DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play
The University of Tokyo, September, 2007
Volume: 4
ISBN / ISNN: ISSN 2342-9666
This paper examines the situated play aesthetics of Japanese digital games with reference to what Takashi Murakami calls Japan’s superflat visual culture. According to Murakami, superflat visuality is born out of imbricated cultural, political, and historical contexts concerning the relationships between high art and subculture, between Japan and the United States, between history and contemporaneity. In this paper, I examine these dialectical tensions and use superflatness as a hermeneutical tool for examining associated aesthetic forms and ludic properties that are recurrent in Japanese games culture. Key videogames under discussion include We Love Katamari, WarioWare: Mega Microgame$ and Viewtiful Joe. My conception of ludic superflatness acts as an interpretive cue for analysing Japanese digital cultural production in context. In particular, I focus on how ludic superflatness might be regarded as a complex agentive – and polemical – expression of culturally hybrid national identity within the contexts of contemporary digitalised globalisation.