Games -- RE: TV news question

Jean Pierre Kellams tetsuo at technolustomega.net
Fri Feb 4 05:11:48 EST 2005


"Without falling into some kind of cultural essentialism,
one could link that, maybe, to the taste for artificiality
vs realism, as can be seen among young Japanese with the
use of 2D cell-animation structure in both animation
(mixed-up with 3D state-of-the-art animation) and video
games (PS2 vs XBox)."

I'd like to quickly address a point on your thought about video games. I
think the PS2 vs X-Box may very well be valid, but it is clouded a great
deal by the fact that very few Japanese developers create games for the
X-Box. Outside of Tecmo and Sega, very few developers wanted anything to
do with the X-Box, and thus a vicious cycle was created in which a
limited userbase was not attractive to Japanese developers, and the
userbase would not expand without Japanese developed games. The perfect
example of this would be the fiasco involving True Fantasy Online Live
developed by Dragon Quest 8/Dark Cloud developer Level 5. They were
funded a great deal of money to develop a very Japanese online RPG, only
to have the limited user base in Japan make releasing the game a
financial mistake. So maybe the choice is not between artificiality and
realism, but between Japanese developed games and American developer
ones. 

I would invite members of the list interested in this subject (Japanese
video games) to check out a recent book published by Prima called Power
Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life by Chris
Kohler. It has been clearanced by the GameStop chain of video game
retailers and you may actually be able to pick one up for $0.01 if you
wish to put in legwork beyond Amazon.com. You may also want to check out
http://www.tokyopia.com, a site populated by British and American
citizens working in the game industry in Japan. 




More information about the KineJapan mailing list