Role-Playing Games of Japan by Björn-Ole Kamm

Author:Björn-Ole Kamm
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030509538
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Unpacking Black Boxes

How were the two interactive kinds of this study, the otaku and role-players, produced, assembled, or ordered during the controversies surrounding their respective media incidents? By untangling the previously homogenised network of “the mass media,” I seek to open the respective black boxes of their media incidents. My tool of choice is thus a qualitative content analysis of newspaper, tabloid, and journal articles that dealt with the Miyazaki Incident and the teen suicides in the US. These articles and their respective authors, as well as other voices in their texts, show some of the bits and pieces making up the “mass media,” ranging from individuals, technologies, and products.

As both debates played out on a national level, I employed digital searches in newspaper archives of larger and nationwide newspapers, including Yomiuri, Asahi, Nikkei, and Mainichi for Japan, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times for the US, but also local and regional newspapers in both countries. Disregarding the type of publication, the Miyazaki Incident attracted more attention in Japan in the months surrounding the arrest of the subject in August 1989 (with ca. 1000 articles between late 1988 and early 1990) then the Dallas Egbert case, for example, did in the US (ca. 250 articles between his disappearance in August 1979 and after his suicide in 1980). The following sections briefly summarise the stories of each case and show how these incidences became node points for the production of knowledge.

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