 Okay, so hi everybody. We're going to get started. The numbers are still going up but we have a lot of people joining us here tonight. I thought this would be a very exciting seminar for everybody. So I'm Helen McNaughton. I'm chair of the Japan Research Centre here at SOAS and it's a real pleasure to welcome tonight Rachel Hutchinson who is originally from England and got her doctorate from the University of Oxford but is now based in Delaware, University of Delaware in the US and where she teaches Japanese language and literature and culture there and she's published widely on on identity and representation in Japanese narrative texts. So everything from novels to manga to films and now video games. And so tonight she's going to talk about her latest book which I have a copy of the cover here to show you in case you're interested in buying it. That's what it looks like if you were to buy it. So it's obviously Japanese culture through video games and so she's going to be talking about how Japanese games are obviously popular entertainment but they also tackle bigger social issues as well. And I have to put my hand up and confess that I know absolutely nothing about video games. I've never played one so I'm very much looking forward to being a student tonight and learning about video games and how they express Japanese culture. So just a tiny little bit of housekeeping. So just to set the schedule Rachel is going to talk to us for about 45 minutes or so and then we should have plenty of time for Q&A and you'll notice that there's a Q&A function there so you can type any questions that you have into the Q&A chat function not the chat just the Q&A if you don't mind. So use that to type in questions and I will moderate those and Rachel is very happy to answer them at the end of her talk. So if you want to go ahead and share your screen Rachel, I'm going to turn off my camera while you talk so everybody can concentrate on looking at you and your slides. So over to you. Thank you. Can you see that? Yes. Okay. Thank you so much Helen for the introduction. I'm very honoured to be here at Sawe's today for this lecture and I'd really like to thank Professor McNaughton for inviting me. As you can tell by my accent I'm Australian but I did spend quite a bit of time in England and I'm really happy to be giving this lecture for Sawe's today. So here are some things. Whoops. I have to do my cursor. There we are. Here are some things that you might find in a course on Japanese culture. We have Natsume Soseki's novel Kokoro, Kurosawa Akira's film Rashomon, Miyazaki Hayo's animated film Ponio, Tezuka Osamu's manga Astro Boy and Ukiyo-e Woodblock Print and a Ceramic Tea Cup. So all of these artistic works can be understood as kinds of texts but what do we learn from them? We learn aesthetic values, what Japanese people think is beautiful or good or useful. We learn about important places, times in history and anxieties felt by the people. The role of the individual in society, the value of truth, how to grow up and assert yourself as a free agent and what makes us human. Just as Kokoro captured the anxiety of the Meiji period in 1914, I would argue that Final Fantasy VII does the same thing for the year 1997. There are a couple of points I want to make in this talk and one is about the positioning of the medium in how we think about it. The novel used to be seen as really low-class, popular entertainment. Natsume Soseki serialized this novel Kokoro in the Asahi newspaper. His books really captured the essence of the times and in the same way, I think that the big classics of the Japanese role-playing game genre or the JRPG are popular entertainment narratives that take on big issues like social anxiety, absentee parents, nuclear power and war memory. Both the novel and the video game can give us great insight into the context of Japanese culture. There are a few ways in which we can use video games as texts to learn about Japanese culture. One is through character design, another is the background setting and the environment of the game world. We can look at the aesthetic style of the game, the thematic content and the game dynamics and goals what the player has to do in the game. And so today I want to look at each of these in turn. Let's start with character design. A lot of Japanese games, particularly the big popular role-playing games, feature main characters that look like this. They have big hair, they're spiky, often blonde, blue eyes, a slim build, yet muscular physique, big swords and interesting clothing design. This is Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy VII. On the left, you'll see him in concept art. And on the right, this is how he appeared in the game in the original 3D polygon rendering. Remember, this is 1997. Similarly, we have Titus from Final Fantasy X. That's the 10th game in the series from 2001. This is Noctis from Final Fantasy XV, released in 2016. And this is Sora from Kingdom Hearts in 2002. These characters look similar because they were all designed by the same person, Nomura Tetsuya, at the company Square. Now Square Enix. All of these characters draw on the same conventions of character design that we find in Japanese culture, like anime, manga, etc. This is the Shonen, the youth, the young man, on the verge of becoming an adult, but still young enough to jump around, play and get into trouble. The visual design, as I mentioned, comes mostly from manga and anime. The spiky hair shows the character's dynamism, how genki he is, his get-up-and-go. And this admirable quality in the young Japanese male has been pretty much constant in character design since the major period. Ever since Samuel Smiles' book Self-Help extolled the values of Rishin Shusei, standing up on your own two feet, getting out into the world, making something of yourself and contributing to society. The tension in the JRPG and a lot of Japanese cultural products is that this sounds like a lot of work. These young heroes are stuck between the child they wish they still were and the adult they are becoming. So the youthful exuberance on one hand is usually balanced by some deep psychological problems as the hero has to adjust to their place in the world and define their identity. In the case of Cloud and Titus, this is a real mission and a big part of gameplay. They have both lost their memories at the start of the game. They're afflicted with amnesia and they don't know who they are or what their mission is. It's your job as the player to help them find out. Moving over to the fighting game genre. This is the cast of Soul Calibur 2. This is a game from Namco in 2002. And character design in this genre is extremely important to quickly establish which country the character comes from and what kind of fighting style they have. Each character, as you'll probably notice here, is incredibly stereotyped. So you have the Kung Fu master, the Nunchuck fighter, the short sword Greek goddess, the ninja warrior, the samurai and so on. So for a minute here, I want to look at Mitsurugi Heisiro. You can see him just to the right of centre there. And this is what he looks like in Soul Edge on the left. And the Soul Calibur series there. These are from Namco Bandai through the 1990s and still continuing today. Mitsurugi is the archetypal samurai warrior. Now I use these games in class to teach about representations of race, gender and sexuality in games. Mitsurugi embodies the Japanese self. He is privileged over and above the other characters in the series. Which is interesting because in fighting games all the characters are supposed to be equally balanced in terms of their fighting skill and so forth. But Mitsurugi is the player one default in Soul Edge. As the player you have to physically move the joystick away from Mitsurugi in order to play as any other character. He is one of the main characters that's featured in Attract Mode in the cabinet games for Soul Edge and the Soul Calibur series. And Attract Mode is a cinematic loop that plays in the arcade while nobody's playing the game. It's flashy, it's loud, it's interesting, there's a lot of music. And Mitsurugi is usually there on the screen and testing you to come and play the game. He's featured on the cabinet art, the cover art of the games and features heavily in the opening cinematics. So before you insert the coin and after you insert the coin while the loading screen plays and what have you. Now over time you'll see that Mitsurugi's visually speaking Mitsurugi's basic elements are pretty much consistent. He's usually wearing tabby socks and he has a katana, he has a messy hairdo, looks like a Ronin, okay. But you'll notice over time the iconography gets more specifically Japanese and more nationalistic over time. He starts off in this kind of vaguely oriental costume and then over time there's more red incorporated into the palette. You get this big Nawa rope around the middle, Japanese armour. There's dragons on his costume here on the left. But then the dragons give way to Chrysanthemums and Buddhist imagery on the right there. That's him in Soul Calibur 5. So over time he kind of becomes more Japanese, I would argue. What's interesting about the privileging of Mitsurugi in the narrative is that he's also privileged in the user interface. This is the character select screen. It happens to be showing Ivy right now. You can choose any of these characters to play as, right. But you'll see Mitsurugi is in the upper top left corner. I don't know if you can see my cursor but I'm indicating you in my cursor right now. Now this doesn't change over the course of the series even though the default Player 1 character does change over time. Sometimes you start off as Talon and what have you. But he's always up there in the upper left hand corner. So he's privileged visually. And this kind of privileging of the main Japanese male character in the game can also be seen in Virtua Fighter with Akira Yuki, in Tekken with Kazuya Mishima and later Jin Kazama and also in Street Fighter with Ryu. And this is Ryu here in Street Fighter 2. You'll see that he is the default Player 1 character. This is how it opens up. You have to physically move the joystick away from Ryu if you want to play as anyone else. And the default Player 2 character is Ken. Okay. And Ryu is privileged in the narrative as he travels from country to country in a little plane and he gets out of different countries to do different fights with various masters. But he's also very, very prominent in art, cover art for the game. There's the Capcom poster there. And on the right you'll also see him on the side of the cabinet. And what's on the side of the game cabinet is actually really important because that is what you see from the street. Like if you're out on the street and you're looking into the arcade, those end cabinets will have the sides facing out into the street a lot of the time. And so you'll see that cover art right away. And so the same thing happens with Akira Yuki in Virtua Fighter 2. This cabinet's really interesting because he's on the left side and the right side of the cabinet, which is really rare. Usually you've got two different characters on each side of the cabinet. Akira Yuki is prominent in here's a flyer, for Sega selling Virtua Fighter 2 to the arcade proprietors and so on. But over on the right there, that's the cover art for Virtua Fighter on the Sega Saturn. And Akira Yuki's right in the front. You can see him there with the spy key here. And it's the same for Kazuyo Mishima in Tekken. Over there on the left you'll see the original taken on the PlayStation 1 with Kazuyo Mishima looking very tall and muscular in the middle of everybody else. And