“I've been having these weird thoughts lately...”: Conspiratorial hermeneutics and reflexive depictions of fan practices in the Kingdom Hearts franchise

This paper draws on the theory of mastermind narration developed by M.J. Clarke in the context of prestige television dramas with highly complex non-linear narratives and inconsistent characters (Clarke, 2012) to offer a reading of the Kingdom Hearts (Square Enix, 2002-) franchise in light of postmodern practices of textual consumption characteristic of current fandoms, such as those explored by Henry Jenkins (2006) and Matt Hills (2002), but also addressing Japanese theorist Hiroki Azuma’s (2009) work around the notion of the Otaku. I argue that the series’ significant deviation from Disney’s traditional approach to narrative (Wasko 2001) indicates a desire for the corporation to explore radical new forms of textual production and to negotiate emerging fan consumption practices within the safe environment of a controlled and licensed text. Just as cultural theorists like Clarke and Anne Allison (2006) argue that a textual product can often contain traces that reflect its wider conditions of production, I propose that the Kingdom Hearts franchise can be read allegorically as an extended experiment by Disney into new forms of collaborative storytelling

Kingdom(s) Come: Character Remediations and Polyperspectivity of the Final Fantasy franchise in Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II

Over twenty years since its original release, Final Fantasy VII (Square 1987) fans continue to debate the video game’s world and characters as they are mixed and remixed into new licensed products. This article explores the fan metanarrative that circulates the story, ludology, and industry discourses that bind Final Fantasy VII. It will demonstrate how fan practices operate within community spaces to locate, present, and police both knowledge and meanings about a fictional world that itself is continually being reshaped by the transmedia production milieu. This article explores the ongoing fan debates circulating characters Cloud, Tifa, and Aerith from Final Fantasy VII, and their respective remixing into the Kingdom Hearts franchise. Through a discourse analysis (Gee, 2007) of online Western fan bases, published above-the-line production interviews (Mayer et al. 2009), and self-reflexive experiences (Hills 2002), I seek to demonstrate the complexity of fan practices and how they attempt to locate (and generate) narrative coherency. I will argue that fans do not simply enjoy games for their variance in gameplay and story but seek a better understanding of a growing fictional world that is complex and is subject to sanctioned rewrites. Drawing on Eiji Ōtsuka’s theories on world and variation (2010), this article will demonstrate how fans can function as textual barristers in their attempts to untangle the media mix (Steinberg, 2012) of Final Fantasy VII through its ongoing reiterations, adaptations, and world-sharing with Kingdom Hearts

The Kingdom’s Shōnen Heart: Transcultural Character Design and the JRPG

Taken by themselves, neither Disney nor Square Enix appears particularly successful at transcultural expression, although both are certainly marketing juggernauts in transmedia franchise operations (Smoodin, 1994; Consalvo, 2013). Disney may be understood in terms of American postwar cultural imperialism, while Square Enix is deeply rooted in conventions of Japanese storytelling. But together, somehow the two achieve a synergy in Kingdom Hearts (2002), coalescing in the figure of Sora, its youthful protagonist. This article performs a close reading of Sora’s visual character design, a transcultural melding of Walt Disney’s own Mickey Mouse and the shōnen figure of earlier Nomura Tetsuya creations. While gameplay dynamics point to a new action-adventure style for Square Enix, the shōnen characteristics of Sora’s appearance combine with his sense of loss and yearning to position the game in the JRPG genre.     Transculturality of the non-player characters (NPCs) in Kingdom Hearts is then considered. These character designs remain static, anchored to their original reference texts. Where the Disney characters fit their settings in an uncomplicated way, providing escapism and nostalgia for the player, Square characters seem to be chosen for their complexity. The use of then-recent Final Fantasy X characters Tidus and Wakka in Destiny Islands is contrasted against the use of darker, brooding characters from older Final Fantasy titles encountered later in the game. Just as loss and yearning define Sora’s shōnen character, the sense of loss manifested by Cloud, Aerith and Leon connect the player to the real-world context of the global late 1990s, speaking to Japanese anxiety following the Hanshin earthquake and Aum Shinrikyo attacks of 1995, and to the despair of ‘Generation X’ following Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994 (Funabashi and Kushner, 2015; Brabazon, 2005). Meanwhile, the deep economic recession of Japan’s ‘lost decade’ (1991-2001) connected perfectly to the post-9/11 unease in America at the time of the game’s release. Overall, I argue that the game’s success stems from its transcultural emphasis on loss and yearning, which fit not only the JRPG genre but also the sense of anxiety pervading both Japan and America at the time

Controllers and the Magic Kingdom: Corporate Partnership, Synergy and the Limits of Cross-Promotion in Disney and Square Enix’s Kingdom Hearts III (2019)

