«Japanese Video Games as “Acultural” Products»

Tomás Grau de Pablos
«Games design and cultural dynamics: an approach to the cultural role of Japanese video games through procedural rhetoric»
Inter Asia Papers, n.º 50, 2016

Inter Asia Papers | Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona | Centro de Estudios e Investigación sobre Asia Oriental y Grupo de Investigación Inter Asia | Bellaterra (Barcelona) | ESPAÑA


Extracto del apartado de este título en el artículo en PDF

«To proceed adequately into the process of understanding and description of Japanese traits in video games, an application of the criteria used by Bogost and Frasca (2001, 2007) is the most optimal choice. By also applying the distinction between games that deliver meaning explicitly or implicitly, it is possible to understand how their overall design philosophy is able to convey different aspects that are assumed by the audience as distinctly Japanese. A proper approach to video games should also use the distinctions already established within the industry between game genres. While some of these categories have become obsolete or are put into question by several experts (Fencott, 2012), they can be useful to understand how phenomenology plays a vital role in procedural gameplay. Likewise, its division is useful to understand how different ludic structures are able to support different types of stories and semiotic signs.

»During the years of Japanese dominance, some of the most well-known game genres were developed and codified by several Japanese developers. Examples of this include platform games, which were amongst the most popular and varied, and action/adventure games, which alongside the former, became the staples of video game consoles at the time (Kohler, 2004). In these games, the narrative is presented implicitly, since the context is only offered throughout the elements of the simulation and only resort to other methods in rare of specific locations. For example, while textual words that described the situation of the game were often used at the beginning or the end of certain events in the gameplay, they were always separated between bigger chunks of gameplay that took the weight of the ludic experience.

»This format of game design does not favor the use of traditional narratives and formal storytelling techniques, as they are used in other media. Instead, the setting and objectives of the players are being told through game mechanics. For example, in all iterations of Super Mario Brothers (Nintendo, 1986), the player learns about the fictional world that the character inhabit through their actions. The fact that Mario is able to jump so high, obtain magical powers by touching mushrooms and flowers, and has to be aware of turtles along the way, are all elements of the game that the player knows by playing it. Shortly after that, the player learns that his objective is to traverse through different worlds —stages— and castles to defeat an evil creature —who can be easily distinguished from the rest thanks to the fact that he's specially strong and dangerous— and rescue a princess that is located in one of these castles. Only the latter bit of information is learned through text, since the rest can be inferred by the way that the game places all these elements sequentially.

»Later cases of this formula would approach this method of gaming to create numerous types of setting and delivering several forms of narrative. For example, the franchise Sonic the Hedgehog (Sega, 1991) which was designed from the start as a competitor to Mario, uses almost the same philosophy, but emphasizes movement and exploration through the use of bigger maps and the presence of different power-ups than those Mario uses: while Mario tends to become stronger and more deadly after acquiring items, Sonic becomes faster and more resistant to enemy damage, which allows the player to traverse the worlds much faster. On the other hand, the focus of games like Kirby's Dream Land (HAL Laboratory, 1992) and Mega Man (Capcom, 1986) is on acquiring enemy abilities and use those against them. These differences help game designers to differentiate their properties and explore different aspects of the same type of gameplay, which always consists on traversing through one end of the map to the next. At the same time, the aesthetics and sound effects of those games are helpful assets to establish the overall tone of the story. Most of the times, these aesthetic elements employ “cute” or otherwise attractive designs (Chen, 2013) that draw a huge inspiration from recognizable authors of both manga and anime in Japan. In fact, Kohler (2004) has suggested that the ludic structure of some of these games, like the arcade Donkey Kong (Nintendo, 1981) was intended to look similar to Japanese comic strips, specially the format known as Yonkoma, or manga that only uses four cells to deliver a joke. However, other type of platform games, like Contra (Konami, 1987) Bad Dudes (Data East, 1988) and Bionic Commando (Capcom, 1988) use elements that seem substracted from the general ethos of the American action movies of those times, or try to reproduce the looks and visuals from already popular American properties, like Disney and Warner Brothers.

»The philosophy design behind platform games like Mario and Sonic were also the basis upon which new genres were explored or refined. For example, brawler games like Streets of Rage (Sega, 1991) or Final Fight (Capcom, 1991) used the same level layout and the same narrative techniques to generate world-building through rewards and motivations. However, instead of focusing on platforming and avoiding obstacles, these games encourage fighting opponents using different combos and objects to defeat them in a setting that resembled those of action movies at the time. In this particular genre, the game mechanics and pacing change substantially, but the design priorities are essentially the same, since story and characterization still rely on aesthetics and ludic motivations.

