Master Malstrom,
I must say I agree with you on Japanese culture being on the whole uninteresting to Westerners. It’s no coincidence that Japanese games rooted more in Western culture have seen more commercial success.
What I do find interesting is that this extends to anime and manga, too. If you take a look at the most popular series in the West (relatively speaking, that is), they tend to be series that eschew or lessen their Japanese roots. The series that do yet another variation of a Japanese high school? Left in Japan, and for good reason. The Japanese developers aren’t trying to be like more Western-influenced anime (such as Baccano and Black Lagoon), they’re purposely trying to become more and more Japanese. They’re becoming like that weird kid in high school who only has one or two interests. Instead of trying to branch out his knowledge, he just introverts more and more until he can’t relate to anyone. It’s like Japanese game companies hired purposely from the ranks of otaku or social outcasts.
At this point, I’m just wondering if there’s anyone in the Japanese game companies (or, for that matter, the manga/anime industry) that has an international world view at all. Heavens knows Japan will need it to become relevant to the world again from an entertainment perspective.
I’m dating myself by saying this, but I remember Robotech and Battletech being popular. Battletech’s popularity is easy enough to see due to its military nature of the mechs and the mech wars. Robotech, what introduced America to Japanese anime, was three separate series that were chopped up, edited, and turned into three generations of one show. Original American music was added, and the writing redone. Carl Macek, the guy who put Robotech together, was forever criticized that he was a ‘thief’ of Japanese greatness and that Japanese do everything better in their stories, etc. He would point out the errors in the animation (and he was an expert) and the story telling.
Maybe much of this has changed over the years. But from what I saw in the 90s was spoiled nerdy Western kids striving to be exotic since they didn’t play sports (ever seen a football player be an anime fan? Haha, I can’t even imagine it!). My impression was that these kids said ‘Japanese stuff is better than what we have.” Then they would even go so far as to take Japanese language in school. I guarantee you that nearly everyone who took classes to learn the Japanese language was an anime fan.
I will readily admit that Japanese did many things better in the 80s and 90s. Their cars were better. Their electronics were better. Their games and game consoles were better. They were in Christensen’s ‘disruptive era’. But what made Japanese stuff so good wasn’t their culture. And by culture, I mean the J-Pop. The Japanese stuff had a far better craftsmanship to it.
I also think anime was popular, at a time, in the West due to how wild the stories could be. Since the popularization of computerized special effects, anime lost its distinctive advantage other other forms of film. All that is left is ‘J-Pop’ which Westerners don’t care to see.
I believe, and maintain, that the biggest threat to video games are people who grow up with them and are not interested in reality. The reality of what? Well, the world. The great literature, music, just simple traveling, getting outside, all this revolves around reality. I’m becoming more and more scared there is a group of gamers, the Otaku is a good example, in the West I want to call them Hoovervillagers or something, is that their entire lives exist inside an Alternate Reality. I met many of them when I played WoW. They actually reverted into a feral state of man where their bodies were not regulated by night and day like the average working man. They kept needing ‘new games’ to keep the alternate realities going, like a druggie needing his fix. These people thrived on being ‘better’ than other people in this Alternate Reality. It did not matter if they ENJOYED the game or not. Their pleasure from the game was not in them winning but in seeing other people lose. Those that did have jobs worked in very low education jobs where they did nothing but play the game when they didn’t work. If they did meet people in public, it would be at a Gamestop or maybe a Dungeons and Dragons get-together.
This was so much different from the gamer of the past. By their definition, people did not play arcade games for long. The absolute longest an NES game was would be an RPG like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, or the Ultima ports (and RPGs were not common). And if you look at each generation, the games keep becoming more ‘engulfing’.
People complain about climbing the corporate ladder, but then they obsess over video game ladders. Hello World of Warcraft. Hello Starcraft 2. Hello those modern FPS games where you gain RPG points or something (I don’t know, I don’t play them). This is why I think people are being turned off by Blizzard games. Their games are just Alternate Reality ladders. Once you climb it, the ladder keeps being added on to.
Take the behavior of the modern hardcore gamer and insert that behavior into the pre-computer world. How would society respond to such a person? They’d be called the bums of society.
Ever since we are little kids, we undergo a huge amount of training when we go to school. I don’t mean the training the school does, I just mean the process of waking up, applying basic hygiene, getting to class on time, and learning to socially interact with other people in real life.
The process of a person undoing all this training is what I call ‘going feral’. The person has trouble waking up, has trouble applying basic hygiene, has trouble going to certain places on time, and so on. Those who have been to college have probably met these people before they flunked.
I’m not saying gaming is like alcohol and can be bad. I think there is a trigger that activates this decline into the feral world. The ones I suspect are losing one’s job, dropping out of college, losing one’s spouse, or a tragedy concerning their family like their parents getting divorced. They are suffering such pain and feel that they aren’t winning in life. As a response, they turn to video games and it starts the devolution into feral behavior. Video games are good, but they are the wrong type of medicine for such pain.
Whatever you do in life, make sure you place your standing in the real world over your standing in the Alternate World.
And boy did I get off topic.