Notice Board

The Department of History & Religion Colloquium 
along with
New Media and Asian Studies

present

Dr. Ben Whaley

Japanese Video Games: Toward a History of Empathetic Engagement

October 18
3:00 PM MST
Room: M1040
Zoom:  https://bit.ly/hist-whaley

How do Japanese video games grapple with some of the country’s biggest social anxieties and traumatic events, such as natural disasters, a declining birthrate and aging population, nuclear disarmament, or youth social withdrawal? And how might games prompt players’ own emotional engagement and self-reflection around these issues? This talk begins with a history of video games in terms of how they promote player empathy and emotional engagement around socially relevant narratives. Drawing on case studies from contemporary Japanese video games that prompt players emotional and intellectual engagement with difficult themes, I investigate what some of the positive benefits are of working through a site of trauma within a video game, and what games might teach us about Japanese culture and society through interactive frameworks different from literature and film.

Ben Whaley is Associate Professor of Japanese in the School of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Calgary. His research examines ethno-racial identity and trauma in Japanese popular culture. He is the author of Toward a Gameic World: New Rules of Engagement from Japanese Video Games (University of Michigan Press, 2023). His essays on manga and video games have appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, positions asia critique, and the Journal of Japanese Studies.

Copies of his book Toward a Gameic World will be sold at the U of L Bookstore and at this event