6. Database Production: Planners and Players in a Japanese Mobile Game Studio

This chapter will look at collaborative global/local production among mobile game creators in Japan, primarily through examining the international culture of production in a single video game studio, by employing a critical lens and methodology from the field of “production studies,” a subset of critical media industry studies that emphasizes the labor of “below-the-line” workers in the process of media creation. Based on fieldwork in a Japanese mobile game company conducted over a 6-month period from 2012 to 2013, this chapter maps the construction and operations of a single Japanese multiplayer, free-to-play (F2P) card-battle game through the critically unexamined role of the planner, detailing how they construct game worlds and how players react to the design choices that they implement.