Martin Picard writes:
For those interested, Jeremie Pelletier-Gagnon and I edited a special issue on Japanese video games. You can find it here:
http://www.kinephanos.ca/2015/geemu-media-mix/
You will find contributions on many topics (media mix, JRPG, localization, video game music [in French], pachinko, etc), but maybe of particular interest to this list is an overview of game studies in Japan (it’s part of the Introduction), as well as an English translation of what is considered to be the first Japanese paper on video games from the perspective of the humanities (originally published in 1984).