Happy New Year, 皆さん！ I feel like the blog dropped off in the last few months of 2009, but I finished up all of my PhD applications (albeit having to drop a couple schools in the end) with ease, so hopefully I’ll be back in the blogging business during the rest of this month! Look forward to (and I’m actually, finally, serious about this) new essays, commentary, and — OMG, really? Yes, really! — new audio podcasts!
In the meantime, take a look at this lecture by Mia Consalvo, who’s currently a Visiting Professor in the Comparative Media Studies department at MIT (where I work). Last semester, she gave a presentation on “western otaku”: American video gamers who interact with Japanese players and culture through MMORPGs. It’s a good, detailed talk, and you can even see me ask a lengthy set of questions at 64m10s. Enjoy!
From Nintendo’s first Famicom system, Japanese consoles and videogames have played a central role in the development and expansion of the digital game industry. Players globally have consumed and enjoyed Japanese games for many reasons, and in a variety of contexts. This study examines one particular subset of videogame players, for whom the consumption of Japanese videogames in particular is of great value, in addition to their related activities consuming anime and manga from Japan. Through in-depth interviews with such players, this study investigates how transnation fandom operates in the realm of videogame culture, and how a particular group of videogames players interprets their gameplay experience in terms of a global, if hybrid, industry.
Mia Consalvo is a visiting associate professor in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT. She is the author of Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames and is co-editor of the forthcoming Blackwell Handbook of Internet Studies.
Long talk, so I haven’t finished listening to it. Does it talk about the whole BR problem with some of those light-weight freemium MMORPGs like Pangya?
By BR, do you mean Brazilian, lol? No, her main focus is JP/US relations, but I didn’t even consider that, though it’s totally a nuisance, hahaha.
Hi Alex,
明けましておめでとうございます! Interesting video, lots of interesting points when it came to games. I just finished playing Final Fantasy 13 about four days before, so I was pleasantly surprised by the focus of the talk.
First of all, I would just like to say that it’s great seeing research done by people who have experienced the game themselves, and that some of the data is from a personal perspective. I could imagine it being difficult to understand trends in the fandom (i.e moe) just from a surface understanding and exposure to the topic, although it certainly wouldn’t be a complete hinderance. It seems to me to add a bit more credibility to the research.
There’s a few interesting points that she brings up, one of which is the topic of localization. After completing FF13, I noticed that all of the trophies I received were in English, and that they had changed a significant amount of names (notably class roles). Although this sounds like a natural fact (culture and language must be taken into account when translating), it brings up a secondary issue, one that I think may not necessarily salient to both casual fans and researchers if they haven’t had much exposure to it. I’m talking about the communication between fanbases when fans of one country (say Japan) attempt to interact with members of another (America), and the resulting difficulty of having to work out which terms were in fact created in the localization, and which terms were familiar to the person of the other country. Of course, it was mentioned in the video that those who merely consume and are less interested in the cultural exchange have no problem with this, but I think it’s a very important dynamic in the globalization of video games that needs to be explored. Not only is it a fan-to-fan sort of relationship, but it involves the choices made by the companies as well. Just for example, Final Fantasy 4 was released as Final Fantasy 2 in the West, since the Final Fantasy 2 and 3 had -not- translated. So when American fans talk about FF2 with a Japanese fan, their could be a serious gap in knowledge with these, sometimes unknown, changes. Of course, as a fansubber, these issues are constantly a problem in our work.
Another interesting idea she covers is the cultural norms between players from different cultures. In my opinion this has always been a very salient distinction between players of the actual games (I played World of Warcraft for four years, and various MMOs prior to that), but is one that is just now being quantitatively explored by researchers. It seems to me that this problem cannot necessarily be placed in categories, but there are a spectrum of different types of players. I’m specifically thinking of my experiences with foreigners in World of Warcraft, ranging from Chinese gold farmers to players completely fluent in English but hanging out with people of their own culture. I think it’s interesting to note that there are some players of MMOs who have a desire to learn English or Japanese, but try to with a low level of language ability that it creates a conflict amongst players. Instead of trying to be patient and appreciating the fact that someone else wants to learn their language, most players may simply prefer a more hostile stance to these players, despite the good intentions on the part of the player learning the language. This cycle reinforces previously salient cultural barriers that existed already, largely because the frustration positively reinforces an unfavorable response from both parties, and may even cause the person trying to learn the other language to lose their motivation.
Something else to note from the video is the avatar idea. She mentioned Turkle in her presentation, and there was a question at the end about conscious choice involving avatars. I don’t think the whole story’s being explored here because there are other facets to picking avatars not simply limited to either expression/exploration of the self or minimizing/maxing characters. Some characters may simply favor a race or gender because there may be salient -disadvantages- to picking that combination. Thus, it becomes a matter of pride (that they picked a character that’s not common or optimized), and it also allows for certain players to stand out more to others (saliency due to rarity). However, I am extremely appreciative that she mentioned lore in her presentation, because I feel like lore is also a significant part of character selection that may be ignored by theorists generalizing on internet phenomenon without years of experience.
There’s many more things that I think would be interesting to discuss, although perhaps outside the scope of the research done in media and communications studies. For example, when Mia mentioned how players tend to call people by the name of their “mains” (what players term as the main character by which another player has leveled the most or used the most), despite the fact that they may have changed their avatar at that moment to another one. I do believe that this phenomenon is very similar to the fact that when anime and games (and other things) are localized, the localized version (which is often the version we become exposed to as consumers) is ingrained in our memory, much like how someone’s name becomes the preferred one we use. Even if we are offered alternatives (the alternative names of pokemon in Japanese vs. English comes to mind), just how do we react as individuals to usage of differing language to express the same concepts, and what does this mean for cultural exposure and language acquisition?
Not exactly related to much of your research, but certainly something I was thinking about throughout the video.
Anyway, it’s good to see another blog from you! Can’t wait to see what this year brings. :)
よいお年を
Tony
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