Hello, Malstrom. Thanks for putting up posts as usual. Today I wanted to write to you asking for a post on a certain subject. This is a long time coming for me, so please read it!
I’m sure you noticed how there is a lack of good things to write about lately… it’s all Nintendo’s silliness. And I remember that once, you said how if we want you to write about something, we should just bring it up to you.
Among the usual 3DS and Wii U posts, a little while ago you pointed out the craftsmanship that comes from the East.
I’m very interested in the general affair of the difference between the East and the West. That is, both on the side of the developers, and the side of the consumers. What do you think about them? Why is the East so different in a few (both key and smaller) subjects? And what does it mean in the context of gaming?
Now, you had a lot to say about this subject, I know. But it was often in small tidbits and never as a whole. There may be things you thought about that you never put up on the site.
Here’s a summary of what you said in the past (to the best of my memory):
– Games from the east tend to have high craftsmanship
– Developers from the east tend to focus on “new, original” whereas from
the west, it is “like a combination of THIS plus THIS”.
– Eastern consumers love Dragon Quest and Monster Hunter, while the west
far less so.
– PC Gaming is completely dead in Japan due to game-novels and
pornographic games.
– The western audience is usually more forgiving towards 3D games such as
3D Mario
This subject is pretty fascinating to me. Some questions: (and please note the last question, I write more on it below)
– Are all these things above related?
– What can a person take from both sides of the coin to produce something that neither side could make on their own (such as Zelda. You touched on this slightly before)?
– If a person wants to appeal to all of these consumers, is he really
limited to either <1> not expanding into cultural inspiration at all (such as simulation games and Pokemon) or <2> expanding into cultural inspiration that exists on both sides (such as magic and dragons)?
Regarding the last question, the question is actually kind of different (but I’m having trouble writing the correct one). I know for a fact that that the answer to the last question is ‘no’. For example: Piracy, and I mean strictly the Western depiction of Piracy, is often popular in Japan (Donkey Kong Country 2 is very loved in Japan and it used pirates. The most popular comic in Japan currently, ‘One Piece’, is about pirates.)
And vice versa (I will use comics again): Dragon Ball, which is very Chinese-influenced, with various Chinese motifs, was very popular worldwide. The motifs did not hinder the enjoyment of the western audience.
This is perhaps the main reason why I am sending you this email… I don’t know what to think. On the one hand, there are many Japanese-influenced games and settings that the West won’t buy (that are very popular in the East, so they’re not bad games). And there are just as many in vice versa.
But there are very few exceptions that defy this, proving that culture is a non-factor in worldwide success. What is the key? What sets them apart?
Thanks for reading. Hoping to read your reply!
I won’t have much of a reply for you. You’re going at this in a very specific way. All these thoughts bubbled up from a general conclusion.
There has been an email that asked a question (written to me like a year ago) that I am finally finishing. It is a mega-post answer. It was very difficult to answer because it demanded me to see with eyes I do not normally use (which I believe the readers do not normally use). You’ll find out the question the emailer asked soon enough.
Have you noticed that history is never presented from a financial context? History is always painted with a political brush (the governments, the revolutions, the emperors, the kings), a technological brush (the printing presses, the automobiles), or a social brush (customs of the people, the religions, the behaviors, the cultures). I’ve realized that the reason why I have remained curious about history is because I now understand how I felt I never grasped it. What is satisfying me is learning more and more to the financial context of history.
Empires cannot be formed unless there is a massive amount of trade (empires are very expensive and require tons of revenue). The British Empire could only rise with the rise of British trade. And when historians long argued about the fall of the Roman Empire, it is pretty well established that the fall was triggered by the collapse of trade (and the trade’s collapse is said to be due to the corruption of the legions who protected the trade routes).
If you looked at the world in a financial context for the past 600 years, what would you see? You would see the Far East (Japan, China, and India) as the place that everyone wanted to go, that everyone wanted to trade goods with.
Ever since at least 1400 AD, the Far East goods have been seen as the best craftsmanship in the world. Demand exceeded supply. Middle Age Europe had their imagination consumed by these wonderful goods coming from the Far East. The actual label the Europeans gave the Far East was ‘The New World’. (It was a New World to the Europeans.) Do you remember hearing the name Marco Polo? Where did Marco Polo go? Why, he went to the Far East and went back to Europe and wrote a book on his travels. That is why he became so famous.
