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Console video games and global corporations : Creating a hybrid culture Mia Consalvo New Media Society 2006 8: 117 DOI: 10.1177/1461444806059921

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Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at Universite du Quebec a Montreal - UQAM on June 17, 2011 ...... new media & society

ARTICLE Console video games and global corporations: ...... Creating a hybrid culture ...... MIA CONSALVO Ohio University, USA ......

Abstract This article argues that the contemporary console video game industry is a hybrid encompassing a mixture of Japanese and American businesses and (more importantly) cultures to a degree unseen in other media industries, especially in regard to US popular culture. The particularities of the video game industry and culture can be recognized in the transnational corporations that contribute to its formation and development; in the global audience for its products; and in the complex mixing of format, style and content within games. As an exemplar of this process, the Japanese game publisher Square Enix is the focus of this case study, as it has been successful in contributing to global culture as well as to the digital games industry through its glocal methods. That achievement by a non-Western corporation is indicative of the hybridization of the digital games industry, and it is examined here as one indicator of the complexities and challenges, as well as future potentials, of global media culture. Key words computer games • game industry • globalization • glocalization • Japan • localization • popular culture • Square Enix • videogame

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INTRODUCTION In the USA, one of the most anticipated video games of 2002 featured a blond, blue-eyed hero reluctantly set on a quest to aid a dark-haired, kimono-clad young woman ‘summoner’ and her band of friends, including a Jamaican-like beach bum, a powerful mage in a dress made of belts, a wise quasi-Samurai fighter, a humanoid lion-beast with a broken horn and another young girl that was adept at making powerful mechanical weapons. Set in a Polynesian-like world, that band of travelers had to overcome ‘Sin’ to save the world. Promotional posters of the two leads, Tidus and Yuna, resembled movie posters featuring star-crossed lovers. The game featured professional voice actors, stunning cinematics and an intricate storyline. Upon release, it received rave reviews, and less than two months later, it had sold more than a million units. The game was Final Fantasy X, the (then) latest installment of the Final Fantasy series created by the Japanese corporation Square Enix.1 The game was actually released in Japan first, on 19 July 2001, and sold more than 2 million units in its first four days of release. Blending Tidus’s western ‘surfer boy’ looks with Wakka’s Jamaican accent, and faux-traditional Japanese styles such as Yuna’s revealing kimono, the game appeared a blending of world cultures, down to the trade winds and tropical islands characterizing the world. Square had created another successful game, one that defied easy categorization as a ‘Japanese’ game, or any other nationality or ethnicity. That success was only the latest in a string, however, as Square is an exemplar of the global digital games industry, a hybrid composed of mostly Japanese and US firms that carefully intermix Japanese and US culture in their games. The resulting hybrid is now a standard for the game industry, and that industry and its games have become a normal part of American culture – accepted and welcomed into living rooms near you. Fears of cultural invasion have marked Japanese ‘incursions’ into the USA as recently as the 1980s, although since the economic troubles of the Japanese and Asian economies of the 1990s, those fears have eased, or become more muted. Yet the current popularity of a pan-Asian style or culture in the USA would suggest that culture does not flow down a one- way street. The growing spread of pan-Asian culture is one indicator of how transnational culture can move in many directions – even into the ‘dominant’ nation of the West, the USA. This development immediately makes sense, if you are a reader of contemporary science fiction, particularly the genre known as cyberpunk. In that world, the future is largely Asian, with dominant cultural markers drawn from the East, rather than the West. William Gibson’s highly influential (to academics as well as science fiction writers) 1984 novel, Neuromancer, is perhaps the best known of this genre, set as it is in the Japanese ‘Chiba City’ and heavily inflected with an Asian pastiche of culture, business, and language. Beyond print, influential and

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Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at Universite du Quebec a Montreal - UQAM on June 17, 2011 Consalvo: Console video games popular films such as Blade Runner and The Matrix also trade in Asian images and influences, in their cityscapes, food, and modes of fighting. Those futures are dystopian, if stylish, decorated in neon and kanji characters. However, it is difficult if not impossible to determine a singular national source for these cultural products (much less gauge their accuracy), given the transnational nature of corporations as well as ‘native’ peoples. As Ow (2000) found in his analysis of the video game Shadow Warrior, to the West, at least, there is little distinction made between what is Japanese and what is Korean, Chinese or Taiwanese in origin, and they can all blend together unproblematically to ultimately represent a pan-Asian (or faux-Asian) style. Yet, despite the growing popularity of these pastiche images and products, charges of cultural imperialism, although critiqued by many academics but still popular in other forums, are usually leveled at western creators of the usual suspect products: Coke, Disney, McDonald’s – the USA in general. Yet, there is one industry where Japanese products and corporations are the dominant if not hegemonic influence. That industry is console video games.2 In this article, I focus on the development of the console game industry (which I will term ‘video games’) and bracket the development of computer games. While the histories are intertwined to some extent, the console segment has become the dominant force in the industry sales-wise, and has historically targeted a market somewhat distinct from computer games. A history of the development of the entire game industry could comprise a book-length project. Therefore, although this history is admittedly truncated, it focuses in greater depth on a particular segment of the industry that has great significance. A basic history of video games involves acknowledging the profound integration of Japanese and US businesses, technologies, cultures and individuals involved. Such a history can be read as either a competition or collaboration (sometimes both). Looking more deeply, even seemingly unique or singular Japanese or US developments are not free of crossnational influences. For example, one of the first video game companies in the USA, Atari, was named for a move in the Japanese game of ‘Go’. The Japanese corporation Nintendo almost single-handedly revitalized the game industry in America, yet earned suspicion for its ability to mesmerize children with its colorful games featuring the character ‘Mario,’ named (in America) after the corporation’s landlord (Sheff, 1999). The Japanese Taito corporation’s arcade game Space Invaders was such a hit in Japan that it caused a nationwide coin shortage, and its creator, Toshihiro Nishikado, admits that his inspiration for the game’s aliens was drawn from the US film Star Wars as well as sea creatures from the local market. These anecdotes challenge us to ask where Japanese influence ends and American culture begins in understanding the video game industry. Just as technology developments have fueled the competition between East and West economies, so too have

