Sunday 11 March 2012

Speculating Wildly about Culture

In this post at therpgsite, a lot of people are speculating about why RPGs are apparently not popular in some countries (India, China, etc.) while relatively popular in others (UK, USA, etc.). Seeing as I enjoy speculating wildly about culture, I threw my own hat into the ring, and will now elaborate on to your education and edification (or rejection and dissatisfaction, whichever you prefer).

First, I've been around the world enough to know that cultural differences are real and have an actual impact on the way people think and behave. People are the same in Japan, France, Kazakhstan, Israel and the UK in that they like good food, having fun, having sex, they care about their families, they worry about the future, and so on, as you would expect: the core is the same. But there are differences around the edges. For instance, in Japan there is no real culture of entertaining in the home. When people socialise they tend to do it outside - at bars, restaurants, clubs, whatever - and house parties are pretty rare (although they do happen).

It would be naive to assume that cultural differences like this would not have an effect on how the practice of playing RPGs translates between cultures. Certainly, in the naive sense, in societies like Japan where people tend not to socialise in the home as much as they do in the UK or North America, there is less of a culture of parlour games and hence a correspondingly smaller window for RPGs to enter.

But also, more deep-rooted cultural mores can impact on how RPGs are played and interpreted, I think. I've written quite a bit before on this blog about cultural differences between the UK and the USA, and how it seems perfectly natural when you think about it that one should produce Warhammer and the other should produce D&D. I didn't really do enough gaming in Japan, but I do have a lot of experience dealing with Japanese people in small group contexts and know that all the stereotypes about Japan being a deferential society are stereotypes for a reason: age and seniority are strongly correlated with how much people are willing to listen to you and agree with you. (This is strongly reinforced by the language.) This makes me wonder about how the role of the DM is interpreted in the Japanese context and how my own relaxed and egalitarian style would fit.

I also think it would be naive to assume that the literary and artistic traditions exhibited by certain societies would not be a factor in how readily RPGs are absorbed. For instance, it seems to me (speaking as a lay person and an outsider in a completely extemporaneous way) that there is a strong fantastical tradition in the modern (as opposed to medieval or ancient) art and literature of Spain, Portugal and Latin America, more so than in some other societies - that those countries produce cultural artefacts that seem more readily fantastical and more readily associated with fantasy than others: that, for instance, the steps from Borges to Vance to D&D are tiny, and that Borges is just one person in a heritage of fantastical weirdness that goes back to Picasso, El Greco, Cervantes... And it also seems to me at the same time that RPGs and fantasy literature are pretty popular in Portugal and Spain, at least to my limited knowledge, and that for instance I'm always stumbling across Portuguese translations of fantasy novels on author blogs, and I know George R R Martin goes on book tours in Portugal quite a lot, and I knew this Spanish girl at university who was an even bigger Tolkien geek than I was. And I also know that the plural of anecdote is not "data", but still.

Of course, you wouldn't want to play down the significance of either language, politics or economics. People in China speak Chinese, and comparatively few speak English well enough to read D&D in the original. People in North Korea don't have easy access to DriveThruRPG. Most people in Zambia don't have the disposable income to spend on frivolous RPGs.

And if living in a foreign country for a number of years taught me anything, it's that it takes a long, long time to get to know a society well enough to pontificate on its mores. I feel confident talking about Japanese culture because I lived there for a large chunk of my life, I worked in a Japanese environment, I speak the language, I dated the women, I played football with the men. The same isn't true of Brazil or India or the Philippines, so what the fuck do I know? And I also know that when I hear people who don't know Japan as well as I do talking in a general way about "Japanese culture" I always think they sound as if they're talking out of their arse, so I'm wary of doing the same thing.

And yet I just have, and will continue to do so.

35 comments:

  1. I always thought RPGs were relatively popular in Japan--Final Fantasy and other anime stuff are heavily D&D-influenced and there are Japanese translations of american RPGs readily available over there.

    Or is it just that _every_ hobby is at least a little big in Japan because of the extreme hobbyist culture over there

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    1. I think it's that. There's like 130 million people there and the proportion of geeks is extremely high, so you're bound to get some RPGs. Compared to the UK or the USA I don't think there's a contest in terms of relative numbers.

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    2. My own experience in Japan is similar to noisms'. And RPGs aren't as readily available as you seem to think, Zak. Of course, they can be purchased by internet (or mail order back in the day), but where I lived, only about 1.5 hours outside of Tokyo, there were no game shops, and very little gaming among the Japanese populace.

