Skip to main content

Bibliography: " Refracted Visions：Transmedia Storytelling in Japanese Games" (2018) by Rachel Hutchinson


HUTCHINSON, Rachael. 2018. Refracted Visions：Transmedia Storytelling in Japanese Games. 立命館大学ゲーム研究センター. http://jairo.nii.ac.jp/0026/00010502.

Hutchinson builds upon the influential transmedia study discourses, particularly, on Henry Jenkins’ transmedia storytelling, and furthering this discourse by suggesting that transmedia is a way to better understand games, as well as how a set of games could function as a common unit addressing a unified idea. To be precise, she explains the action of viewing media as text in relation to each other and in relation to society, where the prefix “trans” implies the possibility of new creation via boundary crossing and connectivity. This interpretation of “transmedia storytelling” points to a nation’s understanding of itself as told in various kinds of stories across various kinds of games.

In addition, Hutchinson examines the reflections of transmedia storytelling within the videogame discourse, wherein, she asserts that through cultural reading across genres, we can see various concerns and anxieties leap out as consistent topics of videogame stories, such as: war and war memory; colonialism and colonial legacy of the Japanese Empire; the mission to define the Japanese “Self”; nuclear power; bioethics and bioengineering; and social breakdown.

In conclusion, Hutchinson calls for a rethinking of “transmedia storytelling” both within a single game text and across a number of game texts from different genres and narrative structure. Through this, she points out that Japanese games are artistic products reflecting any particular time and space; a refracted vision of the Japanese social, cultural and historical context; and that these games are multi-layered and disjointed like Japan’s own history, thus making it necessary in order to understand Japan’s 21st century.

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