The growth of the indie scene, and the importance of indie games, has been one of the defining facets of the games industry over the last ten years. The explosion of digital distribution, a raft of new platforms (hello Steam, hello App Store!) and a lowering of the general barrier to entry for making games have all been factors, and it’s made for some exciting – and entirely novel – gaming experiences.
When I think about my favourite indie games, however, very few of them are Japanese. I think about games like Braid, The Stanley Parable, Journey, Fez, Rogue Legacy and Papers, Please… and they’re just the tip of an absolutely enormous iceberg. When I think about Japanese indies, on the other hand, far fewer games come to mind.
Should we be surprised that independent games from Japan haven’t made more of a global impact in recent years?
Yes, we’re talking about one country versus indie projects from all over the world, but Japan has traditionally been such a powerhouse in the world of game development that that kind of comparison can be justified. After all, if I think of all the games I loved as a teenager, a disproportionately high number of them are from Japan.
Japan’s importance on the gaming world stage has certainly diminished greatly since then, but should we be surprised that independent games from Japan haven’t made more of a global impact in recent years? Why is this that? What’s the scene like within Japan? And how are things changing?
These are complicated questions, and as an outsider looking in, all I can really do is give you some food for thought, based on conversations with numerous game creators working in Japan. I should also say, right from the outset, that my first proper introduction to the Japanese indie scene was back in July when I attended BitSummit in Kyoto, the yearly indie games expo. It was a great show, and brilliant starting point, but at the same time, it’s a show established by ex-pats, with a large proportion of ex-pats exhibiting. It presents, in other words, a skewed – albeit fascinating - window into that world. Even so, simply highlighting just how many Westerners there are in living in Japan making games - beyond the well-known outfits like Dylan Cuthbert’s Q-Games and Giles Goddard’s Vitei - is interesting in and of itself.
“I’ve been working in games in Japan for about six years, now,” says John Davis, one of the BitSummit founders. “I started at Grasshopper Manufacture, doing PR there, and then came and moved here to Kyoto to work at Q-Games with Dylan Cuthbert. And while I was there, James Mielke, who used to be editor for 1-Up and EGM as well, he also came to Q. And after a year there… Mielke had this idea – ‘I want to do a Japanese indie games festival.’”
“There was the perception that there wasn’t a strong indie community here,” he continues, “and that was kind of true, I think it was more fractured about four years ago when we started. There were a lot of people doing things but it wasn’t like indies in the West now, where you have a really big sense of community. And so the purpose was to show that there are Japanese indies and also give them some exposure with the West.”
This year's flyer.
The show as a whole has grown enormously in the four years it’s been running, and this year had 80 or 90 developers showing off about a hundred games. “We’re really proud of what this show has done,” continues Davis. “I think that it’s probably brought together Japanese indies in a way that they didn’t really have an outlet for previously.”
The scene on display at BitSummit, then, is certainly gaining momentum, but I’ve often wondered about the drive to become independent in Japan in general. From a broad cultural perspective, after all, groups are an intrinsic part of Japanese society. Individuality isn’t prized in the same way it is somewhere like the United States or Australia. Japan also has less of an entrepreneurial culture and a tendency to be risk-averse. Does that mean budding Japanese game designers are less likely to go out on their own?
“I think there’s a perception that when you leave school, or something, that you go to a big company,” says Davis. “It’s kind of that old zaibatsu culture that Japan had, like big corporations, employment for life, and people, they graduate, and if they want to work in game dev, they go to a Capcom or a Square or something like that. I think that now with Steam and Sony supporting indies so much, and Nintendo now, Microsoft as well, there’s this kind of people pushing from the bottom up.”
Masaya Matsuura, the President of NanaOn-Sha and creator of PaRappa the Rapper, believes that this zaibatsu culture is still a big thing in Japan. “Recently,” he tells me, “young Japanese people want to be stable, very stable, so they want to be hired by the more stable companies. This kind of thing makes a bad difference for the creativity of the country sometimes. I can say it in a simple way – to be creative you have to be risky, so this kind of balance? Stable, [and] creative will not match. It’s kind of a simple thing.”
Swery, of Deadly Premonition fame, agrees that there are still cultural obstacles. Up and coming developers in places like Europe, he believes, “seem to be more interested, or have more of an enthusiasm, to be independent than I believe people in Japan do. Here in Japan there still does seem to be a culture of wanting to get into a good big company and not strive off on your own.”