      We had to get our stuff in Tokyo or over the internet. And the 'big' shop in Tokyo, in Shinjuku (busiest station in the world blah blah blah) was a tiny, cramped place with Warhammer in the basement, a crammed selection of RPGs, board games, dice and minis on the second floor, and CCGs on the third. Each floor was about the size of a one-room apartment.

      All that said, though, RPGs are BIG in Japan compared to Korea, but even in Japan they're just nowhere near as popular as in the Anglophone countries and Europe.

      Noisms' speculations on why (at least for Japanese culture) may be off, but they seem to match what I experienced as well.

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    3. My impression from reading about industry history is that the videogame RPG scene in Japan was mainly borne out of the popularity of Ultima and Wizardry. Which isn't to say that D&D didn't have input; just that it might be more of a secondary source than a primary one.

      (The Wizardry brand is actually now developed and pretty much only released in Japan, as that market has a much greater demand for dungeon-crawlers than elsewhere.)

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  2. This is really a difficult thing. Because it's complicated to see how your own culture is from the inside. I mean, I can tell ifamericans o british are more "whatever" than us (spaniards), but doing that in the other way is more complicated.

    However, I'm not sure spanish people are more fantastical than the "baseline". If anything, maybe more "artistic" or "playful", if that makes sense to you. Well, probably not.

    I personally love fantasy, but I also read your blog, so... not an average pick. We have our fair share of games that are not translated into english, but the big hitters (with a couple exceptions) are english translations nowadays.

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    1. What's a popular "native" Spanish RPG?

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    2. The oldest one is Aquelarre, which is a pseudohistoric game set in the Iberian peninsula in the low middle ages. But there are tons more.

      "Anima" is published in English but was originally developed in Spain. "Capitán Alatriste" is based in the series of novels of Pérez Reverte (there's a movie starring Viggo Mortensen), set in the Imperial Spain. "Comandos de Guerra is a World War II" commandos game. "Exo" is a space opera game, "1808" tells our rebellion against French invaders. Ablaneda is a fantasy game that uses legends of northern Spain. "¡Gañanes!" is a humoristic game in which you control Spanish bumpkins (very funny if you're a Spaniard). "Mutantes en la Sombra" is a superhero type. "Hispania" is another historic game set in the Hispania province during the roman imperium. And I can go on for hours.

      Also, I myself have created a fantasy game based upon the myths of ancient mesopotamia that will be released later this year (La Puerta de Ishtar), if you don't mind the shameless plug.

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    3. Ah, and one more thing.

      Here in Spain LARPing is huge. Probably because we enjoy a very nice weather (compared to northern europe). Also, culturally going outside and meeting with people is very important here.

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    4. Speaking as an American LARPer, European LARPs are sort of legendary to us - extremely few American games see the attendance in the thousands that we've heard of some English, Swedish, and Finnish games drawing. There is a whole school of thought in LARP style that some groups have imported from Finland, though I don't subscribe to it myself.

      Also, I am a huge fan of the Alatriste novels, and would love to find an (English-language) RPG that modeled that series to my satisfaction.

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  3. Potential and actuality are also very different. For example, China has a culture of fantasy stories that in some ways is even more appropriate for tabletop RPGs than Western mythology, and it is present in their culture in a very influential way. I think the limitations are practical and perhaps political, not cultural, at least in the case of China.

    The Three Kingdoms story, for example, and The Journey to the West, and all the wuxia heroes are live and vibrant in Chinese culture in a way that the equivalent Western artifacts (The Iliad, The Odyssey, the Biblical epics) are not in Western society. We have modern reimaginings like Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings instead. The only real exception I can think of (though I know I must be missing some) is the Arthurian mythos, which seems to be alive and well (everyone knows about Lancelot and Excalibur and Merlin).

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  4. As a grognard in Kyoto, one of my hobbies is collecting old books, especially old Japanese TRPGs. You can literally trace the evolution here from aping of D&D with games like Sword World and The Lodoss RPG, to homegrown Japan only games like Paradise Fleet (which has divergent mechanics like cards and themes by having a tongue in cheek scifi diaspora setting). Fast forward to the present and you have 3 streams of RPGs - computer RPG inspired games (Arianrhod), old school mechanic inspired simulationist games (DoubleCross, basically Xmen at school), and unique Japan-niche products (Maid and YuyakeKoyake, which are more like story games). So D&D, which was produced in the 1970s US cultural milieu, mutates when replicated in other cultures. As for gaming here, few people have the space to play in the basement, and the few Japanese gamer cons I went to were tables of different groups playing the same module (Shar's Revenge from the Gundam RPG) and competing with each other to see who would solve it best. Finally, players were 60% female when I went in the 90s. Anecdotal evidence at best, but shows how cultural lenses can alter a form.

