Pixelated borders: East Asia’s game industry between regional integration and global flows

This article examines Nicchūkan no Gēmu Bunkaron (Theories of Video Game Culture in Japan, China, and South Korea, 2024), a landmark volume that conceptualizes video game culture in Japan, China, and South Korea as a shared East Asian space. While the book’s compara- tive structure challenges methodological nationalism, its emphasis on discourse and representation tends to overlook the material infrastruc- tures of game production. Building on its regional insights, this article argues that East Asian game industries cannot be fully understood without analyzing the globalized production networks that sustain them. The discussion highlights how contemporary game develop- ment relies on transnational pipelines involving outsourced labor, distributed authorship, and infrastructural asymmetries. Drawing on the concept of a “transnational cultural economy,” the article calls for a form of critical regionalism that remains attentive to shared cultural frameworks and to the labor and economic conditions underlying game production in East Asia and beyond.