What a whirlwind few months it's been. I've been enjoying my time at UR, but who would've guessed being a professor would keep one extremely busy? (/s) I've also had a lot going outside of teaching as well. I helped run the AMS Ludomusicology's "Co-Op Scholarship" conference on Discord a few weeks ago and then last weekend I attended and presented at the North American Conference for Video Game Music at Stetson University in Florida. Pete did an amazing job hosting and it was so good catching up with old friends, meeting people both new and irl for the first time (including James Denis Mc Glynn who I've known virtually for years now!), and hearing some really incredible scholarship.
Saturday lunch with the NACVGM crew.
On my end, there were some, ah, road bumps along the way. The most significant one was the fact that I forgot my laptop at my apartment and I didn't realize this until I was going through security at the airport. Like. I packed my mouse and my charger and my flash drive and even had the laptop out... it just didn't make it into my bag. Oops. Fortunately, Joshua Dierenger—my roommate for the conference—let me borrow his laptop to throw together a basic PowerPoint for the presentation. So a huge s/o there. It also forced me to disconnect more than I probably would have otherwise, so perhaps a blessing in disguise.
The other bump was the fact that I decided to entirely rewrite the intro to my paper a night or two before the conference. I was struggling to get the pacing and everything right with it and what I wrote, while maybe not a bad intro in and of itself, did not quite set up the actual paper I was giving. But I think it's a fun and somewhat personal story that's worth sharing so I thought I'd post it here. That's the purpose of a blog, right? :v
So here we go, the story behind my research these last few years:
If you'll indulge me, this is a personal presentation, one that I choose to share with you, especially you younger scholars. A presentation on trusting your gut, on checking all your sources, and on self-revision.
I begin with a presentation I gave here, not institutionally, but at NACVGM in 2017. Some of you may remember this talk, born out of a seminar on opera and film, wherein I argued that some video games, in particular, the Pokémon games, represent a neo-Gesamtkunswerk. What most of you do not know, I'm guessing, is that I presented a revised version of that paper at Yale a few months later, replacing the neo prefix for transmedia, and thus the 8 syllable and 25 letter Transmediagesamtkunstwerk. Gotta love those German Compoundworten.
I will not dwell on these papers, because I knew as I was working on them that I was missing something. Transmedia and Gesamtkunstwerk, after all, are fundamentally incompatible, the former a network of disparate yet interconnected media, the latter a singular work of art that synthesizes the many arts. To put a sexy humanities twist on this, in the back of my mind I was planning on arguing for an Adornian negative dialectics between these terms; Adorno, after all, was a central interlocutor in my initial essay. A year after that, I ended up writing a separate companion piece to this presentation for a media theory seminar, arguing that Pokémon is as successful as it is because it manufactures itself as everyday and quotidian, ordinary, within our lives.
But after these presentations and projects, I set my work on Pokémon aside. I knew it needed a lot of work, I could feel something was missing; I was also starting my dissertation research on something completely unrelated: the concertization and classical arrangement of video game music. Completely unrelated… or so I thought.
Fast forward to June 2022. I've just accepted my current job at the University of Richmond which is contingent on me having a completed dissertation. I am in week 3 of my 4 week marathon to produce a full dissertation. I send my advisor a draft of a chapter. He replies a day later with an email that offhandedly suggests I read one more dissertation on idol culture in Japan. I groan, both internally and externally, but oblige.
With this suggestion, I find the missing piece to not just my dissertation, but to my Pokémon paper as well. You see, I was often frustrated with reading the scholarship on transmedia studies, because it didn't account for what I was noticing with Japanese media properties. That's because Japan's media model, which I might controversially argue is on its way to becoming the dominant media model (gotta love soft power), is fundamentally based around a non, even anti-canonical form of narrative. To my credit, I'd like to think I would have stumbled across this term on my own had I continued to actively work on my Pokémon research. But let this also be a lesson on the value of peer review and what a supportive community can offer you.
I draw from two interrelated Japanese media theoretical terms for this presentation: the media mix and the sekaikan. I will primarily draw from Marc Steinberg’s critical genealogy of these terms from his 2012 monograph Anime’s Media Mix, though I supplement this with primary sources in translation, as well as other scholarship which has engaged with these topics. For the purposes of this talk, I will gloss and define both terms, though I will not dive too deeply into the their histories. For those interested in an in-depth analysis of the terms, I highly suggest Steinberg’s book which is both staggeringly thorough and theoretically rigorous. I follow this discussion by arguing that Square Enix has applied this media marketing practice to its music, extending the otherwise image-based system. I conclude this paper by considering how fan covers further build the sekaikan when companies do not actively employ a musical media mix.
So yeah. That's the way the cookie crumbles. Or something like that. As you can see, it's perhaps a bit disjunct as an intro for the actual paper I gave. It's also perhaps a bitttt preachy, especially for an early career scholar. At the same time, I wish someone would have shared these lessons with me when I was a(n even) younger scholar. It was also an interesting experience for me to finally process all those thoughts. I didn't really have a chance to while rushing to finish the dissertation, and then I immediately jumped into the job, so I didn't have much time to sit with that journey. This intro, "unpublished" that it is (was), gave me the space to finally sit with it. Though I gotta say... this intro would've tied in nicely with my infamous Pokémon jacket that I wore the day before my presentation haha.