Wednesday of the Robot @wednesdayoftherobot - Tumblr Blog

From Twitter, a couple days ago: “SEAN. Nancy Drew. Only 2 Male Characters. One was unhelpful and rude until he wanted one of our friends. The other was the villian. ?”

I’ve gotten this same question a couple of times, and I don’t entirely agree with it (because I see Logan’s character arc as...

Cultural Influence on Games

In "Nature and Significance of Play as a Cultural Phenomenon," Johan Huizinga states that "play" is "not 'ordinary' or 'real' life" (SZ 103). Of course, he means to make a distinction between play and everyday life. To a certain extent, however, the type of play that we engage in reveals a lot about our everyday lives and the cultures we live in. In this way, play is almost indistinguishable from "ordinary" life, insomuch as it is culturally tied up in our ordinary lives.

For instance, the very fact that we feel the need to put a J in front of RPGs that are produced in Japan suggests that we view them as unique to Japanese culture and not to our own. Japanese RPGs, whilst similar to our own Western RPGs, are imbued with a cultural significance that feels distinct enough to us that we must label it as a completely new genre. Similarly, we often refer to German-style board games. Of course, many people in America produce German-style board games, but there is still something different enough about this style of game that we must label it as "German"--distinct from games in our own cultural milieu.

Defining what makes games feel like they come from other cultures may quickly become problematic, however. We can always poke fun at our own culture, positing that Monopoly is distinctly American because of our extreme love of capitalism and its requisite trappings, but it is difficult to boil down other cultures in a similar way without being deeply offensive.

Regardless, games are clearly influenced by the cultures that they come from. It's a subject that is worth looking at, if we can find a way to discuss it in a tasteful manner.

#ctcs505 #games