This article explores the Pepe the Frog Internet meme through a spatial approach that targets the ways in which netizens attempt to repurpose it, so as to build a communal space in which meaning is constantly negotiated and hijacked. We argue that Pepe the Frog and other memes can be interpreted as “cyberplaces” defined as computer environments that display the ideological polemics between netizens as they struggle to build a sense of community. Moreover, the rhizomatic stratification of such cyberplaces reveals a more nuanced view of meme dynamics, one that takes into account the agency of users as they efface and impose meanings on memes, not unlike the process of deterritorialization enacted on places.

The genre of boys' love (BL), which generally refers to a body of works that depict fictional relationships between beautiful "boys," is produced for and consumed mainly by women in Japan. Ludic expressions of sexuality and gender unique to BL have gained popularity on a global scale but have also drawn negative attention. In this article, we employ the concept of asobigokoro (playful spirit/heart) to highlight the importance of regional ideas of play and playfulness in game analysis. We argue that asobigokoro functions as a kind of counter-discourse as it privileges non-Eurocentric ways of knowing, understanding, and "playing" with representations of sexuality. Game analysis through an asobigokoro lens enriches the field of regional gaming by drawing on Japanese sociopolitical contexts to situate a reading of Japanese ludic representations. Asobigokoro stresses the importance of understanding cultural variations of "play" and "playfulness" in order to make sense of "taboo" subjects in culturally nuanced ways. In our textual analysis of Enzai: Falsely Accused, we discover that the simultaneous appropriation and subversion of violent and sexually explicit content, which characterizes the game's asobigokoro, can be traced to Japanese feminist forms of asobi (play), which are rooted within the Yaoi tradition.

What types of discourses characterize Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs) as a genre of video games? Why is the genre so difficult to define, and why has it become polarizing within the gaming community? This article suggests an outline of the evolution of the discourse surrounding JRPGs based on a macroanalysis of the anglophone online gaming press. Using undirected topic modelling text mining methodology to analyse a corpus of 2053 JRPG reviews gathered from ten different online journalistic outlets posted between 1992 and 2014, this article demonstrates the circumstances of the gradual introduction of the term Japanese role-playing games in online publication, first as an extension of other examples Japanese pop culture in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and subsequently as its own genre appropriated by anglophone gaming culture in the mid-2000s onwards and subjected to this community’s particular regime of values.

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