Replaying Japan is an international conference dedicated to the study of Japanese video games. For the first time this year, the conference is held online and will combine various types of research contents (videos, texts, livestreams).

This year’s conference theme will be “Ludolympics 2020”. Particular attention will be paid to the relationship between games and sport in Japan, to the Japanese esport scene and its cultural specificities and to competitive video game practices, but also, more generally, to the notion of video game performance and to the mediatization or spectacularization of this performance (how are game performances commented, represented, transformed into spectacles?).

Through the prism of this theme, fundamental aspects of games and play will be questioned: the physicality of the playing practices, the place of competition in Japanese game culture, the role of rules and conventions in games and play, as well as the possibilities of bypassing these rules (through cheating, for instance) or the spaces of appropriation that they allow (visible in the amateur practices, fan creations or doujin circles, among others).

Furthermore, esport is a common and robust entry point into the study of Japanese video games, their surrounding industry, their history, structuring, cultural variants (through the multiplicity of competitive game scenes, for example), and their surrounding economy. In this summer online conference, participants from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds will present their research and collaborate to understand and shed light on Japanese video games.

The conference participants will present their research in various formats (videos, texts, commented PowerPoints...) and these will be made available to the registered persons on this platform from July 27th. All participants will be able to enter into discussion about the research presented on the forum spaces.

From 10 to 13 August, between 14:00 and 17:00 (Belgian time), live discussion sessions will be organized between the speakers via videoconference, on Discord. The keynote speakers’ presentations will be broadcast live, publicly, on the Twitch streaming platform. During these days, various online social activities will also be offered to the participants.

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