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Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at Universite du Quebec a Montreal - UQAM on June 17, 2011 New Media & Society 8(1) cultural influences, realized in these same techno-products, demanded that we explore this relationship. This exploration shows that the video game industry is a hybrid encompassing a mixture of Japanese and American businesses and (more importantly) cultures to a degree unseen in other media industries, especially in regard to US popular culture. Although the term ‘hybrid’ has traditionally been associated with post-colonial theory and notions of identity in regards to individuals or groups of individuals, the intent here is to broaden its scope, to encompass two types of fusion: the melding of business and culture, as well as a convergence between Japanese and US interests in these areas. Just as different national identities have been mixed in the hybrid, so too the realms of business and culture are converging in novel ways. Although popular culture has always been a business, the video game industry demonstrates how interlocked these areas are, and how the global and the local are the fabric from which they are constituted. This hybrid is not a space between ‘two zones of purity’ where mixing occurs (Tomlinson, 1999), but instead is a significant point at which a global media culture is created that is unlike any national media culture in its composition. The particularities of the video game industry and culture can be recognized in the transnational corporations that contribute to its formation and development; in the global audience for its products; and in the complex mixing of format, style and content within games. Further, the culture, although hybrid, avoids becoming homogenous (perhaps is incapable of becoming homogenous) because the demands of the local still shape cultural products as they travel around the world. Those demands are managed through tightly controlled technological barriers such as regional encoding and technical formats that seek to reinforce disintegrating national or geographic borders. Finally, it is important to note that this industry, heavily inflected (even dominated) by Japanese interests, is widely welcomed by often xenophobic US audiences. Japanese companies including Square Enix have successfully created such cross-culture products, and have incorporated this style into business practices, such as Square Enix’s subsidiaries Square Enix USA and Square Enix Europe. However, this fusion or ‘easy migration’ is not a totalizing system. Distinctions still remain between the games that Square Enix produces for the Japanese market, and those that successfully sell abroad. Those products destined for global consumption are carefully localized, to ensure that their international flavor is not too foreign for non-Japanese tastes. Significantly, the process of ‘localization’ in video games is tied to the Japanese business term ‘glocalization,’ defined by Robertson (1995) to mean the successful global transfer of products to different localities, by making modifications for such variables as culture, language, gender or ethnicity.

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Robertson uses the term glocalization to argue that the local should not be seen in distinction to the global, but that instead both are mutually constitutive. The success of corporations such as Square Enix demonstrate how glocalization is made industry speciﬁc, and how it can be proﬁtable when carefully utilized. Morley and Robins (1995: 150) note a similar strategy employed by Sony – that of ‘global localization’ which entails gaining ‘insider’ status within regional and local markets as it operates around the world. Square Enix has been successful in contributing to global culture as well as to the digital games industry through its glocal methods. That achievement by a non-Western corporation is indicative of the hybridization of the digital games industry, and it is examined here as one indicator of the complexities and challenges, as well as future potentials, of global media culture. Understanding not just Square Enix’s games, but its business practices and role in the global video game industry, provides an important ‘reading’ of that global media culture, an understanding not available through the examination of media products.

AMERICAN AUDIENCES, TRANSNATIONAL MEDIA CORPORATIONS, UNCERTAIN CONTENT Although ownership of media conglomerates is changing and non-US companies are now prevalent in the production of western culture, many of the films, television programs and music considered popular in the USA have their origins (however minimal) on American soil. Even when transnational hits like Survivor are circulated, they are ‘localized’ for the USA (and other countries they appear in) and it is likely that many US residents are unaware of their ‘foreign’ origin, much as many global drinkers of Coke are unaware of its US origins and feel that the drink originated in their home country (Howes, 1996 in Tomlinson, 1999). But when charges of ‘cultural imperialism’ are made, it is generally American media conglomerates that come under fire – AOL-Time Warner, Disney, Viacom – if not for the crass capitalism of Disney World and Coke, then for the spread of perhaps more threatening products including, on the one hand, democratic governance and the extension of human rights, and, on the other, waste, selfishness, and narcissism. As Toynbee argues, in the popular imagination, ‘“cultural globalisation” is often just a synonym for Americanisation’ (2000: 192). So although media conglomerates are increasingly crossnational in ownership and control, the USA still dominates global film (Miller, 2001). As such, cultural imperialism has been the concern of certain groups, generally national organizations attempting to protect their domestic culture industries. Tomlinson (1991) has shown how this thesis ignores how culture has always changed, and additionally how cultural commodities are differentially taken up and used in various locales. And although Hollywood

