Differences between Western and Japanese game design philosophies

Interesting article at 1Up on the subject:

Some interesting save-game perspective:

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. "

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.

This one is even more interesting to RPG's:

"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."

Very good reading, I recommand that every final fantasy hater reads it Nice that you found this mike!

Agreed! A very interesting read!

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!!

sorry while i haven't read the whole thing that second segment shows that the writer is either ignorant and or racist. just because their is a certain type of anything developed in one country doesn't mean it has anything to do with the majority of citizens that live their. it's simply a style/art. its like saying haikus are the most japanese form of poetry so everyone from japan appreciates nature whereas 'hip-hop' is an huge form of american 'poetry' so all americans appreciation of nature is smoking weed. or a better example could be the blues. and these have been around longer than american or japanese videogames, yet only reflect a few talented individuals creating them not so much the masses that listen or play them.

i'm most assuredly not trying to start an argument with anyone here, but i simply can't believe anyone could actual think let alone write stuff like that on a gaming site.

Originally Posted by Corwin
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!!

The interesting thing is that they made the title 'America vs. Japan', yet immediately add Europe in the first paragraph and call everything 'Western' from there on out …

Well while i think generalizing sucks, still in general there are huge differences in game tastes. some games are succesfull only in western countries and some games only in Japan. and then there is blizzard whose games are hits around the world _

It is essential to keep a clear definitive here, Japanese maintain their "honour" above all else - read about their history and way of life, it's all there.

To be dropped in the middle of a free open world has no honour but to kill the three headed hydra and return to the village a hero is the crucial element - they have to be ordered, obeyed and led to gain honour by instruction, it's so distinctive to Japan.

This is something I know very very well. Having been to Japan, a couple of times, and knowing a japanese person very well. It is a big problem, they want everything planned and predecided, uncertainity is not for them. Infact this could make them panic.

Just few comments about the article

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.