Coolio McAwesome
Member
I recently found an interesting article written in the January, 1983 issue of Video Games Magazine. This article looks at the differences between Japanese and American video games and also touches on the differences between "hardcore" and "novice" gamers. Here is an excerpt from said article:
I was somewhat surprised to learn that the topic of "hardcore" games was even being discussed in 1983. Much in the same way that "hardcore" Call of Duty fans may scoff at bright and colorful games like Mario Kart or Wii Sports, fans of Defender were apparently scoffing at games like Donkey Kong and Pac-Man 27 years ago. I find it hilarious that a game as notoriously difficult as Donkey Kong could some how be viewed as a game for "novices," but I guess the issue was always more about accessibility than it was about challenge. Insecure teenagers didn't want to play the same games as their parents in 1983, and nothing has really changed. You won't have to look very hard to find some self-described hardcore gamer trolling about "soccer moms" or "old folks homes" when discussing the Wii. The prevalence of first-person shooters in this current generation illustrates how little has changed in the past few decades. Japan (Nintendo in particular) is still pushing out "colorful, cartoony, friendly, inviting" games; while western development seems more focused on "shooting-driving-destroying" games. I realize that this is a generalization, but it's interesting to see how closely our current generation mirrors the early 1980s. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I was going over the differences between East and West video game styles with Eugene Jarvis, the 27-year-old designer of such "hardcore" games as Robotron, Stargate, and Defender, the other day when he brought up the notion that the Japanese, with the "easier" games "were giving a boost to the novice player, but ripping off the expert." If this continued, Jarvis maintained, it could wipe out the cult of the "pinball wizard" and the "video freak." I thought about this and decided it was absolutely true. Top Japanese games like Donkey Kong and Pac-Man are far more accessible to the "novice" and appeal to a wider group of people. They are colorful, cartoony, friendly, inviting. The "plots" are basically benign. Mario's love for the girl in Donkey Kong, and his persistence in pursuing her, is sort of sweet. Pac-Man's dot-eating proclivities are nothing if not cute. My mother in law, a Pac-Man fan who doesn't care for many of the American games, says "eating things is much nicer than blowing them up." In fact, Pac-Man is often described as a woman's game, with all the implications of the term "woman's drink."
This is exactly what Jarvis was talking about. Formerly, a typical video game player might be a warty teenager, a National Lampoon reader, blasting AC-DC in his room, who went to the arcade to kick a machine's butt. "From shit to God for a quarter," Jarvis commented. The games this type of player favors are almost invariably the American ones: Tough to play, intimidating to the novice, shooting-driving-destroying paranoid filled games. "Sperm games," Jarvis calls them. But now, he went on, these elitist video cowboys might be as extinct as their doggiepunching pinball forerunners. Says Jarvis: "How can you feel cool if your mother is playing in the same arcade? It's like she put your Led Zep record and liked them better than you.
I was somewhat surprised to learn that the topic of "hardcore" games was even being discussed in 1983. Much in the same way that "hardcore" Call of Duty fans may scoff at bright and colorful games like Mario Kart or Wii Sports, fans of Defender were apparently scoffing at games like Donkey Kong and Pac-Man 27 years ago. I find it hilarious that a game as notoriously difficult as Donkey Kong could some how be viewed as a game for "novices," but I guess the issue was always more about accessibility than it was about challenge. Insecure teenagers didn't want to play the same games as their parents in 1983, and nothing has really changed. You won't have to look very hard to find some self-described hardcore gamer trolling about "soccer moms" or "old folks homes" when discussing the Wii. The prevalence of first-person shooters in this current generation illustrates how little has changed in the past few decades. Japan (Nintendo in particular) is still pushing out "colorful, cartoony, friendly, inviting" games; while western development seems more focused on "shooting-driving-destroying" games. I realize that this is a generalization, but it's interesting to see how closely our current generation mirrors the early 1980s. The more things change, the more they stay the same.