6 ms·

There is a risk of oriential mysticism when talking about japan's game design sense. Yet it is a real thing. Japan has a different game design culture which gre

• wingerlang 10y ago
  > Yet it is a real thing. Doesn't seem like a "game design sense" anymore than the fact that they have an isolated culture and their games simply resonate within this culture. We all know the 'asian websites' thing which is spoken about a lot. Their websites look like shit to use, but to them it is simply the better way. Nothing "mystic" about it, it is simply how they do stuff. At least this is what I think.
  • kome 10y ago
    > We all know the 'asian websites' thing which is spoken about a lot. Their websites look like shit to use, but to them it is simply the better way. To be fair, I am kinda fed up as well of this American "Chickenshit Minimalism" ( https://medium.com/@mceglowski/chickenshit-minimalism-846fc1412524 https://medium.com/@mceglowski/chickenshit-minimalism-846fc1... ); If you've ever visited a US landing page, it's like it was designed for a five year old. Huge empty blocks of color, sentences consisting of three or four simple words in large type, very few links widely separated from each other, and almost completely static pages with very low information density. Are Americans illiterate or just easily confused? ;)
    • ZenoArrow 10y ago
      > "Are Americans illiterate or just easily confused? ;)" Joking aside, I'd argue the main reason for the rise of that style of minimalistic website was responsive design. It's much easier to design a website to be responsive if the content is sparsely laid out to begin with. There was a mobile-first trend in web design, and I believe the type of layout you're referring to was the result. Perhaps we'll find better ways of handling responsive design in the future (better in the sense of making sites that are able to better tailor themselves to available resources without a notable increase in code).
    • wingerlang 10y ago
      Of course, but that chickenshit minimalist is specifically aimed at "minimal" things that actually has a lot of bloat beneath them.
  • xo5050 10y ago
    I think people talk about Japanese websites because of the difference between the design of their websites in general and the design of other stuff in their culture. If you look at landscape design, blank spaces in modern Japanese architecture, minimalist poetry, painting, pottery, film, the websites stand out a lot. There is no "zen" in Japanese websites (again, generally speaking). The "mystic" is how we perceive their work. It exists because it's just hard to quantify art and design. We know something's there though. Famous designers and architects like Frank Lloyd Wright go to Japan and are completely floored. Did many other isolated cultures' aesthetics regularly floor their visitors? People don't get that from Japanese websites... we perceive them differently, without any sense of the "mystic." And that seems odd. I think it's an interesting question (kind of like "Why is the USA bad at soccer?" which I've heard being discussed a lot before.) but only because of Japan's unquantifiable success in other areas of design.
    • wodenokoto 10y ago
      The Japanese website doesn't stand out at all. It fits perfectly with the design language of subway advertisement, the free magazines, the urban architecture of downtown shopping areas and the quick and loud structure of their TV programming.
      • xo5050 10y ago
        they do stand out. People wouldn't be talking about them if they didn't stand out. People wouldn't independently come to similar conclusions that they weren't up to par for Japan if they didn't stand out. I think it's because a website isn't a "downtown." It's more like a single building rather than an environment built by thousands of different people. But where is the Toyo Ito of Japanese website designers? It's true those may be reasons why they look like they do, or part of the reason, but I think it's a question that is interesting. Even if Japanese websites get their "language" from those things, it at least seems like they should get their language from other places also, such as modern architecture or industrial design.
        • wodenokoto 10y ago
  • unabst 10y ago
    > Their websites look like shit to use, No no no... It's just that good web design is simply hard to find. No one is proud of these "asian websites". And it takes a while for updated good design practices to make it across the shore. Here is a decent site: http://www.jp.playstation.com/psnow/ http://www.jp.playstation.com/psnow/ And for the record, a shitty "asian" one: http://www.rakuten.co.jp/ http://www.rakuten.co.jp/
    • wingerlang 10y ago
      Oops, I meant to write "to us" not "to use". My main thing was that asian websites have more image-based content and their sentences and blocks of text look more blocky (due to uniformer characters and lack of spacing). I am not saying this is "shitty" - I am just saying that they have a different culture that makes these website the norm for them. The rakuten looks quite busy, but at least it looks discoverable. I opened amazon and eBay and frankly they look hard to use since they hide some information. But yeah the PS one looks more like a western page with a different language.
