One-day Manga exhibition & seminar

Please join us on Saturday 6 December in The Hague for a few hours of manga, art, virtual ninjas, drinks and snacks!

Admission is free and all are welcome.
For catering purposes we kindly ask that your register.

More information and registration is here: asiascape.org/mangainasessay.html

Martin Roth is awarded historic PhD degree: 'Games encourage us to explore alternatives'

The Asiascape hosted Beyond Utopia is a Leiden University project funded by NWO (Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research) concerned with identifying the potentials of artistic media such as manga, anime, and video games for expression, criticism, and intervention in political thinking.

On August 27 Martin Roth, one of the project's three PhD candidates, was the first to get the degree for his research on the political potential of video games. An historic PhD degree it seems; it is Leiden's Faculty of Humanities first one ever in this field.

Below a translation of an article by Bart Braun in Leiden University newspaper Mare about Martin and his PhD thesis. The original article in Dutch is available on Mare Online. 

 (translation by Asiascape.org)
 

The academic interest for games has finally reached Leiden: last month the Faculty of Humanities bestowed its first PhD degree in this field.

 ‘Games encourage us to explore alternatives’.

In the 1950’s the University of Manchester assisted in the development of the worlds first commercially available computer: the Ferranti Mark 1. It consisted of a huge box containing over four thousand vacuum tubes, built under the supervision of the legendary computer scientist Alan Turing.

This computer outperformed the mechanical calculators of the time and you could also use it to play chess. When you entered your move with a punch card, the computer presented a countermove after 20 minutes. The human opponent then had to put this move on a wooden chessboard; the Mark 1 was not equipped with a monitor to display the course of the game. If you were smart enough to understand the punch card hassle, you were likely to beat it at chess because the machine could not think more than two moves ahead. But still, depending on the definition, this was the first computer game of all time.

The computer game has come a long way since. Monitors came and more and more beautiful things could be seen on it. Apart from programmers, composers, authors, actors and artists all participate in the creation of a game and the computer games business forms the largest branch of the entertainment industry. Destiny, the console game that was released this week, cost 500 million dollars to make, almost twice as much as the most expensive movie ever.

Games have gained enormously in popularity and sales, yet they command little respect. Music and film can be considered art; the written word literature and interactive artworks in museums receive praise. But the real culture vultures turn their noses up at a mix of all these elements.

The academic interest in games is lagging behind that of other art forms too. If scientists have been doing research into games, it is to examine whether they make you smarter, faster, addicted or more violent.

This is slowly beginning to change, also in Leiden. Games did come into play, but only now they are made explicit. Recently Leiden started to offer a minor in Game Studies, in which games will be approached in a art historical and philosophical way rather than a neurological one. The introductory course has already begun and all 35 spots for the minor are taken. Professor Comparative Philosophy and Political Thought Chris Goto-Jones [Asiascape : the original Dutch text wrongly states that Goto-Jones is professor of Eastern Philosophy], has won a NWO scholarship to research the ‘intersections of visual culture and political philosophy in Japan’. Last month Martin Roth was the first of the PhD students on this project who had to publicly defend his thesis.

 ‘I believe that gaming culture and the game industry can profit greatly from more academic research into games’, Roth says. ‘Theory-based critique and methodical inquiry offer new perspectives on the medium. I also believe in the innovative force of a research-based scholarly critique, which is not only interested in judging how „good“ or “harmful” a game was but also looks at its content critically and against the background of our lives, our history and ideologies. With my thesis -and with the book I plan to publish sometime soon- I hope to stimulate a dialogue between the humanities and gamers.’

Art, and especially literature and film, enable us to get closer to the other.  A man who grew up in the nineties can better imagine what it must have been like to be a Jewish girl in World War II thanks to the diary of Anne Frank. In a similar fashion, art and games should be able to let us imagine something really different. Roth: ‘The world won’t change when you enact a soldier even if you haven’t been one yourself. The “Otherness” I’m interested in is the kind that hasn’t existed before but seems plausible to imagine. Science Fiction authors have tried to create Otherness in their works, with more or lesser success, and my question is if games might have the potential to do something similar.

The search for new possibilities of “Otherness” is central to my work, because these days we seem to live under the impression that the status quo is the only possibility. It scares me that I am not able to come up with an alternative to the current socioeconomic system. Perhaps videogames are capable of stimulating our thinking of radical alternatives because they put us in situations that don’t fit with our common views, opinions and experiences. In other words, when we are disrupted. Games manage not only let’s us experience new roles and situations remote from our sofas and daily lives, but are also capable of profound disruption on very basic levels of our experience and thought.’

