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| Regional preferences in videogames by Jerry Whorebach 01/03/2014, 7:28am PST | ||||
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From an old Wired interview with Crytek's Joshua Howard, executive producer of Warface, on how his team was custom-tailoring their FTP FPS to appeal to different regions:
The weapon recoil is itself interesting, though. It turns out that Russian players in general like their weapon recoil strong. Asian regions? Not so much. Europe and North America occupy a Goldilocks zone of their own with a weapon recoil that's not too strong and not too slight. It should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with videogame culture that Asians are inherently gamist and Europeans are inherently simulationist. The cause of this divide is equally obvious: people like what they're familiar with. Asians grew up playing mostly arcade and console games, as the demands of Asian character sets made personal computers expensive and inefficient. Europeans grew up playing mostly computer games, as a lack of disposable income and relatively high taxes on imported luxury goods made console gaming equally inaccessible. (Most credit the PlayStation with making consoles appealing to Europeans. Which it certainly did, but more because optical media finally made piracy nearly as widespread and affordable as it was on the PCs, rather than because of any qualities specific to the games themselves. Meanwhile, much of Asia still hasn't embraced the personal computer, with internet culture being largely synonymous with cell phone culture in many regions, and PC games being most popularly played in the modern arcades - LAN cafes.) It's really only us North Americans who have any kind of perspective on design issues like these. As the home of both Atari and IBM, we were always spoiled for choice when it came to the kind of experiences we had access to, a fortunate situation which lead to arguably the most enlightened and inclusive gaming culture on the planet. Hurrah for us! (A much more interesting question, at least to me, is why PC games have always been simulationist and console games have always been gamist. It's tempting to attribute the split to hardware limitations or consumer demographics, and those undoubtedly played a role. However, I tend to think an equally important factor was the low barrier to entry (and similarly low financial stakes) of PC development leading to more independent developers creating the kind of softs that were fun to design and program - simulations. Whereas the corporations who developed console games had to be deeply invested just to bring a cartridge to market, which obligated their developers to create games which were first and foremost fun to actually play.) |
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Regional preferences in videogames by 01/03/2014, 7:28am PST  Good post. Question: Definition of gamist vs simulationist NT by 01/03/2014, 7:49am PST Simulationist games focus on lots of elements and authenticity, gamist ones are by 01/03/2014, 1:15pm PST How far can gamist go up the complexity curve before it wraps to simulationist? by 01/03/2014, 10:53am PST I think it's important to avoid conflating agenda with execution. by 01/04/2014, 4:13am PST I think there's a historical Roberta Williams factor at play by 01/03/2014, 6:46pm PST |
