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Transnational Contexts of Development History, Sociality, and Society of Play pp 151–179Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Database Production: Planners and Players in a Japanese Mobile Game Studio

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Part of the book series: East Asian Popular Culture ((EAPC))

Abstract

This chapter will look at collaborative global/local production among mobile game creators in Japan, primarily through examining the international culture of production in a single video game studio, by employing a critical lens and methodology from the field of “production studies,” a subset of critical media industry studies that emphasizes the labor of “below-the-line” workers in the process of media creation. Based on fieldwork in a Japanese mobile game company conducted over a 6-month period from 2012 to 2013, this chapter maps the construction and operations of a single Japanese multiplayer, free-to-play (F2P) card-battle game through the critically unexamined role of the planner, detailing how they construct game worlds and how players react to the design choices that they implement.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. English and Liberal Arts, Reitaku University, Kashiwa, Japan

    Bryan Hikari Hartzheim

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  1. Bryan Hikari Hartzheim
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Communication, Northern Kentucky University, Highland Heights, Kentucky, USA

    S. Austin Lee

  2. Department of Communication, Northern Kentucky University, Highland Heights, Kentucky, USA

    Alexis Pulos

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Hartzheim, B.H. (2016). Database Production: Planners and Players in a Japanese Mobile Game Studio. In: Lee, S., Pulos, A. (eds) Transnational Contexts of Development History, Sociality, and Society of Play. East Asian Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43820-7_6

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