With this in mind, however, it’s worth pointing out that Japan actually does have one of the richest and most vibrant independent publishing scenes in the world, but it’s almost all within its own borders. I’m talking about doujinshi, or self-published manga, and it’s absolutely massive. It has a host of conventions, including the long-running and world-famous Comiket (Comic Market), and you’ll find doujinshi (new and second hand) being sold alongside official manga all over Japan.
One set of halls at Comiket. 8.7 million comics were sold during Comic Market 85 in Dec 2013.
Doujinshi is known in the West as the Japanese equivalent of slash fiction – a world in which every imaginable combination of characters can be paired up, but it is also a place where established canon is expanded upon, and where fans can experience new adventures in universes they love. There’s also a lot of original content. At its core, though, doujinshi is work by fans for fans, and the production values are often impressively high.
With such a thriving artistic community creating manga (and anime), it shouldn’t be surprising to discover that there are also doujin game creators, and they’re mostly separate to what we would call “indie”. How big is the doujin game scene? “Absolutely huge,” replies Alvin Phu, the CEO and Lead Developer for indie outfit Hanaji Games. “Not a lot of people in the West see that stuff.”
A recent Tokyo Indies meet-up.
Phu runs Tokyo Indies, “a monthly indie and doujin meet-up in Shibuya. We get about eighty, a hundred people coming every month.” Tokyo Indies is one of the main indie meet-ups in Japan, the other being Sagar Patel’s (another ex-pat) monthly Kyoto Indies meet-up. “For me, making Tokyo Indies,” Phu continues, “I kind of want to unite both of those crowds together. A lot of people are like – oh, I don’t speak English, or – oh, I’m doujin, I don’t even know what indie means.”
This highlights a fundamental distinction between the two. Broadly speaking you might say “indies” are setting out to forge a career, while “doujin” are creating games as a hobby, as passion projects first and foremost. “There’s a lot of that,” Phu replies when I ask if that’s the case, “but isn’t it every game dev’s dream to make games for a living? Who wouldn’t want to do that?”
Phu believes it’s the dense, established nature of game development in Japan that’s an impediment. “There are so many game companies within this small space,” he says, “that it doesn’t really make sense, financially, to even go and make your own thing. And so, a lot of those guys, they also work for the big game companies, but they want to make some small stuff too, so it’s not really a big deal for it to go commercial, or whatever. It doesn’t really matter.”
Hanaji's Dot Matrix Hero, in which the player is cast as an indie dev making an action RPG.
“It's more fan based,” says Chris McLaughlin, a programmer at Vitei Backroom, a tiny studio established by long-time Nintendo collaborator Vitei. “It's making games for the love of making games, really and not making money. Japanese people don't, at least by my measure… look at making games by themselves as a way to make money, as a way to survive as a job, it's like, ‘This is something I'm doing for fun and I can sell it at Comiket.’”
Alex May, the “audio wizard” at Vitei Backroom, compares it to the demo scene. “It’s pure indie. It's like, ‘Screw the money, does your game look better than my game?’, that's what it's about,” he tells me. “When you go to Comiket people will buy the game, and maybe you get a bit of extra money but that's not important. Does your game look better than my game? If it's actually copying a well-established idea, that's the whole idea of doujin, it's fan art, really. If it's copying well-established ideas, that's fine. Does it look better than theirs? That's what's important.”
The vast majority of doujin works live solely within the domestic market, where they’re allowed not only to exist, but to thrive.
The vast majority of doujin works live solely within the domestic market, where they’re allowed not only to exist, but to thrive. It’s a uniquely Japanese scene, in which intellectual property holders don’t prosecute the artists creating – and selling - derivative works. (For further info, read this excellent piece.) Thus, in addition to the obvious language and cultural barriers, there’s even a legal grounding for why many doujin projects aren’t able to be readily transposed elsewhere.
This means there’s a huge amount of game content being created in Japan that we’ll never see. It’s not just the self-proclaimed doujin game makers, either. There are plenty of “indie” creators whose work – for a variety of reasons - may never leave Japan. A lot of the games at BitSummit “probably won’t even be released commercially; they’re just pet projects,” says John Davis. “There’s a lot of guys… that have other jobs and they’re indie in the true, like, ‘making games in my garage’ type of thing. Platforms definitely have a lot to do with it. Steam is not that big here, and the dominant console is PS4, and it’s not as easy to release there as to release on Steam or something. And really, the biggest platforms here are mobile platforms, so there’s a lot of that there also.”
Continues
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