Video Game Development in Asia: A Research Project on Cultural Heritage and National Identity

This report, a 2017 collaborative study by Gregory Grieve, Christopher Helland, Kerstin Radde-Antweiler and Xenia Zeiler, examines how video game development in Asia engages with cultural heritage and national identity. Its aim is to address a gap in research, since existing scholarship on media and national identity has focused on social media, radio, television, and print, while video games, a pervasive medium especially among younger audiences, have been largely overlooked. The authors argue that games are "secondary worlds" in which national identities are imagined, histories reconstructed, and traditions reinvented.

The study covers four nations, India, Japan, Nepal, and the Philippines, with each researcher spending roughly three to six weeks on fieldwork involving semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and ethnography with developers and studios. The Nepal case compares the AAA title Far Cry 4 (2014) with the Nepali mobile game polyTricks (2016), drawing on Appadurai's concepts of ethnoscapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes; Far Cry 4 presents Nepal as a romantic, timeless "Shangri-La," while polyTricks emphasizes natural beauty, economic development, and eco-political critique. The Japan case focuses on doujin and indie developers, particularly ZUN's Touhou Project, which draws on Japanese mythology and folklore. The Philippines case finds national identity constructed largely through politics and history, with many recent mobile games promoting political figures, and religion, art, and music largely absent. The India case traces rapid industry growth, from fewer than 20 studios in 2010 to more than 500 by 2012, and highlights games such as Asura and Raji: An Ancient Epic that draw on Hindu mythology and classical aesthetics.

The authors conclude that while similarities and differences exist across the four nations, a shared pattern is that video games have become a global phenomenon taking distinctive forms throughout Asia. The authors describe the work as preliminary, noting that further data collection and analysis remain necessary.