Paper short abstract:

This paper presents a work-in-progress study that aims to supplement the understanding of global and regional game cultures and industries by looking at the transmedia franchises in which East-Asian free-to-play games are developed and released.

Paper long abstract:

The globally successful free-to-play (F2P) mobile games Genshin Impact (HoYoverse 2020), Honor of Kings (TiMi Studio Group 2015), and Fate/Grand Order (Lasengle 2015) show that F2P games from the East-Asian region occupy a vital spot in the media consumption of everyday life (Chapple 2022). In light of the theme ‘Media in Relation’, this paper presents a work-in-progress study that aims to supplement the understanding of global and regional game cultures and industries by looking at the transmedia franchises in which East-Asian F2P games are developed and released. While F2P games from North American and Western European game industries are usually associated with lootboxes, random boxes that offer players items from a large pool of items (Holmes et al. 2017), F2P games from the East-Asian region (i.e., China, South Korea, and Japan) use a gacha mechanic, which incentives players to accumulate or buy resources in the game to obtain a randomized item or character (Woods 2022), and are therefore also known as ‘gacha games’.

The paper will particularly focus on the role of Japanese gacha games within larger transmedia franchises and their influence on digital games from and in East-Asia. According to Hartzheim (2019), licensed mobile games from Japan function to amplify existing larger franchises. They advertise the core texts to various audiences and actively stimulate player consumption for both in-game and products within the larger franchise (234). This paper will supplement this argument by demonstrating that gacha games have gradually become the primary text on to which surrounding franchises are based. Through a close reading of several gacha games, like Genshin Impact, and Disney Twisted Wonderland (f4samurai 2020), this paper engages with the issue that as gacha games become the centre of transmedia franchises, there is an increasing risk of exploitative immaterial labour of players across the franchises, which is common for the overall predatory trend of digital capitalism in which users are constantly monitored.

Paper short abstract:

This paper reformulates Japanese video games centered on establishing, developing and fulfilling intimacy with fictional characters as 'character intimacy games'. By this descriptor, the paper formulates a theory of videogames centered on developing parasocial phenomena as fulcrum of game traversal.

Paper long abstract:

In Japan, video games centered on developing imagined intimate relationships with anime-manga characters, chiefly known in the Anglosphere under the descriptor of 'visual novels', are predominantly collocated within the domain of Japanese pop culture and anime-manga media. This collocation within the existing umbrella of Japanese studies, obscures gamic dimension of said titles, in favor of collocation within the cognate domain of anime-manga media. Re-focusing on the gamic aspects of visual novels and similar games, on the other hand, opens the way for discussing how the inherently fuzzy and unstructured concept of intimacy - both a euphemism for sexual intercourse and a marker of both emotional and physical closeness - may be gamified and transformed into a framework for a distinct typology of video games, of which Japanese visual novels may be only one example.

While most of such video games do not offer significant possibilities for player interaction, limiting themselves to offering a branching plotline and multiple character-centered endings to the game, approaches to how such games are in fact gamifying parasocial phenomena. The term refers to one-sided media reception where one perceives mediated interaction with a character as no longer or only partially mediated, and the interaction becomes akin to one with an actual human being. Approaches in this sense within the domain of Japan-focused game studies have only just begun and have yet to integrate the decade-long experience of communication studies in approaching parasocial phenomena (cf. Liebers and Schramm 2019).

This paper reframes games centered around establishing, developing, and fulfilling intimate relationships with fictional characters as 'Character Intimacy Games', games where traversal is dependent and in function of players being capable of developing parasocial phenomena in response to in-game characters, and to proceed within the game based on parasocial feedback with and towards fictional characters.

References

Liebers, Nicole, and Holger Schramm. 2019. "Parasocial Interactions and Relationships with Media Characters - An Inventory of 60 Years of Research." Communication Research Trends 38 (2): 4-31.

Paper short abstract:

The proposed paper aimed to analyse the VR version of Kuro Tanino's play "The Dark Master" to enquire about the symbiotic relationship between the audience and the artist, relying on posthuman practice to fluidly change the perspective by seeing through different eyes.

Paper long abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic forced many performing artists to rethink the way to perform and propose their pieces, relying on technology to continue staying as close as possible to their audiences. In this sense, virtual events have been produced by connecting people to performers who delivered their works on video-sharing platforms and video telecommunication software and services even though the audience would not feel the same human closeness provided by in-person attendance. To technologically recover such a close experience, the employment of virtual reality can be an opportunity to allow the audiences not only to keep in touch with the performers but also to renew the concept of “technoculture” by putting the audience in the actor’s shoes.

By taking into account the VR reworking of the psychiatrist-turned-director/playwright Kuro Tanino’s work “The Dark Master”, the discussion will highlight how the use of technology in theatre can create a symbiotic relationship between the audience and the artist, relying on the posthuman practice to fluidly change the perspective by seeing through different eyes. The analysis of this experimental performance would underline how the implementation of technology in performing arts can lead us to inquire about the aspects of our society and the individual’s conditions under a new viewpoint by thinking of a crisis as an opportunity to question our existence through a technological mindset.