Like millions of other people around the world, I have spent much of the past few weeks playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (TotK), the nineteenth installment in Nintendo’s widely acclaimed series. With ten million units reportedly sold in its first three days—and other metrics on the prevalence of gaming and significant industry profits even after a rough 2022—I have started to wonder why the study of popular culture and International Relations (IR) has given video games relatively little attention.
Work on popular culture and IR has identified various ways in which films, television series, popular literature, and other cultural artifacts (often in the science fiction genre) might reflect and even affect real-world politics. It stands to reason that video games could have similar effects, but with few notable exceptions, these products have received much less attention than those in more established media. I will more systematically consider how video games might affect our political world in my next post. For now, I want to focus on TotK.
TotK might not seem like a game that offers much fodder for IR scholars. There is plenty of fun to be had, but at least in the first half of the game that I have completed, there is little explicitly political content. The story is a fairly straightforward tale of good versus evil, and our valiant hero, Link, is asked to find damsel-in-frequent-distress Princess Zelda.
At most, TotK scandalously asks you to corrupt a local mayoral election by gifting mushrooms from one of the candidates to potential voters. [Spoiler alert] Your election interference matters little—the two candidates decide to share power because, as it turns out, “The best way to keep Hateno Village vibrant is to work together to combine traditional culture with new ideas!”
Where TotK might matter most clearly for IR scholars is in the scope of the game’s reach. This will likely end up being one of the best-selling games of all time, and wherever it falls on that list, it will join many other Nintendo products. Given Nintendo’s world-wide popularity—as well as that of other Japanese game developers and publishers—we might consider whether popular cultural exports like TotK act as a source of “soft power” for the exporting country.
As Joseph Nye originally defined the concept in 1990, soft power is “co-optive” rather than “command” power displayed “when one country gets other countries to want what it wants”. Nye identified “culture” as a “soft power resource” because a state that “stands astride popular channels of communication has more opportunities to get its message across and to affect the preferences of others”. (See the Duck’s own Peter Henne on this topic for a more detailed discussion of this concept.)
For Nye, soft power was a central aspect of his argument—developed more fully in Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power—that the United States would not soon be eclipsed by any other potential competitor. The volume and uptake of American cultural exports constituted evidence that the United States could remain the world’s leading power even if others made some relative gains in the military or economic domains.
Nye saw various kinds of cultural exports as generative of American soft power. “Young Japanese who have never been to the United States wear sports jackets with the names of American colleges. Nicaraguan television broadcast American shows even while the government fought American-backed guerrillas. Similarly, Soviet teenagers wear blue jeans and seek American recordings, and Chinese students used a symbol modeled on the Statue of Liberty during the 1989 uprisings.”
By contrast, Nye saw Japanese cultural exports as unlikely to overtake American popular culture on the world stage. “Although Japanese consumer products and cuisine have recently become more fashionable, they seem less associated with an implicit appeal to a broader set of values than American domination of popular communication.”
Whether one is playing TotK or, say, watching 2020’s highest-grossing film, Demon Slayer: Mugen Train, today’s ubiquity of Japanese cultural exports would suggest that such products have broader appeal and may be a more reliable source of soft power than Nye expected.
Writing a year before Nye, Francis Fukuyama made such an argument—”the triumph of the West” could be seen in part through the spread of its popular culture, and Japan’s popular cultural products had helped make it one of the world’s leading powers. Japan had “follow[ed] in the footsteps of the United States to create a truly universal consumer culture that has become both a symbol and an underpinning of the universal homogenous state”.
Fukuyama was not concerned that Japanese cultural products would rival those of the United States. Rather, the successful post-war infusion of “the essential elements of economic and political liberalism” into Japan produced a popular culture that complemented American cultural products and that affirmed “consumerist” liberal democracy as a path toward prosperity and influence.
For me and many others, the hours we log restoring order to TotK‘s Kingdom of Hyrule represent a fraction of the exposure we have had to Japanese cultural exports. Do all those experiences—perhaps the experiences of watching Studio Ghibli films, reading Haruki Murakami novels, or decluttering with Marie Kondo’s assistance—translate into soft power?
