Skip to main content

Bibliography: "Convergence and Globalization in the Japanese Videogame Industry" (2009) by Mia Consalvo


Consalvo, Mia. 2009. "Convergence and Globalization in the Japanese Videogame Industry". Cinema Journal. 48 (3): 135-141.

Consalvo alludes to the convergence of content across media platforms, and the joining together of media producers and consumers in the production and negotiation of that content – through user-generated content, greater feedback mechanisms for consumers, or fan-driven media campaigns. Her discussion on the role of convergence is divided into two sections: (1) convergence as content moving across platforms; and (2) converged culture. She also derives from Mizuko Ito’s work on media mix, “which includes games as one component of a broader media ecology that includes anime, manga, trading card games, toys, and character merchandise”, as one form of creating a larger narrative within the universe of a certain franchise. In addition to a fictional media universe drawing from a theme or character to create a diversity of content across multiple media platforms, convergence might entail that process working across regions and markets as well, carefully adapted not only for a technical platform, but for particular communities or nation states. Consalvo concludes that Japanese game companies have over beyond the creation of basic product lines to more sophisticated and inter-related products, as well as, from the export of crudely localized products to more carefully “culturalized” ones. This essay will be helpful in the discussion of the video game as text within the Japanese Media Mix, and how the games are carefully selected to be produced and represent the aforementioned media mix.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bibliography: " Game Design as Narrative Architecture" (2004) by Henry Jenkins

Jenkins, Henry. 2004. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game , edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 118–30. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. In this article, Jenkins examines games less as stories than as spaces ripe with narrative possibility. He list downs the characteristics of games as defined by current Ludology versus Narratology debates such as: (1) not all games tell stories but they do have narrative aspirations, follows genre entertainment and previous narrative experiences; (2) narrative analysis need not be prescriptive; (3) games should not be reduced to the experience of a story; and (4) if games tell stories, they are unlikely to tell them in the same ways that other media tell stories for games as a medium, specifically, is what distinguishes them from other narrative traditions. He also lists down the problems and limitations within the current game study discourses, often pointing out how ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Precis + Critical Response Paper: " The Imaginary" (2006) Chapter 1 part 1 by Claudia Strauss

Reevaluating Scholarships (October 17, 2019) In Claudia Strauss’s article “The Imaginary” (2006), she gives a detailed discussion and analysis of the major scholarships in cultural studies regarding the matter of the Imaginaries, such as the works of Castoriadis, Lacan, Anderson, and Taylor, in order to map out the essential arguments that are more popularly being used/cited in cultural studies research, before she examines how Ivy uses these concepts with regard to the national-imaginaries with the Japanese socio-cultural sphere. In summary, Strauss explains that Castoriadis was concerned with "concepts of cultural abstraction, reification and homogenization, while Lacan used the concept of the imaginary to explain fantasies, and Anderson and Taylor used the concept for explaining cultural models as potentially valuable when used with person-centered ethnographic methods to study real rather than abstract cultural subjects” (323). Despite the summation of the the...
Post a Comment
Read more

Precis: "The Invention of the Martial Arts: Kano Jigoro and Kodokan Judo" (1998) by Inoue Shun

In Inoue Shun’s “The Invention of the Martial Arts: Kano Jigoro and Kodokan Judo” (1998), Inoue explores the modern invention, and subsequent reinvention, of the Japanese martial arts by an examination of Kodokan judo (163). This is done through a detailed discussion of Kano’s decision and active participation of creating the new martial arts such as: conception, process of modernization through scientification of the martial arts, promotions and competitions, institutionalizations and adoptions into various agencies (government institutions, universities, etc.), establishment of the Kodokan Cultural Association (promotion of the basic principles of Kodokan judo as well as serving as a legitimate infrastructure and governing body that actively promotes the new martial arts ideology), its inevitable re-invention post-Kano years by the Dai Nihon Butokukai (leading to an ultranationalistic role), and finally, a return to the sportification of budo post-WW2 in order to escape censorship wh...
Post a Comment
Read more