Abstract
Johnson examines “bullet hell” or “danmaku” games and unpicks their relationships to Eastern and Western gaming cultures and competitive and non-competitive gamers. He first traces the genre’s history and its subsequent spread from Japan into the West, before focusing on the extraordinarily high levels of reflex and eyesight required to play them at the highest level. The chapter then examines several interrelated issues: the epistemological uncertainty surrounding the concept of world records in a community without any centralized database of information, the newly globalized culture of high scores and why less-skilled players choose to play games with such an extreme reflex requirement. It concludes by summarizing the present state of the genre and the place of danmaku in the broader world of gaming.
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Johnson, M. (2016). Bullet Hell: The Globalized Growth of Danmaku Games and the Digital Culture of High Scores and World Records. In: Pulos, A., Lee, S. (eds) Transnational Contexts of Culture, Gender, Class, and Colonialism in Play. East Asian Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43817-7_2
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