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Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at Universite du Quebec a Montreal - UQAM on June 17, 2011 New Media & Society 8(1) remains a global powerhouse, America’s influence in other culture industries is beginning to slip. For example, while Toynbee reports that the USA is the largest exporter of television programs around the globe (2000: 206), these programs are increasingly being bumped to late-night and weekend slots (Kapner, 2003). More importantly, ‘71 percent of the top 10 programs in 60 countries were locally produced in 2001’ (2003: 2). These movements should prompt us to more complex considerations of how culture changes as it is caught up in global flows of capital and commodities, and how a seeming ‘unstoppable’ US culture can be stopped. Many global media scholars have moved beyond the more simplistic model of cultural imperialism to explore instances of national or transnational cultural flows (or dominance) that go beyond ‘West-rest’ and focus on sites such as inter-Asian markets, including Japan’s successful exportation of its popular culture to countries including Taiwan (Ching, 1996; Su, 1999) and South Korea (Iwabuchi, 2001). However, while these examinations of transnational cultural configurations are revealing, they tend to leave in place dominant systems of thought that privilege the West – either analysis examines ‘West-rest’ and tries to incorporate evidence of resistance (which is surely there), or the West is set aside, and combinations such as ‘Japan – East Asia’ are read through. Explorations of these new configurations often find evidence of dominant and submissive partners, with the dominant often compared to American or western culture in its capitalist or modernist attempts to control other cultures. But although the West is explicitly absent from the reading, it implicitly returns, either through the naming of a country that is ‘modern/western in disguise’ such as Japan, or the setting aside of the dominant term which leaves its dominance uncontested. The present analysis is an exploration of an instance when ‘West-rest’ is inverted in a significant way, to ‘Japan-West’. Instances of foreign cultural ‘incursion’ into America are not new, but have been mostly examined either through a single instance such as Pokemon,´ or when non-US corporations begin purchasing too many US cultural markers – a phenomenon mostly seen in the 1980s when a ‘Japan panic’ was experienced, and the ‘Japanese overtook the Russians in opinion polls as the nation which Americans fear most’ (Morley and Robins, 1995: 158). Indeed, when US culture is at issue – what Americans at home watch, see and read – there is little conscious concern that non-American, or more likely non-western, products are the dominant products, even though these cultural products are often viewed on a Sony screen. The video game industry challenges that understanding. The Japanese dominance in console manufacturing, combined with popular games, make them an integral part of the video game industry in America – a part that informs, drives and often leads. Here, the ‘rest’ has become at minimum an

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Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at Universite du Quebec a Montreal - UQAM on June 17, 2011 Consalvo: Console video games equal player, or more likely the dominant partner, in a system consumed by a significant portion of the American populace (an estimated 60% of Americans have played video or computer games). Therefore, analysis of the industry demands an approach that starts from the macroscopic and continues to the particular. The game industry is significant in that it has never been the product of one particular culture. Even in its ‘glocal’ instances, when translation will not work and games are country specific, evidence of the transcultural can be found. This article examines how the console video game industry developed crossnationally between the USA and Japan, and how the technology and culture involved became more integrated and accepted over time. It next considers the Square Enix company’s engagement in this hybridizing system, and then studies the games that Square Enix produces as evidence of a hybrid culture welcomed in the USA as well as Japan. The article concludes by discussing the implications of a hybrid global culture industry and the challenges it provides to such ideas as national cultures and geographic borders.

INDUSTRY BEGINNINGS TO CONTEMPORARY TIMES The digital games industry is indeed global, with game development companies in the UK (Argonaut, Climax, Rare), Iceland (CCP), Brazil (Ingis Games), South Korea (NC Soft), and elsewhere (Companies, 2004). The Russian mathematician Alexey Pazhitnov created one of the most successful games ever developed, Tetris. Yet, two countries emerge as the dominant forces – the USA and Japan.3 Is there something that could be said about the ‘uniqueness’ of these two nations in regard to an interest in video games, proficiency in their design, or interest in playing them? Hardly. To engage in such speculation would result in essentialisms, trying to determine how one nation (and not another) is ‘naturally’ suited to some interest or capacity. A better approach would be to examine cultural, economic and technological forces within the countries, in an attempt to determine if certain favorable conditions were present, and how transnational currents already in place held potentials for this growing industry. For example, although the current technological prowess of Japanese industries seems to be taken for granted as almost ‘natural,’ specific moments in culture, dependent on political and social realities, were instrumental in shaping the ‘natural’ technological superiority of the Japanese. Najita (1989) explains that Japanese attitudes toward technology shifted significantly from the prewar to the postwar era. Prior to World War II, technology was considered an alien Other, apart from ‘culture’ which was not an object to be studied, but rather to be ‘phenomenologically perceived and appreciated’ (p. 15). Japanese culture was distinct from technology, and was a refuge from

