Differences between Western and Japanese game design philosophies

Shin offers a similar explanation. "Being able to save anytime, anywhere is a pain in the butt to implement, and if your audience doesn't expect it, then you really don't want to support it, so maybe the Westerners do it as a throwback to the expectations of evolving PC gamers. "

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Inafune explains the Japanese persepctive. "American designers do not view the save system as part of the gameplay experience. In Japan, the save system is viewed as part of the game. In previous generations, designers took what should have been a negative for the game due to technical limitations and turned it into a gameplay positive. For instance, in Resident Evil, part of what makes the game fun is knowing there might be a zombie between you and the save room. It adds tension to the encounters. If you could save anywhere in Resident Evil, it would not be the same game.

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"Culturally speaking, Japanese culture is firmly rooted in wet-rice agriculture and its status as an island nation," says Inafune. "Japanese want to be able to plan, they want to have guidance, they want to have focus. To put it simply, Japanese people feel uncomfortable with the unknown and not understanding the future. RPGs illustrate this well -- it is your turn to attack, it is the enemy's turn to attack. You pick a magic spell and you have a predictable result. You progress through the game with clearly defined goals. Japanese enjoy having these clearly-defined goals, and it progresses all the way through to the actual game implementation. Japanese people don't like just being dropped into a sandbox with no guidance. If you tell a Japanese person they are free to go anywhere, often times they will choose to go nowhere.

"Westerners, on the other hand, seem to be excited by the unknown. For instance, as a hunting and trapping society, an American may go deer hunting and encounter a bear. Japanese would be scared by this encounter, whereas the American will probably shoot the bear and go back excited that he got a bear instead of a deer. The unknown encounter becomes even better than the known. I feel this is the key difference."

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Corwin said:

While interesting, I wish they hadn't made the dichotomy America vs Japan!! That ignores most of Europe especially, where many great games are being developed. At least now I know why I dislike Japanese RPG's!!

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Listing stereotypical, mostly unsubstantiated generalities does not a good article make.

To clarify, I agree with the main idea of the article -- that societal culture influences media, such as games. However, the examples and arguments they use to support this idea are weak sauce. Looking at what you quoted from the article, that Americans are excited about shooting a bear because they were deer hunting because America is a "hunting and trapping society" is crap. I mean, wtf mate. This is supposed to support the idea that Americans are "excited by the unknown"? The rest of the article is like this too -- they somehow construe Japan's traditionally rice-based agrarian society as being a reason for Japanese people enjoying the game Harvest Moon. I am forced to wonder how many Japanese Harvest Moon fans have farmed rice a day in their lives.

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That little hunting snippet was hilarious. I also liked:

"It's easy to see why the Japanese might enjoy a farming game -- the nation has a strong agrarian tradition"

Um, yeah, not a good article. It read like something a journalism student might half-ass the night before an assignment was due.

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"The United States of America is the source of a huge number of modern inventions - the automobile, the television, the computer, and many, many others."

Wrong from the very first sentence. Not the best way to begin an article.

Television's first encarnation was ascribed to a Scottsman! A fellow called Baird. Some Brit and German dudes did some work on CRTs before him, however.

As for cars, well, just type in 'automobile' in Wiki to get the skinny there. Aparently lots of people involved, very few americans, if any.

As far as computers are concerned, its hard to pin down what the technical definition is. If you want a programmable punch card machine, you can go back to as far as 1801 to some french dude who made a programmable loom. If you consider binary a requisite, then you can push the date forward to 1941 to some German engineer called Zuse and his Z1 computer. The Atanasoff-Berry Computer came on its heels, and that was the first American contribution. After that, most 2nd, 3rd and 4th generation computers were created by American manufacturers of one sort or another.

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About the only part of the article that smelled like bullshit was the part about "Japanese don't like hard games, they like easy games. Foreigners ask for the harder stuff." It seems like most hard games I've ever played are from Japanese developers. Unless by foreigners they mean Korean gamers.

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Also, it's probably best to ignore the ridiculous number of spelling and grammatical errors in the article. I almost wanted to take a red pen to my monitor.

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