Touken Ranbu – How One Japanese Online Game Has Forever Changed the Trajectory of Digital Humanities

Introduction

There is a common misunderstanding in the contemporary academic world, that studies of video games are deemed as unfit to be discussed as a rigorous subject in most humanities study fields. Video game design as an academic discipline that shares most similarity with humanity study has not been fully accepted by the majority of the scholars in the field of humanity study. Indeed, video games are usually framed in popular culture as the “bad culture” which corrupting the minds of our youth, responsible for internet addiction and the causes of social disconnection. However, what has not been stressed behind these headlines is a fundamental issue, the fact these social issues are the outcomes of poorly designed video games, and they are not what is intended by skillful game designers with the right mindset of designing a game that promotes positive social influence and fun experiences. The goal of game designing, like most humanity studies, is to provide some kind of solution to a social problem. In the ancient society, people invented literature to record and exchange experience, and art and philosophy are invented to fulfill people’s need for expression and independent thinking. Therefore, it is very important for us to ask the question, what is role of game in our society and what was the social problem it deemed to resolve? In the tale of King Atys of Lydia in Asia Minor, the nation of Lydia was ravaged by a devastating drought 3000 years ago. This catastrophic event has brought a great famine upon the Lydian. The Lydians blindly accepted the situation and hope this terrible drought would pass. However, against their wishful thoughts, their misfortune went on for years after years. Desperately seeking for a solution to remedy their suffering, the Lydians came up with an unconventional plan of playing games. The Lydians collectively decided to engage in games, they would completely indulge themselves in games for a whole day to forget the hunger and suffering and ate food on the next day. Surprisingly, this remedy of game playing has helped the Lydian to survive a famine that last over 18 years, and the Lydians are considered as the inventers of many popular games which we still play today. This story of the ancient Lydian has demonstrated an important fact about the behavior of game playing, that is, when designed correctly, game playing can be an effective remedy that boost people’s willpower to achieve something great. With today’s technology of video game designing, when a game is designed correctly, it can be a tool that bridges between many humanity studies disciplines and achieve the level of influence that no conventional humanities projects are able to.

Gamification in humanities study, therefore, became an exclusive foreground for digital humanities scholars for they are the people who seeks to bridge that trench between new technology and traditional academia practices. Digital humanities, as an unconventional method of approaching humanities study, has famously been described by David Berry and Anders Fagerjord in their article as “[…] type of cognitive practice as related to a type of knowledge developed through a computational phronesis – that is, not merely a form of technical knowledge (techne) but the form of practical wisdom that emerges from action“ (Berry and Fagerjord, 2017, p.1). Indeed, gamification is precisely an implication of computational thinking, by engaging in the action of “playing the game”, the players are extracting information from the game-setting that they are situated in and building practical wisdom as they repeat these actions. As far as digital humanities scholars should have concerned, gamification is a power tool that only people with visionary sighting can see the potential in it, with the revolutionary method and technological skillset, the variety of expression in humanities study can be greatly expanded so the fascination of traditional humanities study could be understood by more people who are new or armature to the field.

In this article, we will be discussing one of the “unconventional” inventions of a Japanese compacted online game that has caused a phenomenal shockwave of fascination to the traditional culture of Japanese swords among the youth in Japan. The game “Touken Ranbu”, translated in English as “Wild Dance of Swords”, was a free online game that is developed by the private game company Nitroplus initially as a character collecting project that targeted its usual group of players. However, during its initial launch period, the developers quickly recognize the fact this game has captured a much wider range of audiences than they initially expected. Eventually, Touken Ranbu, as a commercially developed compacted game has managed to invoke the interest of Japanese traditional sword in younger generations and hence made a significant contribution to the re-establishment of this traditional culture in the current societies. This article argues that the game Touken Ranbu Online has proposed an alternative approach to developing digital humanities projects. Although starts as a commercial mobile game, it quickly demonstrated its effectiveness as a digital humanities tool and artifact. As a tool, it successfully reduced the knowledge barrier around the original cultural subject, and significantly expanded the audience group of Katana culture. As an artifact, its gamification had overcome the limitation of Katana’s lack of textual information while establishing strong relativity with the original artifact.

Katana – culture around Japanese swords

Katana, the traditional Japanese sword, is an essential part of the culture of the island-nation. Throughout its 1000 years of history, the Japanese people have mostly spent their time in a series of various scales battles and wars. Furthermore, the uniqueness of Japanese political structure has also established a culture centred around weaponry and warrior aristocracy which both recognize the Katana as a spiritual part of people’s life. To understand the concept of the Japanese warrior aristocracy and their spiritual attachment to Katana, we must first dive a bit deeper into Japanese history. Famously, Japan is known for its power-centralized political structure like most east Asian countries. However, unlike most imperial nations that have their monarchs being the center of power, Japan has strictly kept its emperor as only a figurative leader under the control of the military general known as Shogun. A historical article written by David Spafford has famously made the comparison of this power structure between Japanese military government and the emperor’s figure with the western concepts of Pope and King, “the Principal King, who is called Vo (emperor) in their language,[…] apparently is among them such as the pope is among us “(Spafford, 2014, p.11). Consequently, in a nation where its righteous emperor being overpowered by its military leader over the course of hundreds of years has resulted in a culture that centered around warrior, weaponry, and honor. Katana, being the most practical and artistical model of weaponry, had become the most figurative artifact of Japanese history, to an extent, it is a crucial part of every humanities study disciplines in Japanese culture. For instant, according to the Japanese custom, Katanas are treated as the most valuable and symbolic gifts for some of the most important occasions like wedding, conference, and religious ceremony. In an article written by Shogo Takaishi, he described how Katana is also been given a religious meaning in the Japanese culture.

Moreover, from the myths chronicle of the 8th century the mythology arose that the swords were the incarnation of belief into the protection by the gods. This belief has been revealed by engravings found on the swords. Such engravings contain prayers for protection by the gods and by Buddha. Also the custom to consecrate swords in shrines came up. Many mighty men and sword smiths consecrated swords in shrines and asked for the gods’ protection, for luck, and success in the battle. Swords were a mental support for the Bushi (warrior) (Takaishi, 2001, p.380).
Therefore, as artifacts, the significance of Katana in humanities studies like understanding the Japanese custom and aesthetics throughout different periods of time has made the study of Japanese swords a highly relevant topic in the academic world of Japanese humanities study. Furthermore, there is more to the Katana culture that goes beyond the artifacts itself. Since the Katana held extreme significance in the Japanese culture, the stories around these swords have also made them rich resources of humanities research material. It is well-known that a Japanese warrior will never let his swords left his sight, a Samurai (warrior) would live with his swords, travel a journey and fight with his enemy with the swords, and even pass on to his offspring or request to be buried with his swords. A Katana, from the point it is forged, is meant to be accompanied by stories, whether it is about its owner, forger, or some legendary folktales.

Katana in contemporary culture – Gap between traditional and popular cultures

With everything said about Katana’s importance in Japanese culture, like the fate of all traditional cultural artifacts, it struggles to find its place in the contemporary era of technology. As mentioned in the same article by Takaishi, the need for Katana mostly died after the Meiji government (1868 – 1912) officially banned sword carrying in public (Takaishi, 2001, p.380). Ever since then, the business of swords forging has gone through a major downsizing. Finally, following the defeat in WWII, Japanese swords were officially treated as prohibited items by the new government and the history of Katana seems to be placed at the edge of cultural extinction.

However surprising it might sound; it is the modern technology and popular culture that give a second chance to this ancient artifact and brought it back to the attention of the general public. First came the technology of digitalization that turns many existing Katanas into digital records in museums’ database. Historically, any famous Katana that have gone through the process of appraisal would have a graphical imprint made by the appraiser. Therefore, many of the Katanas that have gone lost in catastrophic event have left their evidence of existence in the form of graphical imprint which recorded its physical form in detail. Despite the fact that massive amount of these ancient artifacts along with their records have survived till the modern days, the unimaginable amount of time and effort it took to preserve these living histories in good condition made it very difficult to present their beauty to the general public in person.

Here, we have witnessed a successful example of how contemporary popular culture can come to rescue the traditional artifacts and take another approach at presenting their beauty through modern technology. The gamification of these historical artifacts had turned out to be a great success in educating the general public to appreciate the Katana. By characterizing some of the most famous Katana in history that reference real historical events and background information, the game managed to re-establish a connection between the traditional culture and audiences of younger generations. What is worth noticing is the chain reactions caused by the success of this game. Animations, movies, musical and drama plays, and manga comic books, the world of Touken Ranbu has clearly expanded beyond the game and inspired many different audiences that would otherwise never become aware of the fascination of Katana. Apparently, an intellectual franchise has been established through the growth of the game, and this business development strategy, described as “media mix” in the book Animating the Spirited: Journeys and Transformations, has also been compared to the similar American notion of transmedia storytelling (Hu, Yokota & Horvath, 2020, p.55). According to Alberto Scolari, the unique style of TS is a combination of “languages and media in interactive environments [which] challenges traditional semiotic and narratological research” (Scolari, 2009, p.588). There is a quote that he cited to describe this style of storytelling in the article.

All texts are multimodal . . . There is a trend in which, increasingly, the written text is no longer structured by linguistic means . . . but visually, through layout, through the spatial arrangement of blocks of text, of pictures and other graphic elements on the page. (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1998, p. 187).

Indeed, the characters in Touken Ranbu have managed to tell their own stories through many detailed designs. Beside their unique dialogue, the clothing, personalities, and some of the fashion designing have all revealed important information about the original artifacts. Furthermore, certain characters in the game would deliver their dialogue using unique accents and dialects from certain region of Japan to indicate their relationship to the region. For example, a character called Chiyoganemaru is originated from the national treasure sword of Ryukyuan kingdom (currently known as Okinawa, a region in south Japan), to indicate the sword’s unique birthplace which differs with other swords, the character is using a unique accent and style of dialogue that reminds player this Katana’s originate place (Touken Ranbu Wiki, n.d.).

Thus, the gamification of the culture of the Japanese sword has invoked a trend of Katana, many younger audiences, especially younger females, have become extremely interested in this traditional culture. As a result of the booming trend, museums and institutions that are devoted to Katana research have shifted their public relations strategy and setting up social events and merchandizes that promotes the traditional culture to these freshly emerged audiences. Consequently, the success of this gamification of traditional humanities subjects had pointed out an interesting approach to digital humanities studies, by analyzing the case of Touken Ranbu and its social influence, we might be able to summarize a model that could benefit similar digital humanities projects that aim at reviving marginalized historical artifacts.

Digital Humanities and Gamification – Expansion in audience group

To begin with, Touken Ranbu as a digital humanities tool that successfully gamified various Katanas has managed to expand the audience group of Katana culture by significantly reducing the knowledge barrier and present the culture behind the artifact in a style that attracts a wider audience group. In the article written by Kleinmann discussing the potential of developing a pedagogical tool using the principles of gamification, here Kleinmann has stressed the three impactive benefits of computational textual analysis which are building structural readings that reduce learning effort, increasing exposure to achieve familiarity in a mass of audiences, and lastly, providing transferrable skills for workplace (Kleinmann, 2014). In order words, Kleinmann is stressing computational textual analysis’s ability to reduce the knowledge barrier around the academic subject. By setting up a comprehensive structure, the student who is engaging in the computational textual analysis should be able to acquire the knowledge without getting discouraged by sophisticate conceptual works and unfamiliar terminology. “The basic idea is that human activity is enhanced through fun. If our screwing around digitally with texts is like manipulating the elements of a video game for “fun”, then we have essentially gamified the scholarly process” (Kleinmann, 2014).