as the series goes along, he's supplanted by his son, Jin Kazama, who takes the front stage there in Tekken 5. So over and over again, in the fighting game genre, we get the normative Japanese mail being placed in this central position, the player one default position. And so we can use these games to understand what's valued in relation to masculinity in Japanese society, for example. Okay, we can also learn about Japanese culture from how the set designs are put together. And here's the associated stage set for Mitsurugi, for example. This is the Sakura Dai gate at Kaminoi Castle in the game narrative. And this kind of iconography comes straight from traditional Japanese architecture and garden aesthetics, with the cherry blossoms symbolizing the ephemeral nature of life, especially for the young samurai or soldier cut down in their prime. Cherry blossoms bloom fully and then float away on the wind, which is very beautiful and fleeting. They don't hang around with it on the tree. So the message is to live life to the full while you have it. And you can see this in Japanese Buddhism and the aesthetics of Ukiyo-e, the floating world art as well. So when we talk about Japanese environments in games, it's often this kind of image that comes to mind. Another kind of image is the beautiful nature environment, which is often seen in the JRPG. Here again, we have Cloud from Final Fantasy VII, running into a beautiful forest environment. This game was really interesting for the 2D painted artwork that forms the background. And then on top of that, you had the 3D figures moving through space. And what I want to point out here is the similarity between this kind of background and that found in Miyazaki Heio's films. So this is a scene from Princess Mononoke in 1997, made the same year as Final Fantasy VII. Let's have a look at another one. Is this an anime or a video game? It's actually a scene from another JRPG, Ninokuni, Wrath of the White Witch, that came out from Namco Bandai in 2011. This is kind of a trick question because the game was developed in collaboration with Studio Ghibli. So yes, the animation is supposed to look like a Miyazaki film here. But we can learn a lot about what Japanese people value in their environment from the way they depict it in art. So you have the lush greens, the clear air, bubbling waters, and huge old growth trees dominating the landscape. This shows a reference for nature and perhaps a feeling of loss now that we live in a very built up environment. Some of these games have been analysed in terms of Shinto practice, and you can see this in the latest big game from Nintendo. This is The Legend of Zelda, Wrath of the Wild, released on the Switch console in 2017. Certain features that stand out in the environment, like a particularly large rock tree or mountain, have their own little spirits inside them called Koroks, and here's one. They're friendly. They pop out and say hello, and they help you by giving you seeds, which you can then trade in for inventory upgrades. So the message here is paying attention to nature helps you. The forest people also give you weapons that are made out of wood, which are impervious to electricity. And this becomes really important because in this game, a lightning strike can actually kill you. So if you look at the concept art books for this game, in the margins they've got Stadio Ghibli written in Katakana. So this was not an official collaboration like Ninokuni, but the designers wanted to evoke the same kind of respect for the environment that you find in those films. Now thinking about Japanese environments, other scholars have also noted that Japanese games set the standard for how to render 3D environments with an interior setting. So games like Resident Evil in 1996, which we see here, established a certain kind of Japanese look for video games. Survival horror games depend on clothes in rooms and a dark palette to produce a feeling of claustrophobia in the player. Konami's Fox Engine produces a similar kind of dread in the player. So you feel the need to sneak around and move quietly in this environment. This is Metal Gear Solid directed by Kojima Hideo. This kind of 3D space is now very familiar to anyone who plays games built using Konami's Fox Engine. But the player may not realise that the game environment has Japanese roots. Another way to learn about Japan from game environments is through super realistic renderings of the real world. On the left here we have a scene from Persona 5 made by Atlas in 2016. This is based very closely on the real life streets of Shibuya and other suburbs of Tokyo. This shot of the real life equivalent to the game scene on the right was posted on Twitter by a fan. There are lots of threads on forums and discussion boards where people have hunted down the real environment and posted a picture together with the screenshot of the game. So in this kind of game, exploring the game environment is more like taking a virtual tour of the real life Japanese city. So we've seen in our character designs and backgrounds how Japanese video games draw on manga and anime conventions to create a certain kind of look which players associate with Japan and Japanese culture. This is achieved in a different way by rendering interior environments in 3D which produces a certain kind of affect or emotional response in the player. Over time the early graphics and hand drawn designs have given away to more photo realistic graphics so we feel more and more as if we're moving through the real world of the game space. Lastly just like any other art medium, film, oil paintings, watercolours, sculpture, animation or whatever there will always be people who want to express their ideas in a more experimental and unique way. A good example I can think of here that expresses Japanese art style and a strong focus on Japanese culture is Orkami. This is a game developed by Clovis Studio in 2006. Orkami has a unique art style which is based on hand drawn characters, environments and animated sequences. It draws on traditional ink styles and incorporates calligraphy even into the gameplay. You as the player do calligraphy in order to achieve certain things in the game and it also includes a lot of religious iconography. The title is a pun. Orkami can mean wolf or god and you play as this white wolf here and this is the incarnation of the sun goddess Amaterasu Omikami. Orkami uses a lot of the same symbolism as other games from Japan with cherry trees and so forth but here they're more directly linked to Shinto as you see with the big torii gauge on the right there and also you'll notice there's a white shimenoa rope around the cherry tree itself indicating that it's a sacred tree. In the background I'll see if I can move my cursor over here. There's a dead tree here. Part of gameplay in Orkami is to go around the environment, find dead trees like this and use your calligraphy brush to make them bloom. You bring them back to life and so this gameplay itself carries out the mission of feeling reverence for nature. The environment and background in Orkami uses a lot of traditional architecture and if you go in this building here which you can do you'll also find traditional Japanese furniture, zambuton cushions, musical instruments, teapots and so on. You can often go up to items and examine them by pushing on a button and a text box will appear with an explanation saying something like, samisen three stringed instrument used for dramatic stage performances. So you can learn a lot about Japan just by moving through the space and interacting with the environment. Interestingly looking at the building here you can tell this is not an accurate historically specific depiction. It's more of a mishmash to give an idea of ancient Japan, this kind of idealistic feeling of what ancient Japan was like. A lot of the story is inspired by the Kojiki, the record of ancient matters published in the eighth century which recounted the tales of gods and legendary heroes. So here on the left we have the character Susano, according to legend the brother of Amaterasu and a fierce warrior who also gets drunk a lot in the Kojiki. In the game also he's always after sake which is brewed by the young woman Kushi and you can see her here on the right in her rice field. One of the first missions in this game is to fix the water wheel for Kushi so she can power her machinery to pound the rice to make sake. So there are many ways in which the aesthetic style of a game can be used to complement its ideology and content. Here I'd like to suggest that the JRPG, the Japanese Role Playing Game, can be regarded as the shishousetsu for our era. This is the iNovel, the dominated 20th century literature in Japan. As narrative forms both the JRPG and the shishousetsu are extremely long. The JRPG can take anywhere from 50 to 100 hours to complete or come it took me 130 hours and that's saved game time. So that doesn't include all the times that you fail and you have to redo the whole mission and it's saved game time, successful game time that took me 130 hours. Both these things the JRPG and the shishousetsu are very much concerned with the place of the individual self in society and both explore pressing issues of the day and I think that you can see this especially in JRPGs of the 1990s which explore a lot of quite difficult issues such as nuclear power, war memory, bioethics and social breakdown and these roughly correlate to chapters in my book Japanese Cultures for Video Games. Today what I thought I might do is take bioethics as a case study to show how the game text works within its context. So if we do that with bioethics these are some good games in which bioengineering and genetic manipulation form a good part of the main story. I think the theme comes across most fully in the longer game structures of the role-playing genre and action adventure games but you can also see it in fighting games and also survival horror. I'll start off with Final Fantasy 6 from Square in 1994 and this game is full of genetic experiments which are integral to the main plot. The villain Kefka over here on the left gloating about being all powerful, he spends most of his time hunting magical creatures called espers and he uses them to extract magical power and up here on the right we can see four espers trapped in big glass jars. This is inside Kefka's magic tech research facility. The clearest one you can see here is this kind of unicorn type creature. What Kefka is doing is extracting magic out of these living beings and then turning that magic into weapons through the invention of magitech armor. This is a wearable suit that emits a very powerful blast of light energy from the chest and in this way the ruler the Emperor Gestile was able to create an invincible army of magitech soldiers. At the center of all this is the character Terra who is half human and half espar. Kidnapped as a child Terra is raised as an elite magitech soldier. Kefka forces her to wear a slave crown to subdue her thoughts and send her out into battle wearing the magitech armor. On the right here we see Amano Yashitaka's beautiful art renderings of Terra wearing magitech armor. She's shown riding on the back of a giant mechanical creature almost like a dragon and on the left there the logo for Final Fantasy 6 is in fact Terra riding on a magitech conveyance such as this. In this artwork the magitech armor looks more alive than mechanical and I think this highlights the biological nature of the weapon based on the sacrifice of all those espers in the glass jars. Moving on in Final Fantasy 7 made by Square in 1997 this deals with similar themes of bioengineering. Here on the left we see the