Food for thought time. First, go read this essay at 1UP.com, entitled "Why Japanese Games are Breaking Up With the West." You don't have to know a great deal about gaming in Japan, or gaming in general, to understand where the piece is coming from. The point is simple: Japanese video games are losing their draw as something exported aggressively to the West. The local Japanese game market is dictating, all the more strongly, how games are created and which audiences they're built for.
There are possible parallels here with anime as well, which is what drew me to the piece and forced me to think hard about it. By the time I was done, I realized the parallels weren't as universal as I had originally believed, but were still present in enough force to matter.
From the article:
"The reasons for the shift in Japanese gamer taste are numerous, but there are three that western gamers in the country continuously note -- a peculiar emotion called moé, the Japanese concept of hobbies and adulthood, and a tradition of disparaging foreign games."
Let's address moé, because it's a concept that crosses over into anime often enough that it's worth a digression.
Moé is a quality one associates with a kind of character -- one that inspires a feeling of protectiveness and even sentimentality on the part of the viewer. Many Japanese games, and many anime as well, use moé characters (and by extension situations and settings) to inspire those same feelings. The feelings, less so the plot or the ideas explored, are what matters most. To many Western viewers, especially those with little exposure to anime, the moé aesthetic just feels like soppy sentimentality. Sound of the Sky, for instance (shown here), or Shuffle (to cite two shows profiled here) use moé as a big part of their appeal. They are not exclusive examples, though.
The article describes how games made specifically for Japan often suffer from "Galapagos syndrome" -- things so specific to Japan they simply don't export well. Anime itself has been at least somewhat spared from this for a good while, by dint of having a slightly broader market both domestically and elsewhere.
Outside of Japan, moé is a pretty divisive phenomenon. Some people interpret it as something that divides the more hardcore fans from the more casual fans. The former are (allegedly) trying to look at the same material from the same perspective as its native target audience. The latter may react to moé with anything from indifference to outright hostility. I try to remain neutral on it, but the truth is I've seen far more bad than good in this category, and I know full well there are interesting things happening in anime entirely outside it.
The problem is, so much of what's made in Japan right now is in line with the moé aesthetic to one degree or another because that's what sells consistently well there. That further limits what can be exported here except to the existing, self-selected fanbase -- especially since moé products don't even appeal consistently to them. This means that many more titles like Sound of the Sky or Shuffle -- but that many less wide-reaching, breakout titles like Death Note or Naruto, and that many less quirky and intriguing products like Katanagatari or Princess Jellyfish.
Granted, it's tough enough to find the next big breakout title. What I'm suggesting is that concentrating on moé, like concentrating on any wholly fan-pleasing bracket, means that much less for everyone else. And I've mentioned before how catering to fans at the expense of just about everyone else is self-limiting, whether via deluxe packaging or self-selecting fandoms.
Later in the essay, there's another observation that's worth looking at.
"The issue isn't that Japanese games aren't like western games. Japanese attempts to mimic western titles rarely meet with success, and when a developer in the country produces a worldwide hit, it's usually because they deliver an experience not found elsewhere. This issue is that many (but by no means all) influential Japanese designers refuse to examine western games at all."
In anime the reverse is the case. From what I've seen of anime creators, they are only too happy to emulate and take inspiration from Western entertainments. Dai Sato, screenwriter for highly-regarded titles like Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Ergo Proxy and Eden of the East, cites The Twilight Zone and '80s action cinema like The Evil Dead and The Terminator as his big influences. What's often limiting them is the salability of those titles in Japan: they know that what sells most consistently is either moé or adaptations or spinoffs of long-standing, established franchises (some of which are themselves moé-based). It becomes that much tougher to do something that's doesn't fall into one of those buckets.
On the whole, I don't think anime is as wholly insular as gaming in Japan is alleged to be in the article. For a long time it might have been, but the whole process of opening it up to the West as an export has transformed it from the inside. The anime industry is at least conscious of the fact that their export market is strategically important, and they take that many more steps to make it available elsewhere.
I still feel there's a lot of work to be done in this department, especially since the local market in Japan still dictates to the greatest degree what gets made, where it gets sold, and who sees it. But at the same time, that's what makes anime anime. It would be a shame if anime were liberated from its market constraints, where it's aimed at a very particular set of markets, only to end up becoming something that nobody in particular wants to watch at all.
Images: Sound of the Sky © Paradores/Aniplex/1121. Image courtesy Right Stuf / Nozomi Entertainment.
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