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Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at Universite du Quebec a Montreal - UQAM on June 17, 2011 New Media & Society 8(1) technology, rather than a base for its development. During and after the war, this linkage changed, with ‘technological excellence . . . represented as an extension of cultural exceptionalism, not as resulting from the tension of the Other within culture’ (p. 13). In this latter view, the drive to advance technology is not antithetical to culture, but instead springs from culture, being a logical outgrowth of it. This is in line with other theorists’ explorations of ‘techno-orientalism’ (Morley and Robins, 1995) in which the conflation of culture and technology has succeeded wildly, to produce a world where ‘high-technology has become associated with Japaneseness. . . . [W]ith screens, networks, cybernetics, robotics, artificial intelligence, simulation’ (1995: 168). In that world, ‘the future is now Japanese too’ (1995: 168). Although the future may be Japanese, the past was a more contested space for video games. The first electronic game, Tennis for Two, was developed in 1958 by William Higinbotham at the US Department of Nuclear Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory (Kline et al., 2003). Further developments alternated between Japan and the USA. In 1977, for example, Atari released its home video computer system (the 2600) in the USA, while Nintendo released its first home video game system in Japan. The following year, Atari released the arcade game Football and the US firm Midway released Taito’s Space Invaders in Japanese arcades. Atari soon licensed the rights for an Atari 2600 version of Space Invaders for American players, and in 1980, Nintendo established Nintendo of America as a headquarters for its North American business. Although game arcades were initially popular and profitable, the games industry eventually moved from arcade games to home video game consoles as its central focus. Companies producing the most successful console systems have included the US-based Atari and Microsoft, and the Japanese- based Nintendo, Sega (Sega is a Japanese company founded by Americans), and Sony. After Atari’s rise in popularity in the USA, the market crashed due to poor quality games, and from that point, Nintendo established dominance in the console market for almost a decade. It was the Japanese conglomerate Sony that eventually cracked the console market with the PlayStation in 1994, introducing competition into the market. American firms continued to excel in producing games, but it wasn’t until Microsoft devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to developing the Xbox that an American console would again be taken seriously in the game industry. The console was secretly code-named ‘Project Midway’ by its initial developers (Takahashi, 2002), to refer to its resemblance to both PC and console systems (midway between both) but also as a reference to when US forces turned the tide of World War Two in its favor and against the Japanese. Although it was not referred to publicly as such, it is a telling example of the ‘Japan panic’ still found in the USA. The Xbox, released in

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2001, has not met sales goals, and is battling for second place with Nintendo’s GameCube (DFC Intelligence, 2003). Interestingly, soon after the Xbox’s launch, Microsoft released redesigned hand controllers for the console, because many Japanese customers complained that the standard ones were too large to comfortably hold. Microsoft, a successful transnational company, appears to be having trouble in properly ‘glocalizing’ its products for individual markets. The dominant games of the early industry – Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Asteroids, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda – were also either American or Japanese games, and shared cultural influences. Only one exception – Tetris – stands out, but even though the game was created by a Russian, it was American and Japanese businesses that ultimately competed for its distribution rights. Although now many games produced outside of the USA and Japan are huge successes – such as the British firm Eidos’ Tomb Raider series and Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto games, ‘Japan-rest’ has become the dominant model. In August 2002, for example, of the top 10 games sold in the US, four were from Japanese developers (NPD Funworld, 2003). Likewise, for the US console game market, Japanese developers accounted for 34 percent of Play Station 2 titles and 45 percent of GBA (Game Boy Advance) titles (Price, 2002: 21–2). Yet even as Japanese games successfully travel West, western products have a more difficult time making the round trip – in 2002, the Japanese games market was dominated by Japanese developers, accounting for over 78 percent of the market (Capcom). Over time the process of producing a crossnational flow has become more sophisticated, with greater care taken in developing products and targeting markets. By the beginning of the 21st century, Japanese firms almost completely dominated console production, and US and Japanese firms competed in the area of producing games for those consoles. For the game industry at large, then, the back and forth nature of developments and cross- collaborations in content led to a hybrid culture, one based on both Japanese and US interests, but with Japanese dominance.

FROM GAMES INDUSTRY TO GAME CORPORATION – SQUARE ENIX One company that has excelled at such efforts is the Japanese corporation Square Enix. Although it would appear that console producers such as Nintendo and Sony have greater inﬂuence in the game world, it is the companies that produce games that ultimately make ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of various consoles. For example, the Sega Dreamcast console was released a year previous to Sony’s PlayStation 2 console, and was hailed as a superior system, yet was discontinued, because game producers did not create a critical number of games for the console to achieve a proﬁtable market base. Sony, realizing the importance of game creators, eventually bought a stake

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Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at Universite du Quebec a Montreal - UQAM on June 17, 2011 New Media & Society 8(1) in Square in 2001 following the flop of Square’s first CG film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Before Sony acquired a minority position in the ailing company, Microsoft had approached Square about making a deal to ensure that the games would be available for the Xbox console, but that deal could not be reached (Microsoft eventually bought the UK-based Rare studios instead). But even within the Square Enix corporation, constant attention is paid to the global cultural market and how Square Enix products fit there. The original Square corporation was founded in 1985 in Tokyo, and was a small company producing games mainly for the Japanese market. It has grown to become a major third party developer and publisher of console games in Japan, with annual sales of more than US$600 million, and 900 employees worldwide (Playonline, 2002). Its best-selling Final Fantasy role- playing series has sold more than 42 million copies globally (Bloom, 2003). Square Enix’s business interests are transnational, with Square Enix holding wholly and partly-owned subsidiaries in Japan, the USA and Europe. Sony has part ownership (19%) in Square Enix, and in 2003 Square merged with Enix, a rival Japanese game company. That merger was hoped to give both companies the ‘critical mass’ needed to meet the challenges of rising development costs and sluggish sales, particularly in the Japanese market (Nakamoto, 2002). Notably, Enix’s games were solid domestic sellers but had never sold well internationally. Square, the greater risk-taker of the two, was expected to help Enix better compete in the global market. Square had already recognized that need by forming other alliances, such as with the US-based software publisher and developer Electronic Arts (EA). As part of that deal Square formed Square Electronic Arts to publish Square’s games in America. In Japan, both companies created ElectronicArts Square to localize and publish EA games originally created in the USA and Europe, as well as develop original titles for a Japanese audience. That partnership, however, ended in 2003, as it was replaced by Square Enix USA, which is now responsible for ‘localizing, marketing and publishing the Japanese company’s products’ (Bloom, 2003). The success of companies such as Square Enix points to the ability and desire of different cultures to mix, ultimately influencing and shaping each other. As Robertson explains, ‘national-societal cultures have been differentially formed in interpenetration with significant others’ (1997: 89). This process has gained the most attention in its West-rest direction of flow, but it proceeds along many different paths, indifferent to where it is not ‘supposed’ to occur.

