Convergence, connectivity, and the case of Japanese mobile gaming

The specificities of Japanese mobile telephony are giving rise to new cultural economies of games production and engendering new paradigms of gameplay. These topical developments have considerable technosocial bearing and consequence. The tension between the virtual and the actual resides at the heart of topical debates about the modalities of co-presence in mobile telephony. The potential loss of anonymity in location-based mobile gaming and the increasing awareness that mobile games are mostly played at home add considerable complexity to the already-blurred boundaries of physical and virtual co-presence. The micronarratives of such newly configured and articulated social tropes arguably need to be incorporated into macroperspectives on convergence culture if only to invest the latter with additional levels of nuance and complexity. Japanese mobile gaming therefore has strategic utility in this article as a situated context for analyzing the localized cultural politics of convergence and connectivity in mobile telephony. © 2008 SAGE Publications.