main character Cloud Strife on the floor with his friend Zack who's helping him up after they've escaped from these glowing glass tanks in the basement of the Shinra Mansion. Like Kefka's magitech factory the Shinra Mansion is a laboratory for growing super soldiers and fusing them with mako which acts very much like nuclear material. This process gives soldiers a bright blue glow to the eyes and Cloud didn't complete the process but he does exhibit the same blue eyes and he goes through the whole game completely confused as to whether or not he's a member of this elite fighting force. This also really confuses the player of the game. It leads to very high narrative tension and deep immersion in the game world because you don't know what side you're on for most of the game. Also in this game that evil scientist Hojo has also experimented on other people such as Vincent Valentine who's an optional character but you can find him in the basement if you follow this hidden note and we see Cloud reading the note there. Notice how this room and the one in the slide before they look a lot like Resident Evil right? The designers have found a fantasy seven is the same kind of 3d rendering to get that very claustrophobic scary feeling when you go into the Shinra Mansion. The Metal Gear Solid series by Konami is probably the most obvious narrative about bioethics in the history of video games. The story has more plot twists and turns than you can imagine even if you've played the game and it's hard to keep track of who's a clone of whom and how many different kinds of experiments have been run on how many people. The Metal Gear series has cloned super soldiers, people being turned into weapons, people with mechanical exoskeletons, people whose blood has been replaced with liquid plastic. You've got nanoviruses, people being kept in suspended animation so their cells can be harvested and copied, a human surrogate mother to a clone army and all of this is generously paid for by the military industrial complex. One of the main genetic experiments in the series is this program known as Les Enfants Terribles French is terrible sorry but children are grown from cells taken from the world's most powerful soldier big boss so this series more than any other explores the various aspects of bioengineering and the military from every possible angle. Bioethics is also a theme for fighting games in the Tekken series Jin Kazama carries the devil gene inherited from his grandmother Kazumi via his father Kazuyo Mishima. In Japanese this is called devil's blood debiru no chi the devil factor debiru no inshi or devil's power debiru no chikara. It's never clearly explained what this devil gene is or where it originally came from but the Mishima Zaibatsu and Jeep Corporation both want access to its power. The devil gene is manipulated by Jeep Corporation in cellular experiments trying to create stronger human hybrids. Part of this mission is known as the Gino Cell Program. Jeep Corporation has bioengineering facilities in Nepal and Nebraska where various characters are taken through the game series to serve as subjects for genetic experimentation. The effect of the devil gene is clearly seen in depictions of Jin Kazama. Normally he looks like a typical fighter found in games of this genre with a fierce aspect to his face and a hyper muscular body. But when the devil gene switches on, get ready, his head spouts horns, large black wings appear on his back and the irises of his eyes become yellow in colour. The change is directly reflected in the game dynamics since Jin has different attacks in battle when the devil gene is activated. Lastly, I'd like to consider Resident Evil. This is one of the earliest survival horror games from Japan. The original title, Biohazard, Biohazard indicates the biological concerns of the narrative. In this game, the Umbrella Corporation is a pharmaceutical company, but it's also a secret genetic engineering enterprise. We have more corporate bioengineering to create the ultimate bio weapon, which in this game is called tyrant. And of course, there's a huge disaster resulting in the release of biological mutagens known as the T virus. This might sound familiar because of all the films. When mutated cells arise in a living organism, this is called infection. And this game is interesting because it looks at the infection of both humans and animals and how the pathogens pass between species. In the end, the only solution is atomic destruction and Raccoon City is obliterated. Taking these games as a set, we see many commonalities between them. All include corporate bioengineering with government collusion. All feature the creation of a super soldier and or bio weapons. The dead are used for their cells and genetic material, thinking of Big Boss in Metal Gear Solid or Kazia Mishima in Tekken. And scientific experiments have run on live subjects like cloud and terror against their will. The games also feature mad scientists. Here you can see William Birkin, the scientist from Resident Evil 2, who is horrifically mutated by his own genetic experiments, which is probably a very fitting end actually. Other villains and scientists in these games are revealed to be horrifically mutated beings. Kefka and Hojo both mutate into several different forms in their final battles in Final Fantasy VII. This game dynamic was actually a feature of Final Fantasy and the Dragon Quest series from very early on. But here in these games, it serves a clear narrative purpose as well. We see a judgment and bias against the figure of the scientist. And the narratives are generally negative, set against the whole idea of bioengineering for military use. When you look at the release dates of the games I'm talking about here, you'll notice they all converge around the year 1996. This was the year that Dolly the Sheik was cloned, sparking a great deal of discussion over bioengineering and cloning worldwide. Some saw it as a culmination of research that had been intensifying through the 1990s. A miracle of human creation. Others saw it as unethical, as humans should not be tampering with the natural world. Dolly's health was followed obsessively in the media. And when she wasn't 100% healthy, many saw this to be proof that bioengineering was unethical and immoral. In Japan and other Asian countries, this anxiety was compounded by the Buddhist conviction that a person's body should remain whole and untampered with, both in life and after death. Organ donation in Japan is historically very low compared to Western countries. The cloning of embryos was banned in Japan in 2000, which was big news around the world at the time. Japan passed a number of laws in the early 2000s surrounding things like stem cell research, IVF and assisted reproduction, cloning and so on. And all of this was connected to a much broader global bioethics debate. So all these games converged around the year 1996, providing a discourse on bioethics in the mid 1990s in Japan. What I think is really interesting is if you look at the technology and hardware of video games at the time, this is also when the SNES or Super Nintendo was being pushed to its absolute limits. And the new PlayStation console was being used to generate new kinds of graphics and action capabilities. So this brings us to the specifics of this discourse in the video game medium. How is this kind of discourse different to what we might find in literature or film? Ideology in games is put forward in a number of different ways. The most obvious way is through representation and narrative, what you see on the screen and what happens in the story. Now these elements are common to literature, film, manga and anime. But games are also coded sets of rules that can be used by game designers to put forward their ideas, values, attitudes and beliefs in certain ways. As Gonzalo Frasca has argued, games have goal rules, what the player needs to do to win, and also manipulation rules, what the player can do and what the player can't do in the game. And these all together show the ideology of the game designer. So thinking about goal rules, Inferno Fantasy 7, a Metal Gear Solid, the player and the character share the same goal, and that is to destroy nuclear weapons. The problem is that when Cloud or Snake try their best and it doesn't go according to plan, the player might experience complicity in nuclear accidents. So if Cloud goes and causes a massive nuclear accident, you, the player, feel guilty. You're complicit in this. And this feeling of guilt that you've actually done something terrible to other characters in the game that motivates you to fight against the nuclear enterprise. The other thing that's interesting here is that the success of Cloud Strife or Snake or any of the other characters in these games is almost completely dependent on the player choices and their skill. If you don't have the manual dexterity to actually diffuse the bomb in time or whatever it is, then Snake's not going to be able to diffuse either because you're controlling Snake. So the game's success, the character's success is dependent on you. What this does is it draws very real connections between what's going on in the game world and your own actions in the real world. And I've argued that these connections are what make the nuclear critique very effective in these games. Compared to things like literature and film, games have embodiment. It's lacking in other media. In the game, you are the main character. You're the one that's moving them around the screen through your actions they succeed or fail. So it's working in a different way to other media. If we look at Metal Gear Solid and we're thinking about manipulation rules, Snake's physicality in this series shows the bioethics discourse at work. What I mean by that is that Snake as a character has this amazing ability to sneak around. These are tactical espionage games. Snake can sneak around. He has a great deal of strength and you kind of wonder about this through the game. But then of course, this comes through. This is the result of bioengineering. So it's not natural this sneaking ability that he has. Later on in the series, he turns into old Snake. You see him with gray hair. He can't move as easily as he used to in the earlier games. He has a lot of physical limitations on his body. This is actually a problem with the cloning process. His body degrades over time. What's interesting in Metal Gear Solid 5 is that you have demon points and hero points that accrue to the main character. It acts as a kind of karmic system for the game. You can acquire hero points by doing positive things like liberating child soldiers or you can acquire demon points by doing negative things like building a nuclear weapon, for example. In fact, building a nuclear weapon gives you so many demon points that in many cases the main character Snake will immediately take on the aspect of a demon with horns, bloodshot eyes and yellowish skin. It's quite horrible. You have to play as this character. This tells you that making nukes is not a good thing. You feel revulsion playing as this character. Nuclear ideology is also put forward in the FOB, the forward operating base. This is a military installation you can develop as part of a minigame in Metal Gear Solid 5. I want to look at this a little more. This screenshot shows a description of the nuclear weapon in the game, the most powerful weapon of mass destruction humanity has ever created. You get one trophy deterrence for creating a nuke and a trophy called disarmament for getting rid of one. Now, there are some benefits to the player in developing a nuclear weapon. It deters other players from considering an attack on