HERO MYTHS IN JAPANESE ROLE-PLAYING GAMES Kieran G. Blasingim A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS August 2006 Committee: Dr. Marilyn Motz, Advisor Dr. Jeremy Wallach Dr. Andrew Mara ii ABSTRACT Dr. Marilyn Motz, Advisor The Purpose of this text is to examine the cultural mythologies present in Japanese console role-playing games as they are transliterated for American audiences in an effort to understand how these texts might influence notions of identity in contemporary Western culture. Specifically, this text is concerned with the way these games play out the conflict between traditional cultural values and posthumanity in a postmodern context; the narrative elements of Japanese RPGs seem to be deployed in an effort to problematize any relationship between the posthuman and the heroic, and the gameworlds reflect this demonization and Othering of posthumanity. Specific texts will be examined in the context of the traditional narrative elements which they employ, including various Japanese myths, legends, and narratives, in hopes of exploring not only the loaded comparison these games make between traditional Japanese heroism and posthumanism but also between Japanese and American notions of the heroic. Finally, this text will attempt to combine the theories of ludology, narratology, and folklore for the study of digital games, an approach uncommon in this highly factious discipline. iii I would like to dedicate this text to my parents, who bought me my first game console (a NES cartridge deck) in the mid-80s against their own judgement, and who have despaired of my unwavering interest in video games since that day. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, I must acknowledge Drs. Andrew Mara, Marilyn Motz, and Jeremy Wallach for their help and support throughout this project; it was a joy working with each of them, and I hope that they have had as much fun as I have these last two years. Secondly, I would like to extend some recognition to my fellow graduate students at Bowling Green State University, all of whom have helped to make this experience one that I will look back on fondly. Third, I should acknowledge Patrick Sanders and Shaun Edmonds, who helped me with the phrasing of my classification of J-RPGs. And, finally, I'd like to thank the many gamers with whom I've played over the years, and with whom I've had so much fun. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................................ii DEDICATION ...........................................................................................................................................iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS......................................................................................................................... iv PART I: TRADITION .................................................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER ONE: VIDEO GAMES AND VIDEO GAME THEORY........................................... 2 CHAPTER TWO: CONSOLE RPGS AS CULTURAL ARTIFACTS....................................... 13 PART II: FORMULATION ....................................................................................................................... 22 CHAPTER THREE: THE JAPANESE HERO ............................................................................ 23 CHAPTER FOUR: THE HAKKENDEN AND THE J-RPG PARTY.......................................... 32 PART III: DECONSTRUCTION ............................................................................................................... 42 CHAPTER FIVE: THE POSTHUMAN WORLD ....................................................................... 43 CHAPTER SIX: SCIENCE, MAGIC, AND THE POSTHUMAN HERO.................................. 51 PART IV: REMEDIATION ....................................................................................................................... 62 CHAPTER SEVEN: “ACTION” ADVENTURES AND “REAL-TIME” COMBAT ................. 63 CHAPTER EIGHT: THE DEATH OF STORY............................................................................ 71 BIBLIOGRAPHY....................................................................................................................................... 77 APPENDIX A: TEXTS EXAMINED ........................................................................................................ 82 PART I TRADITION 2 CHAPTER ONE VIDEO GAMES AND VIDEO GAME THEORY The critical study of console video games as cultural works is a relatively recent development in academia, and like most branches taking their first breaths its theories have, for the most part, been brought from other disciplines and reapplied in this context. Insofar as they are games, the theories of ludology seem to be a natural choice for their evaluation; insofar as they allow a player to inhabit another being in a world bound by different physical, moral, and social rules they beg for psychoanalysis; insofar as they attempt to tell stories – to portray narrative movement – literary analysis seems to be an obvious choice; and insofar as they attempt to define that nebulous concept, heroism, through performance, they seem to have ready within them a room for the application of folklore theory. And so, for the last few years, the field of game studies has been racked by a battle between academics of various disciplines attempting to lay claim to this fertile – insofar as video games account for a rather large amount of youth 3 leisure time – terrain for their own theories1. The one thing that is known – and known definitively – is that elements of each of these disciplines apply in different ways to different game genres. Perhaps it is the fundamentally different nature of mediations within the context of video games that gives rise to the difficulty of examining it within any existing framework. Unlike television and other traditional forms of mediation, video games encompass a spectrum of configurative genres – immersive first-person shooters, puzzle-solving adventures, and narratively-structured role-playing games, to name a few. Control and interaction are much more variable between these genres than between genres of TV and other forms of standard mediation – player-character relationships are multi-leveled and may vary depending on the genre in question. Moreover, control and interaction necessitate mechanics and rules – the building blocks of all games – and this leads to an assumption that digital games should be seen first and only as remediations of board games. Individual video game genres may find themselves more or less easily encompassed within various schools of critical study: folklore, narratology, psychoanalysis, etc., or within the newly-defined (and militantly policed) school of ludology, which defines itself as the study of games and game systems. The truth, however, as notable critics have pointed out2, is that aspects of all of these theories are more or less applicable – and, thus, should be incorporated into a larger discourse on the study of digital games. It is with that approach in mind that this text intends to examine a specific genre of digital games using various tools and conceptualizations from several of these fields. Specifically, the object of study shall be console role-playing games created in Japan and transmitted (via translation and transculturation) to Western audiences. My 1 See, particularly, Gonzalo Frasca’s “Simulation Versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology” and James Newman’s “The Myth of the Ergodic Videogame.” 2 Henry Jenkins is a particularly good example. 4 purpose here is not to provide a comprehensive examination of all aspects of the genre, but to investigate the ways in which these games transmit alternate notions of gender (particularly masculinity), heroism, and life within a postmodern or technocratic world, as well as alien cultural information, to their new audiences. Each of these aspects of digital gaming seems particularly relevant given the current discourses on the role of digital games in influencing the behavior and identifications of American youths and on the role of digital culture in general in producing a postmodern, cybernetic revolution in the construction of society and self in the 21st Century. Setting aside first-person shooters and action adventure games; the genres of digital games most commonly discussed by ludologists and psychoanalysts3, this work will deal primarily with one of the more overlooked genres within the medium: Japanese console role-playing games. This subset of the larger category of digital games can be identified as those games which include the following: 1. An overwhelming4, predefined narrative arc or story that is told through the play experience. 2. Characterizations which problematize the relationship between player and avatar by, at the least, establishing a persona which cannot be meaningfully5 manipulated by the player and, at most, which may result in the player distancing herself from the narrative’s “primary” character. 3. A lack of a singular, directly corresponding avatar – which is replaced by a “party” of characters with different skills, motivations, and visual representations, 3 See Alison McMahan’s “Immersion, Engagement, and Presence: A Method for Analyzing 3-D Video Games,” Bob Rehak’s “Playing at Being: Psychoanalysis and the Avatar,”