Piracy and Games in Asia Edited by Krish Raghav

e:\>_ Asian gaming histories e-zine | Issue 1 | Aug 2014 Piracy and games in Asia edited by Krish Raghav 1 CONTENTS Editorial: Towards a working theory of piracy and games in Asia Krish Raghav 04 Gaming with Chinese characteristics: Two views from the Middle Kingdom “ZnyRock” and Junliang Huang 06 (translated by Chanchan Wang, Ann Luo & Xiao Zhang) Between the causeway: Piracy and games in 90s Singapore Aron Gan 12 There and back again: Discovering videogames in Aurangabad, India Kunal Joshi 17 A continent of gaming stories: despatches from Vietnam, Pakistan and the Philippines Quang Nguyen, Faizan Rafi Hashmi 21 and Maria Carmencita Morales August 2014 | http://krishcat.com/edrive | Twitter: @krishraghav cover photograph by Karthik Krishnaswamy (madraseye.tumblr.com) 2 The e:\>_ Manifesto Gaming histories from Asia are not partial, provincial, belated or ‘emerging’ For over two decades, large parts of the Asian continent were outside the world’s formal gaming markets. But that doesn’t mean games weren’t being played, or made, or modded. ‘Developing’ Asia had its own unique gaming vernacular - a grey market and games culture defined by a constant sense of improvisation, clever innovation, and bending games software and hardware to one’s own will. e:\>_ is about chronicling these experiences. We’re interested in the culture of playing videogames in countries across Asia, and stories about relationships and communities that spring up around them. Insightful writing on videogames in Asia is scarce, and often ham- strung by cliché, stereotype and harmful exoticisation. We’re trying to fix that. Find us at http://krishcat.com/edrive. We’d love to hear from you. e:\>_ is published on a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. More information online: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ 3 EDITORIAL Towards a Working Theory of Piracy and Games in Asia Kids at a street-side arcade in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Photo by Karthik Krishnaswamy (http://madraseye.tumblr.com) If there is a common language to gaming across the Asian continent, it is that of access to pirated games. While the specifics of videogame culture vary wildly between countries across the continent, many are probably intimately familiar with dabbling in ‘hacked’ consoles, choos- ing cheap CDs from a roadside shop, and copying the files from the ‘CRACK’ folder into your installation directory. The language of faked, modded, improvised, hacked, cracked, cloned and copied games is integral to Asia’s gaming vernacular. Most countries in Asia were outside the world’s ‘formal’ gaming industry, and pirated games often the only means of access to the medium. Many of these grey markets and structures of discovery exist to this day, and their improvised modes of operation are part of what make Asian gaming histories so unique. 4 The question this issue hopes to ask is: What does it mean to experience two decades of games through the interlocking systems, practices and dynamics of what we dub ‘piracy’? ‘Piracy’ here could refer to software as well as hardware, and spaces both physical (markets, cyber cafes, schools) and psychological that mediate the discovery and commercial exchange of games. Aron Gan, from Singapore, unpacks the psychological landscape of grey markets and access to cheap, pirated games. Consuming pirated games, he argues, was just as much about social convention, and ‘fitting in’, as it was about saving money (Page 12). Junliang Huang and “ZnYRock” write about China’s unique journey to gaming ‘moderni- ty’, and how a top-down crackdown drove games culture underground. In 1990s China, piracy becomes an additional charge to level at gamers, part of a moral panic over what the government calls ‘electronic heroin’ (Page 6). Kunal Joshi writes about piracy in a small Indian city (Page 17), and how gaming histories are remixed, mashed up and re-arranged by gamers cut-off from a formal global market and community. And we get refracted views of different histories, different time- lines, through despatches from Vietnam, Pakistan and the Philippines (Page 21). Joshi once believed that The Legend of Zelda was a straight rip-off of a movie tie-in game he’d played earlier called Willow. I once believed that an obscure 3d adventure game called Largo Winch: Empire Under Threat was the defining game of the early 2000s. Quang Nguyen, from Hanoi, believed that Chocobo Racing was Sony’s premier racing game IP. Junliang Huang tells us that the only ‘Battlefield’ Chinese gamers knew before the current one was an RPG based on a Chinese historical classic, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. These alternate viewpoints aren’t just amusing anecdotes to underscore the quaint ‘pro- vinciality’ of Asian gaming histories. They are perspectives