you and the more nuclear weapons that a player owns, the less often their base can be invaded by other players. The player's ranking against other players is also dramatically increased. On the other hand, developing nuclear weapons is extremely expensive in terms of in-game currency as well as fuel resources and stocks of metals. It takes the player a lot of time, effort and hard-won resources to develop these weapons. Now, there's no capability in the game to actually use these weapons on other players, and some disappointed players on the game forums were met with comments by long-time Metal Gear Solid fans. One of them said, this is Metal Gear Solid. They would never let anyone use a nuke in this game. It goes against the message they want to give us. Metal Gear Solid is and always will be an anti-nuke game. So there you have it. Players can also choose just not to develop a nuclear weapon in the first place. It's not needed in the game. And some players on the discussion boards clearly see them as just not worth the trouble. To dispose of them, the player must spend 100,000 GMP or in-game currency. You have to convert the weapon to nuclear waste and then send it off to be stored at the bottom of the ocean. The player is rewarded with a disarmament trophy and 1,000 hero points, but this does not make up for the 50,000 demon points that you had for making the weapon in the first place. The player can also infiltrate other player's bases and steal their nuclear weapons in order to stockpile or dispose of them, which makes it more interesting. The Famitsu official game guide explained that a special hidden ending could be triggered if all players on a specific server disarmed and disposed of their nuclear weapons. The disarmament event of 2015 caused a great deal of online discussion spurred by press releases from Konami and tweets by Hideo Kojima himself. From November to December 2015, a total number of nuclear weapons owned by gamers across all consoles, that's the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, Xbox 360 and Steam, decreased by the thousands. And Konami was tracking the numbers on the official game website each day. Of course, this didn't last. Eventually the numbers started coming back up again and the effort to disarm is still ongoing. This is an actual Reddit page called Metal Gear Anti-Nuclear with live nuke counts constantly updated across all servers. These people actively tried to dismantle or steal other players' nukes in order to dispose of them. Funnily enough, last year hackers set the number of nukes in the game to zero and they triggered the mysterious hidden cutscene, but disarmament within the game itself has not yet been achieved. The game designer Kojima Hideo made the game this way to make people really think about what it means to possess nuclear weapons and also think about what disarmament really means and what it takes to achieve that. This is a great example of manipulation rules being used to make the player experience the ideology of the game for themselves. So I've just given you five ways in which we can learn about Japanese culture from games through character design, environment, aesthetic choices and conventions, thematic content and gameplay dynamics. All these convey attitudes, ideas, values and messages from game designers, some conscious and some not. These are also related to the context in which the games were made. In this way, games and gameplay join a broader Japanese discourse. Game texts act in their context as an utterance in a broader parole, but if game texts are discursive objects, are game players engaged in discursive practice? This is the animated slide. So games are part of a broader discourse which I've been talking about. To think about it in terms of French post-structuralist thinking, we can see games as a text, as a statement, an utterance, a parole in the broader long. They fit into the broader discourse of the time. But the thing is, this is a different kind of utterance than we used to when we're doing our literary criticism and things like this. One reason for this is that the author in a game is very different to the author of a literary work. If you're looking at something like Sol Calibur, that was developed by a small team called Project Sol within the much larger game studio, Namco and Namco Bundy. If you're looking at Square Enix, you have the main game designer and the script writer and so on, but then you have hundreds of people working on everything from character design to narrative to dialogue trees to item design, everything. And then you have localisation on top of that. Then you also have the executives who have to approve and then market the game, distribute it and what have you. So this idea of the author of a game, it's closer to film than literature, but it's even bigger and more diffuse than that. The text in this game medium is also co-authored by the player. And what I mean by that is the player is the one who's going through the game making choices about various things. And in the JRPG, these choices might be quite limited and all these choices might end up at the same place in terms of the story. But in terms of the strategy and how you decide to play the game, you can level up one character more than others. You can decide that one of the characters is going to be a mage and equip them in all the items, like sorcerer's habit and magical staff and things like this. So you can organise the items and inventory and equipment in certain ways so that your game will be quite different to the same game played by another player. So the player themselves is engaged in authoring the text and also making their own meaning out of the game. And this meaning making is something that's interesting in game studies right now. Another thing about my work in video games is that the social critique in these texts, the social commentary on bioethics or nuclear anxiety or whatever else it might be, is really lived by the player through their experience of playing the game. If you're spending 100 hours or 130 hours as Cloud Strife, then what he does in the game really affects you. Sometimes Cloud might do things that you don't want him to do. If you've been controlling him all the way through and then there's a cutscene and he does something that's going against everything that you've been working for that has a really deep impact on you. And so the designers, people like Kojima Hideo and the designers of Final Fantasy games, they're manipulating you as a player. And this is a way that you really feel the impact of the critique in ways that perhaps literature and film don't achieve in the same way. It's a very active learning process in the game text. And this is why I come to the idea that gameplay is discursive practice. If you're going through the game meaning making and creating your own narrative, creating your own version of the text as you go along, then I've argued in my book that gameplay itself can be seen as a kind of discursive practice. And this is something that I'm interested in developing and then thinking about more in my future work. Oh, so here we come back to the syllabus, the game studies syllabus. Sorry, the Japanese studies syllabus. I'm getting ahead of myself. What does this all mean for our syllabus on Japanese culture that we started with? Well, just as we read Kokoro for insight into Japanese masculinity or the role of the individual at the close of the Meiji period, I've argued that we can look to cloud strife and solid snake as examples of the fractured individual at the close of the 20th century in Japan. So maybe now, when we think about using artistic works to understand Japanese culture, we can include video games among those books and films and so on. And so here I've kind of made the books and films in the teacup move over a little bit to make room for the video games. I'm hoping that some of you here who already play games will look at them in maybe some new ways. And I hope that those of you who don't play video games will recognise the value as artistic cultural objects with a lot to tell us about Japan and Japanese culture. Personally speaking, I'd like to see more games included in Japanese studies syllabi, or at least included in the library as a learning resource for our students. Overall, I think the game studies and Japanese studies have a lot to learn from each other. And I see my workers trying to bring those two fields closer together. So thank you very much for listening. That's the end of my part. Thanks, Rachel. That was fascinating, particularly, as I said, for somebody like me who has no idea about video gaming or has played video gaming. So perhaps if I could start with a really obvious question, which leapt out at me, probably because of what I'm interested in personally. But can you tell us about the gender dynamics that play a little bit more here? So obviously, well, to me, all of the characters that you introduced were male. They were warriors. And you showed us that many of the males are default players in the games. But clearly, there are some female characters there. So what are the different representations of females that take place in gaming? Because I didn't get a sense of that from your talk, obviously, because of the way that you were concentrating. Maybe because you were doing the fighting genre as well. So that warrior presence is very strong. So that was my first question. And linked to that, the physicality of those male warriors, fighters, is pretty impressive. I mean, it's interesting that you linked it to bioethics because they do look quite genetically enhanced or genetically engineered. So I just wanted to ask about that a little bit more. They're fighters and they're heroes, but are there any male characters that are not quite so perfectly muscled? Are there villains that look very different physically or portrayed very differently? So maybe you could comment on that as well. I'm sorry if there's very basic questions from someone. No, that's fantastic. That's a nice place to start, actually. Thank you for those. Yeah. So today, I focused on the shounen. And I've done quite a bit of work on this representation, the shounen, and what he means in Japanese culture. But of course, there are many, many female characters in games. In the JRPG, in the very early games, it was usually a male character. So I'm looking at things in the 1980s, 1990s, things have moved on from that now. All right. And in the Final Fantasy series, there have been a couple of games, not many, but there have been a couple of games where the main player character is a female character. Another thing that the Final Fantasy games do, which is quite interesting, is that not all of the games can find you to playing as that one player character all the way through the game. So for example, right now, I'm in the middle of Final Fantasy 12. And the main character in that story is Van. And he looks exactly like those people that I showed you. All right. He's actually much slimmer, though, thinking about the physicality you mentioned. But you don't have to play as Van. And in Final Fantasy X, you don't have to be tight as all of the time. If you're in a part of the world where you have to explore a town and buy things at shops, then you are that main character. But when you're walking around the world and doing battles and things like this, you can be any character. So I've actually been playing Final Fantasy 12 with a party of three women. And I've been running around as Ash, Fran, and Panello. And they're actually much stronger than Van now. Because they've levelled up, you see, and he hasn't. So really, and this goes back into the embodiment and