It was amazing to have my teaching and game design featured on the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts website. I gave a brief interview which was turned into an article and a video. Check them out!
I have always been a huge fan of Godzilla, but I have not had the opportunity to incorporate that love into my research until now. I have started to pursue a long-term, multi-media project centered on Godzilla and anti-nuclear representation. As a first step, I was happy to present my early findings in the DM Talk series at Georgia Tech.
My talk examines the origins of Godzilla from a collective memory perspective with a focus on the anti-nuclear representation of the early Godzilla films and novelizations. From here, I briefly discuss 5 selected Godzilla video games and their connections (or disconnections) from that original narrative. I conclude with a short look at how I wish to pursue these ideas through a multi-media project.
I’m excited to continue on with this project. The next step will be to refine my observations of the video games for my conference presentation at RePlaying Japan 2024!
I am very pleased to announce that the final version of Nagasaki Kitty is now available. Nagasaki Kitty: Enhanced Edition can be downloaded for free on Itch.io! The Enhanced Edition adds new gameplay content, new original art, expands the map, and includes a new musical score written and recorded specifically for the game.
I was excited to add more content to the game for this edition and was exceedingly lucky to work with Mimi Okabe (Translation), Marc Lajeunesse (Music), and Robyn Hope (Art). While I was happy with the first two RPG Maker MV versions of the game, I was happy to upgrade the game through some key editions. Marc’s soundtrack replaces the licensed tracks from the original. Having musical pieces written specifically for the game certainly improves upon the atmosphere and the mood of the game. Robyn’s art helps to improve the player’s experience. Her art, based on artifacts from the Nagasaki atomic bomb museum, helps to add more authenticity to the side quests that the player completes in the game. As always, Mimi provided her translation skills. The download includes the English version, the Japanese version, and an updated workbook.
Here is the announcement trailer for the game:
I started the early work on the Nagasaki Kitty project in 2016. This eventually led to multiple iterations, both in Twine and RPG Maker MV. This project has been one of the most rewarding of my career and I am exceedingly proud of all of the completed versions. I hope that you will take the time to play it!
Nagasaki Kitty Enhanced Edition is available for download on PC here.
This year for the Canadian Game Studies Association Annual Conference I was able to work with my good friend and colleague, Scott DeJong. Scott does some really amazing work on disinformation while also designing board games (find his game, Lizards and Lies here: https://www.lizardsandlies.ca/). Naturally, as educational game designers, there are overlaps in our research and development activities. In particular, we have found that many educational games do not take full advantage of the unique affordances of board games and/or video games as a medium. As a result, we made a short video about our design experiences and how we deal with this (and similar) issues.
Discussing these ideas and later making the video with Scott was an amazing experience. At this point we consider the ideas to be in their early stages, but we hope to revisit this project soon and make a more polished version. Hopefully we will put something more together soon because these are ideas that I am interested in pursuing further.
Recently, I was contacted by my old high school classmate and current faculty member at the University of King’s College, Adam Richter. It was great to see that he is doing well and I was very happy to be invited to give a guest lecture for his History of Science and Technology class. It has been quite a while since I have given a history lecture (as opposed to a communication or game studies lecture with some history incorporated into it), so I was a little nervous. Luckily, it went very well. I was happy to put together the lecture and I hope that I get the opportunity to continue to use my skills in history, historiography, and historical methods.
The guest lecture is broken into three main parts: History, Collective Memory, and Video Games. The History section gives a very brief history of the Pacific War leading up to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is followed by the Collective Memory section, which examines how the atomic bombings have been remembered in both North America and Japan. Finally, the Video Games section gives an example of how the history and collective memory of the atomic bombs is remediated into video games. For this lecture I used case studies of Valkyria Chronicles 4 (Sega, 2018) and Resident Evil 3 (Capcom, 2020).
As with most opportunities for presentations, lectures, and public talks since the beginning of the pandemic the lecture was delivered remotely (and in this case asynchronously). I still have some mixed feelings about this because I love to travel and present my research in person but I also realize that there are some benefits to the remote models as well. Not only was this an opportunity that I would have needed to turn down if it was in-person due to travel costs but it also would not have been recorded and, as a result, much harder to share widely. The lecture is now available on my YouTube channel. You can watch it here:
As a final note, I have upgraded my recording equipment and become slightly more comfortable recording since my last batch of videos. I like being able to more easily and widely share my research so I hope that I can keep recording and editing videos even as we transition back to more normal circumstances.
Remote development of a game was a new and (mostly) exciting experience for me, however, I am hoping that my next game project can be developed under more normal circumstances. Regardless, I was extremely grateful to be working with Mimi who was meticulous in her work, respectful of the content of the game, and added many excellent ideas to the project (especially the workbook that comes with the game). I am very proud of the work that we did and believe that we have created a unique and meaningful game.
Here is the original announcement trailer for the game:
Nagasaki Kitty Japanese Language Edition is available for PC and MAC here.
I have been making progress on the translation version of Nagasaki Kitty with my writing partner Dr. Mimi Okabe. We recently released the pre-order for the game in time for our conference presentation at RePlaying Japan 2021 (hosted online by the University of Alberta). In our short video submission we discuss our motivations for making the game, American historiography, and our adventures in translation (in particular the dynamics of translating “meow”). We are continuing to make progress on the game and plan to start playtesting soon.
On another, semi-related note, I have been getting more practice making videos and I think that they are becoming higher quality. Post-pandemic, when we will presumably move away from remote conferences, I think that I will continue to make video versions of my talks so that they can be more easily disseminated (especially post-conference).
I recently had my first opportunity to be interviewed about my work. I felt excited and honored that Epoch Xperience reached out to me to discuss my RPG Maker MV game Nagasaki Kitty. Epoch is a company that focuses on historical research (not only in games but also in more traditional mediums) and was interested in talking to me about the design and historical work that went into Nagasaki Kitty. Below is the full hour-plus interview where we cover everything from my academic research to how people who are interested in making their own historical games can get started.
I want to thank Mark LoProto for both organizing/recording the interview and providing me with the completed footage to present here. I should note that the lighting and video issues in the completed interview originated on my end and were the unfortunate consequence of completing the interview remotely during a lockdown. Overall I was quite happy with how the interview went and hope that I get the opportunity participate in more of these types of activities in the future.
The entire process of designing the game, playtesting, setting myself up on Itch, creating content for social media, and advertising the game is something that I want to revisit at some point. I plan on writing a full post-mortem about the entire process at a later date.
In the meantime here is the launch trailer for the game: