Bryan Hikari Hartzheim, Waseda University.

As the architect of the Metal Gear Solid franchise, video game director Hideo Kojima is synonymous with the “stealth game” genre, where tension and excitement is created from players avoiding enemies rather than confronting them. Through the franchise, Kojima also helped to bridge the gap between video games and other forms of media. In this talk, Bryan Hikari Hartzheim draws from his recently published book to explain the core tenets of Kojima’s game design. Despite working for a commercial game studio for most of his career, Kojima designed and directed games that were both industrially disruptive and socially relevant. Focusing on developer disclosures from Japanese game periodicals, Hartzheim argues that Kojima advocates for a “progressive game design” that expands the boundaries of both game industry conventions and sociocultural discourses in Japan.

Bryan Hikari Hartzheim is Associate Professor of New Media at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. He teaches and researches on game studies, media industries, and Japanese popular culture in the School of International Liberal Studies and Graduate School of International Culture and Communication Studies. He is the author of Hideo Kojima: Progressive Game Design from Metal Gear to Death Stranding (2023) and co-editor of The Franchise Era: Managing Media in the Digital Economy (2019).

Introduced by Andrea Mariucci, graduate student, Asian Studies. This event is created by the EAP Graduate Student Steering Committee.

Watch an interview with Bryan Hikari Hartzheim and Andrea Mariucci here! (2 min.)