Abstract

‘Tilting the Axis of Global Play’ presents an historical review of East vs. West tensions between the United States and Japan, drawing past game studies literature. I posit that an East/West framework, although rightly recognizing national and regional cultural differences in the emergence of the game industry, has limits that a South/North perspective better addresses transnationally. Like other industries, the game industry leverages globalization to exploit Southern labor in the fabrication of game consoles and other game hardware. And predominant Northern cultural paradigms are disseminated globally in the fictional scenarios of highly produced Triple A games. Despite this disequilibrium, I make the case that in the global South, players and other gaming culture participants contribute meaningfully to transnational gaming culture.

Keywords: globalization, global South, Japanese and North American game industries, localization, piracy

Although the global South is only recently being considered more often in studies and analyses of digital games, a number of historical accounts of digital games have recognized at least two primary Northern nations’ roles in shaping a cosmopolitan game industry, namely, the United States and Japan. Before I continue to argue the utility of a global South/North framework, I will revisit the East/West axis which we are more accustomed to applying to our understanding of international gaming. I will then argue that such an East/West framework, although rightly recognizing national and regional differences and the existence of a transnational dialogue and cultural exchange on game innovation, has limits that a South/North perspective better addresses transnationally.

Most of the earliest digital games were programmed in United States. For instance, in 1962, Steve ‘Slug’ Russell, an undergraduate student and member of an informal hacker club of computing aficionados at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote a science fiction-inspired game, titled Spacewar!. Russell designed the spaceship battle game to show off the new keyboard control features of a PDP1 computer that MIT had recently acquired (Levy 47). Copies of Spacewar!, along with other student-written programs like a ‘expensive typewriter’ word processing program, soon spread to other university computing labs across the United States (Levy 35).