Revisiting Creative Industry Models for Game Industry Development in Southeast Asia
Chung maps out the current state of video-game development in Southeast Asia, which is in a transitional state as Southeast Asia game industries start to participate in global game development. The chapter provides a detailed theoretical discussion on cul
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Revisiting Creative Industry Models for Game Industry Development in Southeast Asia Pei-chi Chung
INTRODUCTION This chapter examines the current state of video-game development in Southeast Asia, in order to understand Southeast Asia’s transformation into a global game-development location. This phenomenon is part of a larger decentralization of US-based transnationalism that the literature in media globalization studies has already emphasized. Within this literature, one prominent debate concerns the re-centering of this media globalization to Japan. The country’s popular culture, some argue, facilitated a new form of local–global relationship that compares in scale of influence with global Hollywood. Iwabuchi (2002) argues that a sole focus on the “Americanization” paradigm misjudges Japan’s transnational cultural power. Japanese transnationalism engenders hybrid localisms that allow
P. Chung (*) Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China © The Author(s) 2016 A. Fung (ed.), Global Game Industries and Cultural Policy, Palgrave Global Media Policy and Business, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40760-9_7
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local people to resist US globalization. Similarly, Fung (2007) states that Japanese popular television consumption creates an autonomous space within which audiences resist domineering cultures like China and the USA. The consumption of Japanese popular television drama also creates in-between third spaces that allow Asian audiences to maintain distinctions and to form local identities. Globalization in Asia after 2000 continues to evolve toward an even more decentralized state. This further complicates academic debates. The rise of the Korean wave, for example, challenges the presumptions behind the existing academic debate that sees Japan as representative of Asia’s predominant form of modernity. In addition, the rise of the media market in China, the shift of Asia’s economic center from Japan, and the rapidly expanding middle-class population in Southeast Asia also suggest the shifting pattern of media production and consumption in today’s globalized Asia. This chapter engages in these debates about a decentralized, global Asia in its most recent form of digital gaming. The chapter uses game-industry development as an entry point into the complex global and local relationships that contribute to the direction of cultural flows in Asia. Questions regarding Asia’s globalization include the following: How have new movements in the media industries shifted and reshaped Asia’s globalization? Ideologically speaking, what has changed? Does the new culture that emerges after the change manifest the way in which a location’s negotiation of difference has played out in Asia’s globalization? In the particular context of creative industry, how does game-industry development in Southeast Asia speak about Asia’s new form of globalization, which has decentralized beyond western corporation-based imperialist ideology and hegemonic control? This
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