Indeed, Kleinmann has pointed out a very important factor about how to successfully gamify humanities subjects. Since most of the scholarly research regarding Katana has been carried out with utmost respect and sophisticate process, the limitation of access to the research result has also been build up during the process. With limited access to the original artifact and highly expected professionalism when dealing with the research materials, the traditional process of studying the Katana can hardly be described as a process that can be “fun”. However, by gamifying these artifacts and digitalize them into an intriguing tool that helps educate the players, the discovery of each Katana’s background information has become a process that the audiences can have fun while doing it. Naturally, the benefit of this straightforwardness has resulted in more exposure to the academic subject, which would continuously nurture new audiences that would otherwise not develop a passion for the subject. This pedagogical endeavor is crucial in any digital humanities project because the purpose of using new technology is to benefit the potential audience that has not yet familiar with the subject. As a digital humanities researcher or scholars, it is always important to always ask oneself the question of “why getting the digital technologies mixed with humanities study in the first place?” If we are using new technology to develop tools that serve the same group of users that are already familiar to the subject, then we have not fulfilled the propose of using new technologies. Ideally, the best use of technologies is to make an appeal of the traditional humanities subject to younger generations who would appreciate the presentation through digital technologies and educate them to become enthusiastic in a humanities subject. As we have mentioned in previous sections, when designed correctly, game playing can be an effective remedy that boosts people’s willpower to achieve something great. Therefore, with this logic in mind, the best use of technology in developing digital humanities artifacts has to be devoted to reducing of knowledge barrier for potential audiences to have easier access to the knowledge. When we look at the case of Touken Ranbu, we have noticed the lack of knowledge barrier in the game and the amplification of the fun factors in the process of discovering the story of each Katana. For example, as a general audience who has no knowledge regarding the culture of Katana, Touken Ranbu can still be enjoyed as a character collecting game. Through the gameplay, the player is gradually building a knowledge base about each character’s background and the historical artifact each of them is representing. At a certain point, a collectible dialogue or trivial facts about a character will raise questions in the player’s mind, thus motivate the player to find out the information themselves. In its six-years operation, it managed to mobilize a group of audience that are nearly strangers to the subject of Japanese swords. “Touken Joshi”, which translate as Katana Girls, is a freshly emerged group of young female audience who got a passion for this ancient artistic weaponry (Martin, 2020, September 2). This scenario has proved the points of Kleinmann. When designed effectively, the method of gamification can greatly benefit the humanities study by reduce learning effort and increasing exposure to achieve familiarity in a mass of audiences.

Additionally, Kleinmann also stressed the importance of building transferable skills that would benefit the audience in a workplace setting. Although it is not exactly executed as Kleinmann had elaborated, Touken Ranbu Online have successfully fulfilled this mission. In a news post written by Paul Martin, he has confirmed the influence of Touken Ranbu Online as the main drive of enthusiasm for the young ladies to become familiar in Katana studies, and some of them even went on to take the sword crafting profession (Martin, 2020, September 2). Although Martin also mentioned several powerful works of manga and anime that have incited a trend of historical study in Japanese martial art as well, but it is clear that Touken Ranbu is by far the most influential work regarding Katana studies in the pop culture. Evidently, the game Touken Ranbu as a digital humanities artifact has also managed to provide transferrable skills to its audience consider some of the Touken Joshi decide to take the profession of Japanese swords crafting.

Bridging Between the Historical Artifact and the Fan of Popular Culture Game

To continue with, the interactive communication between the historical artifact and its audience has also been made possible by gamification. For instance, non-textual artifacts like Katana would suffer significant information lost in the process of digitalization because of its lack of textual contents. By turning these non-textual artifacts into personable characters, the game successfully established a sense of communication between the audience and the artifacts. The interactive communication happens when players have to engage in the “discovery” of the background information behind each Katana as a side-mission. Take an example of the “recollection” system, when a player arranges two or multiple Katanas that have historical relativity, the game will automatically show a short cinema scene contain a fictional conversation between these Katanas. Through the short cinema scene, players could learn about either a historical event or an episode regarding the Kanata’s previous owner (Touken Ranbu Wiki, n.d.). This mental investment of putting effort into discovering the conditions to trigger the recollection is itself a process of interactive learning. Similar to Paola’s method of digitally escorting students through the virtual Rome, Touken Ranbu also deliberately hinged these cinema scenes with the locations in the game so the players can find out about the historical backstories regarding these Katana (Matei, 2009). Currently, due to the limitation of the mobile game technologies, the locations, and the recollection system is merely installed through textual dialogues and verbal indication; however, it is possible in the future, with the right technologies being applied, players can experience a much more immersive environment in the game that educates them about the historical significance of each Katana, similar to the Visible Past software which Matei mentioned in his article. (Matei, 2009).

