Cultural Assassination: Is Globalization Just Westernization?

I have been hearing too much of it in the last couple months. Globalization. I’m on my way back from the countryside on a rapid train headed east. The beautiful Japanese landscape is passing me by, and all around me, businessmen and students alike are practically catatonic, sleeping the commute away. Some have cell phones in their hands; others have a PSP or a DS.

Despite being a gamer myself, I’m not playing anything. I’m watching the tree line and the blue sky, and listening to Listen Up, the successor to 1Up Yours, one of my favorite gaming related podcasts. Someone is talking about the controls in Resident Evil 5. Some agree with him; some don’t. They’re all arguing about how inaccessible some games are for the modern American gamer. Companies need a more global outlook.

Modernization. Globalization. These are words being thrown around in excess in recent months. Journalists and gamers alike have used both words as synonyms for controls and game conventions familiar to the modern western audience. As North America slowly pulls ahead as one of the most financially important territories, the interests and desires of its inhabitants seem to be gaining prominence.

Unlike the Playstation era, when gamers were more than willing to learn new control methods to facilitate exploring new genres like the Japanese RPG, the pendulum has, as is its wont, swung back towards genres more practiced and tread by the North American game development community. Companies like Capcom see the benefit of capitalizing on such change, and has expanded its lineup of action shooters. Kojima Productions enlisted Ryan Payton (among others I’m sure) to “westernize” Metal Gear’s controls for its outing on the Playstation 3. Why list these changes as globalization, though?

This past week I spent much of my time in the center of Osaka with Josh and his visiting brother, playing Bandai Namco’s online arcade game Gundam: Bonds of the Battlefield (known as Senjou no Kizuna in Japan). The game uses a projector and a dome like screen to simulate a cockpit experience, and outfits each player with a set of two sticks and two pedals with which to control their mechs. Despite giving the player two independent sticks and using much of the mechanics and conventions inherent to team based first person shooters, the controls do not work like a traditional console shooter.

Unlike many shooters where one stick controls swivel and another controls strafing and moving forward, each stick independently controls a leg, giving the player a surprisingly high level of control when strafing, turning, escaping from an imminent beam rifle attack. It also contributes greatly to the authentic feeling of piloting a giant robot. Despite all of this, if the game was ported to a home console and mapped to a set of twin thumb sticks, there would inevitably be a girth of belly-aching and moaning about its incongruency when compared with other competitive team shooters.

I also played quite a bit of Metal Gear Online during its beta period. There was no question that Japanese players struggled with the controls far more than American players. Playing on both types of servers, there were a number of incredible players, but the average Japanese player seemed to have trouble acclimating to two stick movement and aiming. American gamers, of course, picked up the controls rather quickly and even average players were a force to be reckoned with, even early on.

Why hasn’t Japan widely adopted the “global” shooting controls in its various games, with the exception of a few? Even Capcom was hesitant to go all the way with its implentation of Resident Evil 5, still offering traditional one stick controls for series fans. Some could (and have in the past) suggest that Japan is behind the times, and that they’re stuck in the 90’s. Some might equally suggest that shooters are not the region’s strongest genre, and they lack the kind of modernization that which American games are inherently imbued.

The simplest answer is that Japanese gamers are not as acclimated to this type of control as American gamers. They also desire different types of gameplay and different goals. Additionally, Japanese gamers have become accustomed to using twin sticks in different ways (such as in Virtual On, where players use the sticks as if they’re controlling a tank). This is not to say that two stick console first person controls are not the best solution the industry has for now. They’re reliable, they’re accurate to a point, and they’re easy to grasp with a little practice.

The problem is in its colloquialism. If these controls, among a number of North American gaming conventions, are indeed commonplace and required, why do Japanese gamers not stand up in arms about their lack of implementation? They’re wonderful, but global they are not. A call to globalize games is not to globalize at all, but to americanize. Is that horrible? Certainly not. American gamers, like Japanese gamers, have their own expectations and knowledge to which they want their games to adhere.

This is hardly globalization, though. This is an inward looking movement that asks that gamers in other territories throw away their “childish” ways and walk through the door into the modern American era. This seems to leak into opinions on foreign games, whether it be a disdain for Football Manager or a general dislike for Japanese animation. Where mainstream American gamers once looked across the seas for gaming goodness, we now find plentiful on their doorstep. We no longer need the strangeness and idiosyncrasies of other countries to satisfy our needs, and so now shun them in favor of something wholly American and wholly homogeneous; perhaps dangerously so.

American games have seen somewhat of a renaissance in this console generation, and it has allowed American gamers to once again shy away from the strange and the new. We can once again be coddled by sameness and cultural homogeny, and reject what we once held dear. There are exceptions, but those exceptions hold no particular cultural flag high. They might originate from a land far away, but without that knowledge, no one would know the difference.

Every territory has something to offer, and while many acknowledge that each region has its strengths and weaknesses, there’s a remarkable and lopsided view of the industry. While Japanese games were idolized in earlier days, now western games fill the void. There does not seem to be a healthy mix of both in the average gaming diet. Some gamers shun western “bald space marines” in favor of Japanese games, while others refuse to be corrupted by “animu” in favor of playing western games. Homogeny seems to be reigning supreme on both sides of the coin.

Gaming is about new experiences, and it scares me to see a call for more cultural ambiguity. There are games that are quintessentially American, and there are those that are so very Japanese or European, and it would be a dangerous future if that line were blurred. A global market does not mean a culturally united market. Culture is not something to be hidden from the public and to be worn as a yoke in private. Regional culture built our favorite games and our favorite genres, and no country should have to shed its own identity to be recognized in other territories. It should be appreciated for its difference and its dissonance.

Perhaps one day we’ll figure it out.