Introduction: Histories and Industries of Gameplay

Abstract

From the production of arcade video games in the 1970s to the development of E-sports in the early 2000s, East Asia has been a driving force in the global video game industry. In 2016, China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have collectively generated more than 40% of the global games market revenues.¹ As of 2016, the global video game industry is a $101.6 billion industry,² while current global box office film sales are a $38.3 billion industry,³ making video games one of the most profitable entertainment industries of the twenty-first century. While these numbers highlight the influence of the region on game sales, they do not cover the complexity of the video game industry. Current video game platforms offer more styles of games, game-playing demographics are more varied and wider than ever, “and games are now large, small, polished, experimental, two-dimensional, three-dimensional, text-based, gestural, genre-specific, or mashed up” (Consalvo 2016, 2). There is therefore no single context, industry, or community of games but a diverse multitude of game structures that have shaped the cultural milieu of video games in the region. Due to the intra-regional and transnational flow of content, East Asia is not only recognized as a historic global gaming center but is “marked by diverse consumption and production patterns of gaming, mobile and broadband technologies, subject to local cultural socio-economic nuances” (Hjorth and Chan 2009, 3). Moreover, in the historical and contemporary contexts of East Asia, video games have given rise to new forms of identity formation, social interaction, and virtual colonization that blur national boundaries and create transnational practices of interaction. From this multifaceted context and cultural flow of information across historical and regional boarders, East Asia is an automatic “must” when studying the global contexts of the video game industry.