If you mainly play Angry Birds or Candy Crush and don’t recognize these kind of gaming experiences: don’t worry. For his thesis, Roth used a selection of Japanese games that haven’t all gained much popularity in the Netherlands. ‘Japan has a long and rich gaming culture, which has influenced gaming globally worldwide. There is an enormous amount of Super Mario games but there are also many notable exceptions. Plus, Japanese games are less violence-focused. My personal favorite is the Metal Gear Solid series precisely because it plays with violence in a very ambiguous way. The games in this series feature instances in which violence is directly criticized or in which the tragedies of war are displayed in a critical way. In some cases the characters in the game even directly address the player and confront him/her with the violent actions committed throughout the game, and the fact these were done solely for entertainment’s sake.’

Another example: ‘The time travel game Shadow of Memories confronts the player with a world in which our concept of time does not make sense anymore. This game invites us to question our own understanding of time and its linearity. What does it mean to measure our entire lives in the same time - I worked 8 hours, you worked 10.  We spend time although we never seem to really have it, in the sense that it is ours to distribute freely. What kind of world would it be if we did have time? Would it work?

‘This is a rough sketch of my though process while playing the game and reading Paul Virilio’s political philosophy on time and the speed of our society. Games can speak to this, express it in a palpable way. Some games, at least, and and maybe only if you want to be disrupted.

Martin Roth, Disruptive Conflicts in Computopic Space – Japanese SF Videogames as sources of Otherness and Radical Political Imagination.

Date PhD defence: 27 August

New edition 'Manga in/as Essay' available now

All winning entries to Asiascape's 2014 manga competition 'Interpreting Kurama Tengu' can now be enjoyed in our 3rd Manga in/as Essay publication.
The publication is available on the Asiascape Issuu page: issuu.com/asiascape.

Replaying Japan in Edmonton

In August, I had the opportunity to present a paper at the Replaying Japan conference in Edmonton, Canada. This was the second gathering of scholars from all over the world working on Japanese games organized between the University of Alberta in Canada and Ritsumeikan University in Japan. The kind support from the Goto-Jones VICI project (NWO) allowed me to join the event.

Although Edmonton is not exactly next door to Leiden, I am very glad I could do so. This was a rare opportunity to meet and discuss with an expert group of scholars working on Japanese videogames in a very nice atmosphere (as you can see on the photos provided on the conference website). Combining great keynotes, a variety of technological, cultural and other perspectives on games, including regional game creators' experiences, the conference stood out in that it opened a space for dialogue between researchers and practitioners from many countries and made a serious and successful attempt at reflecting on the richness, diversity, complexity and transnational character of games. What is more, the organizers and volunteers spared no pains in order to make the conference an inspiring, fun, and even relaxing event; an unhurried schedule and very skilled volunteer interpreters for Japanese were as much part of this as raw snack vegetables and lots of coffee - not to mention a very nice dinner.

What was it all about? As the title promises, we replayed Japan - for example in the first keynote delivered by THE Nishikado Tomohiro, creator of Space Invaders (1978). He reflected on the almost single-handed creation of the game, bringing with him all the way from Japan his Space Invader notebooks from the 1970s: a mixture of graphics sketches, circuit-layouts and hand-written assembler code. In case you didn't know this: the invaders were human in the first instance, but Nishikado ultimately decided that killing humans was not a good idea, and invented his space invaders. These, in turn,

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With some exceptions, like the UFO, the aliens, as many science fiction theorists have noted, are not so alien after all...