Games as cross-culture hybrids A look at speciﬁc games may further demonstrate how the digital games industry functions as a hybrid global culture. In the software, the global meets the local, as the games must of necessity be played by real people, in actual locations, using speciﬁc hardware. The games are the realization of the

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‘glocal,’ as they signify where the global flow finally arrives at local markets, and how it is understood, accepted, embraced, or perhaps rejected in that locale. When considering games, it is also important to remind ourselves that even though Japanese-produced games may be popular with Americans, or vice versa, it is foolish if not dangerous to attempt to determine with any authority the ‘essential’ or ‘fundamental’ national qualities that may be found in individual games, and how these qualities are understood by players. There are several reasons for that. First, those types of analyses are doomed to fail if one is looking for ‘pure’ culture in some unadulterated form. Culture, as Tomlinson (1999) reminds us, is mobile rather than static, and has always sought the influence of whatever is new, different, ‘foreign’, or strange. That is how culture continues to grow and adapt. A culture that does not change is a culture that is dying. The USA and Japan have, over a long period of time, exchanged cultural influences, minor and major. For example, perhaps the most influential manga (comic book) artist in Japan, Osama Tezuka, admits that he was greatly inspired by the animation work of Walt Disney, and the Disney style is clearly reflected in his work (Kuwuhara, 1997). Japanese manga, further adapted into anime, has now also found an audience with American children and young adults, from Pokemon´ and Sailor Moon to Spirited Away. Thus, attempts at locating the ‘authentically’ American or Japanese cultural product may never be realized.4 Further, even if some ‘authentic’ cultural strains could be found in games, there is no guarantee that audiences would ‘read’ them as such. If fears of American cultural commodities being exported globally fail the cultural imperialism test because audiences read or interpret those commodities in varying ways, we cannot expect that American players would unproblematically ‘read’ Japanese games exactly as Japanese players would. Just as Israeli, Japanese and Russian viewers of Dallas interpreted the show in different ways (Liebes and Katz, 1993), so too must occur the same processes of interpretation, translation, mutation, adaptation and indigenization among Japanese and American players of Final Fantasy (Tomlinson, 1999). When attempting to attribute a national cultural essence to a game, we might ask what Lara Croft ‘says’ about Britain, as the Tomb Raider heroine is an English character, or instead how Croft is emblematic of ‘Britishness’. Alternately, we could conclude with absurdities like reading ‘communalism’ into Japanese role-playing games such as the Final Fantasy series, because they feature a hero who needs his/her party of friends to help in battle and provide companionship – conveniently omitting the fact that most every role playing game (RPG) produced across the globe features a central character surrounded by a party of varying size, even in the hyper- individualist USA. Indeed, the precursor to electronic RPGs, the paper and

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Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at Universite du Quebec a Montreal - UQAM on June 17, 2011 New Media & Society 8(1) pen group role-playing game ‘Dungeons and Dragons’, was very popular in the USA in the 1980s, and continues to attract large groups of players with new adventures as well as at national conventions (Fine, 1983). Rather than be concerned about the ‘truth’ found in such readings, analysis (itself a form of ‘reading’) of the industry of console games provides an alternate way to examine the production and flow of games around the globe. This ‘reading’ or analysis sidesteps problems of interpreting ‘correctly’, while instead allowing us to see how cultures, interpretations, and modifications are all part of the game production process. While we cannot claim that games are free of ideology, or are produced in a cultural void, we must ensure that examinations of the content of games does not slide too far into essentialist statements of national cultures. On the other hand, neither are these creations ‘just’ games, but rather complexly marketed products, as exemplified by the Square Enix business model.

SQUARE ENIX AND ITS GAMES Square Enix of Japan has been successful at carving out a niche in the video game industry, as well as in the global culture industry. It began by producing role-playing games and has branched out to create some car racing, horseracing and action games, although its inﬂuence lies in its RPGs, particularly its Final Fantasy series, which is considered a standard setter for the genre. Although its plots are intricate compared to other RPGs on the market, they never stray far from creator Hironobu Sakaguchi’s initial conception of a mythical world composed of basic elements manipulable by magic, where reluctant heroes come together to save the world from evil. Although simple in concept, Square Enix’s continued reworking of that theme has resulted in games that consistently sell millions worldwide, crossing borders, languages and cultures with apparent ease. To do so, Square Enix has a network of Japanese, American and European holding companies that ensure it can effectively localize its global products, as well as make the (perhaps even more crucial) decision as to which products are best suited for global markets, and which may not ﬁnd an international audience. That is an important realization, as game creation is a multi-million dollar enterprise, and the process of localizing games is complex. Square Enix has successfully navigated those currents, and their strengths can be found in the areas of big budgets, longer than average production cycles, high production values, and extensive development and marketing of their ‘brands’. But likely the most important reason that Square Enix has been so successful in the American market (and other foreign locales) is the sophisticated and extensive localization used in translating its games for the USA and other markets. Here, the terms mirror each other, with the game industry’s standard term ‘localization’ becoming the marker of the larger process of ‘glocalization’ that is central to Square Enix’s success. Again,

