[…]during the late 90s and early 00s, Taiwan was a powerhouse of game development, arguably only behind the US & Japan. They produced hundreds of games, played by millions of Chinese language speakers, going as far as influencing local literature and TV. Modern hits like Naraka: Bladepoint are openly advertised as spiritual successors of that lineage.
But we don’t talk about Taiwanese games. For a myriad of reasons, from language barriers to plain old sinophobia, they are not part of the “video game canon”. They don’t matter, it’s a small, local thing.
And is not just Taiwan.
In 2019, Mia Consalvo & Christopher A. Paul published Real Games. The book examines why some games are seem as legitimate and worth talking about but not others — why Counter-Strike, StarCraft and EverQuest are “real games”, but Kim Kardashian: Hollywood and Mystery Case Files aren’t.
The book identifies three main areas that are commonly discussed when assessing if a game is “real” or not — the game’s pedigree (its developer), the contents of the game itself, and its payment structure.
This helps us understand how games like Free Fire can reach 150 million daily users but have basically zero presence in gamer circles & media — it’s a free-to-play battle royale mobile game created in Vietnam.
But I think the book lacks a fourth area, rarely discussed openly, but just as important: Who is playing these games?
[…]popular games in India will never be discussed outside of the country unless they’re first presented via a US-based media like IGN, because few non-Indians read Indian games media — even if it is in English. China is another great example — Black Myth: Wukong isn’t the first Chinese hit on Steam, its impact comes from being the first one to grab Western media & gamer’s attention.
Different nationalities all have their own game history, their cultural memory, with their own hits and particularities, but they’re rendered invisible to anyone but themselves.
It’s not “sinophobia” to not be aware of games (or any kind of media) that only ever released in a certain language and only in a certain region, especially before the Internet. Nobody has ever been afraid of freakin’ Taiwan, other than mainland Chinese kids after a fresh indoctrination class at school.
This does not just extend to games from Asia. The article mentions the European home computer scene from the '80s, but there are predominately European niche gaming genres that nearly completely passed by Americans, even if there was an English-language release, like for example the resurgence of point and click adventure games in Europe in the early to mid 2000s (started off by the runaway hit that was coincidentally called “Runaway: A Road Adventure”, an equally excellent and obtuse title, sustained by regionally successful series, like for example the dark and moody - and kinda crappy - Black Mirror series or, more recently, by series like The Whispered World and Deponia that are just as good as the Lucas Arts classics that inspired them), mid-budget RPGs from that time like Gothic and the first Witcher that at best found niche audiences outside of their core central- and Eastern-European player bases and cheaply cobbled together, yet consistently best-selling German job simulators, the only true international breakout success of this genre being the Farming Simulator series. Honorary mention: The astonishing OMSI vintage bus simulator, which is at the same time very retro in terms of its tech, yet so detailed and realistic, it caused perhaps one of the strongest waves of childhood nostalgia I’ve ever experienced.
As for titles like Free Fire, not every F2P slop that finds hundreds of millions mostly bot users in Asia even deserves any attention to begin with other than as a cautionary tale of what the industry as a whole should not move towards. It wasn’t “prejudice” that “erased” the Korean predecessors of modern P2W nonsense out of its nonexistent public consciousness in the West, but rather that these games were objectively terrible, sent the industry in a worse direction and, also only released in their home markets for many years, were only playable from there due to language, authentication and payment barriers. Terrible games with terrible business models that are only interesting as historic artifacts. When a few eventually did make it over to the West in the mid 2000s, they were rightfully panned for their predatory monetization and poor quality; I tried a handful back then and found that the reviews were right. These games flopped hard, but Western developers took notice, unfortunately.
The one good aspect about this preachy article that seems to be born out of some global South inferiority complex (seriously, just do your stuff without constantly wishing to be appreciated by Westerners) is the mention of the vibrant South American modding scene. On the other hand, I’m surprised, given that this article tries to at least touch on so many overlooked historic niches of gaming, that there’s no mention of the Famiclone scene, which to many people in Asia and especially Eastern Europe was the first contact with videogaming after the fall of the Iron Curtain: Cheap, extremely low-quality NES clones initially produced by Taiwanese and Hongkong firms, sold through flea markets, with cartridges that contained increasingly bloated collections of pirated games, sketchy ROM hacks of popular titles and even some original games (virtually none of them any good, unfortunately). These are still being made to this day, but are now sold online to unsuspecting buyers looking for affordable retro systems.
I’m a little confused by this. It seems like the question here itself is Anglocentric. These games presumably are being discussed if they’re big, just, like, in the places where they’re big. Japanese games are only discussed in the US because we have typically had a ton of ports of Japanese games. We do a lot of business with Japan, and many of our console game studios and even the consoles themselves are and were Japanese.
Nintendo, Sega, Sony, even Neogeo were all Japanese consoles. Other than Xbox, it’s tough to find an American console that was relevant in the US more recently than Atari and Colecovision. We had a lot of American computer games, cabinets, and developers for Japanese consoles, sure, but it’s not really surprising that Japan is featured prominently in the minds of American gamers.
Why would games that were released to markets that don’t port games to the US or advertise here be known here or discussed?
I’d imagine that Indian gamers very much see Indian games as part of their gaming history. Same with Vietnamese gamers and Vietnamese games, etc. Presumably they’re also better known in nearby countries and other places with overlapping languages or trade deals that involve localizations of their games.
There’s definitely some bias toward particular types of games getting attention vs not, and some of that is certainly rooted in sexism, but I’m not sure Americans mostly talking about games they actually have access to is quite the scandal this article wants to frame it as.
I’d certainly be interested in seeing some ports from countries that we don’t see many games getting much attention among gamers in the US and other primarily English speaking countries.
Just like pretty much all media ever really. It’s not like many novels, songs, movies and TV shows are world wide hits either.
I’m curious once translation technology advances if one day we’ll get some kind of cultural bubble “pop” where suddenly everyone can enjoy global media without the language barriers.
Is this a video game specific phenomenon? Just an example, how many of an American “Top 100 Greatest Movies of All Time” are from India?
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