Next Generation: Japanese video show “an unfortunate trend in design”
Over at Next Generation, Tim Rogers has written an article entitled “JAPAN: Why The Big Head?“, in which he tries to explain why Japanese video games that depict baseball players as huge-headed cartoon characters outsell games that go for a more realisitic appearance. For those of you who don’t want to read all 3 pages of his article, here’s the main point:
Big-headed baseball games with 3D graphics, using all of ten polygons on a character’s head, fun as they might be to play with your Yomiuri Giants fanatic father (who finds the realistic graphics in Virtua Fighter “creepy” because they’re “Not realistic enough”), represent an unfortunate trend in design. The reason they exist at all is simple: we can see a baseball field if we turn on a television somewhere in Tokyo on any summer day. Until the one we see in the videogame can look exactly like that, people will need to keep making baseball games that look as little like that as possible, so long as it looks like that on purpose.
I read an article once, wherein an interview was quoted in which the president of Acclaim was showing off a new Major League Baseball game to a television reporter. The reporter alluded to how real the game looked, saying that maybe someone walking into the room might be tricked into thinking it was an actual game on television. The Acclaim president beamed at this, and replied, “That’s our goal. We’re about five years from realizing it completely.”
From the standpoint of a Japanese game developer, this must look very embarrassing. Surely, yes, when you make a game that is a simulation of a real-life sport, a real-life pastime, you are aspiring to make it look as real as possible. Only, in Japan, that goal would never be spoken. It would merely be released when it was ready.
I think it might have to do more with the Japanese love of cute characters, than a clever attempt by Japanese game makers to cover up their own artistic/technical ineptitude. What do you think?