    • lmm 10y ago
      That second one looks a lot more usable. Reminds me of the old Ebay or Amazon homepages back when they were growing really big - lots of links making it easy to find whatever you wanted, maybe not beautiful according to some arbitrary aesthetic but very functional.
      • digi_owl 10y ago
        As i like to phrase it, functional has a beauty all its own.
      • unabst 10y ago
        Regardless of whether it's usable, "reminds" is right. Rakuten is a huge modern forward-looking company, yet this is the best they can do. It's basically a classifieds of clickbait.
    • enqk 10y ago
      Can you break down what's wrong with the rakuten one? I don't find it repellent at all. I also like this one: http://cookpad.com/ http://cookpad.com/
  • ZenoArrow 10y ago
    Regarding Japanese websites, one thing I've noticed is that the images used tend to be smaller than those in UK websites. For example, compare Yahoo UK to Yahoo Japan: https://uk.yahoo.com https://uk.yahoo.com http://www.yahoo.co.jp http://www.yahoo.co.jp I saw similar differences in video game magazines. I've only had limited exposure to Famitsu, but it seems to favour a collage of smaller images laid out more evenly across the pages compared to something like Edge. http://www.rpgland.com/content/media/2009/10/rpglanddotcom1106famitsu29.jpg http://www.rpgland.com/content/media/2009/10/rpglanddotcom11... http://perfectdark.retropixel.net/pdzero/scans/edge_november_03.jpg http://perfectdark.retropixel.net/pdzero/scans/edge_november... I like both styles, it's just an observation.
• pvg 10y ago
  Entire companies are isolated. So you have isolated game designers working in an isolated country. This has led to several unique understandings of how games should be developed. Google up the influence of Wizardry on JRPGs as just one well-documented counter-example. Japanese game designers in the 80s and 90s were designing in the 80s and 90s, not during the Tokugawa shogunate.
  • Nkdo 10y ago
    Sigh. Isolated doesn't mean they never, ever receive foreign influences. Take a look at their old, pre-iPhone cell phone industry. Japan didn't "invent" cell phone technology, so clearly they had at some point been influenced by foreign powers. But their own take on it has been developed in full isolation to the point where the Japanese themselves talk of their old smart flip phones as "galakei" in reference to the galapagos syndrome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_syndrome#Mobile_phones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_syndrome#Mobile... Funny you mention Wizardry because it's yet another example of galapagos syndrome in action. They took the basic ideas from the first Wizardry (even the spell naming schemes are still used to this day in games series like the Shin Megami Tensei) and then.. literally stopped looking at anything new in the series. It's like Wizardry 8 never happened in Japan. Their Wizardry clones to this day still play like Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, the first game of the series, just with "improved" (but anime-style) graphics. The innovations like the more open world, various interactions with world elements, improved positioning and movement to the turn based combat and so on. There's still no concept of movement and position (beyond being "frontline" and "backline" binaries) in games like Etrian Odyssey. And then games like Fallout came out and showed it was possible to integrate a large amount of variable interactions with the world and consequences to your choices and Japan was still making those Wizardry 1 clones as if the genre could never, ever improve on that basic game design. It's only very recently in Japan, with the success of games like Skyrim outselling their own jrpg in their home country, that japanese developers started to take note that maybe, the genre could do better than replicate the same game from the 80s ad infinitum. Which is how they ended up with games like FF15 which finally dropped the primitive, limited combat system from early wizardries that weren't even position aware. I prefer turn based RPGs, but I would take the real time FF15 over a system that doesn't even simulate the space in which you fight ignoring all potential positioning and movement tactics. Something that even board based, pen&paper RPGs can simulate. Their own take on the ability to feature combat in an actual environment usually precludes any RPG features other than pure combat, like Fire Emblem. They have good turn based combat but that's all there is to the game. No dungeons, no exploration, no world, not much choices, no nothing, just a series of combat missions after combat missions. It's the kind of hyperspecialization and narrowmindedness that led to the galakei and the inability to build anything like the modern smartphone. Nintendo is another manifestation of the galapagos that has just recently started to panic and understand that they won't be able to go on forever like that. The next Zelda will finally let go of the template created by Ocarina of Time and will play more open. That's a start, considering how much they love to remake the same thing again and again. http://digg.com/video/zelda-is-going-open-world-and-the-gameplay-trailer-is-gorgeous http://digg.com/video/zelda-is-going-open-world-and-the-game...