Digital Shogun and Electronic Imperialism: Japanese History through the Lens of Historical Videogames
From Firenze University Press Book: East and West Entangled (17th-21st Centuries)
Why Videogames?
First, we should ask ourselves why videogames should be researched from a historical perspective. Nowadays, videogames are a powerful, global, all-encompassing medium. The videogame industry is a worldwide colossus, competing with and sometimes surpassing other more classic industries, such as cinema and music publishing. Developing and publishing videogames is a complex process that not only involves great assets, but also boosts technological advancements, given the great number of different hardware supports they can be played on, including consoles, personal computers and mobile phones. A large number of titles produced by the videogame industry are historybased. Humankind’s past has always attracted videogame developers, who have looked to history for stories to create and narrate. History not only represents a source of inspiration, but also provides the background and the scaffold on which a game is created. In fact, many videogames feature in-game historical notions, sometimes taking the form of electronic encyclopaedias, which help the player feel part of a realistic historical setting. Precise depictions and descriptions of weapons and tools, historical events contextualised in the gameplay, insightful descriptions of economic and social processes: all these aspects are very often part of the structure of history-based videogames. Given the popular dimension of this medium, digital games spread historical knowledge in a popular form. They represent a sort of cultural mirror: they produce views of the past, but also reproduce how we see, understand and manipulate the past itself. This aspect is fundamental in a history-related discussion on videogames. In recent times, we have seen the launch of serious academic criticism on history-based videogames. In the last fifteen years, many historians have tried to address the theme of history as it is represented in videogames. In 2005, William Uricchio produced a contribution that is widely considered the cornerstone of a new historical approach to videogames: Simulation, History and Computer Games (Uricchio 2005.) In this article Uricchio highlighted the videogame as a tool for reproducing and simulating historical processes, as opposed to focusing on historical authenticity and accuracy. Taking Uricchio as an example, a group of academics founded what they termed Historical Game Studies, publishing their manifesto in Rethinking History, titled Introduction: what is historical games studies? (Chapman, Foka, and Westlin 2017). In this manifesto, the authors describe their intentions and offer a way to approach videogames as the subject of historical analysis. The definition they suggested for historical games is very important for my research:
Though of course it is possible to forward many definitions of the «historical game», we work from the open definition of this as those games that in some way represent the past, relate to discussions about it, or stimulate practices related to history (Chapman, Foka, and Westlin 2017, 367).
The relationship with the past and the way it is portrayed in videogames is fundamental when we address the depiction of Japan in this medium. Japanese history is widely used as a setting for historical videogames. As previously said, this happens in different ways, depending on whether the producers are Japanese or Western. In the last thirty years, the history of the Japanese archipelago, and certain historical periods in particular, has become archetypal in the gaming dimension.
DOI: 10.36253/979–12–215–0242–8.15
Read Full Text: https://books.fupress.it/chapter/digital-shogun-and-electronic-imperialism-japanese-history-through-the-lens-of-historical-videogames/14123
