As promised, I transcribed the entire article. I do not wish to infringe on any copyrights and I am not sure what this site's position is on posting 27-year-old articles. If this post violates any rules, feel free to erase this post.
In any case, here is the article in its entirety. It's easily one of the best gaming-related articles I've ever read, and I say that without a hint of hyperbole.
---------------------------
Zen & the Art of Donkey Kong
By Mark Jacobson
Woke up this morning with an intense craving for Japan. Crawled over to the tube and flipped on
Mothra, wondered if the two tiny princesses who sing to the big bug grew up to be Pink Lady, and felt a little better. Then I went out for some sushi. Scarfed (can you truly "scarf" food that looks like tinker toys?) some kappa maki, maguro, ebi. Still unsatisfied. So got on the subway, pretended it was the "Bullet Train" to Kyoto with Mount Fuji rising above the smog layer in the distance, made it up to Fascination in Times Square, and threw quarters into Donkey Kong.
Let the new wavers slice off their hair, suburbanites brag about gas mileage, and businesswomen get awestricken by Theory Z. When I want Japan, I head for Donkey Kong. Got to be honest: I'm an old fart pinball nonwizard who's yet to see the elevators, except on the machine of the 8-year-old juvenile delinquent playing next to me. But bathing in the radiating glow of the Donkey Kong screen enlightens me, like an electronic muse.
The question then for today is: Philosophically speaking, do Japanese video games differ from their American counterparts? The answer is... (game show music here, Richard Dawson kissing a housewife on the mouth)... a complicated one, of course. After all, we're talking about Japan.
Theory #1: "Up and Down, not In and Out"
When delving into the essence of a thing, it often helps to examine its outer appearance, especially when this exterior carries with it historical import. Soon, given the usual trend of global capitalism, American and Japanese games may all look and play the same, but as of now they still retain some of the elements of their respective cultures. When I was in Tokyo, I spent hours in noisy, grubby places called "Pachinko parlors." These are Japanese arcades filled with rows of Pachinko machines. I never quite got good at it, but Pachinko is essentially an upright pinball game with a two-dimensional board, face-high to the player. You deposit silver balls into the cabinet, which then filter from the top of the machine to the bottom. The idea is to capture the balls in the little "house" on the board for "reward" balls that you can exchange for prizes.
Pachinko is very popular in Japan, and its basic set-up is seen in many of the "flat" maze video games coming from Nippon. The first screen in Donkey Kong is the virtual video equivalent of Pachinko. Space Invaders, with its rows of descending aliens, is another example of "up and down."
On the other hand, Americans have long preferred the three-dimensional "coming-at-ya" feeling of a horizontal approaching ball. With all of the pinball companies going into video you can see many of these distinctly pinball characteristics turning up on the little TVs in the arcades. Stuff is always flying at you in American games.
Theory #2: The Decline of the Sperm Game
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."
A reason for this trend can be found in the Japanese idea of the "youth-culture." Quite simply, there isn't one. In Japan, a trip to the arcade is often a family outing, which probably accounts for why Japanese games tend to be easier to play. (Nintendo's
Japanese version of Donkey Kong is a breeze compared to the company's American one.) So, as video games begin to break big, demographically, in the States, it makes sense that the games leading the pack would be the "less intense" Japanese creations.
Theory #3: Bomb Innocence
Ever wonder where the Japanese come up with bizarro notions like making the "Carpenter" in Donkey Kong an Italian? I dunno, he looks Italian to me, and I hear he looked Italian enough to the American ad agency who handles Nintendo's account to name him Mario (the Japanese simply call him "jumpman" but they did come up with Donkey Kong, which means "stupid monkey"). Japanese pop culture is full of weird items. Most of the cartoons on their television, stuff never intended for export, feature blonde and blue-eyed heroes (i.e., Astroboy) and heroines. This, from a country that is as close to a "pure" race as there is in the world. In Japan, almost everyone is "Japanese." I have always imagined this apparent free association had something to do with a twisted inferiority complex that somehow, coupled with national grace, came out being very winning and innocent.
