The absence of a clear ending in Snatcher and Metal Gear, the fragmented and seemingly empty narrative of Dark Souls, the very convoluted plot of Kingdom Hearts or the impossible world of Super Mario Bros are difficult to see in a European or American game. why? What has made us understand the narration and presentation of a video game in such different ways?
This article collects the reasons and how they have crystallized in different Japanese cultural expressions that have caused Eastern video games to differ from Western ones. The objective is twofold: to arrive at an explanation of why it is sometimes so difficult for us to understand or accept their narratives and also to discover if we are really that different or not.
The cultural elements capable of expressing the voice of an author are a mixture of those that preceded him, both from his own field and from others external to him. Hideo Kojima’s video games are influenced by cinema and literature, Shigeru Miyamoto’s by puppets and classic manga, and Hidetaka Miyazaki’s by American and European literature, book-games and other video games such as ICO .
In other words, to understand why Japanese video games are the way they are, we must talk about cinema, theater, manga and what impacted this society to be so different from the Western one; But neither can we forget that, as we shall see, the video game is one of the cultural expressions that has best absorbed influences from around the world to the point of acquiring an almost global voice. Unlike other arts, in the video game artists of all kinds converge in development studios with increasing diversity, which facilitates the existence of a globalized discourse instead of one that differentiates us by regions.
Fear and appreciation for emptiness sets us apart
In order to understand which is the first germ and what differentiates us from each other in our artistic production we have to refer to the concept of ’emptiness’. In the West we fear it as much as death. The expression horror vacui refers precisely to this : the terror of the blank page, of having nothing to do or to think about, death, a painting that is not loaded with elements or a movie in which not many things happen.
All of this makes us uneasy. But while in the West the ‘full’ is admired : the rooms with defining furniture, the paintings full of details and the stories that answer all the questions proposed, in Japan the same is done with the ’emptiness’ . For this reason, unfurnished rooms are sought with panels that open so that the interior merges with the exterior and empties, paintings with blank spaces that penetrate and empty the represented, and a type of theater, the nō, with such slow movements who intend to stop time in that void. All of this comes from Zen.
In Spain it is common to hear the expression: “I have to be zen” to refer to calm down, but Zen, briefly explained and without implying that I am an expert in the field, seeks to contemplate this void , that nothingness to penetrate into the cosmic nature; what in the West is usually explained as ” attaining enlightenment .” But as Fernando Gª Gutierrez explains in his book Zen and Japanese art , explaining Zen and its nuances was not easy at all, that is why Japanese architecture, painting, theater and dance sought to build a common artistic language to communicate this to others. way of seeing the world and, in turn, to serve as a means for one’s own contemplation of that void.
The void during the Muromachi period
Miyamoto has sometimes been linked to the Japanese puppet theaterThe contemplation of the void seeks to suggest rather than show , which ends up translating into a certain interaction on the part of the one who looks towards the gaze. Whoever observes a nō theater performance, its sobriety, its slow movements, the almost non-existent decoration, the division of its stage into several parts … is immersed in a riddle of metaphors in which they participate by immersing themselves in the void they cause, such Javier Vives tells in his book The Japanese Theater and the Plastic Arts .
That he insists so much on the theater is no coincidence. Articles such as The Interactive Theater of Video Games: The Gamer as Playwright, Director, and Actor by Daniel and Sidney Homan, or Play’s the Thing: A Framework to Study Videogames as Performance by Clara Fernández Vara point to the relationship between theater and video game , both by the type of spectator they share, since they participate in the performance, as well as by the very act of representing a performance, which is still a game played by actors.
Relating this to our object of study, it has been many times that Shigeru Miyamoto has been related to bunraku , a type of Japanese theater also closely related to Zen, in which the puppets are the protagonists and which in turn connects with the theme of Super Mario Bros. 3 : Everything is a function.
Are zen and emptiness characteristic of the Japanese video game?
