IJS Co-Sponsored Lecture: Hiroshi Yoshida, "In What Sense Can Digital Games be Called Media?"

The Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, East Asian Studies Center, Billy Ireland Cartoons Library & Museum, Chronos Lab (Teresa Lynch), School of Communication, Center for Folklore Studies, ACCAD and Institute for Japanese Studies present:

"In What Sense Can Digital Games be Called Media?

Hiroshi Yoshida
University of Tokyo

Abstract: In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan discussed games as one of the media and called games "media of communication in society as a whole.'' However, the games he envisioned were mainly card games and sports, and digital games using computers were not in his scope. If we are to understand modern digital games as media, we will need a post-McLuhanist media theory adapted to new media. In this presentation, the speaker will examine what kind of media modern digital games are, with reference to Lev Manovich's concept of "metamedium" and Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's theory of "remediation.'' Through an analysis of three ongoing practices—emulation, metaframing, and demaking—this presentation demonstrates that modern digital games are media that engage in reflective and self-referential remediation. In digital games, "metamedium" (Manovich) as the most essential property of computers and "metacommunication" (Gregory Bateson) as the most important function of play combine and reinforce each other. We are witnessing an era of metagaming, where digital games remediate themselves. This metagaming is the true realization of the "implosion of media in the electric age" that McLuhan once predicted using the enigmatic phrase.

Hiroshi Yoshida is Professor at the Department of Aesthetics, the Faculty of Letters and the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, the University of Tokyo, Japan, and a visiting professor at Leipzig University since 2017. He has published extensively on aesthetics, game studies and musicology in European and Asian languages including: Japan's Contemporary Media Culture between Local and Global: Content, Practice and Theory (co-editor, Heidelberg, 2021) and Digital Game Studies (in Japanese, Tokyo, 2023). He founded Ritsumeikan Center for Game Studies (RCGS) in 2011 while he worked at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto.