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This article examines the role of mediators in the production of commodity value, arguing that there is a rise in a kind of immaterial labor, shaped by contemporary conditions of late capitalism, that functions explicitly as a mediating force. In this example, video game journalists are understood as actively engaged in producing and negotiating the value and meaning of video games for both producers and consumers. By specifically examining a moment of value contestation, a podcast debate between a journalist and a game developer, this article traces the mediating practices of the enthusiast gaming press and examines the way their history with and relationship to the video game industry continue to structure their ability to filter knowledge and shape desires.

This special Games issue brings together diverse questions from broadly defined notions of gaming. On some level, all the articles collected here work to reestablish how gaming, in all its variations, is embedded in the social knowledge, meanings, activities, and productions of users and makers.

Is Japan a "paradise for the press?" Or is robust discourse on matters of public interest in Japan stifled because of defamation laws that heavily favor the plaintiff? Kamakami v. Sakurai, as one of the final events in Japan's HIV-tainted blood scandal, is a provocative and illustrative chapter in the freedom of press and defamation law in Japan. In the early 1980s, hemophiliacs faced an HIV epidemic. When researchers concluded the HIV virus could be transferred by blood, they recognized that the blood products created from plasma pooled from hundreds of donors used to treat hemophiliacs could carry the HIV virus. Clinical trials soon proved that the HIV virus could be deactivated through a heating process. But in Japan, later investigations revealed delays in clinical trials and in recalls of potentially tainted products by both pharmaceutical companies and the government. Multiple prosecutions and convictions for criminal negligence followed this scandal. Freelance journalist Yoshiko Sakurai not only followed the investigations, but conducted her own. Based on her extensive research, she published a magazine article and a best-selling book on what has become known as the HIV-tainted blood scandal in Japan. In these publications, Sakurai accused Dr. Takeshi Abe, a highly respected hemophilia specialist and government advisor, of intentionally delaying the clinical trials the pharmaceutical companies commissioned him to conduct for personal monetary gain. Two years after the book's publication, authorities arrested and prosecuted Dr. Abe for professional negligence and Dr. Abe filed a defamation case against Sakurai based on several statements in the article and book. The unanimous Supreme Court decision handed down in Sakurai's favor, translated below, is significant for what is said, but also for what was left unsaid. Sakurai was ultimately justified in her journalism as the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in her favor. However, while it would not be unusual in a similar case in the United States to have ...

Adriana Petryna, Horizon Work: At the Edges of Knowledge in an Age of Runaway Climate Change, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 224, 2022
Sertaç Sehlikoglu, Working Out Desire: Women, Sport, and Self-Making in Istanbul, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, pp. 339, 2021