Westernization for Dummies: The Rise of Western Game Design October 15,2008 - Videogame violence has a long history as old as Pong itself, but it wasn’t until five or six years ago that violence was truly domesticated. This afforded critics the belief that we were on the precipice of the meteoric rise of the M rated game, which had everything to do with the violence of the time, a violence reflected in the radical shift of the industry. This might have been true, but I think that there was a corruption in the original thought that failed to underscore the true reality of the time: the rise of the western ideology.

Paralleling the spirit of naturalism and brutality that developed in Hollywood over the course of the 20th century, the ideological framework of the modern western developer is grounded in realism. Not true realism or necessarily graphical realism, but realism in the sense that the values of the real world - its physics, its freedom - are imposed over a fictional universe. This is coupled with an awakening to the kind of thought that violence is as much a metaphor as it is a way of blowing things up. Gangster movies over the decades have used violence to portray excess, self-destruction, and the rise of the individual through use of the American dream. Grand Theft Auto IV has as much to say here as any videogame does. Though the full spectrum of its success can be debated, there is a sense of moral ambiguity in many of these games and the idea of choice as it relates to the method by which the game is played.

I would characterize games in two ways: there is the game as a canvas, in which the game is about what the player can do; and there is the game as an outline, in which the developer dictates the path the player must follow by use of stringent boundaries. The western ideology tends to rescind boundaries, and the boundaries that do exist are of the nature that favors experimentation and unique outcomes so that no two people have the same experience. This is, of course, not always true. After all, the FPS genre tends to be very structured. But FPS games also favor immersion and fluid AI, which are also important components of realism. Western games connect by offering the player a sense that he is in the world and, to a degree, in control of the world.

I think that the eastern ideology emphasizes the very opposite. It has no misgivings about telegraphing the fact that you’re in an illusory world. The experience is carefully controlled within the parameters that the developer sets. I think that the value of eastern developers is that they have always understood that a game projected toward the player can be felt most poignantly through the interaction the player has with the controller. If the player buys into what he feels, then he'll buy into the world even if it’s a synthetic world by design. Eastern games don’t necessarily offer realism, but they might contain the structural aesthetics of beautifully controlled level design. Even the games with character customization tend to follow a linear and rigid path, and so many of these eastern games can be pulled apart like a tightly orchestrated machine and examined first hand through each of their individual components.

In theory, this age of realism was unavoidable. The backbone of realism is contingent on 3D, but its emergence didn’t necessarily arrive with the PlayStation era because pre-rendered graphics and fixed camera angles were still viable alternatives. The idea of total realism didn't quite make sense in such limited environments, and because games tended to be very cinematic, there was a slight flirtation with the idea that games were as much spectacles meant to be witnessed as much as they were meant to be experienced. Some of this still holds sway even now.

Racing games were one of the few genres that were sophisticated in that era, so Gran Turismo, became an unprecedented success in the west and particularly in Europe where it’s hard to get everybody to agree to anything since tastes are so eclectic and diverse. The sports genre too rose in sophistication. Relics such as Tecmo Bowl with limited playbooks and unscrupulous AI languished, as NFL Gameday and Madden became the waves of the future. While NFL Gameday did not survive the generational gap, Madden has become a game of increasing cultural significance.

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