the meaning making that each player brings to the game, because other people will play it completely differently with maybe Van and two male characters in that party. Or Van and two of his female friends. You know, they're all kinds of different combinations. And if you look at more recent games and things like Tales of games and the Persona games and what have you, the female characters are a lot stronger. Today, I was just giving you some examples from the kind of classic JRPG. Metal Gear Solid has been criticised on that point, though, that Kojima Hideo's representation of women is questionable. And I look at that more in the book, actually. But I liked what you said about the physicality of the people in video games. And I've done some work on this in representation of the human body. And very often, especially in fighting games, what you're thinking about is the ideal figure. You know, if you were a fighter, if you're going to play the fighting game, what would you want to look like? And what do you want to be able to do? And so the fighters have these huge muscles, because they're made to punch and kick and do these things, a warrior physique, as you said. But again, as those games have gone on, and you can see it in Soul Calibur, they're more androgynous characters, they're slimmer characters, not so heavily hypermuscled, you know, and all different kinds of characters now. And it's really interesting to see that development over time, actually. Interesting. And then just another question quickly, because there's some chat building up there I can see. You said that, you know, if you look at the environments that they're operating in, you can see lots of sort of Japanese scenes or characteristics. So obviously you mentioned nature. You also see, you know, urban Tokyo streets, architecture, the importance of wood, for example. And something that just popped out at me that is something so important in Japanese culture, and it's food. Is the washoku represented? Maybe it's dinnertime here, and I'm just hungry. Does food come into play at all in terms of Japanese food? Is that everywhere? So I didn't talk about food. Food's really important in Japanese video games. And all the characters, you know, they always have to stop at an inn to eat something to refuel themselves, so that whole eating culture is very important. But I showed you still from the Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild, and there's a cooking minigame, if you like, in there. And what happens is Link has a certain number of hearts that you see on the screen, and if he takes damage in battle or his health goes lower, you can replenish his hearts by cooking food and eating it. And there's this whole part of the game where you go around to different stables and you look at posters on the walls that show recipes of the local delicacy, and then you go around and get the ingredients and put it in a cooking pot. And it comes out, and it's really funny because if you make a mistake and you put something awful in there, it comes out as this kind of green, brown, disgusting glop, and it's called dubious food, and Link will eat it, and it'll give him one heart, but he makes this horrible face that he's obviously not enjoying eating what it is that you cooked for him, so it's really funny. But there's so many games, and there's games just about cooking too. Right, okay, great. All right, I'm going to have a look at the chat because as I said, it's building up, and you had just over 100 people today, so well done, you've really tipped the scales there. I knew it was going to be interesting. So the first question is, where can we purchase your book? That's a good question, there's an interesting question. Yeah, on the Routledge website, yeah, routledge.com. So it's not, there's no e-book or Kindle form yet? Yes, there's an e-book, it's hardback, paperback, and there's the e-book version, you can get it for the Kindle. I think the Kindle was going for about $40 at one point. I don't know what it is now, they had a sale a couple of weeks ago, which might still be going, I'm not sure. Okay, yeah, routledge.com. Okay, great, thank you, hopefully that'll be some sales for you. Or Amazon. There's some questions here from Maria, there's quite a lot of linked questions here I think. So do Japanese games reflect the process of changing national identity in Japan? So for example, as do the newer games sort of change the Japanese representation of themselves or their identity, and then link to that are there any Chinese or South Koreans in some of those games as well and how are they depicted? Yeah, and then the third, she's got three questions here really, sorry, does the Japanese government have any sort of program or strategy for gaming industry? Well, clearly it's in cool Japan, isn't it? And some of those things that other things are in cool Japan as well. But anyway, so those are three sort of linked questions there from Maria. Thank you for those. The first idea was the changing national identity. I don't, surprisingly enough, now that you've asked me that, I actually find it really consistent that the same tropes are used, the same imagery is used, the same basic attitudes about life and death and religion and things like this are quite similar. What you do find in newer games is more diversity in representation, I'd say, compared to older games. I think that there's more gender fluidity, for example, in games now. But in terms of the overall idea of what it means to be a Japanese person and living in Japan, I don't really think that that has changed that much over time. Thinking about representation of Japanese people, Chinese people, Korean people and other people through Asia, there are a lot of different Asian characters in Japanese games. And sometimes they're portrayed quite negatively. All right, usually it's an essentialised kind of a stereotype representation. And the main genre that you find these kind of characters in is the fighting game genre, which essentialises everybody anyway. So if you're looking at the typical French character, they'll have all kinds of stereotypical ideas about what a French person is fighting with a rapier and being very fashionable things like this. But when you look at those Chinese and South Korean characters that in fighting games are usually depicted in very specific ways. And I've written about this and processes of Orientalism, for example, and it's tied up with ideas that go right back to the major period and earlier about whether Japan is, you know, what is Japan's identity as part of Asia? Is it part of Asia? Or is it something different? Because it's an island off the coast, right? So Japan has been kind of struggling with this idea of what Torio is. What is the Orient? What is the East? Are we part of it? Should we lead it? Right? With the greater East Asia co-prosperity sphere and all that kind of ideology. And so you see this informing current representations of Chinese characters and South Korean characters in particular. And I've argued in my work that it's the South Korean characters who are the most sexualized, for example, in fighting games in different ways. They have the most flamboyant, colorful costumes and so on like this. With the South Korean characters these days, there's a really interesting depiction of Korean characters in the Yakuza games by Sega. And this has changed over time actually, right? And so the Sega games are quite nuanced in the way that they portray Koreans, right? You have people from South Korea who are in the K-pop industry and they're in Japan, you know, trying to get their K-pop stars, bigger venues to sing at and things like this. And then you've got Zainichi Korean people in the game, right? Who are an ethnic minority in Japan who face quite a lot of discrimination. And the game shows that, right? Because those Zainichi characters are kind of interacting with the Yakuza and what have you and there's a really, really interesting dynamic there. So I think I took quite a long time on that answer but there's something that really interests me is this representation of the different ethnicities in Japanese games. Great, thank you. There's a question here from Nazro. So curious to know about video game addiction and self-isolation in Japan and Japanese youth, I guess referring to the Hikikomori. Is there a correlation between video game addiction and self-isolation and increase in mental health issues? And do video games try and address that in any way? Or do they fall into the trap of sort of rendering youth vulnerable to those kinds of health issues? So yeah. Yeah, that's an interesting question. Thank you for that. And there is certainly an kind of idea that we have of the gamer kind of shut away in their room, on their PC, playing games for hours and hours and hours. And certainly, you know, of course, all around the world, some teenagers and young people do become addicted to video games or any other activity that they do obsessively, right? But what's interesting in Japanese games is that games like Persona, Persona 5, Animal Crossing, they've started to build a lot of socialization into the game itself. And so in Persona, for example, a lot of the game has to do with you as the individual building up social relationships with other characters in the game and you do things by very mundane activities like initiating a conversation or going for a coffee together or calling them on the telephone to ask for advice about your homework. It's based in school, this game. So it's very relatable to the young audience. And what happens is you increase your social power, right? And the more social power you have, the better your Persona or your avatar can fight battles when you go over into the fighting plane of the game. In Animal Crossing, it's interesting because they incorporate ideas like shyness into the game and the game recognizes that you, as a newcomer to the island, you might not want to go around and make friends. And that the game recognizes that's a big step to go up to someone and actually initiate conversation. And the game character will show that hesitation. But if you do actually interact with other characters in the game, it gives you points for that. And then you get this kind of range of emotional responses that so you can choose to wave at someone or drown at them or talk very loudly at them or something like this. And if you go up to someone and you talk very loudly at them for a long time, they'll walk away. So it's kind of teaching you how to act as a social being, which I think is really interesting. And so the game companies recognize that perhaps young people feel isolated. They feel that social isolation and don't know where to begin. You know, how do you go make friends? That's really interesting, yeah. And a comment here from Leo, great presentation. And there's a very specific question. What do you think that Avalanche represents in Final Fantasy VII? Ooh. That means nothing to me. Hopefully that means something to you. So Avalanche is the guerrilla organization that Cloud joins and it's led by Barrett Wallace and people like this. And they run around basically dismantling nuclear reactors. Okay. So I see it as a kind of anti-nuclear guerrilla movement, just as the game wants me to. And the reason why I read it as nuclear and not just anti-Maco is because there's so many ideas in the game that it's like an allegorical tale of nuclear critique. And so this thing called Mako, you know, it mutates, material mutates over time. Mako affects your body, right? You become radioactive with these glowing eyes and things like this. So yeah, in a nutshell, I would just call it the anti-nuclear movement, I'd say. It all sounds very James Bond to me, which is a genre I'm much more familiar with than gaming, for anyway. Fabio, who's one of our lovely psoas colleagues, said, fascinating topic, thank you. Looking at the representation of Japan, the representations of Japan, I was wondering what role self-orient, self-orientalized, I can't do it, self-orientalization played. So is the assumption that these games will be played by Japanese players, or are they meant to portray Japan in a particular way to a foreign audience, or I guess to foreign gamers as well as what he's asking? Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. So in the book, so I talked about Orkami a fair bit, and this game is very deliberately made as a Japanese cultural product. It's very self-conscious about this, it crams as much Japanese culture as possible into the game. There's like a yokai encyclopedia where you can fight against various monsters and then look them up later and see, you know, their artwork and what kind of monster they are and what elements they're weak to and things like this. And so in a way, I think that Clover Studios is self-orientalizing Japan, packaging, actually the first part of my book is called packaging Japanese culture or something like that, like we're packaging the idea of Japan to sell it overseas, but also to Japanese people. Let's sell it to young Japanese people so they can revel in Japanese culture and attain this kind of celebratory idea of what Japan is all about. I definitely think there's a lot of that going on, yes. Thanks. A question here from Ben, who starts off saying he's very excited that gaming along with manga and anime is being used more frequently in discussions of Japanese culture, so thanking you for that. He said, what do you think about the narrowing of the lens in terms of looking in on Japanese culture when overseas players are looking in? So he gives the example that, you know, there's a choice of which games are released overseas and which become more popular outside of Japan. So he's given an example of Dragon Quest 6, the most popular game in Japan but was not released in English at all. Another one he gave was the manga Slam Dunk, didn't become popular overseas, even though it was more popular in Japan. Yeah, so what about the ones that how does that narrow the lens maybe of looking in at Japan? Right, yeah, and you're perfectly right. You know, there's a lot of games that are made for just consumption within Japan, right? A lot of PC games to stay in Japan. Some series become a lot more popular outside Japan such as Final Fantasy, right? It'll sell better. The whole kind of rivalry between Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy is an interesting one because they're made by the same company, right? But I'm not sure what you mean by narrowing the lens quite so much here on Japanese culture. But you know, it's quite accepted in game studies that a lot of Japanese material doesn't make it out of Japan. And so what do you make of that? Do you go and study the things that are less accessible in the West, right? Because that's one way I could have gone with the book. I could have gone and hunted down the kinds of games that we don't really see here because they're not exported here, right? But I decided not to go along that line because what I wanted to do was show my students, many of whom have grown up playing all these PlayStation games and things on the Nintendo consoles. You know, well, what do we learn about Japanese culture from playing those games? Those big huge blockbuster AAA studio games which are smoothed out and kind of made attractive for the overseas audience, right? What is it that designers are trying to include in those games? What version of Japan do they want to show us? And this comes back to the self-oriental obviously, right? So there are some people who are kind of digging up the, especially the PC games, there's so many PC games that never had released in North America or around the world. And they're looking at those in more detail and say, well, what's in here? And what can we tell about that? But I kind of took a different tack with the book. Yeah. And I mean, you can argue that the gaming has widened the lens, hasn't it, of Japan? I mean, I'm sure you do in Delaware, but we get so many students coming to Sirius to study Japanese language or some other aspect of Japanese studies because they've grown up with Japanese manga and anime and gaming. And so that's often where their interest in Japan starts, isn't it? You hear that all the time. So in fact, it's kind of widening the lens into Japan in many ways, I would say. Yeah, I see what you mean. Yeah. And a lot of my students come in playing, they've all just played Persona 5. So last year in my game studies, I teach a class called video games in Japanese culture. And like half the class had played Persona 5. And I'm like, wow, this is a real kind of homogeneous set of students with this playing experience behind them. And there's a question here. What is your opinion on the fetishite? I can't speak tonight. I've been teaching all day. Fetishization of the black body in Japanese animation and games. So would you say there are similarities between the way cross-cultural interaction occurs between African-American and Japanese pop culture in anime and video games? Right, that's a really interesting question. And that would probably be more relevant now in the games that are released these days. In the games that I'm talking about, there are very, very few black characters. And especially, I did some work on this with the Street Fighter series. It's quite interesting. Back in, you know, you're talking about the 16-bit pixel days when the skin tone of characters was quite difficult to achieve. It was kind of all or nothing. So if you had an African-American fighter, for example, who'd have very dark skin tone, but then somebody like Ryu and Ken would have the same skin tone, even though Ryu is meant to be Japanese and Ken's meant to be white American. And so this very visual difference, right, singling out the black character as opposed to all of the other characters who are supposed to be from Brazil and Japan and America and they all look the same. It's very, very notable. And then you get characters in Final Fantasy VII that I was talking about. Barrett Wallace is the leader of Avalanche, the guerrilla movement against Shinra. And he looks like Mr. T, right, who was a big pop culture figure on television in the 1980s. And so the way that the Japanese designers have drawn these black and African-American characters is very specifically drawn from famous black people that they knew, right, such as, you know, Boxers or, you know, Mr. T on television, things like that. Soul Calibur didn't get a black character until quite late in the series. And then it was, what's his name, the Salamel. And he was set in the 16th century. So he was a more, a moreish person who came through. But he's on the cover of one of the games. And it's a very forbidding character. He's wearing a hooded cowl. And he's carrying this scythe. And he basically looks like the figure of death. And so you could argue, you know, the way that these characters have been represented in fighting games hasn't been very positive over the years. There's an interesting question here about blood. So this person was in a seminar with a journalist where it was told that Japanese gamers dislike blood despite many Japanese games involving fighting and killing. So could it be related to the Shinto, you know, blood being impure? Oh, that's really interesting. Yeah, so if you look at Japanese game design and censorship, I don't do a lot of work on censorship in Japanese games. So it's interesting what's shown in Japan and what's shown overseas. And in Salka, I always talk about Soul Calibur because I've played all those games and I'm very familiar with it. But when you hit somebody in Soul Calibur, instead of red blood coming out, light comes out. Right. So you get this emission of light out of the body. And it's almost like the body's energy dissipating into the atmosphere, I feel like. But it makes it a very spectacular and not revolting scene to watch. Right. So if you think about fighting games in particular, these are things that are played in arcades with lots of people behind you. So like playing these games in the 1990s in the Japanese arcade, there'd just be huge crowd around you. And they're all screaming and jumping up and down or watching very carefully. And so it's a spectacle. And the game designers and the executives and the arcade owners knew that you couldn't have this huge spectacle of blood to see out in the street in Shinjuku. Right. So the games are made in a very specific way. So it's not to have that. And that has to do with the kinds of people that wander through arcades, as well as, you know, at home on the console, you're very often thinking about a younger audience with console games and so on. But it's really interesting about the Shinto. And indeed, if you know the game franchise, Grand Theft Auto, it's by Rockstar Games. It's a Western game series. But in the Western version, in the version that I have, if you kill somebody in the game and they fall down, their body's on the street and then you can kind of kick the body and money will come out because they drop all the money out of their pockets is the idea. And then you can collect the money and run off with it. Right. In Japan, if you kill somebody in the Japanese version of the game, if you kill a character in that game, it's been localized so the body doesn't stay around on the street. So you can't desecrate that body by kicking it or running it over with a car or any of the other inventive ways you can get money out of a body in the American version because they don't want the dead body desecrated in the game. So there is something to what you say with the religious aspect. That's really interesting. There's a question here, which sprang into my mind as well. So the characters that you talk about, Cloud and Soda and Snake, visibly appear to be Caucasian. So you mentioned at the beginning, blonde hair and blue eyes as well. So what does this say about the relationship between Japanese-ness and whiteness? And how does that factor into your assertion that the JRPG's modern Shishousetsu, when thinking about Japanese people? Yeah, thank you so much for that. So Koichi Iwabuchi has done a lot of work on this idea of the Mukokseki Japanese product, like the culturally odourless Japanese product that can be shipped overseas and played anywhere. And so with those, with Cloud's strife in particular, this is why I did an in-depth study of him as a shounen character in the book because, yes, he's blonde and he has blue eyes. But what does that mean? The blue eyes are intimately connected to the narrative of the game with this mutation of Muko. And then the blonde hair, I think the shape has more to do with things than anything else. It's spiky hair, the dynamism, this idea of ginkiness in the young Japanese shounen youth. But then when you get over to Snake as well, it's very interesting, the original cover art for Metal Gear Solid had a blonde-haired blue-eyed protagonist on the cover. And they changed that later in later iterations of the game. And he didn't look like that anymore. It was a much more neutral kind of gray scale face with high cheekbones and what have you. And in the narrative of the game, Snake is revealed to have Japanese genetic heritage. And there's another character in one of the games who's a Native American ancestry. And he says, Oh, you and I have a lot in common because our ancestry is, you know, from