Mediating the Promised Gameland

This paper reflects on the mediation of Japan as gameland for non-Japanese travelers, from a transmedial perspective. It uses a hybrid explorative method, including the analysis of a series of travel video guides, social media commentary, qualitative interviews with game travelers, and autoethnographic field notes. The research takes a starting point in the field, where the human action (of travelling or desiring to travel) is situated, and theorizes a posteriori, drawing from the theoretical fields of tourism studies, Japanese studies, and game studies. The writing of the paper wants to illustrate this process by including vignettes from the empirical data collection, so that they can enter a dialogue with the academic voice. The paper is based on the Keynote of the same name, that the author presented at The Replaying Japan 2020 Conference, organized by Liege Game Lab.