For years, many of us had to endure a constant hectoring from Japan-o-snob gaming friends. Culturally and intellectually they were clearly our superiors. Speaking in hallowed tones about Akihabara like it was heaven’s electronics department. Claiming that after touching Ryozo Tsujimoto at Tokyo Game Show they’d been miraculously cured of their Monster Hunter Claw repetitive strain injury. They even had a sealed copy of Terranigma they’d brought off eBay. Okay, so they were down a kidney as a result, but dialysis is a much less painful procedure when you’re filled with such a strong sense of self-satisfaction.
My, how times have changed. Such has been the speed of stagnation in Japanese game design that, despite the fact that us uncouth Westerners spend our days uncontrollably drooling like lobotomised Neanderthals at the latest knuckle-scrapping shooter, we’re now regarded as the progressive ones.
Japanese developers probably thought things couldn’t get any worse. That was until they saw the cultural attaché for dude-bro nation, Cliff Bleszinski, roadie running over the horizon to save the Land of the Rising Sun from being fully eclipsed.
In a recent interview with Gamasutra (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/170144/what_if_ cliff_ran_the_world.php) the design director of meathead melodrama Gears of War went weapons free with his thoughts on how Japanese games, and a scattershot selection of other popular IPs, could be improved.
Now, to be completely fair to Cliff, he clearly states that he’s thinking off the cuff and it’s refreshing to hear such a prominent figure speak with such candour. For those reasons, I don’t mind his egotism couched in altruism, or his self-superiority, which he manages to reign in just shy of mailing out an aid package of “What would Cliffy do?” wristbands to his peers. I’m not even that worried about the fact that the ideas he’s promulgating sound either recycled, shallow, riddled with potential problems or all of the above.
What I do object to, is his apparent assertion that games are virtually incapable of survival as full priced, let alone Triple-A, releases unless they include some form of multiplayer; and the implication that the reason for Japan’s current travails lies in its designers’ disregard for this fact and their failure to embrace the incorporation of multiplayer with more sincerity.
The overemphasis on the importance of multiplayer is one of the most unfortunate and costly myths currently distracting the video game industry. It’s the decisive ingredient in so very few games. The fortunate few that manage to capture the zeitgeist like lightening in a bottle for longer than their allotted 15 minutes of fame, and make being beholden to other players improve rather than detract from the experience.
For all the rest, the vast majority of games, the idea that the single player only ones are destined for a future scrapping for survival on the downloadable undercard is seriously misplaced.
Mario Galaxy, Fallout 3, Shadow of the Colossus, L.A. Noire, Heavy Rain and Cliffy’s beloved Silent Hill 2 all owe their success to their unflinching single player focus. Kane and Lynch’s Fragile Alliance provided a clever twist on the already stale uniformity of multiplayer shooter conventions, but neither it nor Eidos’ excessive flexing of its marketing muscles on the game’s behalf paid any dividends. Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood and Red Dead Redemption both made a killing, but in each case, the adroit multiplayer was merely an accessory after the fact.
The reality is that multiplayer remains much more a Pandora’s Box than a panacea. Competitive multiplayer would not have salvaged Vanquish’s lacklustre sales. Ditto Shadows of the Damned and co-op. And simply adding a second player into SotD’s story would have necessitated an awkward reconfiguring of many of the game’s areas and a dilution of the engagingly bawdy central relationship between Garcia and Johnson.
Cliff’s insinuation that Western games are inherently superior because of the gung-ho approach they’ve adopted to multiplayer is ill-conceived. And his passionate words urging his Japanese counterparts not to just tack on multiplayer would have been much more valuably directed at Western game designers.
While it’s true that fear of change may currently be the most prominent factor stifling Japan, in the West, fear of nonconformity has had an equally detrimental effect. It’s hard to fit in and stand out at the same time, and in Western games, multiplayer has become an unwarranted expectation that’s leading increasingly to a dull and predictable homogenization not just within genres, but across them.
In fact, Japan’s more considered and circumspect approach to multiplayer – often only including such options if they naturally stem from and enhance the core creative vision such as in Monster Hunter or Demon’s Souls – is, if anything, closer to Cliff’s ideology. He just doesn’t seem to realise that, or that the last thing any game maker, Japanese or otherwise, should do is surrender their aspirations or deform or compromise their identity.
Rather than becoming second-rate Western bootleggers, Japan’s game makers just need to concentrate on producing Japanese games of genuine quality. Most Western games (like, to take a completely random example, Gears of War) make little in the way of compromises to try and court Eastern markets and don’t sell anywhere near as well in those territories as a consequence. That doesn’t make them lesser achievements.
It’s always tempting to allow yourself to be seduced by what’s currently in vogue, but the present state of the MMO realm should be more than enough of a warning of the kind of painful injuries that can result from trying to jump on a passing bandwagon. I like Cliff, I like Gears, I like multiplayer, but in no way do I want any of them to dictate the future of game design any more than they currently do. And Cliff lecturing Fumito Ueda and Co. on how to make games is a bit like Michael Bay lecturing Hayao Miyazaki on how to make films. The great Japanese auteurs turn game development into an art. For Bleszinski, it remains very much a craft.
It would be easy at this point to lazily throw down the gauntlet to Cliff and suggest that, if he is the fabled game-whisperer he claims to be, that he take a sabbatical from work, buy a plane ticket and go and prove me wrong. But I think I’ve got a better idea.
Instead, I’d like to see him riding into downtown Tokyo on a homemade Brumak to rescue/capture a selection of impressionable Japanese developers before extracting them to a life of mind-altering multiplayer and limited colour pallets in the West by moving them from one handily placed bit of cover to the next all the way back to U.S of A.
Once on friendly soil, the unwitting dissident designers would be forced to appear in a new reality TV show called The Apren-Cliff (I know, that doesn’t quite scan, but its close enough). Split into two teams (Team Marcus and Team Dom), each week they’d compete to create new multiplayer experiences (which Cliff would own the exclusive rights to) and, as the climax to each programme, rather than being fired and sent home in embarrassment, the weakest performing prisoner (sorry, designer) would receive a ceremonial teabagging from Cliff before being chainsawed in half. It may not be big, it may not be clever, but it would make a hell of a lot of money and that, Cliff, sounds like an Epic multiplayer experience to me.
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