This pop culture innocence runs deep: The cartoon shows, like the video games, are not just for kidsthey play round the clock. If you stay at a ryokan (a Japanese-style hotel), you'll find stacks of magazines to read on your futon, almost all cartoon books. Even the sex-porno lit is done in cartoons. Call it extended childhood, call it a preponderance of ghostlike unreality surrounding daily life. Whatever, it turns up all over, and the playfulness of the video games is only one aspect.
What other culture could have created Godzilla as the symbol of horror of the atomic age and then turn him into a lovable, almost goofy savior of children? And why would Nintendo resurrect King Kong in a video game? Could it be that the Japanese are simply more at ease that we are with the all-too-obvious burgeoning of terrors of the modern world, more at home with technology and less afraid of its dubious side effects, and therefore not nearly as paranoid about the potential apocalyptic visions swirling inside humanity's head? Could this have something to do with having already experienced, at Hiroshima and Nagasaka, what we all fear? After all, what's the driving force of most American video games? Isn't it dread?
Theory #4: Buddha's Bluebeam Screen
Eugene Jarvis has a pretty philosophical outlook on his world within a box. The metaphysical differences between American and Japanese games, he says, "comes down to a concept of Free Will. Japanese games are basically pattern games. There are set paths, predetermined courses. The attitude is life is a rigged thing, you've got to recognize the correct way to go and go that way. Like in Scramble and Donkey Kong, there isn't a lot of choice about which way to move your man. You either do it a certain way, or you're going to get zapped. Just follow the
right way and you'll win. It's like there's a trick to happiness, and if you know it, you'll be happy.
"American games are more random," Jarvis continues. "In Tempest or Defender, you can go whichever way, basically, you want. There's no pattern, the grid isn't a fixed thing. You go on your competence, abstract skill is what counts. You don't have to memorize anything, no teacher is asking you, "Well, was Lake Michigan discovered in 1519 or 1615?' Sure, you can get blasted out in the first minute, but that's life. American games give you a chance to absolutely fail."
Listening to all this made me think of an article in a recent
Harper's magazine which purports to explain the Japanese character to Americans and vice-versa. The article depicts the American hero as a lone ranger riding off into the sunset, the Japanese hero as the person who, by most closely conforming to the path prescribed as perfect, contributes the greatest good to the group as a whole. A close look at each country's video game products bears this thesis out.
But, this is a whole lot to think about when you're trying to doge a fireball and jump onto a moving elevator platform. A smart and shifty player wouldn't want to get weighted down with this sort of baggage. Still, being a reporter at heart (and an 8,000-point Donkey Kong player at best), I asked a preteen kid named Johnny, who announced himself as being "from uptown" and wore a green running suit, if he saw a difference between American games and Japanese games.
"No difference," he said, continuing to throttle his joystick, "Just line 'em up, I'll knock 'em down, Watch me carve my name in this one." Which he did. A moment later, with more than 100,000 points to his credit, Johnny typed "J27" to the machine's program. He'd just made the highest score of the day on Donkey Kong. So I figured, you pays your quarter, you takes your choice.
---------------------------
Jacobson, Mark (1983) Zen & The Art of Donkey Kong
Video Games Illustrated, 1(4),30-33.
I didn't realize it before, but this article was actually written by Mark Jacobson! He's what you might call a
real journalist, and is probably best-known for his contributions to
The Village and
New York Magazine.
American Gangster (the 2007 film starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe) was actually a film adaptation of an article Jacobson wrote, entitled "
The Return of Superfly." I've provided a link to the article if you are interested. If you want to check out more of his writing, I'd recommend checking out
Teenage Hipster in the Modern World. In any case, I think he had some pretty interesting observations on the video game industry. I think his point about American gamers preferring "three-dimensional 'coming-at-ya'" games was especially astute; especially considering that he made that observation 27 years ago.