West is a four-letter word

As a specialist in Japanese video games, I often hear the word 'West' being used as a contrast. However, coming from a branch of humanities that is rather awkwardly known as 'Area Studies', I have learned to hate that word.

Historically, the boundaries of what we call ‘West’ have changed erratically. Even today, people don’t really have a shared notion of what the West is. The only country that has consistently belonged to the category for as long as the term has been in use, has been Great Britain. Even France didn’t always make the grade.

The term became more powerful during the Cold War, when it was analogous to the parts of the world that had a capitalist economic structure. Sadly, even then it didn’t make any kind of sense. Cuba is not in the geographic East anymore than Japan is in the geographic West. And that’s assuming that it’s valid to divide the globe at the Pacific. Pretty convenient that this results in Britain being in the centre of the map, right?

At least during the Cold War, Europe pretty much split East-West in a relevant way. But now Eastern Europe is often lumped into the ‘West’, against ‘Eastern’ countries such as Japan and China. Meanwhile, South America belongs to neither block, and Africa is woefully invisible.

Games have never been Western

When discussing video games of the 1990s and earlier, often a distinction is drawn between Japanese games and 'Western' games, or Japanese taste and 'Western' tastes. Westerners, for example, don't play dating sims. However, this masks huge differences within the 'Western' group when it comes to console take-up and genre tastes. Europe and America played different games, often on different consoles; it has been mentioned in passing that the Dreamcast was more popular in Europe than in the US or perhaps even Japan.

Japanese developers and publishers localising their products for foreign audiences were by no means blind to this difference; many RPGs were released in Europe but not North America, because the genre was relatively unpopular there. Major differences between Europe and America continue to endure today in the mobile and social space; Zynga have far less dominance in Europe compared to the US.

I don’t want to refer to genres, tastes, trends or societies as ‘Western’ anymore. I want to be able to say, at the very least, which continent I’m talking about. It matters a great deal.

Why it matters

The arbitrary categorisation of the games industry into Japan and the West is now irrelevant. Japan has increasingly been seen as impenetrable, a universe unto itself, as companies focus on South Korea and Asia's emerging markets. On the whole, people thankfully seem to know better than to lump them all into an Eastern block. Korea and China are far too different to be treated as the same market; they monetise differently, on different platforms, with different gameplay preferences.

Our view of the West has to be just as nuanced. Time and again, games publishers from South America are turning up to conferences and begging developers to localise for their market, [romising that the money is on the table and warning that local players' dominance may become entrenched if they don’t act soon. Speakers from Eastern Europe don’t talk with the same rhetoric, but similarly point out that there is a huge untapped market for online games in the region.

This may be true, but to be able to see emerging markets in any clarity whatsoever, developers have to ditch their old, cold war metageography and imagine their audiences more complexly. We have never been Western.