»Another genre that derives heavily from this philosophy are action/adventure games, like The Legend of Zelda (Nintendo, 1986) and Metroid (Nintendo, 1986). Unlike traditional action games —like plattformers and brawlers—, the fictional worlds that are being presented here are not being explored by traversing a number of obstacles, but by allowing the player to move at his own pace in a specific setting. Since in these games it is impossible to inform the players of his goals through a preset course, the appeal of the game must rest on rewards based on exploration and throughout narrative input by which the player is able to know his role in the world. Recently, designers and experts have named this type of design as “environmental storytelling,” a technique that relies on objects and triggers to convey information, and while this term is usually used to refer only to recent games, it can be equally applied to earlier cases like the ones mentioned above. Thus, if we were to place these games according to their semiotic qualities, they would lie somewhere between pure implicit games —like Mario and Sonic— and purely explicit ones, like role playing games.

»At the opposite side of this design ethos spectrum, role playing games became quickly known for their dense and complex stories and their lack of compulsory mechanics. Since it was assumed that video games were not able to deliver complex themes by player action alone, many of these products opted for heavily abstracted rules that tended to reduce every form of player input into numerical values, much in the same vein as tabletop role playing games (Barton, 2007). A compromise between the ludic system and the story that is woven into it becomes the key factor to understand the structure of these particular types of text, which allows literary content to be placed in front of ludic. It is, thus, a type of game design that subscribes to an explicit narrative and only relies tangentially on traditional ludic motivation to be engaging.

»Of all the genres presented above, the most successful and popular of them were those that resorted to implicit narratives in order to present the setting of the simulation. Games like Super Mario and Legend of Zelda were quickly treated as landmarks of interactive entertainment and an inspiration for designers across the industry (Fencott, 2012). At the same time, newer design choices and genres emerged from the ideas that originated in those games. Sport games, fighting games and shooting games were heavily influenced by the mechanics that had been used in those, and in all cases, they delivered characterization and themes implicitly. This design philosophy was also favored because it facilitated a lax approach on storytelling and, indirectly, the possibility to market these games as “odor-less” to foreign audiences (Iwabuchi, 2002). While the games had a clear point of origin —Japanese game developers—, their design heavily facilitated its consumption and distribution to Western audiences, since any trace of “culture” in the text is kept to a minimum or becomes so abstract as to becoming secondary. As such, these games weren't perceived as part of Japanese culture, even when Japanese cultural images were being used as inspiration to populate them (Kohler, 2004). For example, while the Super Mario franchise tends to draw inspiration from traditional folklore tales —specially Yokai and other Japanese mythological creatures— when designing the obstacles of the simulation, this relationship gets heavily diluted thanks to the importance given to the gameplay rather than the digital world itself. In many ways, this approach was similar to what earlier American games did with arcade games, since they relied a lot on abstract representations to convey their rules. However, unlike those games, Japanese products did represent elaborated scenario, with clearly defined characters and stories written therein. So, in order to guarantee the success of these games in the Western market and avoid any sort of cultural interference, these characters were presented either as cultural hybrids that evoked both Western and Eastern cultural images (Consalvo, 2006) or were obfuscated by game mechanics that were put in front of them. In both cases, they were presented to the Western market as “acultural” products and, thanks to that, were easily digested by American and European consumers.

»Those games that couldn't fit into this category of game design —those that focused on explicit storytelling and favored narrative over mechanics— became, on the other hand, rapidly associated with ludic modalities and preferences that were identified as distinctly Japanese, and because of that, their distribution became much more limited (Kohler, 2004). Game genres like JRPGs (Japanese Role Playing Games), shooting games and visual novels became the staples upon which considerations of “Japaneseness” were introduced in order to address their most defining traits.

»REFERENCIAS

»Barton, Matt (2007). Dungeons & Desktops: The History of Computer Role-playing Games. Oakland: AK Press Ltd.

»Bogost, Ian (2007). Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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»Chen, Lai Chi (2014). “What’s the Cultural Difference between the West and the East? The Consumption of Popular ‘Cute’ Games in the Taiwanese Market”. New Media & Society, 16 (6), pp. 1018-1033.

»Consalvo, Mia (2006). “Console Video Games and Global Corporations: Creating a Hybrid Culture”. New Media & Society, 8 (1), pp. 117-137.

»Data East (1988). Bad Dudes [Arcade].

»Fencott, Clive et. al. (2012). Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games. Hokoben: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

»HAL Laboratory (1992). Kirby's Dream Land [Game Boy].

»Iwabuchi, Koichi (2002). Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

»Kohler, Chris (2004). Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life. Indiana: BradyGames.

»Konami (1987). Contra [Famicon].

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»____ (1986). The Legend of Zelda [Famicon].

»____ (1986). Metroid [Famicon].

»Sega (1991). Sonic the Hedgehog [Mega drive].

»____ (1991). Streets of Rage [Mega Drive].»