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Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at Universite du Quebec a Montreal - UQAM on June 17, 2011 Consalvo: Console video games glocalization takes the global and makes it local, by making ever finer distinctions in audiences, and in the process creating these audiences, and then tailoring content to fit the perceived needs and desires of those audiences. For the global digital games industry, the process of localization involves far more than simple language translation – it is a complex, time- intensive process that generally starts with initial plans for the game, and continues through planning, coding, production and final testing.5 For example, the Square Enix game Final Fantasy X employs spoken dialogue, some text-only dialogue, musical scores, background artwork that may include text (for such things as a store sign), and a user’s manual. All of those need translation into various languages for various markets. Below the ‘surface’ level of the game, programmers must code into the game ‘text strings,’ which store text for use in the game (so when the user clicks on an object, for example, a textual description of it may pop up in a dialogue box), and those strings must be carefully sized, so that translation from kanji/pictogram characters to roman alphabet characters does not make the text too small or large, either shrinking in the text box or disappearing in part because it is too big for the available space. Beyond the more technical matters, game localization involves careful translation or alteration of idiomatic speech, which changes not only from language to language but culture to culture (many expressions found in England would sound strange to Americans, for example). Additionally, some content must be censored or changed to comply with other nation’s laws or traditions – for example in Germany blood can’t be shown and neither can depictions of Nazism, while in Korea, sexual content is heavily frowned upon. The use of national or religious holidays must also be taken into account, and occasionally the art in the game is changed – either to give characters a more ‘native’ look (for the target country) or to add more ‘native’ options for personalization – such as possibly adding more Asian objects (wallpaper, art, clothing) to a Sims game that would sell in Asia. All of these requirements demand that if a game is to be sold globally, the localization process must begin early – as early as the pre-production/ planning stages of the game. This demands a significant investment, as the process must occur for each language/nation that the game will sell to. Thus, multiple versions of the same game are carefully crafted to appeal to specific market segments. And because of the increased costs of adding multiple versions, decisions must be made early on about the suitability or ‘flexibility’ of a game for its successful export. During the early years of Square’s production, for example, not every installment of the Final Fantasy series was exported – either because of budget constraints or fear that the market would not be large enough to absorb the costs. However, beginning with Square’s move to Sony’s PlayStation console and the release of Final Fantasy

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VII, the careful process of localization began to pay off, with the game selling more than 8 million copies worldwide (Gamespot, 2002). However, Square Enix’s success is also dependent on its many decisions not to export some games – realizing that the localization process, however extensive, would still fail due to the inflexibility of particular games, or subject matter. Returning to the work of Tomlinson and others, as much as culture is becoming more global, it is not turning completely homogenous, with only one template for the world to use. Regional differences remain, and are vital to recognize. So, Square Enix does not export games such as the 1997 PlayStation game Pro-Logic Mah-Jong Hai-Shin, which is a video game version of the Mah-Jong game. Likewise, its many horseracing simulation games never make it to the USA, nor do many other of its role- playing games, which remain more popular in Japan than in the USA, despite the success of the Final Fantasy series there. But before we can say that the games that remain in Japan must reflect some ‘essential’ Japanese culture or character which prohibits their popularity in the West, it is instructive to consider another game that Square Enix chose not to export/ localize for sale in the USA – its 1989 Famicom (Nintendo) game Square Enix’s Tom Sawyer, which was an RPG starring ‘none other’ than Mark Twain’s quintessentially American character (Gamespot, 2002). In that instance, the local for the Japanese market was tied to American culture, yet was not sufficiently ‘glocal’ to make the trip back to America. Either because of cost considerations or concern that American audiences would not be sufficiently interested in the game, even a game based on a US ‘icon’ failed to create an audience outside the East.6 That would appear to be the case with many games, as it has been estimated that about 2800 games were available for the PlayStation in Japan, while there were only 800 in the USA (Takahashi, 2002: 31). Square’s past alliance with Electronic Arts signifies recognition of the impossibility of complete market similarity between the USA and Japan, as it capitalized on the strengths of an American firm to sell its products in Japan, aware of how the glocalization/ localization process is delicate, and must proceed in both directions to be successful.

Halting or controlling the flow – the rise of the technoregion? It has been argued here that culture is dynamic, moving across borders – through games – in directions that challenge a West-rest hierarchy. Yet it is also crucial to acknowledge that just as culture is found in business practices and products, so too business or economic concerns are implicated in cultural flows. Beniger (1986) has argued that technological developments in capitalist systems are generally met with crises concerning their proper flow and control. The railroad system in the USA, for example, increased the

