At 3:00, the video games hall opened. Now, I'm a gamer. I like to play video games. I spend way too much time playing video games. But I like to think I have some taste. I prefer those with complex systems of rules, engaging storylines, well-written prose, and more recently, the ability to interact with other people through artifical environments. Generally I'll settle for one of those, but sometimes you stumble across a real gem that has all three.
The video game hall had about 60 consoles running, most of them on rented TVs, but 3 on projectors. With few exceptions, the most notable one being the 6 PC network in one corner (alternately playing or ), every single game fell into one of three categories: fighting, Halo, or some variant of DDR.
The fighting games were all basically descendents of the legendary Street Fighter II, published by Capcom in 1991. Basically, you control a character on the screen by moving him around and directing him to engage in various attacks and blocks. Certain buttons when pressed in the right combination will trigger special moves, some of which can be strung together to create some pretty impressive combos. But basically, the gameplay in all of them is the same, and has been for over a decade. Yet somehow, there is a huge overlap between liking fighting games and liking anime. I have absolutely no interest in playing fighting games. They hurt my fingers.
There were at least 3 games of Halo going, one of which involved two networked X-Boxes hooked up to projectors. Halo is the game used to make the incredibly funny Red vs. Blue machinima. I find Halo intermittently amusing, but didn't bother to wait in line to have my ass kicked.
Now we get to the really interesting bit. For those of you who don't know, DDR is perhaps the most bizarre thing to come down the pike in I don't know how long. It is a genuine Japanese innovation, as are fighting games. "DDR" stands for "Dance Dance Revolution." Yes, it's a video game about dancing. The gameplay is pretty simple. At the top of the screen are four arrows, representing the four pressure-sensitive pads on the floor. You've got forwards, backwards, left, and right. When the round begins, some obnoxious techno music starts up (more on that in a bit), and arrows start scrolling up the screen forming rhythms in time with the music. The object of the game is to hit the indicated pads at the instant they reach the arrows at the top of the screen. This creates a fairly stationary but interestingly complex dance stem that involves a lot of stomping. Some of the better players were able to keep up with the machine and throw in their own flourishes to boot. There were a few variants of this going on. One of them had motion sensors on the floor over which you waved your hands instead of stepping on them. It sounds easier except that there are five instead of for sensors. The other was basically a 5 key keyboard that required you to hit keys in the indicated sequence.
Personally, I don't understand the attraction to any of these forms of entertainment, with the possible exception of Halo. That can be fun from time to time. But now seems as good a time as any to venture into some of my general thinking about the anime phenomenon. There are three interests that seem to have an incredible amount of overlap: anime/manga, fighting games, and techno music, all of which I will argue are related. Also, some of the most popular RPGs in the world come from the Final Fantasy series. There were quite a few guys cosplaying as the main character from one of the more recent installments, actually. But all of the FF RPGs hold not a candle to the complex systems that make up the aforelinked and fantastic Planescape: Torment. FF combat is basically choosing an attack and watching it happen. The detailed management and nurture of a character is entirely absent, as is any kind of realistic rule or stat system. I think this is somehow related to the whole Japanese obsession.
The connection I see between all of these things is this: they are all complex in a way that is very different from western complexity. The complexity here is one that you don't need to think about. In fact, thinking about it detracts from the experience. Take techno music for example. Some of the rhythm schemes produced by some of the better DJs are really, really intricate. But when you listen to techno music, you don't look for that. You nod your head to the pulsing beat. You react, you don't interact. The same goes for fighting games. There's certainly something to do that requires the input of the gamer. And learning the moves to these games takes a lot of time and practice. But you don't really think about it. The really good players function entirely off of trained instinct, not calculated tactics. No conscious thought is needed. Final Fantasy is pretty similar. The story lines are, reportedly, fairly impressive (I have yet to play one), but the actual gameplay is pretty, well, lackluster. You basically use one or two attacks over and over until you get a better one, and then you use that one. Whee.
I believe that anime and manga themselves are the same way. They require an incredible amount of thought and attention, but not in the same way that say, Walker Percy, Wes Anderson, or John Milton do. Anime requires attention if you simply want to keep up with the sheer nonlinear randomness that they mostly consist of. The plots can be incredibly complex, but not in what I would consider a productive way. They're complex seemingly for the sake of complexity.
This can be distinguished from Western forms of entertainment, including many video games, a form of entertainment widely accused of being mindless. If you watch a Western movie, even a dumb one, you aren't sucked into the experience in the same way that you are watching anime. It doesn't take nearly that much attention not to be completely lost. Say, for example, you've completely mastered a fighting game. You can't really talk about it. There are no lines of discourse available to you that aren't available to others. But mastering a game like Counter Strike does produce lines of discourse. You can discuss squad tactics, combat environments, leadership, communications, etc. A game like Civilization III creates a lot of discussion about the flow of history and the relatedness of various social forces.
Western entertainment seems to accentuate individuality and thought while Eastern entertainment, I would argue, supresses it. The end result of this is basically a trance-like state in which all of one's faculties are devoted to the same task, a task which doesn't actually produce anything concrete as a result of being focused upon. And this, I can not help but think, is an evidence of Japanese thought coming out. The East has long been taken with the idea of the merging of personal identity with the Great Beyond in trances, the supression of consciousness, and such things, and it seems that this kind of thing comes out in their entertainment.
Speaking of entertainment, this series continues with webcomics.
Posted by ryan at August 9, 2003 10:11 AM | TrackBack