that emerged from particu- lar, complete structures of play and discovery. They are windows into different ways of looking at games - at what they mean, where they came from, and the million directions they could go in the future. Krish Raghav is a comic book artist, games critic and policy analyst in Singapore. He shares a hometown with Dhalsim from Street Fighter, but cannot shoot fireballs from his face. He writes at http://krishcat.com 5 gaming with chinese characteristics two views from the middle kingdom An internet cafe, or ‘网吧‘ in Turpan, China. Photo by Tom Thai (https://www.flickr.com/photos/eviltomthai/3579663737/) PARADISE LOST: CHINA’S UNDERGROUND ARCADES by ZnYRock, translated by Ann Luo and Xiao Zhang I he development path of China’s video game industry is quite unique compared to other Asian countries. In the 1980s, video games entered the Chinese market for Tthe first time, pitched as an ‘entertainment lifestyle.’ Some open-minded young people became its first batch of followers - the first Chinese gamers. Back then, most games came from East Asia, especially Japan. I group myself into the ‘second generation’ of videogame players in China - my father played video game earlier than me. The first video game I played was Battle City on the Nintendo Famicom, a console my father bought. It was developed by Namco and hit the market in 1990. 6 The reason my father’s generation was exposed to video games was that he travelled on business, and his trips took him to relatively developed Chinese cities like Shenzhen and Beijing. It was during one of these Beijing trips that he picked up an original Famicom, or what Chinese gamers called ‘红白机’, or the ‘Red and White Machine.’ Here I should elaborate on the two kinds of consoles you could buy in China - the standard Famicom (hacked or original), and the “FC machine”. The FC machine was a hacked Fam- icom, sold as an integrated “learning device”with a standard PC keyboard and a Famicom cartridge slot. It was a local innovation catering to Chinese game players, but its compat- ibility with Famicom cartridges was not authorized by Nintendo. In other words, it was a copycat, a infringing product. But its low price was more acceptable for Chinese families back then, so it became quite popular, and it is this copycat than nurtured the second generation of game players in China. A Chinese “FC Machine” with game cartridges. A ‘Red and White Machine.’ Photo from 163.com It’s important to know that back then, most Chinese families even didn’t have a TV set. I lived in a so-called second-tier city, so there was also no way for my father to get new games or software for his new purchase. So there was no material foundation for the growth of the video game industry in China. However, by the time I started playing games, the TV was a common home appliance, and many began to upgrade their black-and-white TV to colour ones. So in that sense I was lucky to be born some time after the Chinese Reform-and-Opening period. My father was a teacher, and only well-educated people who grew up in this developmental period of China could accept the concept of video games as a medium to consume and as a form of entertainment. No videogames were localized, so some knowledge of English or Japanese was necessary. Even so, since many games weren’t really text heavy, even children could easily find a way to enjoy the games, and put their own spin on the stories within. At that period, Japanese games ruled the market, and most of the popular games were action side-scrollers like Contra. Then, in the early to mid-1990s, Chinese game players were introduced into a new world - the videogame arcade. 7 II Not long after arcades began to sprout up across cities in China, a government campaign to eliminate pornography and illegal publications swept through China. The media had widely reported violent crimes committed by teenagers, who were report- edly driven by their addiction to “electronic games” in these arcades. The general public responded to video gaming culture with strong negativity. The public opinion dubbed video games as “electronic heroin”. This led to the systematic shutting down and “elimi- nation” of arcades country-wide. This backlash wasn’t just in China. Japan, too, had tried to oppose the popularity of arcades by invoking a moral panic. Both China and Japan had taken similar kinds of measures but somehow, in Japan, the gaming industry grew expo- nentially afterwards. Japan’s campaign to eliminate video gaming culture wasn’t quite as debilitating as China’s. Even so, a strong demand for electronic games and video games still remained. The neigh- bourhood arcades went underground, commonly known as 包机厅, or “Bāojītīng” These small-scale underground arcades were usually hidden in alleys and operated illegally, so to speak.

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