

I feel the same way with my Ipod – the first one I had, I got in 2003 – a nice iVideo – I adored it – until the drive died in it about 2 years later. Then I bought an ipod Classic – a few short years later – the drive died, and I had to replace it. So on and so forth… I now have a nano – i love the size and the features, but fear it is an expensive two year solution to my personal musical listening needs.

But this is not a rant about apple. It is about the speed that we are expected to upgrade and change. This expectation is oddly in conflict with the concept of cell phone contracts … Case in point – my daughters both have cell phones on 3 year contracts. Yes, I know that’s bad of me, but for the phones they wanted, I could not afford the purchase outright… Before I go any further with this story – I just want to say, I hate all cell phone companies equally, and everyone has a story why XX company rocks or sucks…. moving on…. So – When I was with Rogers, I could upgrade my phone almost every 6 months, but it would reset the contract term. Boo Rogers. I eventually went to Bell. I can make changes to my phones without affecting my contract, but even having 3 phones on 3 year contracts (2 of which are smartphones), I am not offered ANY upgrading for the entire three years! (I have argued and asked for explanations many times). The thing is, I wouldn’t care so much (I don’t need to upgrade), if the companies themselves weren’t constantly shoving new phones down our throats and convincing the general population that every two weeks you need XX new phone for XX new service on XX new network blah blah blah (4g LTE anyone!?)

So – my youngest daughter is stuck with her Samsung Reclaim – an perfectly acceptable phone for a 13 yr old (when she got it) but now that she is 15 she wants something new and hip…

For myself, I am happy with my phone (much to the chagrin of a few of my friends). I love my blackberry. But they seem to be suffering from this upgrade upgrade upgrade mentality – fixing things that aren’t broken, and changing things to compete with other smartphones (namely the iphone. Well, RIM, I will tell you – if I wanted and iPhone, I would get one – not use some half-assed feature mimicking version of it. I chose the Blackberry for its own merit…). So, for the last few weeks, I’ve been getting notices to upgrade to os v.6.0. I have had the last version for quite some time – I like it a lot. It served all the purposes I needed – and I was happy. But I decided to not be a crankpot, and try the upgrade. WELL….. after a few days of trying to learn a new interface (up until this point, all the other upgrades were mostly back end), losing my simple interface theme, and constantly being told that I did not have enough space on my device to open xx website (the OS takes SO MUCH more space than the old one), I decided to downgrade. Yup. I want to be left behind. I am tired of running the upgrade rat race — at least for now.

It’s not that I hate things change. I am ok with change – I like change. I like new and shiny things too, it’s that the change is happening faster and faster that it is getting hard to keep up.

Tech Confession

My name is Kelly and I’m a PC…. yes. I know … it seems that this is cause for shame in the world. I am surrounded by mac advocates, and they just can’t understand why I use a PC, constantly informing me of all its shortcomings and how much better my (tech) life would be if I would just make the switch. I have been told that I need an iphone. Even if I am happy with my blackberry, I don’t know how much I actually ‘need’ an iphone until I have one – then I would realize how much I’ve been lacking without one. I want to say I have never, since 1994 (when I bought my own computer), been infected with any computer virus – and I couldn’t play EverQuest on a mac in 1999, and my blackberry itself is overkill for my needs.

To those who keep trying to convince me, I say two things: I am an academic whose primary tech function is to write. I use the internet for fun (and some scholarly research), and I use MS word (or even google docs) to work. I understand that there are 100 things Mac’s are better for – if you are a composer or work in an area where graphics are key for example. Some around me claim that Mac is better for game design… but I believe this to be specific for those wanting to make games for the iphone… in my experience, many ‘a game designer use a pc… but that’s not my gripe (honestly, I could care less what other people use for things I do not do – and I don’t mean that rudely).

My second point is – what I don’t understand – how can everyone afford to own a Mac? I have to admit, that is probably my biggest deterrent. The price differential – for someone like me whose primary function is internet surfing and text creation – I cannot justify $1,000 minimum for something that suits my functional needs for $400. Don’t get me wrong – I understand spec for spec, they are not the same machines whatsoever. And who can deny mac’s sex-ay aesthetic and lightweight portability? But whenever I look at my budget and my needs, I cannot even begin to justify the cost.  Hell, I cannot even find it in my student budget at all (which brings me back to – how can every undergrad and their dog own a mac – let alone an iphone too! lol)

Perhaps there is some deep (deep deep deep) rooted tech envy. I doubt it though. For other areas in my life, I have tried to be reasonable (with the exception of shoes and face cream). We drove a toyota Echo for years because it sufficiently served our functional need. Sure, it would have been nice to have … well … any other car – but in the end, why pay more for something you don’t really need. It’s really all about the cost to need ratio.

In the end, I will continue to be a pc girl in a mac world. Hope you still want to be my friend

What Did I Just Say?

I know age is relative, but lately I have been finding myself saying things that I never thought I would say…

Every time I watch MuchMusic’s top 20 videos with my daughters, I inevitably say  ”back in my day” … never fail.  I find myself telling them that “back when I was young” the videos had more variety, there was less gratuitous sex, blah, blah, blah. Never thought I would be that mom, but I am happy to be a muchretro subscriber….

I drive youngest daughter crazy when we go shopping because 80% of the styles at H&M or Forever 21 are clearly leftovers from the 80′s and ’90′s ..I mean, there not even “redesigned” or a modern version … I swear!  Of course when we go shopping I have to point this out in some sort of annoying mom form like “oh my, I wouldn’t even wear that when it was in style the first time” or better “I think I still have this in a box in the basement” …

But the worse came out of my mouth last night – when we were watching television, and a commercial for “America’s Fastest Network” came on (can’t remember the company) and they were announcing 4g LTE – and I looked at my daughter and asked her “what the hell is that!? I thought it was a 4g network”? Her response of course rolled off her tongue like a true teenager, with a heavy sigh as she utters “mooooooom, its LITE – like, you know, FASTER than just 4g…” and what comes out of my mouth next stunned even myself as I muttered “hell, I haven’t even made it to 4g yet – can’t they just leave things alone for a while” ….

Am I really getting that old!?