Martial Arts Studies. London; New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. xii, 159 pp. (Illustrations.) US$32.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-78348-982-4.
After a five-year research project involving more than a thousand fighting-game players, Chris Goto-Jones has created the Virtual Ninja Manifesto, a text-and-image treatise inspiring gamers to intentionality and purpose in gameplay, aiming for self-transformation through practice and combat. Goto-Jones begins from the assertion that videogames impart knowledge, understanding, and experience in a way that other texts cannot, and that fighting games in particular emphasize a specific mindset and approach to gaming not found in other modes of play. At its heart, the Virtual Ninja Manifesto suggests that fighting games in and of themselves may be regarded as a form of martial arts practice, emphasizing mastery over mere winning, and self-transformation through discipline. Part of the book is indeed a manifesto, a ten-point code combining beautiful artwork by Siku with koan-like questions and short paragraphs pointing to the purpose of fighting games as a martial art. Every other martial art has its manifesto, argues Goto-Jones, so why not fighting games?
As Goto-Jones observes, fighting games “place uniquely high emphasis on mastering incredibly complex and intricate control schemes, requiring delicate and precise physical dexterity” (6). The use of special moves demands both mental and physical skill, with mastery hard to achieve and greatly admired. Goto-Jones persuasively demonstrates that slow and disciplined mastery is emphasized in the narrative of Street Fighter, a Zen-like journey of the “world warrior” Ryu to learn and improve his skills over time. Other games also privilege the normative Japanese male, as seen with Akira Yuki in Virtual Fighter, Kazuya Mishima in Tekken, and Mitsurugi Heishirō in SoulCalibur. While Goto-Jones’s analysis focuses on Street Fighter, the arguments regarding Ryu can certainly be extrapolated to these other game series.
Skeptics will argue that the whole idea of positing Street Fighter, Tekken, SoulCalibur and the like as a form of martial art smacks of Orientalism and exoticism, making these Japanese arcade videogames into a mere object for Western academic scrutiny. Goto-Jones is way ahead of such critiques, making the problem of “gamic Orientalism” central to his study. Gamic Orientalism describes attitudes such as the “Asian hands” fallacy, the assumption that players of Asian descent are naturally better at fighting games than Caucasian or other non-Asian players. Asian hands can also be aspirational, with players aiming to achieve the same deft touch and smooth immersion as the Japanese experts. Gamic Orientalism also refers to current perceptions of fighting gamers in arcades today, seen as strange, overly dedicated otaku figures who somehow stand apart from supposedly normal gamers on the PC or home console. Much of this discourse is also sexist, assuming the masculinity of players. Goto-Jones exposes these attitudes as essentialist discourse, and turns the lens of gamic Orientalism on his own study as well. Goto-Jones is very aware that his own position could be taken as Orientalist and essentializing, but his clear argumentation and logic throughout the book dispelled my concerns on this point. He is careful to base his arguments in the empirical evidence of the five-year study “The Virtual Ninja Project,” quotes from gamers at length, and thinks creatively about the subject without giving in to generalization.
Two significant passages caught my eye and deserve mention here as interesting and useful interventions in the field of Game Studies. The first is the incredibly detailed description of one of the most famous moments in fighting game history, now known as “EVO moment #37,” when Umehara Daigo fought Justin Wong at Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike in 2004 and beat him in the final seconds of the 57-second bout. Goto-Jones provides a movement-by-movement description of the EVO moment’s onscreen action, including the reasoning behind each action (47–49). This is a very useful model for analysis, and will be of interest to many scholars and instructors of videogames. Further, Goto-Jones argues that this event is almost completely inexplicable to outsiders because it takes two kinds of literacy to understand—not only “abstract literacy” regarding the protocols and control schemes of the Street Fighter game, but also “embodied literacy,” understanding what is required to perform the specific techniques, including physical skills, reflexes, and the ability to mesh the player’s own conceptualized body with that of the avatar. Finally, Goto-Jones explains the bout in terms of how it was perceived around the world, as an instance of Japanese bushidō ideology defeating the West, much as Bruce Lee’s jeet kune do baffled and inspired Western audiences in the 1970s.
The second significant point is that Goto-Jones employs the neologism “ploystar” to indicate the closely melded identity of player + joystick + avatar when a player achieves moments of “deep engagement” or “authentic immersion,” in a form of selfhood “unifying gamer, hardware, and software into a single coherent agent” (69, 109). The emphasis on the physicality of the fighting gamer, and their identification with the avatar through technology and physical hardware, is a useful way of conceptualizing the player-character relationship and what role the arcade cabinet plays in the process of identification and immersion. This idea will no doubt lead to some interesting new ways of “doing platform studies,” and reinstate the arcade as an important site of physical video gaming.
Overall, this thought-provoking volume is certainly worth reading for anyone interested in videogames, Japanese philosophy, or frameworks of cross-cultural perception such as Orientalism. The contributions of the illustrator Siku and the use of poetic language in the manifesto make this a very attractive and entertaining volume for people to read. Mixing this material with the academic analysis is a bold move, one which pays off, broadening the target audience and opening up what has often been seen as the closed world of fighting-game culture.
Rachael Hutchinson
University of Delaware, Newark, USA