Cross-postage go!
I’m working an actual blog post at the moment, but to quote every absentee parent in history, “Something suddenly came up.”
Anyway, here’s the first installment of part of my New Media project. Essentially, the project is my very own Wiki, so I hope to make it quite inclusive. It’s about culture in gaming — everything from actual ethnicities to the “culture” surrounding World of Warcraft. Along with larger pieces, I hope to keep a Myth-Busters style feature running in the background. This is the first in what will hopefully be a long-running and prodigious series of articles.
Videogaming has, without a doubt, formed a culture all its own; you need only direct your Internet browser over to a World of Warcraft website to see that. But like many others, gaming’s culture has subdivided along numerous lines – console vs. PC, hardcore vs. casual, and Call of Duty 4 vs. Halo 3, to name a few. But right now, we’re going to focus on one of the most obvious cultural clashes: East vs. West, utilizing the two most prominent “foes” on the battlefield, Japan and the U.S.
We’re big, loud, and prone to disrespectfulness and cursing; they’re super-intelligent, overly-quiet, and live in a country full of ninja and time-traveling super heroes. Obviously, people on each side of the great blue divide are at fault. Gaming isn’t absent from such gross misconceptions. In fact, due to its community-oriented nature, it might be the most likely of all mediums to fall victim to preemptive assumptions and stereotypes. So before this problem gets any more out of hand, let’s debunk some myths, shall we?
Myth #1: Japanese game design is insular
This myth — and the negativity associated with it — is a hold-over from the gaming’s earliest beginnings. See, for a time, Japanese games and American games were, for the most part, irreconcilably different. After all, Nintendo, a Japanese company, resurrected gaming from its grave in a landfill with the Atari (an American console) and E.T., so they probably didn’t much care for the idea of sharing their crayons with the kids who ruined recess. Life continued in that manner for a time, but towards the end of the PS1-N64 generation of consoles, the American videogame market became quite lucrative. Meanwhile, the Japanese market reached the top of the figurative mountain, and from there, all it could do was slowly rappel downwards. Thus, Japanese developers were forced to start opening their doors to foreign involvement, but as with any goal worth reaching, the process moved at snail’s pace.
Even now, Japanese game developers certainly march to the beat of their own drum – or even their own orchestra – but when Square Enix is using the Unreal Engine 3 you know things are looking up. On a similar note, Konami is farming out its Silent Hill series to the good Californians at The Collective in an attempt to appeal to both American and Japanese consumers, while also taking greater advantage of the Xbox 360 and PS3. Other examples along those lines are too numerous to list, but needless to say, Japanese developers are long past the warm-up phase. Truly, this is the way it was meant to be since man first stepped foot into the land of ones and zeroes.