If enough Americans engage with images of Japan that generate fond feelings for (or “affective investment” in) the country, does that mean that the United States as a government will be more likely to “want what [Japan] wants” in at least some areas?
I do not yet have firm answers to these questions. At a time when Chinese officials are seeking to enhance their own country’s soft power, however, and when Japanese game developers are fretting about the rise of the Chinese gaming industry, it would be worth building on some of the scholarship I have cited here to answer such questions. We might thereby bring video games more fully into the study of popular culture and IR.
Author’s note: I have edited the original post to specify that “IR” is an acronym for International Relations and to add a spoiler alert for a side quest.
One of the basic tents of writing is that, if you’re going to use acronyms, you need to define them at least once, ideally the first time you use them.
I read this entire article and still have no idea wtf “IR” is.
Could have defined (IR). The article makes it sound obvious, but I have no idea what IR is. Maybe it’s obvious to some, but my news feed article made me fall on this article without much context, I just couldn’t understand the core studied concept.
Simply define IR and make your article more accessible!
Definitely need more study into this. Especially now that game studios are becoming less centralized in the west. Some great games coming out of China these days. Especially interesting now that video games are more popular and reaches a more diverse populace than ever. Would like to see studies of how people feel about a country before and after playing a game developed by that country.
International Relations — the academic field of studying world politics; originally relations/politics among “nations.” In Andrew’s defense, our usual audience is basically students and teachers in the field. But you’re right about undefined acronyms/initialisms (it’s even in our style guidelines!).
As someone directed here by chance via Google article suggestions, I would really have liked to know what “IR” stood for.
I see a few comments with the same suggestion, here’s another for emphasis: I also was a bit annoyed that the meaning of IR was not explained. Interesting article though, as I was thinking about this recently.
American thinking the elections were ridged, is stupid. Racism, discrimination, is the real issue. Focus on that Americans, solve it and true peace will rain over America.
I’m surprised but happy to hear that this has reached an audience unfamiliar with “IR”. I have edited the post to clarify that, as Dan noted, I was referring to International Relations.
wish you’d let people know your article contains spoilers. thanks a lot for ruining that for me.
I’ve added a spoiler alert for that side quest. Sorry about that!
Considering people my age (40) and younger grew up with limited and then growing access to Japanese media that grew both in variety and popularity as we got older, I’d say Japan’s video game industry being a beacon of soft power is unquestionably true.
I know people that barely recognize that Japan sided with Germany in WWII, like the idea that the US and Japan were ever at odds is beyond them – watched Grave of the Fireflies and had no idea what it was about – which is mildly hilarious (in the darkest of ways) considering how racist my grandparents and at least one of my teachers was. All it took was some cartoons, some rad action films, some j-pop and j-rock, and video games and we all just wanted to go hang out in Japan.
I went when I was 17 on a cultural exchange trip. It was pretty darn neat though certainly not exactly like it appeared in even a lot of the slice of life manga id been reading.
No different than our export of baseball and Disney and rock and pop making people dream about a utopic America. But you are less likely to want to go to war with a place that you have happy dreams about, yeah. And more likely to invest in their business, buy their bonds, spend money in their tourism sector…
Very interesting. I love that Google’s little StumbleUpon/Feed feature dropped me into this one, though that algorithm tends to be hit or miss, haha.
I had been wondering why studying video games as a source of cultural influence had seemed anemic, but it’s heartening to know that there actually exists those within the academic circles that sees the same blindspot. This article may not address more than that observation, but it’s an excellent observation. It’s a pleasant surprise. Similarly, unless the culture is long dead, I don’t often see other cultural artifacts that involve games be more than touched upon as well, video or not. I suppose actually playing the game or exploring their dynamics on a cross-societal basis could conflict with certain ideas of what an academic “should” be studying. I suspect the lack of gravitas there has an impact, but that’s just as an outside observer.
The concept of cultural exports as a projection of power is a pretty obvious conclusion in my opinion, or propaganda wouldn’t be such an issue.
You don’t even need to export your own products anymore – you can simply exploit social media discourse surrounding the product instead. It’s a playbook we witness malicious actors use constantly, ranging from ad campaigns to election interference.
This is also a concept that itself has been explored in games before, notably the Civilization series (“soft power” is actually a win condition in that series).