Yusuke Koyama – författare

Characteristics of Japanese visual narratives are depicted in this book, shedding light on cultural, institutional, and industrial aspects of reproducible contents. The book consists of three parts which deal with the Japanese contents industry, the hypervariety industry revolution, and related case studies, respectively. The first part proposes points of view for organizing research on the Japanese contents industry. The authors explain characteristics of the industry from the standpoint of cultural, institutional, and industrial strata. The second part explains the system of revolution in the industry as a hypervariety industry. The Japanese contents industry implicitly predicts the next innovation system, which will be hypervarietal but not top-down or Hollywood style as in the Western economy. The third part provides case studies on phenomena such as the comics market, Akihabara: a cross-cultural town, Cool Japan, and animation.

This book is the first one to describe the entire history of the video game industry in Japan. The industry consists of multiple markets—for PCs, home consoles, arcades, cellular phones and smart phones—and it is very difficult to see the complete picture. The book deals comprehensively with the history of the Japanese game industry from the beginning of the non-computer age to the present.The video game industry in Japan was established in the arcade game market when Space Invaders was released by Taito in 1978. Game markets for both PCs and home consoles followed in the early 1980s. The platform that occupies a central market position started with the arcade and shifted, in order, to the home console, handheld consoles, and smart phones. In the video game industry in the twentieth century each platform had a clear identity, and the relationships among platforms were "interactions". In the twenty-first century, with the improvement of computer performance, the platform identity has disappeared, thus the relationship among platforms is highly competitive. Since the "crash of 1983" in the United States, the Japanese game industry has one of the largest market shares in the world and has developed without being influenced by other countries. It reached its peak in the late 1990s, and then its relative position declined due to the growth of foreign markets and the failure of emerging markets such as online PC games. Even today, Japan's gaming industry holds a dominant position in the world, but it is not the superpower it once was.Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, game research has become active worldwide. Among game researchers, there is a large demand for research on games in Japan, but there is still little dissemination of research in English. The original version of this book published in Japan is highly regarded and received an award for excellence from the Society of Socio-Informatics in 2017.