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Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at Universite du Quebec a Montreal - UQAM on June 17, 2011 Consalvo: Console video games speed of communication, yet at the same time demanded a new system of communication for its own operations, to better manage the increased flow of communication and commodities it carried. As Square Enix and its competitors seek to enlarge their markets by bringing localized games to the USA and other places, or vice versa, they are at the same time attempting to ensure that this flow is properly controlled – by the interests of transnational corporations. As Tomlinson (1999) has pointed out, culture itself has no strict national boundaries, ‘ending’ at a river or a line drawn artificially on a map. Culture flows to survive, and as it flows, it shifts, warps, changes and modifies, to become hybridized, strange and new. Corporations in the USA and Japan capitalized on that particular channel, using it to create a global digital games industry, benefiting from it and making the US gaming culture more global than most other ‘global’ culture industries found in the USA. But just as culture is slippery, moving and shifting around, transnational corporations still seek to control it, as it becomes a commodity to sell. If the nation is no longer the boundary of culture, another unit of measurement must be created or found if corporations and governments want to properly police the dollars involved in channeling this flow. As Timothy Luke argues, ‘having open and unconstrained access to flows, not closed domination of places, becomes a crucial attribute of power, perhaps as vital as juridico-legal sovereignty, in informationalized societies’ (1995: 100). Luke argues that, as geography declines in importance, other ways of organizing flows will emerge, including the creation of technoregions, defined by him as ‘intensive modes of production used by corporate capitalism . . . emerg[ing] in the flow from the processes of international communication, travel, commerce and transportation’ (1995: 103). Those regions are not place based, but correspond to specific industries, trades, arts and sciences. According to his definition, the transnational video game industry is one such technoregion, but even within this region, further boundary markers must be found to help modulate and regulate flow. One such mechanism is localization, but this process only works with individual games – a larger system is needed to deal with consoles, game-related merchandise, and games on a larger scale. Within the technoregion, ironically, geography still matters, as the answer to problems of control (for now) is based on geographic region.7 As culture is commodified into PlayStations and Final Fantasy titles, it encounters business tactics such as release dates, regional encoding, system standards and lockout chips. Culture can still flow, but only along well- marked paths, designed to ensure careful tracking and control. So, for example, the game Final Fantasy X was released in Japan in summer 2001, it came to the USA in December of that year, and Europe had to wait until mid-2002 to play the game. Delays could be explained by the localization

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Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at Universite du Quebec a Montreal - UQAM on June 17, 2011 New Media & Society 8(1) process, which extends production time for exports over and above the ‘native’ version, but that only tells part of the story. Sales are closely tracked and measured in each locale, to better determine how to market a game, and approximately how many units to produce. Although the replication of CDs and now DVDs is quite cheap, control of the flow is still carefully monitored. Even if US players decided to import a Japanese-language version of the game, it still would not play on their PlayStation 2, as each console is regionally encoded via computer chip to play only those games allowed for its geographic region – Asia, North America, or Europe. US game players interested in playing Japanese games that are never localized must ‘mod’ or modify their consoles, opening them and soldering circuitry to override the technological lockouts. Of course, that voids the warranty, and the procedure is considered illegal, and so few players attempt it. Alternative courses of action include buying a Japanese Play Station 2 to play those games, but it, of course, only plays those games encoded for Asia. The flow of culture, even within a technoregion, is controlled along such avenues quite effectively, at least for the present. And the seamless way that business channels the flow makes it easy to forget the massive work involved in that process. For example, as I was traveling in England in 2002, I saw promotions there for the Japanese game Ico, released in America several months before, yet at that time unavailable in England. A demo version was available to play (not for the general public, but at an academic conference), and although the main character’s dialogue had been translated into English, the supporting character’s spoken (but not text) dialogue was still in Japanese. Playing the demo was strangely jarring – like tuning in to two radio stations at one time. The not-quite-ready, unreleased game demonstrated the glocalizing process in action, producing an odd culture clash that did not let the player forget that the game was indeed of Japanese origin, no matter how ‘Western’ it might otherwise appear in language or style.8 Controlling flow is about power, and the direction of the flow in game release dates speaks to where power lies in the digital games industry. The flow of games then, if taken as a measure of cultural dominance, has shifted in the last 50 years, with Japan leading production, the USA and Europe following, and other regions such as Southeast Asia trailing along at the end. Certainly there are games released in Europe or the USA that never make it to Japan, but the flow does have a well-marked path for consoles and many major games, and its major direction is east-west.9

CONCLUSIONS The success and inﬂuence of Japanese hardware and software in America (along with growing markets in Europe) make it apparent that the industry is a hybrid – and a very successful one. That conclusion is obvious when

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Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at Universite du Quebec a Montreal - UQAM on June 17, 2011 Consalvo: Console video games reading popular gaming magazines such as Game Informer and Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM), which regularly report on Japanese-only game releases, and the latest in gaming culture in Tokyo. Magazines such as EGM and others also often feature lists of the ‘most influential’ games in history, and entries such as Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda and Konami’s Metal Gear Solid regularly top the list. Japanese games have also, and perhaps most importantly, influenced western game creators, and it could be said that game creation is now unmoored from national borders and cultures, and has become its own sphere of influence, defining its own technoregion. However, just as global gaming is developing its own culture and writing a transnational history, it cannot be said to be leaving the local completely behind. Companies such as Square Enix will successfully cross-market certain games, but others will stay within certain borders, national or otherwise. Thus, Square Enix will release Final Fantasy XII in Japan during the first quarter of 2006, and American and European fans must wait until later in the year for its release, but are assured that it will arrive, as long as the franchise continues to sell well globally. As the gaming market grows, game makers will likely begin to tailor their products to highly individualized sub-cultures or groups, based not on nationality but instead on gender, age, and favorite hobbies. Localization processes will still continue to be necessary for games that cross borders, as long as the world is multilingual. And some games may never ‘translate’ to other languages or cultures. Localization will never result in the same games for all people – local differences will remain, but the intermixing of these differences will continue to provide the spark for the creation of new and innovative games as ‘local’ takes on meanings other than geography. Finally, even as the culture of games is losing, or has lost, any claim to an ‘originary’ national culture, capital seeks to keep some boundaries in place to channel this flow. Even within the technoregion of the gaming industry, the power of the multinationals to control or channel the flow is real and significant. Technological borders have replaced (or shored up) geographic borders. The persistence of the importance of space is recognizable in the way the barriers have been constructed – along looser geographic boundaries, such as Asia, North America and Europe. However much digital industries attempt to rise above the constraints of physical boundaries, or discard the national, it reappears, here as the current solution for channeling flow. The global digital games industry has successfully hybridized itself, and is seeking new markets. Those markets include geographic ones, such as greater penetration of Asia (including China), and virtual ones, such as the growth of online gaming. With the development of online gaming, however, will come even more challenges to the industry regarding the flow of culture and its control, as hardware encoding may become irrelevant, and