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  5. I live in Korea and I think I could get a bunch of geeky Korean middle school students loving D&D without too much effort, and while you're very right about the lacking of a tradition of entertaining at home (also lacking in Korea) I think that history also matters. The rise of computer games took a big bite out of tabletop RPGs but in Korea and Japan there just wasn't much of a hobby established yet before the rise of computer games, which probably strangled tabletop gaming in its crib before it could develop properly, while in the west TT RPGs had a lot more time to lay the groundwork of a hobby before computer games moved in with big stompy feet.

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    1. Sure, there's no racial essentialism here - anybody from any society can enjoy D&D.

      And you're right, history definitely matters. I think this is part of the reason P&P RPGs will never make it in India and China. Computer games have already overgrown that particular garden.

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  6. I just realized that tabletop RPGs are relatively popular here in Norway. I play with groups recruited from an organization of about 200 people, and I have received about 30 requests about joining my games. And I have found out just how many games have been played just under my radar, sometimes for a long time. RPGs just aren't something you talk about in polite society, I guess.

    But all of Noisms points about what makes a culture RPG-friendly, seems to hold up for Norway. Most of us speak decent English, we tend to have spacious houses with a parlour-game culture, and there is an almost shocking superstitious streak in our culture (although not in modern literature)

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    1. Are there any Norwegian games?

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    2. I can't speak for Norway, but here in Sweden we've had about 10 rpgs published during the past 25 years or so. The first and most popular was basically a translation of BRPG, and another was setting-wise Gamma World in Scandinavia, with mutated moose, driving a Volvo, in a pine forest. We had a huge WOD/Vampire-LARPing wave in the 90's and early 00's, and then kids started playing computer games and cosplaying manga characters instead. Or maybe I grew older. Anyway, I've always thought that Swedes (and apparently Norwegians) were relatively active roleplayers, given that we're a pretty small country. I've also always linked it to the presence of a pretty big middle class, with lots of spare time and room for leisure activities. And of course we get exposed to a lot of American/British pop culture. But maybe we're not so special as I thought, considering what the Spaniards are saying in the comments below.

      And also? We're story gamers, through and through. When I started reading OSR-blogs it was a revelation.

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    3. Noism: There is about two (or three) Norwegian rpgs that I know of. Considering that there's less than five million of us, so that's not so few, considering.

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  7. This post should have been titled "Eminently moderate, reasonable observations about culture!" :D

    I find it interesting how dirt-poor trailer-home dwelling housewives in rural Oregon will play D&D online, they can't buy anything or their husband would have no money for petrol/gas, but they use free 1e stuff off Dragonsfoot and some old TSR adventures from the '80s. As I said before, if people really want to do something, it's hard to stop them.

    I like the ancedote from someone trying to GM D&D in China. He set up the adventure plot hook, and all the players responded:

    "This is terrible! We must wait here and do nothing, until someone from the Government arrives to sort it out!"

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  8. I get the impression that RPGs are still a lot more popular in the USA than UK. I hear: "I have to travel _40 minutes_ to my 'local' games store!" and I think, how many people in the UK live within 40 minutes of a games shop? Not too many - admittedly that is partly due to our appalling transport networks, I live in London Transport zone 3 so it takes me 45 minutes to go the few miles to Orc's Nest in zone 1...

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    1. I know. There isn't a single games shop in Merseyside, at least as far as I'm aware. That's a metropolitan area of 2 million people without a single dedicated game shop (although you can get D&D and a few others at Forbidden Planet or Waterstones).

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    2. If work post-PhD is not forthcoming perhaps that is a niche that could be filled by your good self?

      "Noisms' House of Games"

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  9. 'Playing in the basement' seems very much a US thing. Not too many UK homes have habitable basements.

    I agree that in the UK playing in the dining room or lounge is normally common; I get the impression that's what happens in eg Australia too. I haven't played at my (tiny, London) home since my son was born though, since 2007 it's always in pubs. Which gamers from other cultures (America, Scotland*...) often find weird.

    *I'm from Northern Ireland. I wouldn't play D&D in a Belfast bar, either!

