Game Studies Meets Japanese Studies: Ten Years of Research

Luca Paolo Bruno's survey examines the intersection of Game Studies and Japanese Studies across 2012 to 2022, centering on a question that remains unresolved: what makes a digital game "Japanese"? Answers may rest on production location, aesthetic conventions, or perceived cultural identity, and the two fields approach these criteria in complementary but sometimes conflicting ways, without a shared vocabulary to reconcile them. Citation analysis shows that Japanese-produced titles such as Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros., and Final Fantasy rank among the most cited works in Game Studies journals, though scholarship has tended to emphasize their global reach over more locally specific games.

The survey identifies persistent biases that have shaped the field. Japanese video game scholarship has often treated games as illustrations of "Japaneseness" and generalized about Japanese audiences, a tendency critics argue confuses commercially deployed aesthetics designed for global markets with prevailing domestic attitudes. Verifiable academic histories of the Japanese game industry remain scarce, with English-language accounts frequently journalistic and scholarly contributions, notably by Koyama and Nakagawa, limited in number. Research has also been marked by male-centered perspectives and Western framings of Japanese games as sexualized, exotic, or dangerous, framings the field is working to correct.

Scholarship has nonetheless diversified into niches such as arcade culture, pachinko, and adult games, and has produced conceptual tools such as gēmu and ludo-mix that bridge the two disciplines. Institutional infrastructure, including the Replaying Japan conference, its journal, and the co-hosting of DiGRA 2019 at Ritsumeikan, has supported exchange between Japan-focused and global researchers. The survey argues that Japanese digital games should be studied not merely as products of Japan but as artifacts that reference Japanese practices, requiring combined methodologies. Work on war memory, religious heritage, and media mixes illustrates how this interdisciplinary encounter has both narrowed its objects of study and opened new methodological ground for both fields.