ASIAN 6683 - Videogames in East and Southeast Asia

Spring. 3 credits. Letter grades only.

Co-meets with ASIAN 4483.

K.T. Wong.

While Japan used to dominate the Asian gaming landscape, its East Asian and Southeast Asian neighbors have since developed into major gaming hubs with distinctive characteristics. This course presents a historical and theoretical overview of the cultural, industrial, and technological aspects of videogames within the contexts of East and Southeast Asian nations from the 1970s to the present. Although this course is organized using nation as a unit, we will study the proposed topics not solely from a national perspective, but also through the lenses of transnational media flow and globalization to shed light on the factors that regionalize videogames as a cultural imagination and an industrial system in East and Southeast Asia. (SC)