Moreover, regarding the level of interactivity, Touken Ranbu has taken a very different yet much more effective approach to present the hidden context within the materials been studied. Instead of offering a linear, directive learning path that holds the player’s hands to arrive at certain “knowledge”. The game just simply incorporates all the relative knowledge into the character’s design. In fact, every detail of the characters has certain historical backstories in them, and the player is left with absolute freedom on whichever characteristics that they might want to find out the historical reference. For example, certain dialogue a character says might suggest this Katana have been stolen or been given between the warrior families as gift in history, or else, it might hint that its previous owner, a famous historical figure well-known for bravery and visionary, have lived a difficult and tragical life. Furthermore, the game also introduced the concept of “brotherhood” and “family” between similar and culturally related characters. For instance, characters of Katana made by the same or related swordsmith are considered as brothers, and Katanas that made by the different members in a swordsmith school are considered a family. These fictional concepts made the characters more personable and relatable; it can assist the player to quickly grasp the sophisticate relations between each Katanas. Thus, effectively educated the players through the careful design of gamification.

This approach of non-linear pedagogy is what differentiates Touken Ranbu from other digital humanities artifacts. because it has the potential to become an open-world, interdisciplinary education tool. The freedom that is been given to players with diverted background would allow them to pursuit piece of information which they might find uniquely interesting in the game, such as Buddhism/Shinto religion, evolution of Japanese clothing, Japanese dialects, and game design. This is precisely what Anne Burdick have elaborated in her book regarding the advantage of digital humanities project.

Digital Humanities projects most closely involve communication /graphic /visual designers who are concerned with the symbolic representation of language, the graphical expression of concepts, and questions of style and identity. Interaction/user experience designers, with their focus on interface, behavior, and digital systems, and media designers who combine communication and interaction also bring expertise that is critical to the design of operations and environments that structure the ways in which ideas come into being (Burdick et al, 2012, p.12).

This non-linear pedagogy style can be said as a great model that can only be made possible with the application of digital humanities approach. This level of interactive communication is a result of several elements combined together. The massive amount of information regarding each artifact is converted into various forms of graphical expression and symbolic language. On top of that, the minimalist interface and the easy-operating game system have made it possible for the user to focus on the historical knowledge that is been embedded into the game. In the future, with more available technologies that can enhance the user experience, this game might have the potential of becoming an even bigger project. For instance, technologies like augmented reality that empowered the user to interact with video game characters in certain location in reality can make a great addition to the game system. Similar to how Pokemon Go have mobilized its players to physically visiting locations, Touken Ranbu can also initiate a project that utilize this technology to host educational museum event or regional tourism projects. Fortunately, there is already a similar tourism culture in place in Japan. Fans or certain TV show or animation series would make a visit to real life places that got featured in these shows, and the local facility or government would host tourism events that make the visit memorable for the fans. For example, in the year of 2016 and 2017, the local shrines and temples in Kyoto have come together to host stamp rally events (Ayumi, 2017, March 3). During the event, these shrines and temples would exhibit graphic panels of Touken Ranbu characters which are related to their facility, and visitors who are fans of the game would come in to collect a special stamp that features special marker from the game. We can clearly see the potential of this tourism model, with well-combined AR technologies that can enhance the visitor experience, the game Touken Ranbu can establish a more advanced digital humanities pedagogical model that surpass the effectiveness of Visible Past described by Matei.

