More with the games, GAWD

While I was taking a break in between classes of listening to students go on about how they picked their weird-ass English names or why they didn't want English names as they felt it was a form of betrayal towards their Chinese culture, I read up a little on an old issue of 游戏机, or "Video Game Console" magazine, commonly referred to amongst those in the know as "UCG", due the similarity of pronunciation in the English letters and the actual pronunciation of the Chinese characters.

This issue, along with strategy sections, something I haven't seen since EGM started covering N64 games, has a lot of their picks for their best games of 2008. Which was an interesting read.

Chinese gamers are stuck in this weird, fantastic middle ground of gaming, or what I'd like to refer to as the East/West divide. Put very succinctly, with a lot of generalizing going on, Western gamers prefer straight-forward action, diving instantly into the action, and lots of first-person slaughter. This is evidenced in the obligatory inclusion of tutorials in almost any action-oriented game, the ability to move freely and interact with the environment during any cutscene or key event (if the game even has it), and the ability to sign-on-drop-out in multiplayer competitive gaming. Western gamers tend to have a shorter attention span, but why I don't know. Blame it on Myspace, I guess. Eastern gamers, on the other hand, enjoy item management, love their old-school platformers, and have lots of patience when dealing with the pace in which a game moves, as evidenced by the number of unskippable cutscenes and fifteen minutes straight of "bloop-bloop-bloop" dialogue bubbles between two static characters.

It's interesting to look at some of UCG's choices for best games of 2008, and it's even more interesting to see the chasm between the editor's choices and the reader's poll.

Some similarities with critics on our shores are present. GTAIV, as expected, receives a 5 out of 5 rating and is unanimously considered to be the best multiplatform game available, period. Metal Gear Solid 4 also receives the coveted 5 out of 5 rating, voted by the readers and deigned by the editors as a masterpiece of cinematic gaming. Other games, such as God of War: Chains of Olympus, Little Bigplanet, Fallout 3, Gears of War 2, and surprisingly enough, Dead Space all receive similar accolades.

But the differences, while somewhat negligible on any other day, are glaring. Guitar Hero: World Tour and Rock Band, two games that both hold an 85 or perhaps on Metacritic, all receive a resounding "meh", both scoring a 3 out of 5 by the editors, and receiving little to no attention from the readers. The editors, in a quarter-square blurb of paper, state, in both reviews, they don't "understand the point of these kinds of games." They don't get into that "learn to play an instrument" thing of hobknobbery, either; they just don't get it.

In the reader's poll, Devil May Cry 4 came out on top as their choice for best game of the year, with Metal Gear Solid 4 coming in a close second. I bought DMC4 when it came out, and I loved it. It's fun as shit, in case you didn't know. But, ultimately, my view of Dante's latest adventure boiled down to a "eh" in light of 2008's other offerings. While the game is fun, it doesn't do anything new. That's not to say that innovation is the key deciding factor in determining whether or not a well-made game is, in fact, well-made. But there were plenty of games this year that made innovation their selling point, and most importantly, made that innovation damn fun.

As expected, Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G makes it into the Top Ten games of the year. No comment.

Compared to the quarter-page blurb for Rock Band 2, the latest iteration of Dynasty Warriors: Gundam receives a 4 out of 5, an editor's choice award, and noticeable support from readers and editors alike. If you've ever played any of the DW games, you know what I mean when I shudder, gasp in shock, and then probably die. If you haven't, imagine being forced to watch Jeffrey Dahmer rape a cow, reduce the tremorous, emotional shock of seeing said act by about 2.6%, and you basically have an idea of how the game functions.

Reading a Chinese gaming enthusiast magazine is an interesting experience to say the least. This being China, there are no corporate sponsors and PR representatives the magazine runs in danger of angering, as I don't think Chinese gaming press attends E3 or GDC on a regular basis. However, most of their games (barring the simplified star system they used for the year-end issue) are rated on the infamous 7-9 scale, with the truly horrendous crap of the rest receiving the rarely-grazing-in-the-open 6. Chinese gamers are, to sum it up in the simplest of terms, Japanese gamers with a love for FPSes, a love conditioned through years of Counter-strike 1.6. Because of the relative easiness it is to find entire libraries of Manga for rent, there's that video game / anime assocation with characters, rather than IPs themselves. Full wall-scrolls of Squall from Final Fantasy VIII are available for purchase at just about any retailer that dare refer to themselves as a game store.