the islands, all this kind of thing going back into that. That's a huge backstory, right? And you're correct visually, they don't look Japanese, these people, right? So what I argue in the book is more that it's not the visuals of these characters so much as what they do, their attitudes, what masculinity means to them, what are the causes that they're fighting for, things like this. But there's so much interesting stuff to be thought about in terms of, you know, because in the fighting game genre, Akira, Yuki, Ryu, Kazuyo, Mishima, they're all constructed in exactly the same way visually, right? And they're very typically Japanese looking to have black hair, dark eyes, etc. But JRPG is different and it works in a different kind of way. It's got its own rhetoric, if you like. So I'd like to think about that more. There's a few questions here, sort of basically asking the same thing. So you've talked about how Japan and Japanese culture is depicted in these games. But what do you think some of these games have to say about Japan looking out on the world and looking at other cultures in that sense? So Japan looking out rather than people looking in on Japan. So do you mean how these games represent other kinds of cultures other than Japan? Well, Japan's perspective on those cultures is what they're asking, essentially. Some of them are asking the depiction of other cultures and some are thinking about the Japan's perspective of other cultures. There's a few different questions there. Yeah, it's very interesting. So taking America as an example, right? If you look at Street Fighter, I keep coming back to Street Fighter. But the way that Street Fighter 2 is set up with Ryu as the default player 1 and Ken as the default player 2, it's very interesting because Ken is American. He's blonde, right? He wears red, Ryu wears white. So it's very ancient Japanese red versus white kind of color palette going on there. But it's always Ryu versus Ken. And if you look at the museum exhibits of Street Fighter and things like this, it's always Ryu versus Ken. And so America is kind of set up as the ultimate opposition to Japan. It's this binary system where it's always Japan versus America. And the way that American characters are introduced in the series is quite interesting. And you get this character Gile who has blonde hair, has kind of gelled straight up from his body. He's a military man. He wears a military uniform, big combat boots and things like this. And this idea of the American military man is very, very common in Japanese games of all genres. And so Metal Gear Solid kinds of makes fun of it a little bit, right? So Snake is this military man and he's sent out into, you know, the Middle East and Costa Rica and all these different places all around the world to take part in military activities. But then we find he's actually, you know, he has Japanese heritage. So what does that mean about the, you know, stereotype of the military man that we have? And different game designers have different ways of playing with this stereotype of America, right? And you can see that with other cultures, with other cultures in the Japanese games as well. So I mentioned the Yakuza games that look in a more nuanced way at the Korean culture. I find it fascinating and there's so many games available and they all represent characters from all around the world, right? So you could do so many studies of Japan's perspective on the West or Japan's perspective on African countries or Japan's perspective on Latin America, right? And these are all fascinating studies to me. And I'd like to read them. If you do them, send them to me because I want to read them. I'm conscious that it's 6.30, but there are tons of questions. So are you okay to go a little bit longer? I'm probably not going to get to all of the questions. I'm sorry, because there are just so many here, but I knew that this was going to be a lively, very interesting. I'm going to pick another very specific gaming question for you. Do you see Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII as a villain or a victim of a biological experiment? So the person saying I think he's a really complex character like other villains just wanted to ask your opinion. I love that question. That's fantastic. And Sephiroth's so frightening in the game, right? You go through and he's just an incredible figure of power and his sword does so much more damage than you ever can, right? When you're looking up to him. And then you're going through this wasteland, right? And there's this, all of a sudden, there's this massive spike with a snake on it and the spikes going through this giant snake's neck and you just kind of stand there and say, did Sephiroth do this? And so, you know, the game builds up and builds up and builds up and then you meet Sephiroth and he's this horrific villain and you're terrified of him. But then you find out all his backstory and he's been completely twisted, right? And he has all these genetic experiments done on him and in the womb and everything like this. And you do end up feeling sorry for Sephiroth. So I do think he's a tragic figure. He's also a horrific villain. But this is my point about how the square game designers really manipulate the player in very intelligent ways and the impact, the emotional impact of these things on the player just can't be described. You know, you go through it and you're just gutted at some of the things that happen and then you realise something else and you're like, oh, no. And for parts of the game, you're really not sure, am I the evil one? Am I the good one? You're really not sure, right? And so the idea that Sephiroth's this villain, or maybe not, you know, that really fits into the whole idea of the game, playing with the emotions of the player in this way. A number of people have asked about Final Fantasy VII, Helen. And so, you know, this is one of the big canonical games everyone knows, you know. Well, actually, there's another question here about Final Fantasy VII. So the remake is only in its first part. So how do you feel or see the differences in it compared to the 97 version in terms of representation of characters, environment, and of course, modern Japan as well. So I'm going to confess here, I haven't played the new one. Yeah, so I played the old one on a, I've played, so for the research for my book, I was very careful to play the original versions, right? So, and this entailed buying old consoles and when I put Final Fantasy VI into the PlayStation, I had the disc and it was originally released for the Nintendo, right? So I cheated on that one. I've got a PlayStation II version of it and I put it into the PlayStation II and I couldn't save it because it was an earlier game and I needed a PlayStation I memory card in order to play it. So I had to order the memory card on Amazon and then wait three days. This is before Amazon Prime and to wait three days. And then, you know, my game was racking up hours. So even when I was sleeping, it was racking up hours. So I was really upset that my game time had like 72 hours added on to it even before I really started the game even. But no, I haven't played the new one. Okay. Is a question here, can you comment on the Pokemon phenomenon and why has this been so successful over the last few decades, particularly given the international success? Yeah, yeah. So there's pocket, you know, I've got my Pokemon thing up there next to the cactus. Yeah, Pokemon's just an incredible phenomenon all around the world and there's been a lot of books written about Pokemon and Pikachu. Pikachu's Global Adventure is a really good book if you want to read that one. But, you know, it's perfect. It's a collecting game, right? So you can obsessively hunt down all the different kinds of monsters and learn all about them. And, you know, again, it's like all come you have this as well. There's always like a collection board where you can go in and make sure that you have every single item and learn all about them. And it becomes a mark of, you know, cultural knowledge. What did Pierre Bourdieu always use to talk about? I'm completely blanking now, cultural capital. It's your cultural capital that you know all there is to know about every single different creature. That's something that people really take pride in and especially for the younger players, right? If your world is completely confusing to you, which it is most of the time to all of us, being able to control your game and all the little characters in it and know everything that is to know about something gives you a real sense of confidence and calmness, I think, in a confusing world. So, I mean, that's why I think Pokemon does so well. And they're just fun to play. And they're cute. They're colorful, right? It's got a lot going for it. And it translates very easily into other languages. There's not huge amounts of text or dialogue that you have to worry about. So they localize very seamlessly all around the world. We've got a question here from Sebastian, who's a lecturer in modern Japanese studies and says, thanks for your book. Had a great experience reading it with students in the seminar and intrigued by the concept of gameplay as discursive practice that you mentioned at the end. So the question he has is, in light of very influential game studies paradigms like procedural rhetoric, where would where would the player subject and their agency in reading the text fit into this model? And how would you relate gameplay as discursive practice to the programmed rhetoric of development teams and corporate execs? So there's two parts that question. So you're thinking about procedural rhetoric from two directions. One of them is the executive decision level. And what was the other one? In terms of game studies, more influential game studies paradigms themselves. So I guess putting it into the literature that's out there would be my reading of it. So you're thinking about Ian Bogost and the procedural rhetoric there. And I like to also use Ken McAllister. He works on a lot of rhetoric in games. And how the game, right? So what we're talking about is how the game rules position the player in terms of the player's agency, their abilities to choose various things in the narrative and shape the game in certain ways and really produce their own narrative. So what is discursive practice? When we're meaning making, we're story making, and we're making our own interpretation out of this. And reader response theory comes into this quite a bit too. And there's some very interesting PhD thesis being written now about games through the reader response theory lens. But I like the idea of the player as a subject or agent of their own story and their own discursive practice. And I come back to that word. Because what we're doing is by playing these games, we're adding to the discourse. So this discourse surrounds us. So taking bioethics as an example. There's all these laws being made about cloning. There's Kojima Hideo making games about, you know, cloned people and what it feels like to be a cloned person. And then you feel that, right? As a subject playing the game and also as a character who's positioned as a subject at the centre of the narrative. There's a lot of different levels of identity going on, right? But as you play through the game and you embody this character and you feel what they feel, I think that this enables you to create your own version of that discourse. And through your gameplay, you have the lived experience of being part of the broader discourse that surrounds you. So if you're looking at the news every day, it's about stem cell research and things like this. And then you're playing a game that's