Unboxing Japanese Videogames: A Metadata-Based Approach to the Production and Distribution of Spatial Instability, written by Martin Roth
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dias-article-p291_13.pdf
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199.39 KB
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Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Paul Roquet
Date Issued
September 18, 2025
Journal
Asiascape: Digital Asia
Publisher
Brill
Citation
Roquet, P. (2025). Unboxing Japanese Videogames: A Metadata-Based Approach to the Production and Distribution of Spatial Instability, written by Martin Roth. Asiascape: Digital Asia, 12(1-3), 291-293.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Unboxing Japanese Videogames begins with a literal unboxing. Martin Roth and his home institution of Leipzig University receive a donation from Japan’s Computer Entertainment Rating Organization of around 50 boxes, with about 4,500 assorted videogames that the group had been sent for review over the years, including many largely unknown and forgotten titles. The unsorted archive seems to pose a question: how might digging through box after box of assorted videogames transform game scholars’ assumptions about what constitutes ‘Japanese games’ – assumptions most often built on a vastly smaller canon of frequently referenced titles? Unboxing Japanese Videogames is the result of the methodological experiments that emerged from this initial challenge: how can a country’s game industry be mapped out at something approaching its actual scale and complexity? Inspired by Lev Manovich’s ‘cultural analytics’ and similar digital humanities projects to search for patterns in large amounts of human-generated data, Roth’s metadata analytics approach more specifically leverages metadata in both fan and academic game databases to reflect on what it can – and cannot – reveal about the complexities of videogame production and distribution.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Comparative Media Studies/Writing
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1163/22142312-bja10065
