Japan’s not dead

Not to make any sweeping generalizations (or to sound as hopelessly out of touch and naive as this writer), but I think that the video game industry is perhaps the medium that is most susceptible to deleterious memes. To some degree, this has to be because of shifting tastes within the gaming populace – even Mario is now prone to the idea that those games aren't "important" because they're "rehashes" and don't even have deep storylines or shooting (I of course reject all of those views for many reasons, but I won't get into that here). But I'm more concerned about the kinds of memes that seem to come out of nowhere, and seem to have a destructive quality to the discussion of video games.

Perhaps one of the most damaging, both to the video games industry and to the continued struggle for legitimacy in this infant medium, is the idea that Japanese games and developers don't matter anymore, and that the Japanese industry is dead. I'm going to go into why I think this is a fallacy, but first, allow me to state some things upfront that I believe about video games.

First, while I'm hopeful that the medium will stop being so mired in the kinds of gameplay and storylines that it seems to be stuck in right now, I can't help but see the medium as a whole as being… well, just not as satisfying as I want it to be. Lately, I've been surrounding myself with books and TV shows and movies, and not to say that any book is better than any video game, but on the whole, those mediums are far and away more mature, developed, and satisfying than most video games. Video games haven't yet found their Mad Men, and TV is not that old of a medium.

To some degree, this is not the fault of anyone – video games are, in film terms, basically just entering into their "talky" phase, so it's not entirely fair to expect the medium to be as fully developed as its counterparts. There does, however, seem to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the current limitations of video games – they are, ultimately, still "games" with objectives and rules and points and achievements, whether obfuscated or brought to the forefront; and while I wouldn't go as far as Roger Ebert in saying that these elements make them "lesser" art (a view I've shifted to in the last year or so), they do mean that there are certain kinds of stories that simply do not work as video games. The themes and storytelling and connection to the player has to be made almost entirely through physical means, and this is fundamentally different from films and TV shows. The aforementioned Mad Men would make for a shitty video game, because the things you would have to do in the video game wouldn't add anything to the drama that already exists within the show.

This is my longwinded way of saying that, in my opinion, I have noticed that more Japanese developers seem to understand these fundamental limitations better than their American counterparts, and that it is perhaps a case of ethnocentric defense mechanisms that seem to put Western games now on a higher pedestal than Japanese games in the gaming media. The attitudes have shifted to more "cinematic" experiences – so many of the most highly regarded Western games are just as ludicrous as Contra, but with all of the self-awareness stripped away and with an emphasis on "drama" instead.

The comparative simplicity of many of the Japanese-developed games in what I'm now seeing as the medium's heyday (from the 8-bit to the 32 or 64-bit eras) are seen by too many people as what they appear to be: simplistic. Yet many of those experiences still hold more weight and importance than their modern equivalents. Final Fantasy VI, for instance, is far more evocative and inventive than Mass Effect 2, and they basically have the same structure.

That's in the past, though; we're talking about the present. And yes, there are problems within the Japanese gaming industry. An overreliance on established franchises that really do need some shaking up (Final Fantasy, Monster Hunter) and too many attempts at courting the Western market in hollow ways have gutted a lot of the importance of Japanese developers in the west.

But that last point is entirely the fault of American consumers, who, in the 16-bit and 32-bit eras, would scoop up games from wherever if the quality was there. Now, the meme of "cinematic experiences" has put games like Red Dead Redemption on the top of the heap, and a game like that is fundamentally un-Japanese. People aren't buying games like Muramasa en masse, and this is seen as a repudiation of Japanese culture in video games, despite the fact that gamers were willing, only a few years ago, to make games exactly like Muramasa best-sellers.

I'm more concerned with the complete, fundamental misunderstanding of the problems of the "cinematic shooter" in the west. So, so many of these games get free passes because their mechanics work and they're "fun." But no one cares that the very idea of this kind of gameplay is so boring, meaningless, and ill-suited to the medium.

It seems to me that there's nothing so ethnocentric as the idea that Japan is irrelevant now because the Western market seems to have conveniently forgotten about them. From a financial standpoint, it makes sense that developers should want to reach all corners of the globe, but Japanese developers shouldn't need to have Western consumers on their minds when they're making their games. That's nothing short of hegemony on the west's part, not that that's anything new. It would be much more convenient for the promoters of the cinematic shooter if they could just ignore what's going on in that weird little Asian country, and write off the accomplishments there.

Because there are accomplishments, and accomplishments that don't need to exist within the framework of western understanding. Mistwalker is making some of the most compelling games out there – Lost Odyssey is a modern masterpiece. Cave is making the bullet hell shooter into an artform. And any discussion of Japanese development dying seems to conveniently forget about Nintendo (as everyone conveniently forget about Nintendo) who are still the world's preeminent development house. Sure, these companies are all existing within a quote-unquote "traditional" framework, but what some people view as out-of-date or traditional, I view in these cases as a fundamental understanding of the medium. Besides, Nintendo in particular does more to push the medium forward than almost any other developer, precisely because of the recognizability of their brands. Super Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 are essentially some of the most daring and inventive games ever made, and the inclusion of Mario as the playable character doesn't make that untrue.

Basically, I wish that the overriding idea in the west wasn't that Japan has to do anything to appease the west from an artistic standpoint, and I wish that so many Japanese developers would stop hmming and hawing over how to go about appeasing the west. Honestly, western gamers shouldn't care that they don't find a monster collecting game or a game based off of an anime unappealing, because not every game has to be made with a "global" (read: western) audience in mind. I'm not saying that either industry is perfect, nor am I saying that Japanese development is always inherently better than any other development – I just wish that more gaming press outlets would recognize the same, and move beyond the cultural hegemony that is threatening this young medium.

(Note: I have made some sweeping generalizations about western development and attitudes for the sake of my argument. I'm stating this here so that you're aware that I'm aware of this, and that I'm also aware of the many, many exceptions to the rule. Western development isn't all shooting and death and football – there's also a ton of awesome stuff going on here. But that also holds true of Japanese development, so you can see where I'm going with this.)