Shenmue
Game
Documents about Shenmue
Flesh, Plastic, Stone: The Pleasure of Recontextualised Character Models
This paper examines moments in videogames that deliberately undercut their own fictions by presenting characters as inert digital objects rather than lifelike agents.
- The paper argues that moments where game characters appear as statues, toys, or museum exhibits deliberately undercut their own fictions and produce a distinctive pleasure, analysed through theories of comedy, the ontology of digital objects, and the cultural status of games.
- Its central example is Shenmue II, where a marble bust of a villain turns out to be the same scaled and retextured 3D model used for the character himself.
- The author contends such moments do more than mock players who mistake digital puppets for living people (as Bergson's theory of laughter might suggest), also mediating anxieties about games as commodified playthings versus serious art, and the deskilled, precarious labour of developers whose cutting-edge assets become obsolete.
From Play to Playces: The Representation of Contexts of Play in Japanese Games and Popular Media
This paper examines how Japanese popular media, including manga, anime, video games, and television, represents "playces," the physical and social contexts in which play occurs, such as game centers, entertainment districts, theme parks, and domestic spaces.
- The paper argues that depictions of 'playces' (game centers, entertainment districts, theme parks, domestic spaces) in Japanese manga, anime, games, and TV are meaningful sites rather than neutral backdrops, where spatial affordances, cultural rhetorics of play, and digital game development intersect.
- The analysis draws on a corpus of roughly forty items, including manga such as Game Center Arashi and Hi-score Girl, games such as the Yakuza, Shenmue, and Persona series, and the TV program Game Center CX, and is funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
- Its framework combines semiotic models with dimensions covering architectural properties, ludic activities, space-player identity relationships, societal and self-rhetorics, and, for games, the interaction between simulated space and player agency.
Promoting Yokosuka via Video Game Tourism: The Case of the Shenmue Sacred Spot Guide Map
This paper examines how the video game Shenmue (SEGA-AM2, 2000) has generated tourism to Yokosuka, Japan, and how the city's Yokosuka Action Committee for the Promotion responded by releasing the "Shenmue Sacred Spot Guide Map" in 2017.
- Yokosuka, a city of roughly 400,000 people in Japan, has drawn tourism driven by fan pilgrimages to locations recreated in SEGA-AM2's 2000 game Shenmue, a phenomenon the author calls "video game-induced tourism" or "secular pilgrimage."
- In 2017 the Yokosuka Action Committee for the Promotion released the "Shenmue Sacred Spot Guide Map," shifting the municipality from passively benefiting from fan travel to deliberately capturing its economic value through a promotional leaflet modeled on film "movie maps."
- Per an interview with a Yokosuka City tourism official, demand for the guide is strong among both Japanese and foreign fans, many of whom were residents of Japan, and the guide is currently available only domestically.
Realism and the Everyday in Digital Games
Paul Martin's paper develops Alexander Galloway's theory of "social realism" in digital games, arguing that realism's critical potential becomes visible only when three elements are considered together: the mode of representation, the everyday, and what the Marxist critic György Lukács called the social totality.
- Martin revises Alexander Galloway's theory of 'social realism' in digital games, arguing that realism's critical potential emerges only when the mode of representation, the everyday, and Lukács's concept of the social totality are considered together.
- The paper critiques Galloway's account for neglecting representation, conflating realism with critique in general, and relying on a 'congruence requirement' that ties the everyday life depicted in a game to players' own everyday experience.
- Drawing on Lukács's defence of literary realism and Yuri Lotman's view of everyday life as a boundary zone where personal habits collide with dominant codes, Martin frames realism as a means of linking individual lives to the totality of social relations.
Space, Agency, Meaning and Drama in Navigable Real-Time Virtual Environments
Navigable real-time virtual environments, examined through the action-adventure role-playing game Shenmue II, derive their meaning and dramatic force from a hybrid structure that combines rule-based, systematic organization with situational knowledge drawn from real-world experience.
- Navigable real-time virtual environments derive meaning and dramatic force from a hybrid of rule-based systematic organization and situational knowledge drawn from real-world experience.
- Grounded in environmental psychology, the authors frame person-environment interaction as a cyclical, bi-directional process in which perception is continually shaped by prior experience, a cycle virtual environments replicate with an added layer of authorial mediation.
- The authors conclude that interactivity and culturally situated associations are the principal sources of engagement, and designers who neglect links to the external world risk producing confusion rather than immersion.