Who controls the Kingdom Hearts franchise? This article examines this question using a mixed industrial and promotional approach to seek moments of revelation about the creation and status of the Kingdom Hearts franchise for both of its conglomerate co-creators, Disney and Square Enix. Disney’s conglomerated industrial practice has long been assessed for adherence to the concept of synergy. By examining where and how synergy was adopted as an industrial logic within the creation of the Kingdom Hearts franchise, and Kingdom Hearts III in particular, I argue that it is in moments of tension, that we can find the most instructive evidence for who controls the games we play. Following work by Janet Wasko (2001) and Barbara Klinger (1999) in particular, I first look across the shared discursive history of the franchise and then at the promotion of Kingdom Hearts III for instances where synergy breaks down or becomes contested. These, I contend, demonstrate the limits of the logical of synergy in cross-cultural, transindustrial production cultures

Charting the Kingdoms Between: Building Transmedia Universes and Transnational Audiences in the Kingdom Hearts Franchise

An Introduction to the Kingdom Hearts video game franchise as a prime example of the new generation of synergistic, multinational and transcorporate transmedia

Baba Is You: Doing Things With Words

Baba is you is a 2D electronic game in which the player-controlled character pushes word-blocks around in order to build sentences, which make up the rules governing the simulated environment. With Baba is you as the case in point, we bring up parallels between video games and Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response theory, J.L. Austin’s pragmatics, and Gregory Bateson’s levels of learning. By considering self-reference paradoxes, metalanguage, and the map-territory distinction, Baba is you becomes an intuitive philosophic playground by enticing players to question not only language and its uses, but some conceptions about games – and life, as well

English

The Kingdom Hearts franchise (2002-2020) is truly a product of convergence culture: in its aesthetics and narrative world, it unites games, films, animations, fairy tales, comics and cartoons. The games’ premise to merge intellectual properties from Disney and Square Enix into one coherent universe strikes as an ambitious effort with contrasting themes, motifs, characters, and worlds sharing a single stage on top of a new cast of characters and an original storyline. An analysis of any franchise is often associated with complex licensing structures, its economic impact, and the great financial endeavour to create multimedia franchises. With a franchise such as Kingdom Hearts however, its franchise relationships to other media can be made apparent through a media-centred analysis, allowing us to understand its franchise character from within. One method to make this approach possible for instance is to look at how the franchise delivers on its cross-collaboration premise by creating game worlds inspired by Disney. Some of these worlds are seemingly exact copies of their original and others deliver a new experience altogether. It is exactly this ambivalence that truly stands out in the franchise, juggling between old and new

Who Gets to Be in The Guild? Race, Gender and Intersecting Stereotypes in Gaming Cultures

While media studies have frequently assessed the importance of representation, research in this area has often been siloed by institutional and methodological norms that define academics as “gender”, “race”, or “class” scholars, rather than inclusive scholars of all these and more. This paper thus responds to recent calls for more intersectional work by simultaneously addressing the overlapping representations of race, gender, and gamer identity, and their relation to Lorde’s concept of the mythical norm, in the popular webseries, The Guild (YouTube, 2007-2013). Via a detailed, inductive thematic analysis of the show’s two characters of color, Zaboo and Tinkerballa, we find a doubly problematic intersection between standard “gamer identity” tropes and gendered Asian/American stereotypes. The show forecloses on its potential to be truly diverse and reinforces the oppressive, marginalizing practices it tries to mock, suggesting that gaming culture will not change until we address its intersecting axes of power and exclusion. This research also demonstrates how the constructed identity of media audiences-- in this case, stereotypical “gamer” identity-- can exacerbate and reaffirm existing power disparities in representation. We suggest that media scholars remain attentive to the intersecting articulations of media consumer and individual identities in considering how representation can influence systems of inclusion and exclusion, as well as viewers’ lived outcomes

Le jeu vidéo au Québec

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La culture vidéoludique au Québec: Le besoin d’une histoire du jeu, de ses pratiques et de ses discours

How are video games discussed through time in the Belle Province? Do Quebecers share a common and specific video game culture? We try to answer those two questions in this paper through an analysis of Bibliothèque and Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) catalogue. We compiled and analyzed a variety of discourses created and presented by (and for) Quebecers between 1978 and 2018. As we talk about different trends animating discourses on video games, we also discuss the limitations of BAnQ’s catalogue and the state of video game preservation in Quebec. We focus on a few key items pinpointed during our research at the Collection nationale.Comment parle-t-on des jeux vidéo au fil du temps dans la Belle Province? Peut-on parler d’une culture vidéoludique spécifiquement québécoise? Voilà les deux questions auxquelles nous tentons de répondre dans cet article. Prenant notre départ dans le catalogue général de Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ), nous recensons les documents sur le jeu vidéo, nous attachant aux publications ou discours produits par des Québécois à l’intention d’un public québécois entre 1978 et 2018. Au fil de l’argumentation, nous signalons certaines limites du catalogue de BAnQ, discutons de l’accessibilité à la culture du jeu vidéo au Québec et des problèmes que pose sa préservation, et analysons quelques-uns des documents trouvés par le moteur de recherche de BAnQ