Keita Moore specializes in Japanese cultural and media studies. His research focuses on the intersections of media and the social sphere—how different media produce new social formations and serve as complex sites of sociocultural and political negotiation. His primary research focuses on the sociocultural politics of Japanese videogames as they move between game texts, game designer discourses, and a wide range of social actors including pedagogues, parents, and politicians. His book manuscript, tentatively entitled Videogames, Social Regulation, and the Politics of Wasted Time in 1980s Japan, examines the ways in which gaming served as a major site to rethink norms of childhood in the “new” media temporalities of postindustrial, information society, and incipient neoliberal Japan.

Moore’s other interests include how gender is worked and reworked in playable form. His contribution to The Handbook of Japanese Games and Gameplay (Amsterdam UP: 2025), for example, examines how norms of corporate masculinity influence the design of wargames set in the Sengoku (Warring States) period. Likewise, he has considered the gendering of Nintendo DS “lifestyle software” (DiGRA 2024; with Joleen Blom).

Moore’s second monograph project considers representations of mixed-race individuals across media forms in Japan. Building on his contribution to Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) About Us (Duke University Press: 2024)—which examines bi-racial identity in the Metal Gear Solid series—Moore is interested in exploring questions of multi-racial representation. Moore’s affiliation with the Asian American Studies program at OSU speaks to this ongoing interest.

Dedicated to exploring the use of interactive media in the classroom, Moore has worked with a number of units on campus to sponsor talks related to game studies. Moore is a founding editor of the GAMING + Project (with Kaitlyn Ugoretz and Daigengna Duoer). Thanks to generous funding from the UC Santa Barbara Center for Taiwan Studies, the GAMING + Project unites videogame studies with multiple disciplines in digestible, public-facing scholarship and lesson plans. Additionally, he is currently investigating the ways in which digital games have been used to configure and teach Japanese cultural geographies (forthcoming).

Moore’s research has been awarded funding from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), the Japan Foundation, and various OSU funding bodies.

Prior to entering academia, Moore spent several years as an in-house localization specialist with Square Enix in Tokyo, where he translated several games including FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn. He has an ongoing interest in translation, with a particular desire to make Japanese-language scholarship more accessible to an Anglophone audience. At present, he is translating key essays on Japanese game design and videogame history (forthcoming).

In his teaching, Moore invites students to explore culture and media not in isolation, but rather at the intersections of larger social forces and dynamics. Before joining DEALL in 2024, Moore taught in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at UC Santa Barbara. At the Ohio State University, he teaches courses such as Japanese 2231: Elements of Japanese Culture; Japanese 2452: Modern Japanese Literature in Translation; and Japanese 4400: Japanese Film and Visual Media. Moore is also interested in exploring different methods for transnational research, in a course under development entitled Studying Transnational Japan.

Moore is interested in advising graduate student projects in areas such as Japanese game studies, manga studies, contemporary Japanese cultural studies and East Asian media studies. He particularly welcomes projects that relate representation, mediation, and socio-historical context.