Revive the Traditional Culture – strong bondage between the DH tool and the original artifact

Last but not least, while the game gradually becoming a digital humanities tool that has its own fanbase, it has also retained a strong bondage with the original historical artifacts. This has resulted in a positive outcome which did not shifts the audience’s attention away from the original artifacts, instead, most of the game’s fanbase have actually become more aware of the significance of these endangering historical artifacts. The original artifact is not marginalized and replaced by this new digital humanities artifact, in contrary, it actually forms a tied relationship with the original artifact by referencing, translating, and interacting with the original artifact. Evidently, this game has made some positive contribution to the revival of the Katana culture. One of the most significant social contributions of the game is it builds an awareness of protecting historical artifact among its fans. According to the article written by Stephen Ramsay, one of the challenges of new digital humanities texts is that it generates analytical findings that would potentially replace the original text as the object of focus (Ramsay, 2011). Ramsay points out that during the process of digitalizing humanities study materials, there is always the possibility of “losing the text” because the extracted analytical findings are too abstract that it can hardly retain any detailed linkage to the original text. For example, when someone “distance reading” the texts of Shakespeare, the result of the distance reading would hardly remind the reader any sentimentality that a conventional reader would capture when reading the texts individually. However, the game Touken Ranbu has setup an example that proven to be not only referencing the original artifact closely, but it is also capable of directing its audience’s attention back to the original artifact. In order words, it has successfully minimized the “losing of text” in the process of gamification. As a digital humanities artifact, it has served the propose of preserving the entirety of the original artifacts by redirecting the player’s focus from the characters in the game towards the larger community of Katana studies. As the result, the fans of Touken Rabu have made great social contribution in preservation and restoration projects of many historical artifacts that would otherwise gain no attention from the general public.

A news articles written by Asano indicates the player of Touken Ranbu has a great sense of protecting the historical treasury, “a crowdfunding campaign to restore 77 precious Japanese swords that were submerged by torrential rain that struck the Kyushu region in July, is gaining support across Japan mainly due to young women who are interested in the historical weapons as fans of the online game “Touken Ranbu””( Asano, 2020, August 20). Furthermore, this strong relativity has also made similar contribution to the humanities study of Katana culture. Even some minor Katanas that are not featured in the game have gained more public exposure, some damaged and lost Katanas have been revisited and restored; most importantly, more institutional collaborations between various museum, gallery, private collectors, governmental sectors, and scholar communities that might never happen under normal condition are incited by the influence of this digital humanities artifact. For example, the successful publication of a scholarly blade-themed photo book (Yamaguchi, 2020, March 1). Normally, this type of scholarly edited photo book is only targeting consumers that are either professional collectors who are interest in Katana culture or scholars of the field, yet with the on-going trend of Katana boom, many younger audiences who are craving the knowledge regarding Katana have made up the majority of the consumer. The influence of this strong relativity is a key to our digital humanities study endeavors. How can we keep the original artifacts relevant to the conversation after the new digital humanities tools have proved to be effective? It is an important question that we must ask ourselves about the future of digital humanities study.

Conclusion

In sum, the game Touken Ranbu Online has set up an example of developing a commercial game with enough room for growth for a scholarly digital humanities tool. The way it uses new technologies to make an appeal to new audiences is a great strategy that can be mimicked by many similar projects that study non-textual artifacts. Its method of gamification has successfully applied some computational thinking principles like abstractions and layering, decomposition to the development of an educational tool. Information in the game is presented with various expressions that involve graphic design and interactive users experience. Furthermore, the layering of the game ensured that audiences with different levels of interest in the subject can all find joy playing and learning with the game. This carefully structured system has significantly reduced the knowledge barriers while delivering the necessary information. Finally, the game does not make a digital replacement for the original artifact. As a successful digital humanities artifact, it fulfilled the mission of connecting its newly emerged audience with the original artifacts. Once again, this method of gamification suggests there is a model that other digital humanities projects can also utilize. Although the success of this game has something to do with the unique Japanese aesthetic that allows the fusion of traditional and popular culture, yet it also presented some interchangeable methods of how digital humanities can assist the revival of marginalized culture.

Reference List
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