Ka as shomin-geki: Problematizing videogame studies William Huber 34 Rausch Street 401 San Francisco, CA 94103 USA +1 415 861 5863
[email protected] ABSTRACT The paper addresses limitations of strictly interactive theories of videogame genre, proposes a supplementary, historicist inter-media alternative, and interprets the videogame Ka as a ludic worked based in the shomin-geki tradition of Japanese cinema. Keywords Japanese cultural history, videogame genre theory, shomin-geki, domesticity, intertextuality Rather than looking at videogames in general, this paper examines one game in particular as a cultural artifact: Ka, produced in Japan in 2001, and later released in the US and Europe as Mister Mosquito. By bringing a historicist sensibility to the study of individual games in the aftermath of the initial ludology/narratology formalist discussions, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate a way to access videogames as texts in ways that recognize their inherent, media-specific structure as videogames, yet also explore their inevitable intertextualities. To begin with, I look at some general aspects of genre theory as they affect the study of games. I then turn to the game itself, breaking out the structure in a table of interactive and narrative events. An explanation of the shomin-geki comedy drama follows, with attention to how the texts of that genre react to historical changes in the discursive field it tracks, ultimately to include Ka in its concern with the ongoing construction of domesticity in Japan. By tracking genre-formation to historical anxieties within cultural practice, and seeing game-texts as participants in intertextual, thematic genres, we can better understand how they generate discursive positions within gameplay.