Japan is a harsh country. No, I'm not referring to the near manic work ethic that seems infused into the populace. Nor am I commenting on the shocking rate of suicide amongst Japanese youths. I'm not even referring to all the obscure things I've had told to me from either my editor (who currently lives there) or my ex-girlfriend (who is in fact Japanese, not that she liked games in the slightest, much to my disappointment). What I'm referring to is the geography of the country. About 70% of it is uninhabitable so millions of people are left to squeeze into the little space that remains, hence the small buildings and vertical car parks.

What has this got to do with anything? It means that the Japanese nation is an industrious one. Its always had to be since it has literally no natural resources of its own. Throughout its history it has borrowed elements from other cultures and adapted them to its own. The fact that it seems able to do so with such individuality and flair is why sometimes this is forgotten. We think of so many things as being intrinsically Japanese that are in fact not. Take video games, for instance. Ask most gamers where they believe the spiritual home of gaming is and they will say Japan, and maybe rightly so. After all, Nintendo, and Sony, the three companies that have radically shaped our gaming culture like no other, are all of course Japanese. But in fact, gaming is a Western invention, an American one in actuality. Gaming was born when a computer engineer was asked to adapt the latest computing technology to offer some sort of entertaining amusement for visitors on an American airbase and thus illustrate the accessibility of technology to Billy Average. The result was a game called Pong and whilst Miyamoto's Super Bros may have changed gaming forever it was Pong that gave birth to it.

To many gamers the gaming cultures of the East and the West are in fact not at all distinct and instead form one, large pixelated whole where rifle-butting an alien in the head is just as common as commanding a team of plant-men to carry a Duracell back to your spaceship. Games that originate from both sides of the world share the shelves of our gaming stores and unless you're interested enough to look into it chances are that you'll never know one from the other. Whilst the same is becoming increasingly the case in Japan, however, there's still no denying that there are in fact some quite major differences between the two gaming cultures. A simple way to demonstrate this is to look at the first person shooter.

Now, in the West, FPS's have dominated our market for several years. Whilst many continue to predict that its heyday is drawing to a close, it still persists in dominating our gaming culture. You need only look as far as the really big releases this year in the west; 3, 2, Half Life 2 and San Andreas. Yes, I realise that San Andreas is third person but the is still big business. Look to however and the FPS is a virtually ignored genre. RPG's, anything made by and collecting monsters instead dominate the gaming scene. In turn, Nintendo is struggling in the west and collecting monsters is so last year. Whilst is huge and certain RPG's do gain widespread success (Fable, for instance, though this is of course a western game) it is still very much a niche market.

This difference is plainly a cultural one. It has been demonstrated that the wants of eastern gamers are different from the west in one fundamental way. Whilst westerners and particularly Americans like to run around destroying stuff and killing each other in as violent and brutal a way as possible, the Japanese are generally a lot more fascinated by working together in an effort to overcome obstacles. Of course, both RPG's and FPS's can be played alone and I of course recognise that FPS's offer on the whole a far more enjoyable spirit than RPG's but the difference lies more in the fundamental spirit of the games themselves. In the vast majority of RPG's the player embarks upon a quest in which throughout the narrative they form a team with other characters by forming the "party". Within each party individual members will have particular skills and abilities that when used in combination with their companions should allow the player to defeat any adversary. On the other hand, despite any cooperative or cosy dressing you may apply to an FPS it is still fundamentally about looking through the eyes of one person as they single-handedly slaughter hundreds of others.

Of course there are games that both the east and west buy in their thousands, though it is worth noting that these are normally Japanese games and not western games. Though some titles have achieved a certain level of success in Japan recently (GTA and The Getaway, for instance) it is very uncommon to see a western game in the Japanese charts; conversely it's quite the norm for Japanese games to feature heavily in the western charts. This can of course be accredited to the fact that gaming as we know it today is at least based in Japanese game design even though the western scene is now rivalling its eastern rivals in terms of sales. They've been doing it longer and many would still say that they do it better. They are also far more fanatical about it.

Whilst we may see the odd tabloid side story about people queuing up for San Andreas and how it broke opening day records across the entire entertainment industry, gaming is still not anywhere near as infused in the western psyche as it is the eastern. We spend lots of money on games, we like gaming and even those that don't are now quite accustomed to those that do. But in South Korea, for instance, Computer Stores host nightlong sessions of MMORPG's for teenagers and young professionals. In Japan kerbside toy dispensers give away plastic Mario's and Vincent Valentine's; people dress up as gaming characters and go to parties. Fundamentally gaming is far more engrained. This is arguably the cause for another diversity in our tastes. How often have you read about some fantastically imaginative import game only to later learn that it has been denied western release for being too quirky? For the Japanese a quirky game is no more bizarre than a slightly surreal late night TV show for stoners or a peculiar cover on the B-side of a Kylie Minogue single. For many in the west, however, a quirky game is something that not only doesn't interest people but can often alienate them too. This makes sense, in a way, but it also follows that as gaming attains more acceptance so will the more leftfield titles. A game like Katamari Damashii (possibly the best game on PS2, in my humble opinion) did at least manage an American release if not a European one.

But as open minded as the Japanese gamer may seem they also know what they like and much of the time that is very much not the same as we do. The has had a fantastic year in the west going from strength to strength. The machine is not only the most sophisticated home console on the market, but have also lead the way in console gaming. In Japan, however, the Xbox has been fiercely rejected. In the first week of December for instance the stormed into the charts with opening week sales of 468,883 units. The meanwhile shifted 93,829 pieces and even the GBA SP managed 27,313. The Xbox sales? 621. It was even outsold by the original GBA, though it did manage to beat the at least. Perhaps it is the western-centric release schedule; perhaps it is a reflexive Japanese reaction to an American machine in the market. Either way you have to note that the machine that has impressed the most in the west this year has had literally no impact in the east whatsoever.

The question is whether western developers will continue to grow at the same rate as the western market and perhaps even in time have the same effect on eastern markets that they have had in ours. Japan, like everywhere else in the world, is becoming more Americanised and whilst it will obviously always retain its own very rich and unique culture this does not mean that American and European gaming will not be able to gain more acceptance in their gaming markets. for one is a company that I would have thought will never rest until it has cracked a market as large as the Japanese.

But at the end of the day does any of this really matter? I personally am very happy for both markets to continue offering different styles of game and for me to able to pick and choose between the two. It's also really interesting to see games from one region imitating those of another, sometimes successfully (like Fable, though do note that in opposition to almost any Japanese is based around the idea of shaping oneself and not instead a virtual world or peoples) and sometimes not so successfully (Sudeki, for instance). It's healthy for gaming to have two perspectives and I would much prefer for the two to compliment each other rather than for one to totally dominate.

By Ben Parfitt