Trade went back and forth between Europe and the Far East through Asia itself. However, this is a long stretch of land with lots of middlemen. All this trade created the Ottoman Empire.
Europeans knew they were getting shafted with all these middlemen (i.e. the Ottoman Empire). So this is why there was such passion to find an alternate trade route to the Far East. And this trade route would be water based instead of land based. Portugal began to sail around the southern tip of Africa to get to India. What’s amazing about this is the desire for Far East goods caused the Portuguese to confront old superstitions and legends about the seas particularly around Africa.
A rival to Portugal, Spain, wanted to find another trade route. Some guy named Columbus (who I’m sure you’ve never heard of) had a plan to sail around the world to get to the Far East. Of course, no one knew there was a continent in between that was not supposed to be there.
Much of the colonization of the ‘New World’ as well as the rise of the Spanish and British Empires was due to this Far East trade. Our modern world is shaped by ‘obsession over high Far East craftsmanship’. It is ironical and funny. And it is certainly not the context you think when you go about history in a political or cultural point of view.
Much of Clayton Christenson’s writings on disruption is based on the Japanese disruptions of American industries (cars, electronics, motorcycles). Missing from Christenson’s analysis is Japanese entertainment such as video games. Christenson writes about these Japanese disruptions as ‘crappy products for crappy consumers’. But I cannot ignore 600 years of history which clearly shows obsession over Far East craftsmanship.
I’ve always heard these Japanese ‘disruptive products’ as being described by American customers as ‘better craftsmanship’. Examples: “Japanese cars have better craftsmanship than American cars.” “Japanese motorcycles have better craftsmanship than American motorcycles.” “Japanese consumer electronics have better craftsmanship than American consumer electronics.” This is how it was in the 80s and 90s. But what about video games? No academic mentions video games it seems, not even Christensen. Would people say “Japanese video games have better craftsmanship than American video games?” back in the 80s and early 90s? Most definitely.
The NES Era is the era of Japanese invasion of video games into America. There was a mania surrounding the NES that was similar to the Wii. And have you noticed that children of the 80s have an obsession with Japan? They want to move to Japan, speak Japanese, immerse themselves in ‘Japanese Cultures’, because in their minds everything of Japan was ‘better’. Much of this thinking is no different than their European ancestors had for half a millennium ago.
So it was from that general sense that I began to think about it in more specifics about video games. Is there a Far East ‘craftsmanship’ phenomenon going on here with video games? I believe there was.
The first time the video game market crashed was in 1977 with the glut of PONG clones. The Japanese video game called ‘Space Invaders’ revived interest in video games. It was the home version of Space Invaders, when ported on the Atari 2600, saved the Atari 2600 on the market. People bought the Atari 2600 in order to get to Space Invaders. So a Japanese video game was the very first killer-app.
Space Invaders took a year to develop. Atari would never take that long to make a game (PONG, Break-out). But the Japanese mentality was different.
While I need to research this more to be sure, I think Space Invaders was the game that had the longest amount of development time ever (one year). The idea of spending a year of development on a video game would not occur to Westerners. It certainly never occurred with Atari.
Space Invaders was also influenced by Break-Out. Do you know who made Break-Out? It was made by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the future founders of Apple. The Apple II was designed by Wozniak in part so it could play games like Break-Out.
Space Invaders began the classic Arcade Era. Both Western and Japanese games have prominence here. Sega and Nintendo were making games like Donkey Kong and SubRoc 3d.
Let’s look at two different genres: the platformer and the shmup.
Donkey Kong was to the platformer as Space Invaders was to the shmup. But other platformers appeared both from Japanese companies and Western companies (many of these Western games appeared on the PC market such as Jumpman or Montezuma’s Revenge). Pitfall is the most famous of the Western platformers pre-NES.
I can’t really describe much in differences or craftsmanship between the East and the West in terms of platformers at this time period. The Eastern games stayed in the arcade (Eastern games did not appear on the PC unless it was a port of an arcade game). So it may be unfair to describe the Eastern games as more concentrated because, in the arcade, it could be no other way. But games like Pitfall or Montezuma’s Revenge focused more on exploration.
The difference in shmups is far more illustrative. Western shmups were games like Defender, Asteroids, Combat, and Uridium. Japanese games were more like Xevious or Zaxxon. The difference is that the Western mentality is to have an arena where the ships loop over if they fly across the screen. The East mentality was more of a ‘gauntlet’ where the ship had to go through a stage by flying in one direction.
