[quote=âboingboing, post:1, topic:54552â]On the flip side, how about âJapanese gaming culture?â[/quote]This description doesnât sound particularly different from âWesternâ gaming culture.
I liked watching the genre evolve from speedrun demos, like the famous Mario 3 tool assisted run, to the âLPâ format, where the game was played at a normal pace, typically by an experienced player. I remember people initially referring to the videos as âlongplaysâ, as a record metaphor. At some point âLetâs Play:____â videos came out, typically with commentary. Now it seems like the commentary is becoming the focus, although there have been long standing precedents like the Angry Video Game (formerly Nintendo) Nerd, but that comes from a journalistic background. I donât know what the future of gameplay vlogging will be, but I hope shows like Game Center CX become more popular.
My kid watches these videos, and makes them, and I simply canât fathom how this is fun. I am old.
Not a perfect relevancy match, but Iâm a Canadian doing a weekly Letâs Play show playing Japanese games.
Itâs called Retro Monogatari and thereâs one episode so far. Pure, uncut, unadulterated, Creative Commons goodness.
Oh, my cohost Michi is Japanese. There, that brings us up to one hundred percent relevant to this topic.
In the first episode we play a Famicom game made by Takeshi Kitano, who made MXC (well, the un-dubbed original, Takeshiâs Castle). The goal of the show is to showcase formative early Nintendo games that might not have made it across the ocean.
Tyop watch: thatâs Anijya not Aniyja.
I see kids playing smart phone games all the time on the train in Japan. One day I saw a kid playing a taiko (drum) game but something was off. He was drumming the air vigorously without touching the phone. âHmmâ I thought âhe must have some kind of bluetooth controller.â After some minutes I realised he was watching a recording of a game and âplayingâ along.
I wonder if this difference in culture has a bearing on Nintendoâs crackdown on everything âLetâs Playâ in the last few years - as I understand it Nintendo will actively block any video containing even a small section of any of their games using Youtubeâs dodgy copyright infringement policies to essentially censor the videos, keeping them from earning any ad revenue during the time when the video would be most likely to ear any money for the producer.
I just wonder if itâs a confluence of âtheyâre making money that should be oursâ, âwe canât control what they say/negative opinionsâ and a sort of misunderstanding of the culture in that they simply âdonât do itâ over thereâŚ?
Japanese Letâs Players arenât particularly rare, even those who play western games, you just have to know where to find them. Have a look at www.nicovideo.jp â switch your region to Japan in the drop-down menu at the very bottom of the page and search for âSteamâ.
Niconico caters to various quirky cultural preferences of Japanese viewers better than youtube, timed audience comments that scroll over the video being a particular stand-out feature.
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