While Nishikado reflected on his own creative process and on one of the most influential moments in Japaneses videogame culture, Mia Consalvo took one step back, tracing the influences of Japanese games on "Western" game designers and urging us to pay more attention to the creative flows across countries, regions, and cultures. She proposed to distinguish games "from Japan", which could have come from anywhere, and games "of Japan", which reflect on their cultural production context directly. Martin Picard, in turn, traced common discourses scholars of Japanese games are confronted with, in the attempt to negotiate between universalism, cultural specificity, and exoticism. He developed "geemu" (Japanese ゲーム, for "game") as a term for games in Japan that reflects on the historical development they are embedded in.
A Canadian Industry Panel, an introduction to cutting-edge AI-research by Vadim Bulitko (whether you like it or not, it seems that we feel more agency in games that automatically adjust to our preference and give us exactly what we want), as well as a very interesting poster and game presentation session, added to the variety of perspectives present at the conference, which was equally reflected in a wide range of rich papers. I'll not go into much detail here, since each paper I heard deserves much more space and time than I can offer here. Rather, I'd like to refer the inclined reader to the conference proceedings on the website, which contain all abstracts, as well as the photos found on the same site.
My own presentation was part of a great panel on violence in Japanese games, in which Mimi Okabe, Ryan Scheiding, and myself tackled violence from very different perspectives. Mimi proposed to understand the extremely violent sex and rape scenes in the Japanese BL game Enzai as a playful way of turning the body into a spectacle, which is capable of interrogating power relations as well as existent stereotypes of manga and anime character types like the beautiful boy (美少年　bishōnen). She concluded that exaggerations of violence can function as a tool for political intervention and liberation from existing frameworks.
Ryan Scheiding, in turn, looked at the problematic and often racist depictions of Japanese soldiers in historical war games. By comparing specific cases in several popular games with earlier depictions of Japanese soldiers, or "treacherous moneymen" in media like Bugs Bunny etc., he shows how stereotypical representations have persisted and evolved in contemporary games, calling for more sensitivity to such representations among scholars and the gaming community.
In my own presentation, I focussed on the series Metal Gear Solid, arguing that the games confront their player with a complex and ambiguous and provocative experience of violence, between critique and glorification, ultimately forcing the player into a state of exception in which his or her actions demand for reevaluation beyond priorly applicable frameworks and norms. Thus, the games create a free space in which play, including playful violence, is possible.

Overall, the event was rich with new ideas and acquaintances, and definitely a great contribution to drawing together scholars scattered all over the world working on the still developing field of research one of my main interests lies in. I can't wait for the follow-up event next year!

Once again, my thanks to the organizers and all participants for a wonderful event and to the NWO and Chris Goto-Jones' VICI "Beyond Utopia" for supporting my participation!

25 September - opening 'Artist in Residence' manga exhibition East Asian Library

In the summer of 2014, Asiascape and PAI Artist-in-Residence Dr. Lien Fan Shen taught a series of masterclasses exploring Taiwanese female masculinity through gender & queer theory and manga creation.
The artistic results of these masterclasses of the Political Artist Residency 2014 are on display in the East Asian Library of Leiden University from 1 September until the end of 2014.



Please join us for a festive opening and reception at the East Asian Library on Thursday 25 September from 17:00 - 19:00, with a short introduction to the exhibition at 17:30.

Location: Leiden University East Asian Library, Arsenaalstraat 1, Leiden

For catering purposes, please register your attendance here: spotlighttaiwanleiden.weebly.com

Want to help realise a sci-fi anime?

A group of anime industry veterans, among which director Masahiro Ando ('Neon Genesis Evangelion', 'Ghost in the Shell', 'Full Metal Alchemist'), have launched a Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund production of 24 minute original sci-fi action anime 'Under the Dog'.

The anime is presented as "...a science fiction action thriller that will explore what it means to live and die well, testing the limits of all we hold dear".

Rewards for backers of the 'Under the Dog' project range from having their name on the project's website, to creating a anime character, attending the Japanese premiere and meeting the anime's creative team in Tokyo.

With almost a month to go, over 1300 fans have already pledged more than USD 87,000 towards its USD 580,000 goal.
Interested? Visit the Kickstarter site.

'Kurama Tengu' manga competition winners announced

Asiascape is happy to announce the winners of its 3rd manga competition 'Interpreting Kurama Tengu'.
Each of the winners offered a unique and compelling graphic interpretation of the classic Japanese Noh play Kurama Tengu.

The first prize (Euro 500) goes to Elena Vitagliano from Italy for her impressive 'Tariki: Divine Intervention'.
A joint second prize (Euro 200 each) is awarded to Brittany Partin and Carl Li, both from the USA.
Deanna Taylor Nardy from the USA wins third prize (Euro 100).

All winning manga and bio's of the artists will be available in our online publication 'Manga in/as Essay' soon.

Excerpt from Elena Vitagliano's winning entry

We thank all those who participated for their hard work and creativity, resulting in wonderful manga!