The platformer and shmup were the butter and bread of the 80s. Almost all games after the NES were either a platformer or a shmup (or a racing) game.
When the Japanese invasion came (NES Era), they completely took over the platformer and the shmup. Today, the shmup is defined entirely in the Eastern way. And Super Mario Brothers just obliterated all Western platformers. Nothing came close.
Of all the platformers you remember from that time period, they were all Eastern. Super Mario Brothers. Contra. Mega Man. Bubble Bobble. Ghosts and Goblins. No Western platformer could compete.
This Japanese Invasion was fundamentally an invasion of craftsmanship. NES took off so well because of how ridiculously well crafted these games were. Yes, Pitfall was amazing. But Super Mario Brothers was so much beyond that. Go from Atari 2600 games to the NES games, and you can see the difference. Heck, go from Commodore 64 games to NES games and you can tell the difference.
Nintendo was doing things that were increasing craftsmanship. Game companies were only allowed to publish five games a year. This forced the games to be better made because if your revenue came from a few games, you better make sure they were good games. Inside Nintendo, Yamauchi had development teams compete against one another in order to create the best games.
Let me point something out here. The explosion of interest in video games didn’t come from ideas or concepts. It came from craftsmanship. In some cases, the sequels ended up becoming the popular game. Mega Man 2 has no new ideas over Mega Man 1. It is the same exact formula. But Mega Man 2 is a game whose craftsmanship was far better than Mega Man 1. I remember playing Mega Man 1 before Mega Man 2 came out. I remember thinking that it was a good game but got very frustrating (like early Guts Man stage). The game was not consistently fun as there were many spots that were extremely frustrating (which stopped me cold when I played the game). Mega Man 2, however, is consistently fun.
The mistake all these game companies made back then was believing video games revolved around ideas or formulas. It actually revolves around craftsmanship. One Western company whose NES games were well done, which were well programmed to not cause sprite flicker, was Rare (who would make games like Battletoads. Battletoads is a good game, but extremely uneven. It reminds me of Mega Man 1. Had there been a better crafted sequel, we could have seen the rise of a Battletoads phenomenon…).
When you look at the successful Western game companies since then, they all share craftsmanship in their mission statement. When is the next Blizzard game going to be released? “When its done.” The answer doesn’t mean that a long development schedule creates a better game, it means a far better craftsmanship creates a better game. Blizzard went from a 16-bit third party game to being a flagship company based on craftsmanship (and riding the trend of Internet multiplayer).
The creator of Grand Theft Auto, Rockstar Games, also shares a high priority for craftsmanship. When it came to building the city in the GTA games, detail was incredibly important when it would appear to others to not be ‘crucial to the gameplay’. This is why GTA 3 exploded when it came out. Sandbox games were not new. But there had never been such a sandbox game with such incredible craftsmanship in detail.
The N64 fans like to point to the phenomenon of Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time. There is nothing new in these games. 3d platformers and 3d adventure games were done before. But what was new was that none of them had been done this well before. Nintendo has misanalyzed this phenomenon to be about the ‘surprise’ of ‘HOW’ you play or ‘integration of hardware/software’. It was actually about WHAT we were playing and how well crafted it was.
Many gamers appreciate Retro Studios games as they do have a high degree of craftsmanship. But while Retro Studios is in the United States, it is actually a Japanese company and run like a Japanese company.
When it comes to wide eyed youngsters who “want to make video games for a living”, I do my best to discourage them and tell them to go get a real job. What these youngsters think video games are about is nothing close to reality. Video games do not revolve around ‘ideas’ or ‘surprise’. Video games revolve around craftsmanship. There is an insane amount of craftsmanship that needs to be done when making a video game, and a video game for consumers requires hundred times more craftsmanship.
Much of the collapse of the video game market seems to be everyone trying to make something other than craftsmanship as the important part of video games.
“Video games are about stories, about narratives.”
“New business models are needed.”
“A cute art style is very important for a video game.”
“We take what works and add a gimmick. So it would be a FPS with something like wormholes thrown in!”
“Mature themes are what’s needed.”
“Facebook. Twitter. Social Media. Hee-yah!”
“Character development is what video games need.”