made the same year. So Metal Gear Solid 4 came out in 2004. And it's all about stem cells. And because that's when the Japanese scientists won the Nobel Prize for their stem cell research, it really reverberated through the whole society. And so you're playing in this and it becomes part of your personal experience. So this discourse isn't something that's just in the context anymore. It's in the game text called Metal Gear Solid. And it's also in your game text called Rachel Hutchinson's experience of Metal Gear Solid, right? As the subject and centre of that narrative. So I don't know if I've... This is something I'm developing as well. I don't know if I'm expressing myself very clearly here. But that's how I think about it. And when you're talking about the game designers and then the level on top of that with the studio executives who make the final decisions on what is going to be distributed. How do we market this? What do we put on the cover of the game? What kind of artwork best represents and encapsulates the ideas and the ideology of this game? That's another level of again. And then you're getting into ratings and censorship and all that kind of interesting stuff. So thank you for that hint actually. I'll have to take that into consideration as I develop this idea of games as discourse, games adding to the broad discourse of a time and what the player's role is in all this. Not only experiencing that discourse for themselves but adding to it through their own lived experience. There's a question here from Andrew who's one of our JRC visiting scholars. Could you talk a little bit more about the localization of these games for different audiences around the world and also perhaps to the extent that it exists their transnational production? So does this complicate the notion of these games as Japanese culture? I'll take the second question first. Mia Consolvo and Jeremy Peltier-Gagnon have done a lot of work on this. So they look very specifically at things like the JRPG as a transnational product. And Mia Consolvo has looked at Square Enix in particular and the Final Fantasy series in particular as a corporate product. So rather than me trying to answer that, I mean yes, the simple answer is yes, these are transnational products. Square Enix has offices all around the world. But I really do direct you to those scholars' work. In terms of localization, there's some really, really interesting examples of how Japanese games going out have been localized in various ways for specific markets and how other games have been localized coming into Japan for the Japanese market. So I'll give you an example of each. When Soul Calibur was exported or taken out to the Asian market, if you're looking at places like Korea, that image of Mitsurugi Heishiro with the katana, the summarized sword or all the rest of it, that's very offensive to the Korean audience who was under Japanese oppression for many years as a colony of Japan. So what they did with Mitsurugi, they made a new character called Arthur and he's meant to be this kind of swordsman. And Arthur has blonde hair and an eye patch. But this being the early days of localization back in the 90s, that's basically all they changed about Mitsurugi. So they didn't really bother changing Arthur's sword. So it's this blonde guy with an eye patch with a katana and tubby socks. So it's very incomplete kind of localization, but it was enough to be able to sell the product overseas. What's interesting coming into Japan, there's an American game fallout. And I haven't thought about this game for a while, but you're going through the environment and there's an unexploded bomb as an atomic weapon. I forget the name of the town, but as the player in fallout, you have a choice to detonate this atomic bomb and just obliterate the town. Now in the Japanese version of that game, when the game was coming into Japan, it was localized so that the player does not actually have that choice. Oh, Megaton, thank you. Somebody just said, yes, thank you so much. Yeah, the town of Megaton. And in the Japanese version of fallout, you don't have that choice. So you could call it censorship, or you could call it localization, but the atomic anxiety nuclear fear is so strong in Japan, they did not want the player to be put into that agonizing position of having to decide whether to detonate an atomic weapon on civilians or not. So it's interesting to see the different kinds of ways that the game to localize going in and out of Japan. I'm just going to have one more question because I'm conscious of the time and then end with a comment because there's a couple of comments that are similar. So there's a couple of people asking about war experience and war memory. So there's one in particular here from Alex who says, in more traditional media, films, books and so on, the Japanese experience of the war has been reflected in more nationalistic ways. But in his personal experience of gaming, that sort of overt nationalism, nationalism isn't so clearly represented in gaming. So what, why might that be? Or do you think that war experience or war memory is just portrayed differently in video games compared to traditional media? So asking about war memory and nationalistic. That's fantastic. Thank you for that question. There's a couple of questions about war there, but I've taken that one as an example. Yeah. So this is another hour long presentation. But it's chapter seven of my book. So I was very interested in this question about Japanese depictions of war. And if you stick with the games I've been looking at today, Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid, for example, they have quite negative depictions of war. It's not something that you really want to get into. It causes all kinds of human suffering, right? And so the overall message tends to be anti-war and anti-nuclear. They go together, right? And so there's a very nuanced idea of war in these very long games, because long games have the space to be nuanced and have a very kind of complex idea about what put you in that soldier's position. Have you fight as the soldier experience war for yourself and realize, no, it's not really something that we should be doing. But if you look at other genres, so real time strategy, for example, or online card games, then you find a greater range of different kinds of depictions of war. Some are positive, some are negative. Some people, most of the Japanese gaming industry does not want to deal with World War II because it's a defeat for Japan, right? And so as the player, if you're playing a war game as a player, part of the fun is to experience winning. You want that victory at the end, and there's no victory narrative. You know, you can't make a Japanese call of duty. It'll be awful, right? American video game industry can make call of duty because America was on the winning side, right? So we have all these kind of victory narratives that we can exploit for games. But Japan doesn't have that, right? And so what do you do with that? Well, you can set the war in an alternate universe. You can make it a fantasy idea where it's not called the hours of the Axis powers. It's called something else, right? You can replay World War II through allegory. You can set it at sea. There's a lot of naval games, a lot. And some of them depict a battle of midway. But, you know, depending on player action, it might be alternate history, right? And a lot of the real-time strategy games have alternate endings because it depends on the player's skill. And if you're a very poor strategy player like myself, you end up in the alternate history very quickly, because I lose the wrong battle and things like this. So it's kind of fun to see how those play out. But there are some games that are very nationalistic. And you see some things like Kantai Collection is an online card game where you play as the Japanese Imperial Fleet. And the cards, they're anthropomorphised as beautiful women. But they're based on actual Japanese warships from the Imperial Fleet. And they have the same names, you know? And the battleship Yamato is in the game, right? And there's a whole manga and an anime about it. And in the anime, particularly, it's really interesting because in the end, the Japanese Fleet is victorious. And what does this tell us about the way that Japanese game designers are choosing to remember the war? It's really interesting, actually. Well, like I say, that's a genre. Yeah. And that's another whole big subject in itself. So I'm just going to end with a couple of nice comments here, actually. And they're linked. So there's a comment here from Kiera, who also got very excited when you were presenting during the chat, putting lots of nice little comments in there. And she said that when she was, I won't give the name of the university, but when she was studying, she did some research on video games. And she was completely dismissed by her professor at the time as it had no academic value whatsoever. And since then, you know, she's never engaged with video games within that sort of academic environment for fear of being dismissed. So she was extremely grateful to have heard your talk and considered the value that there is now. And to follow that up, Mark Pendleton from Sheffield, who I'm sure you one of our great Japanese studies colleagues said, thanks for a great talk, Rachel. Nice to see your face as well. And he said, we've got several students at Sheffield now working on video games for their dissertation projects this year. And we're very excited to hear that you were speaking tonight because they've read the book. And he knows that a few of them are in the call tonight. So just confirmation, just confirmation to Kiera as well that, you know, this is a field that's really growing thanks to your book as well. So I think that's a nice way to, to finish off tonight. And I'm really sorry to those of you whose questions we couldn't get to just because of time. But there was over 100 people in there in this seminar in the end. And a lot of questions. So I'm sorry if I didn't get to your question. I was just trying to get some different questions there. Hopefully you enjoyed it anyway. And yeah, Rachel, thank you so much. I think I may not take up video gaming, but I think I think I'm interested in reading your book though. So thank you so much for having me. And thank you so much to all the people that came and the wonderful questions. Absolutely. Yeah, most of what I said is in the book. And if you have specific questions about further reading, I can certainly send you, you know, Mia Consalvo and Jeremy Peltier-Gagnon, Gonzalo Frasca and all those fabulous scholars whose work went into what I was presenting today as well. So thanks again. I really enjoyed today. Thank you. And my final note of thanks is to Charles, who's been running this logistically. And he may also be able to send you the chat and questions as well afterwards so you can, you can have a look at them. But people were so complimentary in the chat as well, saying what a wonderful presentation it's been. So thank you. And I know you said you had the first snow in Delaware today. So keep safe and warm over the winter. And I have to, I have to apologize because of course you are Australian. You're from the land down under. And I was just thinking you'd got, you know, you'd lived and studied in England. And for a moment there, I completely forgot that you were a fellow Antipodean like myself. So always nice to hear an Australian accent. No worries. So thank you so much, Rachel. We're going to leave it here tonight. But thank you to everybody who joined us and hope you enjoyed the presentation. Thanks, everyone. Bye.