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Downloaded from nms.sagepub.com at Universite du Quebec a Montreal - UQAM on June 17, 2011 New Media & Society 8(1) other nations and cultures may gain more access to the creative side of digital games. Researchers of new media must continue to examine not only cultural products, but also the business practices that lead to the production and circulation of these products. If, for example, Electronic Arts continues to be the largest game publisher worldwide, what will this mean for the global circulation of games? Game researchers need to examine the practices of such companies, as well as the speciﬁc decisions they are making about such things as which games to produce, which popular culture licenses to acquire, and which markets to expand into (and which to avoid). Only by examining both culture and its production can we better understand the world of culture and its ever-shifting conﬁgurations.

Notes 1 Square Company Limited merged with Enix in late 2003. In this article I will denote the company as ‘Square’ to indicate pre-merger activities; and ‘Square Enix’ to mark post-merger actions. 2 This article focuses on those advances made in the console game system market. The digital games industry is comprised of arcade games, console games, handhelds, and computer games. The most profitable segment of the industry is now console systems such as the Sony PlayStation 2, Nintendo’s GameCube, and Microsoft’s Xbox. Although more computer (PC/Mac) titles are released each year, they form a smaller dollar segment of the market. Additionally, although there is crossover with some players playing both console and computer game systems, console systems generally capture a different portion of the game-playing demographic than computer games. Computer game players are generally older on average than console players and have more disposable income, and more women play computer games than console games. However, consoles are cheaper to purchase than computers, they rarely crash, and they do not require any special skills in machine configuration to make games run on them. The market reflects the dominance of consoles over computers for gaming systems – in 1998, only one of the 30 top games was a PC title – the rest were console games. Although many games are released for both computers and consoles, many others are not, and the types of systems remain somewhat distinct. 3 When looking at the games industry as a whole, the UK and Europe have also been major influences. During the 1980s, when the US industry was concentrating on home consoles and arcade games, UK programmers were creating games for home computers such as the Sinclair ZX81 (Entertainment and Leisure Software Publisher’s Association, 2003). At that time companies such as Rare and Codemasters were founded, and they still continue to turn out successful games. However, the UK and European segment has not been as influential globally as its market size and history suggest. The UK games industry currently employs more than 20,000 people, yet ‘many of the top selling UK-developed titles are also highly UK-specific – for example, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, based on the leading television quiz show . . . focused primarily on English football leagues and their teams’ (‘From Exuberant Youth to Sustainable Maturity’, 2002: 17). Further, although Europe as a market is the second largest games market in the world, ‘it has often been treated as secondary to those of the USA and Japan by global players such as the console manufacturers. The European market does not exhibit the same degree of homogeneity and suffers

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from localisation requirements and diverse cultures, making it more complex and expensive to serve than the unitary US and Japanese markets’ (2002: 11). While the UK and European segments of the industry have been successful, their achievements have not been as recognized as those by Japan and the US, and much of that success lies in computer game development, rather than console games. 4 Although there is some crossover influence between western cinema and Japanese anime in terms of style and aesthetics, I would argue that Hollywood has been the dominant influence in global film, and anime one genre among others (Hong Kong action cinema, French film noir) that have added specific elements to what we perceive as popular film style. Other scholars have made similar arguments (see Miller, 2001). 5 I would like to thank the following individuals for their assistance in explaining the process of game localization to me. Any errors in this article come from my own misunderstandings of their careful explanations. Many thanks to: Sheri Pocilujko, Lora Roa, Damion Shubert at Ninjaneering, and Elena Siegman. 6 Some reviews of the game suggest it was quite racist in its depictions of African- Americans, although I cannot say if that was a contributing factor to the games immobility. It is just as likely that Square, noting the lack of a US market for RPGs outside of a narrow set of themes (fantasy worlds, sci-fi), based its decision on that factor instead. 7 Elements of the video game technoregion are already following some established models. While the USA and Japan are dominant developers and creators of Intellectual Property (IP), other world regions are employed for mass production of the hardware. As Lugo et al., explain, ‘companies such as Microsoft and Nintendo are investing in Mexico, Costa Rica and Brazil in order to develop low-cost production centres capable of exporting to the US market using the opportunities that NAFTA and other inter-regional agreements provide’ (2002). That same region is not likely to support development of software due to a lack of intellectual infrastructure and most significantly the problem of piracy, which is rampant in the region. 8 Likewise, avid readers of game magazines such as the US Electronic Gaming Monthly and UK’s Edge often are given news of games released in other nations that may never make it to home markets, and pre-release screen shots of Japanese games often show on-screen text in kanji characters. Such cultural barriers are considered a normal part of the business. 9 That may change in the future, as game publishers such as Electronic Arts become even larger and control more of the market. While the Japanese game market remains somewhat insular, the creation of more license-friendly, mass-market titles in North America and Europe may lead to a more segmented industry than we have witnessed in the past.

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MIA CONSALVO is an associate professor in the School of Telecommunications at Ohio University. Her research interests include the study of digital games, including players and industry formations and activities. Her work has been published in such journals as Television & New Media and Feminist Media Studies, as well as in the edited volume The Video Game Theory Reader. Address: School of Telecommunications, Ohio University, 9 South College Street, Athens, OH 45701, USA. [email: [email protected]]

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