• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.173-192
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• 2009

As video games gain popularity and become a normal part of home entertainment, concern about youth access to inappropriate games continues to grow. Some people have claimed that violent video games influence children's aggressive behavior and that violent video games have some responsibility for violence in the school. In response to people's concerns, the video game industry created a video game rating system in 1995 to help parents decide which video games are appropriate for their children. This study investigated whether parents were aware of the video game rating system and how often they have used it when selecting video games for their children. This study attempted to find relationships among parents' attitudes toward video games, their guidance styles for their children's video game play, and their use of the video game rating system. This study found that most parents have used the video game ratings very frequently when they select video games for their children. But many parents still don't understand the video game rating system. This study showed that parents who had more negative attitudes or less positive attitudes toward video games were more likely to impose restrictions on their children's video game play and to use the video game rating system as a means to restrict their children's access to violent video games.

• Journal of the Economic Geographical Society of Korea
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.375-388
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• 2008

The early studies on the cultural industries had mainly emphasized the viewpoint of "efficiency" based on the "flexible specialization" theory, but they have gradually shed light on the viewpoint of "creativity": creative human resources and various networks generating creative energies. Despite the importance of these studies, it is impossible to explain every cultural industrial agglomeration phenomena from specific and few viewpoints due to the diversity of each cultural industry. This study describes the dissimilarity of agglomeration factors between the Japanese animation and home video game industries which form salient agglomeration in the same region. Both industries share similar characteristics with industrial agglomeration of SMEs in Tokyo and close inter-firm relationships. However, they differ in their historical development paths and each firm's behavior and strategy because of their own distribution systems and production processes. In particular, the difference in distribution systems clearly affects whether a company values "efficiency" factors of agglomeration advantage or "creativity" factors of that in case of locational choice. The distribution sector of the cultural industry, compared with the production sector, has a tendency to value profitability rather than creation itself. Therefore, a cultural industry with the strong distribution sector tends to form the industrial system emphasizing profitability. The Japanese animation firm is apt to choose its location from the perspective of efficiency, which easily contributes to profitability, because television broadcasting stations are strong distribution sector. Conversely, the Japanese game firm chooses its location from the perspective of creativity due to the absence of strong distribution sector.