A look at ‘Japanese Culture Through Videogames’ by Rachael Hutchinson (2019)

After approximately a year away from my PhD topic, Rachael Hutchinson’s Japanese Culture Through Videogames has not only positioned itself as a foundational text for my research, but also comes  at the perfect time to re-energize me as I come back to research and adopt a fresh approach to my research.

When I last set my research down I was increasingly finding myself faced with a question to which my answers never felt entirely satisfactory. Setting aside the growing sense that trying to engage with a question about JRPGs as a genre was increasingly being undermined by a general move away from genre clarity in most games (in many ways the past decade in games has seen big budget, best sellers and indie games alike push to blur many genre conventions and expectations in games), the core dilema I found myself unable to address without talking myself in circles was simply ‘why?’