The Hypersociality of Collectible Card Games

Yu-Gi-Oh! demonstrates how pervasive media technologies in everyday settings integrate the imagination into a wider range of sites of social activity. Far from the shut-in behavior that gave rise to the most familiar forms of antimedia rhetoric, this media mix of children’s popular culture is wired, extroverted, and hypersocial, reflecting forms of sociality augmented by dense sets of technologies, signifiers, and systems of exchange. David Buckingham and Julian Sefton-Green (2004) have argued in the case of Pokémon that “activity— or agency—is an indispensable part of the process rather than something that is exercised post hoc” (p. 19). The image of solitary kids staring at television screens and twiddling their thumbs has given way to the figure of the activist kid beaming monsters between Game Boys, trading cards in the park, text messaging friends on the bus ride home, reading breaking Yu-Gi- Oh! information emailed to a mobile phone, and selling amateur comics on the Internet. This digitally augmented sociality is an unremarkable fact of life for the current generation of kids in urban Japan. With the majority of Japanese accessing the Internet through mobile phones and with the rise of the handheld Game Boy as the preferred platform for gaming, computer and TV screens are no longer privileged access points to the virtual and the networked world.

Congregating with their Game Boys and Yu-Gi-Oh! playing cards, kids engage in a form of hypersocial exchange that is pervaded by the imagination of virtual gaming worlds. Buzzing with excitement, a group of boys huddles in a corner of their after-school center, trading cards, debating the merits of their decks, and talking about the latest TV episode. A little girl rips open a pack of cards at a McDonald’s, describing their appeal to her baffled grandparents. A boy wears a favorite rare card around his neck as he climbs the play equipment at the park, inciting the envy and entrepreneurialism of his peers. As their mother completes her grocery shopping, a brother and sister walk into an elevator dueling with coupled Game Boy Advance machines. When Yu-Gi-Oh! players get together, (hyper)social exchange involves both the more familiar discursive sharing of stories and information and the material exchange of playing cards and virtual monsters.

CCGs are a very social game, involving not just game play but trading, bargaining, getting out to find cards, etc.