I mention all of this, because it's important to note a few things. First, China has yet to establish itself as a global powerhouse in next-gen gaming, much in the way (hate to say it, but it's true) America and Canada have, and the way Japan was in the past. One look at these gaming publications displays a cross-section of a specific but hardcore niche audience here in China. They can't read or understand the text on 80% of these games, but they play the hell out of them anyway, and well, might I add. I got thwomped by a 13 year-old kid at Zhongguancun, China's Silicon Valley and loaded with purveyors of all things tech and maybe otaku, in a match of Gears 2, and I was using Dizzy, with my lucky cowboy hat and bad stereotyping in tow. This is a genuine love for games that transcends any kind of cultural differences or language barriers, and Chinese people being some of the most unpretentious people I've ever come across, this is a good thing. Rather than being overly critical, much attention is paid to only the positives of a game, which is constructive on it's own merits. So, with all this in mind, then, is where I make a statement that makes me somewhat sad to say it: China, by the looks of it, will never make anything gaming-wise of international acclaim.

Because of the rampant piracy that makes living in China such a wonderland of decadent digital lunacy, Chinese game developers have no plans to move their prospects towards consoles just yet. 90% of Chinese triple-A titles are free-to-play, microtransaction-based MMORPGS that are more or less rehashes of WoW, an example of "sticking with what you know" in heavy motion. Any other choice in development spells early financial doom for any game company that endeavors to invest the time and budget required to developing for consoles. Piracy is also the major prohibitive factor that prevents Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo from providing infrastructure and support to China, excepting Hong Kong and Taiwan, which, depending on your definition, do or do not constitute this "China" we speak of. Speaking of which, consoles are fucking expensive; it's doubtful that many Chinese PC gamers, many of them not quite enjoying that standard of life the decadent West so takes for granted, find it economically feasible to switch from a gaming platform that affords them a keyboard and mouse to a platform that forces them to score headshots with their thumbs.

Chinese console gamers, then, are stuck in this unique, observational position, where piracy allows them to absorb the best and oftentimes worst of gaming cultures from both sides of the Pacific, all at the price of an extra-value meal at McDonald's. Because gaming here is comparatively infantile in relation to Western countries and Japan, Chinese gamers have concepts and ideas that are mutable, and flexible, due to that aforementioned observational standpoint. There is a huge amount of talent here, as I've seen firsthand in my numerous visits to Zoe's office. But what does this piracy spell for China's aspiring game designers, fresh with ideas from playing Fallout 3 or Little Bigplanet? Sadly, not much. According to Zoe, game producers are rated at the bottom of the producer/art/programming hierarchy, meaning they earn the least and are considered to be the least important, aesthetically and financially, in production of a game. Why would a company pay top dollar to a group of planners, developers, and conceptualizers to come up with maybe five small variations on the WoW or, in some cases, Perfect World (完美世界) formula?

This is not to say that China needs to start upping the ante and producing huge, big-budget, morally-guided games like GTAIV or Mass Effect, but there needs to be some kind of forward momentum in terms of innovation. The role of the producer here in China serves as a huge contrast to other countries such as America, where we're provided with countless interviews with Cliff Bleszinski's tattooed biceps, or Japan, where we get thirty different posed photos of Tomonobu Itagaki, in sunglasses and leather trench, learning against thirty different walls in Shibuya. Games, like movies, are now sold on a few things, like established IPs and graphics. Those are givens. But like that radical paradigm shift in the comic industry amidst the waning popularity of Image Comics, where the role of writer was suddenly emphasized over the artist to heavy degree, games are now more and more being sold on the strength of their production and creative teams. Take Bayonetta, and the crew at Platinum Games, for instance. Why do we care about yet another third-person stylish action game in the vein of Devil May Cry? Because of the name: Shinji Mikami, a producer responsible for some of the biggest and most popular franchises in gaming of all time. This is what separates Bayonetta or a game like Mad World from another Ninja Blade, which really, after playing for a bit, I've come to realize isn't all that bad.

China is, then, currently stuck in a position of comfortable staticity. There are enough people (a few billion, to be exact) here that there is never a concern as to whether a market will reach saturation point; logic dictates there will always be a potential audience for any product. As China is not an officially supported region for the Big Three, game piracy that takes place here is theoretically, and in the loosest sense of the word, a victimless crime. Victimless, that is, unless one day Chinese gamers of all shapes and sizes stand up in unison and declare a pox on microtransaction-run MMOs. Then we're all fucked.