“Unboxing Japanese Videogames fascinates us like a toy box. By mapping the subject in global and multidisciplinary scopes, Martin Roth cautiously unpacks the closet of Japanese gaming culture in a way that even Japanese researchers have never imagined before.”
—Hiroshi Yoshida, Associate Professor, University of Tokyo

“Roth’s excellent book brings new, accessible methods in metadata analytics to Japanese games in circulation to understand how these games are always already global and local artifacts simultaneously.”
—Jennifer deWinter, Dean of Science and Letters, Illinois Institute of Technology; coeditor of the Influential Game Designers book series; author of Shigeru Miyamoto

“An important and timely volume that lifts the lid on the complex spatialities of game production and distribution. Inviting the reader to rethink the fundamental concept of the ‘Japanese videogame,’ Roth’s analysis is characteristically deep, rigorously theorized, and packed full of examples.”
—James Newman, Research Professor and Senior Teaching Fellow, Department of Computing, Bath School of Design

“Tracing almost thirty years of videogame history, Roth’s book encourages readers to reflect on how the global world of the twenty-first century is far from being a completely digital one.”
—H-Net Reviews

“Unboxing Japanese Videogames provides a careful and comprehensive introduction to metadata analytics as a valuable tool for navigating media production and distribution at scale.”
—Asiascape

“Unboxing Japanese Videogames is a valuable contribution for opening up new possibilities of studying video games from different perspectives with new methods, in which game titles and the act of playing are not only research subjects, but also other stakeholders, such as publishers, producers, and other aspects, such as new technology, environmental crisis, economics and consumption, can be examined.”
—Japanese Studies

Martin Roth is Associate Professor at Ritsumeikan University and a Research Fellow at Stuttgart Media University. He works on videogames, play, and digital culture, with a regional focus on Japan. His first monograph, Thought-Provoking Play, is available open access from ETC Press.

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