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  10. It's difficult to meet a 30-years-old male in Spain that has not ever played RPG, although a single time. Said this, it's equally difficult to meet some guy that actually keeps playing today, ( World of Darkness was a huge fad back in the days, but today more people choose computer games, Warhammer and Magic as a geekly entertainment).
    Nonetheles, the RPG players in Spain are few but dedicated. There are some fine RPG-themed blogs and a few of recently published games of high quality, like Aquelarre (mentioned by Rodrigo, now in its 3rd and awesome edition) or "Aventuras en la Marca del este" (Old School Boxed Awesomeness).
    Latin America seems to share, or even surpass, the love for RPG. I think maybe we Hispanics are traditionally fond for social games, (card games are a absolute staple for colleges students!).

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    1. Yep. I didn't mention "Aventuras en la Marca del Este" because it's a retroclone of BECMI. But it's very popular here. :)

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  11. I have a pet theory that rpgs survive better in places with crappy cold weather. My native St John's Newfoundland, with a population of 150, 000, had three FLGS, although they also sold comics and such to survive. Four if you count a hut one guy runs next to a high school.

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    1. Sure, that does have an impact. Although if it was true in all cases Spain would be one of the least rpg-playing countries in the world!

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  12. On Argentina, D&D was relativelly huge on the first half of 90's. But M:TG trumped that; but some RPG activity still persists, mostly 3rd Edition and some old school World of Darkness.
    I was on Medellin, Colombia this year, and they don't have a single game store in all the city.

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  13. One thing that also needs to be considered for Asian (at least Chinese) cultures is the importance of studies on the life of children. In many cases kids are herded from school to after school cram school and then home for homework and sleep. They do not have the leisure time that US kids do, nor do they have the opportunity to meet in the numbers required for a general gaming session easily especially in large blocks of time.

    Computer/console games are very popular and it may be that they can match the schedule of kids- they can be played solo, online, face to face and in small chunks of time or even all night. Once kids get to college they no longer have such a scholastic grind, but by then the hooks may not have set.

    3x had Traditional Chinese translations of the core books, and 4e had Simplified Chinese translations btw.

    Cheers

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    1. Yeah, that's a thing in Japan too. They go to school 7 days a week, because even when they don't have classes they're doing "group activities" like sports, band practice, etc. They have almost no leisure time. This has its advantages but in terms of D&D it's a definite disadvantage!

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  14. Two quick things:
    -I didn't mean any sort of racial essentialism. It's just that I think that if you grabbed random groups of middle school kids from all over the world and ran D&D for them, the Koreans would probably like it more than average, despite D&D being almost non-existent here. History and logistics have a lot to do with this...

    -I don't know that much about the British hobby scene but my understanding is that it's quite a bit bigger per capita than the US scene. The US has almost five times as many people as the UK and I've never seen any online group of RPGers in which American outnumbered Brits by anywhere near that amount. I think maybe the paucity of hobby stores in the UK could be explained by a lot of the US ones being kept afloat by M:tG which isn't as popular in the UK (I think).

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    1. Sorry if I was unclear - I wasn't accusing you of racial essentialism, just protecting myself from anybody thinking I was. I'm in total agreement (I don't know much about Korean kids, but I do think that Japanese middle schoolers would be just about the most fertile ground you could concievably imagine for D&D to take root, were it not for the logistical problems - i.e. nowhere to play, and too little free time).

      Not sure about the British hobby scene being bigger. I have no basis for comparison. I do get the impression there are more players per capita of Warhammer and 40k in the UK, as you would expect.

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    2. Ya, what I meant to say was that I wasn't accusing you of racial essentialism, I was trying to protect myself from anyone thinking I was. *head starts to spin*

      Again I don't know the British hobby scene at all but Warhammer sells their stuff (to a large extent) in their own shops, right? M:tG doesn't do that. So if there are a bunch of shops selling M:tG in the US with a little shelf off to the side to sell RPG stuff while in the UK there are a bunch of Warhammer shops just selling Warhammer stuff, then you can get more hobby shops with a little shelf off to the side for RPG stuff in the US even though there's no that many people buying it any more per capita. In any case, there's certainly more American than British gamers overall, but that just comes from there being more Americans in general.

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  15. Thanks for the links/recommendations, Rodrigo and Liza.

    I have to say, judging by the art and my crappy Spanish skills, La Puerta de Ishtar looks very cool. I love ancient Mesopotamian-themed fantasy, and I think there's nowehere near enough of it.

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    1. Thanks for your kind words. If the game enjoys some success in the Spanish market, I'll probably translate it to English. Let's see how things develop...

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