The article I have been working on for many years now has been published through the Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds. The paper grew out of an experimental project that I conducted for the completion of the field papers requirements as part of my PhD degree that the MLCS department had at the time at the University of Alberta. I essentially text mined hundreds of JRPG reviews in order to find meaningful discourses that would help scholars understand the formation of the JRPG genre as a discursive phenomenon. While not all the results introduced groundbreaking elements to the history of the circulation of JRPGs in the anglophone Western world, I believe that it provide enough new elements that could serve as a base for the emergence of renewed inquiries on the genre, as well as reaffirm previous claims backed with statistical evidence.
Perhaps the element that surprised me the most was that, starting from 2009 onward, JRPGs started to be written on in a much more negative fashion than in previous years. The contrast between these two generated topics covering both positive and negative language offered some paths worth investigating:
Negative connotations attached to the genre clearly outnumber positive ones with JRPGs becoming objects of harsh critique at a time of an important industry-changing technological shift in game production and marketing. Although JRPGs did have a generally positive reputation in the first few years of the twenty-first century, their image was tarnished by the end of the decade as their higher presence in the media exposed them to conflictual reinterpretations through a phenomenon compa-
rable to Appadurai’s ‘tournament of values’.
Overall, I think this is just the beginning between text mining and me. Having gone through all the steps to publish this sort of research (both to conduct and explain the project), I am now in a much stronger position to tackle more ambitious projects on gaming culture and digital humanities methods using my own tools. If you have any game-related text data sets that beg to be explored, don’t hesitate to reach out!