From the Muromachi period, between 1336 and 1573, artistic expressions were built to explain Zen and favor the observation of emptiness. In the 70s, 80s and 90s, dates in which we can frame the childhood and youth of the Japanese video game authors we cited, the reason why houses, paintings or theater and cinema had Zen in their marrow for various reasons, but part of their language was still there, so they were influenced.
With the defeat of Japan during World War II , after the fall of the bombs, America led its troops to the archipelago and also to its Hollywood, which was increasingly erasing the discourse of Zen and its presence in its indigenous art. Own Hideo Kojima acknowledges that he began to admire the American cinema because his father, someone who initially wanted to join the army to fight for the empire, ended up being seduced by so attractive frivolity of the United States.
To continue with this cocktail of influences that softened Zen in art, it is time to talk about manga . The world cultural ambassador of Japan is still a way to collect what Disney has taught , only using fixed shots, many looks, less movement and a greater plot load for not having means after the war to produce that quality of animation.
And not only the American cinema or Disney softened the influences of Zen , also Western fantasy. Japan looked at us for something exotic and came across dragons from The Lord of the Rings and from Dungeons and Dragons. With them, Shonen Jump herself colluded with Enix to kick off their successful Dragon Quest series on the orders of Kazuhiko Torishima, editor of Akira Toriyama.
How Japanese narratives camouflage the language of Zen
In her fabulous book ‘Atari to Zelda: Japan’s Videogames in Global Contexts’, Mia Consalvo tells us about this hybridization, about this mixture that inhabits the Japanese video game with the West and how she has ended up producing works between East and West, but, What about one place and what about another?
Bloodborne , for example, dresses like a Westerner. It is a mix between George RR Martin’s book: The Fevre Dream , Lovecraft, Berserk (as always), but it also has a narrative that, like that nō theater, requires the player to lose himself in it , empty himself and immerse himself in questions that have no answer, because they have to give them. The same is the case with Dark Souls , whose aesthetic draws from Western fantasy.
Super Mario Bros is a puppet theater in which everything is representation. There is no context, there is no before or after, everything is the moment, the suggestion that is played, is the bunraku work boxed in a stage; but its protagonists are Italian-Americans, princesses and dinosaurs painted as characters from the manga inspired by Disney .
Hideo Kojima, when he finished his first version of Snatcher, said in an interview that he did not want to close the game with an obvious ending, since he wanted the player to make his own by entering the fiction and making the work his own.
Does the Westerner understand the language that survived Zen?
All these clues, hidden in the narratives of the video games of each author, suggest that the language that they wanted to prepare to talk about Zen survived , only camouflaged and mixed in the rest of the influences and present among them almost accidentally. It no longer manages to show us that cosmic nature of the void, but it does maintain that special interaction that theater, Japanese architecture or painting demanded of whoever looked at them.
The Japanese house opens to infinity, it is not delimited by walls in the same way that a story in a Japanese video game tends to have no limits, to leave questions in the air. And this is very difficult for the Westerner who suffers from ‘Japanism’, that is, who loves Japan only in the terms that interests him. Because studying Japanese culture is not just watching anime or appreciating a specific drawing style or samurai, it is also knowing how to get to the root of why their stories tend to be ’empty’ at the end of these or even why many manga authors it is difficult for them to finish their work. What ends is not empty, it is a ‘full’, it is partly western.
To the Westerner, emptiness causes uneaseIt is precisely for this reason that the narratives from here and there differ, in many cases but not in all. It is also the reason why so many people in our country are angry that Metal Gear Solid V does not have a clear ending or that they say that Demon’s Souls has no history; It also explains why they keep asking Miyamoto to explain the true relationship between Peach, Bowser and Mario and he offers silence as an answer. Because the emptiness causes uneasiness to the Westerner.
And where does the lore mess from Kingdom Hearts come into this? Is it also because of that language to explain the residual Zen that has come to the video game? Well, as a fan that I am, let me fool myself and believe that yes … But really: damn Nomura.