All these ‘ways’ seem like developers are slouching towards the easy path. Craftsmanship is a hard path. This is why there are so many failures in the video game business. It also explains why some people can keep succeeding over and over. They don’t have some magical ‘gift’, they have a magical context. And this magical context is craftsmanship. Many Western developers learned about the high state of craftmanship from the Japanese invasion of video games. The Japanese truly did raise the bar for video games.
The Western developers who seem to understand the issue of craftsmanship vary wildly. What seems most common today is that it is accepted that the gameplay must have a high state of craftsmanship. The gameplay must be balanced, must be fluid, must not get repetitive, etc. etc. But what about the rest of the game? What about the content? I’m sure people like Sakamoto thinks his Metroid: Other M story was well done. But it isn’t. The West has a far better craftmanship of movies and television. Western standards for a movie-like story are going to be exceed anything in the Japanese mind. This is why Japanese made entertainment, aside from video games, cannot sell in the West. Even anime had a short life span as being popular in the West.
What is ruining Japanese entertainment? Craftsmanship has been replaced with creativity. In fact, the creativity context is hostile to craftsmanship because craftsmanship only ‘limits’ one’s ‘creativity’. The Japanese are not trying to make the best well-made games anymore. They are trying to make the most ‘creative’ games.
I think the beliefs of Iwata and the software developers at Nintendo about the gaming experience revolving around the ‘surprise’ of Nintendo’s ‘creativity’ (i.e. ‘integrated hardware and software’) is destroying the company. The reason why people love Nintendo products is because of their high degree of craftsmanship. I’ve never associated Nintendo with ‘creativity’ before.
People inside Nintendo may not be able to detect this error they are on. From Miyamoto or Iwata’s point of view, the high state of Japanese craftsmanship is invisible to them because they live in Japan. But to those of us in the West, we easily could detect it. It is also why Western video games have such a hard time breaking into the Japanese gaming market. The games that do are always the games with ‘high craftsmanship’ such as GTA.
Or to put in another way, those of us in the West do not think of Hollywood as ‘high craftsmanship’ when it comes to movies. This is because it is normal to us. But when we watch movies from, say, India, it only appears as junk. Too much emphasis is placed on cultural differences and not on craftsmanship skills.
I think Miyamoto and Iwata thinking that ‘surprise’ is integral to successful video games is based entirely on correlation. They focused on ‘surprise’ before, and it worked out very well. But in the 80s, there was far less competition in video games. Famicom was the only console that mattered in Japan back then. And overseas, the NES was popular not because of the ‘surprise’ or ‘ideas’ the game had, it was the ridiculous high degree of craftsmanship the games had. Everyone copied Super Mario Brothers, but craftsmanship cannot be copied.
What separates indie games from the big boy games? The same exact ideas and concepts are use in both. Indie games also have more ‘new ideas’ than the big games. Craftsmanship is what separates the two. Indie games place a low priority on craftsmanship and more on ‘high concept’.
People have also talked about the collapsing prices for video games to even free to play. I believe this is reflecting the collapsing craftsmanship of games.
One thing I also learned from history is that craftsmanship was always considered very important. The craftsmanship of the carpenter was important which is why they had apprentices. Craftsmanship ceased to be emphasized because of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of mass production.
But we are no longer in the Industrial Revolution. And video games belong to the family of the microchip. One thing the market of video games, and the shocking rise and fall of Atari, shows is that Industrial Age thinking does not work in the video game market.
Since everyone is talking about Apple lately, did you know that Steve Jobs was obsessed with the Far East? I mean the obsession was so great, he managed to get Atari to pay him to take a trip to India where he shaved his head and immersed himself into that land. When it comes to Apple products, which are more expensive than similar products, what is the consumer buying? It isn’t hardware/software integration. It isn’t innovation. It is craftsmanship. Apple products sell at a higher price because their craftsmanship is at a higher level.
Before you accuse me of making up these contexts, listen to what Steve Jobs says himself back in 1996:
Jobs compares Apple’s products to beautiful books (like a monk slowly drawing it) and calls Microsoft out for making ‘third rate products’. Jobs is emphasizing craftsmanship here. During the Industrial Revolution, someone interested in craftsmanship like Steve Jobs could not be successful. But in this new revolution, craftsmanship matters. The graveyard in computers and video games are full of business guys who said ‘craftsmanship doesn’t matter’.