Grand Designs: Videogames, Social Regulation, and the Politics of Wasted Time in Contemporary Japan

This dissertation examines the history of videogames in Japan through the lens of time, conceived in two ways. First, it considers time as intrinsic to video game design in terms of tempo and rhythm. Second, it analyzes time as an extrinsic, socially constructed matrix in which play must find a suitable context with regard to other developmental, educational, and productive functions impinging on players. My research argues for approaching digital play time in its design and social narratives as a significant political frontier to videogames, one that is formed dialectically between the flowing times of designed play, and social efforts to contain it. These politics have particularly crystalized around the playing child or youth, a polysemic figure within the adult imaginary. Concern about the meanings of this child and their play time constellated a wide network of adult actors, including policymakers, police authorities, pedagogues, parents, social and cultural critics, as well as game designers and industry insiders. The widespread debates between these social agents have hinged upon the in/compatibility of digital play with the existing organization of time, drawing videogames into an uneasy relationship with the expanding adult administration of children’s lives. The dissertation opens with a consideration of how game designers themselves approach the temporality of the medium. Through expert interviews, I show that designers professionally active between the late 1970s and early 1990s conceptualized videogame time through the notion of rhythm, of tempos and excitations and relaxations of intensity to produce what I term “durational appeal”—the ability of games to hold the player’s attention over long spans of time. I subsequently trace how designed durational appeal emerges discursively in the three situated contexts of early gaming history. First, I look to the interstitial times of play that portable games inhabited through the Nintendo Game & Watch (1980-1985) series, arguing that the situation of ...