Masuyama:

Pokemon as Japanese Culture:

The information seen below is in reference to a piece of writing by Masuyama in “Pokemon as Japanese Culture?”:

 

Pokemon’s origins can be traced back to Autumn of 1978, when Space Invaders took over the gaming world. The craze of Space Invaders was so prevalent that nearly every coffee shop in Japan was equipped with an arcade machine. This happened before the economic boom Japan experienced in the 1980’s, while American economy was beginning to decline in the aftermath of the Vietnamese war.

 

Space Invaders was so popular, that it caused a shortage of 100-yen coins. amongst the die hard fans of Space Invaders was Satoshi Tajiri, whom would become the future creator of Pokemon. He has mentioned that the origins of Pokemon lie in bug collecting, which fascinated him as a child, as well as these “Invaders” which he encountered when he was 13.

 

From that time on, Tajiri became obsessed with videogames. Not only did he play them, but he would also teach himself how to become a designer, so that he could eventually become a part of the creative process which he enjoyed so much. What set Tajiri apart, was that with his journalistic fervour, he printed his own game strategy guides.

 

In 1983, when Tajiri was 18, Namco released Xevious. The game was a revelation for him. It was a vertically scrolling shooter and a highly evolved version of Space Invaders. Tajiri became a devoted player, and he created a new magazine called “Indies”, which belonged to the still-new genre of “game strategy mini comics”. Tajiri wrote a magazine himself, ran off copies, stapled them by hand, and took them to bookstores or sent them by mail. (Online selling wasn’t yet an option)

 

The strategy guide garnered attention alongside Xevious itself, which was rising in popularity, and Tajiri began his professional career writing a column on arcade games in a popular Japanese video game magazine. From the beginning, Tajiri had a clear goal of becoming a games designer, and so while continuing his work as a writer, he would also develop games at “Indies” with his college-student friends.

 

Six years after Xevious, their endeavours bore fruit. Quinty was released in 1989 by Namco on the Famicom platform. The success of this game allowed Tajiri to create a new company by the name of GameFreak. This is also the year that Nintendo released the Game Boy. As soon as Tajiri saw the Game Boy’s “communication cable”, he began conceptualising “Pokemon”. At Game Freak, the design code for Pokemon was #002, next in line after Quinty. Pokemon took six years to make, starting in 1990.

 

Different games achieved different levels of popularity inside and outside Japan. For example the biggest global hit in the 1980’s was Namco’s Pac Man. Other examples include Space Invaders and Xevious, the two games that inspired and influenced Tajiri Which would also become a cultural sensation comparable to rock music.

 

A part of Tajiri’s idea for trading monsters came from his experience with the JRPG Dragon Quest. He tells us that when players found unusual items, they often wished they could trade them with friends.

 

Dragon Quest was a best seller in Japan, shifting millions of copies, but outside Japan, it attracted little attention. Making it three games that influenced Tajiri’s creation of pokemon huge hits only in Japan.

 

Pokemon is a standard RPG, however it has a unique feature that allows players to trade monsters through the use of cable connecting game machines. When the Game Boy was first released, Terri’s was a global hit, and the Game Boys were connected to allow real time battles. Despite this, Tajiri noticed that the name of the cable wasn’t “battle” but “communication” cable. Pokemon allowed for more than metaphorical communication, it made use of a system that created actual communication, a network game. The amazing success of Pokemon happened to coincide with the rapid spread of Internet growth in Japan, however its communication system differed vastly from games that had come before it and even from the internet itself.

 

Peer to Peer Communication:

After the web browser, the internet device that had the greatest impact was the music trading software Napster, which came onto the scene in 1999. Users connected to Napster would be able to upload music tracks from their hard drives onto the Internet and other users would be able to download them into their hard drive for free without any of the users losing the data. This differed a lot from what the world was used to with CD rentals. This method of transfer is generally referred to as “Peer to Peer P2P) communication”

 

P2P In Pokemon:

In Pokemon’s case, the P2P communication consisted only of two people who were standing in front of each other with two game boys linked by a cable, meaning that this was a primitive version of Napsters’s P2P. However, in Pokemon’s case, the data isn’t copied and pasted from one machine to the other. Rather it is Cut then Pasted onto the other machine, meaning that in this metaphorical relay the data is lost once passed.

 

One of the goals for pokemon is to complete the in-game Monster Encyclopedia, which requires the collection of every single creature in the game. Preserving the rarity of the creatures in the game is crucial to this. The uncommonness of some of the monsters Excited the interests in the players, extending the duration of enjoyment of the game, and encouraging the new type of P2P communication amongst players. The game’s producer Tsunekazu Ishihara, describes this marvelously designed communication as “not closed”.

 

Pokemon being a “not closed” game sets it apart from a majority of entertainment Media. For example, with films we see a beginning and end. While this is true for Pokemon, in which we see the credits, the game encourages you to seek out the encyclopedia by catching every Pokemon and trading the monsters with your friends, creating a circle of “communication friends.”

 

This is significant because games that came before Pokemon had never entailed such a laborious process. In fact, one of the pluses of videogames was the very fact that you could enjoy them without any interpersonal communication. But when we set out to make hand-held games into communication tools the software itself could no longer be “closed” 

 

The “not closed” communication model of both the games and cards is the single largest reason why Pokemon became such a mega-hit worldwide. The fact that the designers refrained from using the word “open” suggests that it is fundamentally different from the “open system” of the internet.

 

The writer doesn’t intend to suggest that this communication model is exclusively Japanese. However, there is a connection between the three games that have influenced Tajiri and the “not closed” system. Space Invaders and Xevious can both be enjoyed on three different levels.

Firstly, they can be played as ordinary games. Secondly, there are game secrets. In Space Invaders, the score for shooting invaders changed depending upon the number of shots used “(from our present perspective, a primitive secret indeed- and yet the designers were sure that it would not be discovered!)”. In Xevious, a hidden character was intentionally designed into the game. When the player shot into a certain pattern, one that bore no relation to the game itself, a hidden “flag” appeared, and the player relieved an extra fighter ship.

 

Thirdly, players can search for bugs.

They revel in making the game behave in ways that were not intended by the designers, and the knowledge of such bugs spreads within the community. This happened with both these games. These three levels of play include aspects that are “not closed”, as well as, in fact, “not intended”

 

Remember the rare items from Dragon Quest. The die hard players will continue playing even after the story has ended in order to find such items. Recent RPGs are specially designed so that players do not easily lose interest, but in the rudimentary RPGs of the 1980’s, there was plenty of fun to be had in the search for rare items.

These games were in a sense “un closed”, but we’re also too tight to allow cross communication.

 

Space Invaders, Xevious and Dragon Quest all present some aspects of the “not closed” concept of Pokemon. And all three were huge hits in Japan.

 

The writer suggests that perhaps the striking worldwide success of Pokemon should not be considered the result of the adoption of “Japanese Culture” on a global level as with sushi), but should be seen as two cultures meeting halfway in the 1990s, as Japan became more Westernized and the West became more open to foreign culture. Gone were the days when, in the realm of entertainment, globalisation was exclusively referred to as Americanization.

-Masuyama (Pokemon as japanese Culture)