Hunting Down the Monster

In Japan, monsters are big business. Since 2005, one of the most successful video game franchises in Japan has been CAPCOM's dinosaur battler Monster Hunter. As the game has got bigger so have its monsters. Many creatures are now so complex that would-be Hunters are required to band together in teams to have any hope of bringing down the largest beasts. On August 1st, 2009, CAPCOM finally released the latest title in the series, Monster Hunter Tri, to an eager Japanese game-playing public. Within its first week, the game had sold 520,000 domestic copies seemingly validating its continued mix of big weapons, bigger monsters and most importantly player co-operation.

But behind the beast-slaying bravado, cracks were already beginning to appear. The forums of the PSP-based predecessor Monster Hunter Freedom were reporting the emergence of a new monster, lurking not in some hidden corner of the new game, but rather in a new attitude being adopted by some players. Luring, flaming, trolling camping and other forms of 'subversive' (read abusive) gameplay had begun to be seen on some servers. This was not the community- based cooperative style of play that Japanese hunters were used to and the finger of blame for such an individualised attitude to the narrative was being pointed squarely at the influence of Western gamers.

I have some sympathy with these Japanese players; ask any online gamer about their biggest bugbear and they will usually cite disruptive players. As one disgruntled hunter tells me "They just don't know how to play".But the Monster Hunter tensions seem to move beyond the act of play itself to a more cultural response to the collective arenas. Japanese players complained that Western games tended to encourage a more individual approach to the narrative. When this playstyle was transferred to the arenas of the Japanese role-playing-games (RPG), it appeared to undermine their domestic spirit of co-operation and community. This is not to say however, that American and European games do not draw upon similar ideas of social collectivity – the meteoritic rise of the MMORPG market is testament to that – but knowing how to 'play the game' brings with it multiple, culture-specific, understandings of social arenas.

Defining community

Collective spaces tend to be problematic, particularly in the neo-liberal economies of the West. The British anthropologist Anthony Cohen reminds us that, in Western terms at least, community is always defined by symbolic boundaries. Moreover, both the actions and responses of the community group will be intrinsically linked to the ways that these boundaries are perceived by its members. In an article in the Japan Times last July, Roger Pulvers compared the American response to the Oklahoma City bombing with the Japanese treatment of the sarin nerve gas attacks on the Tokyo tube system. The Americans quickly distanced the perpetrators from the decent, ordinary citizen, pushing them to the boundaries – the bombers were isolated, monsters, not 'one of us'. In sharp contrast, the Japanese adopted a far more inclusive position. Perhaps rooted in their historical tradition (Japan was a 'closed' society until comparatively recently) the Japanese took a not untypical inward-looking position blaming themselves as a society: 'what did we do that our brightest graduates could commit such a monstrous act?' Whilst these might be similar events, each conflicting response is drawn from an almost polar opposite view of the relationship between the individual and the wider community.

Making sense of collective spaces

But if conceptions of social collectives are culturally driven, how do we make sense of collective markets within a global arena? James Paul Gee, the American educationalist, offers a slightly different perspective on how we might consider collective spaces. Gee argues that social arenas offer 'affinity space': a site of voluntary affiliation around a common passion. Thinking about collective arenas in this way offers compelling insights into how they might be navigated. The affinity space acts as a sort of totem – a rallying point – that gives the collective focus and adds stability to an unstable world. In this sense collective arenas have the capacity to unite the disparate.

Totems may take the form of an idea, an interest or a brand or label, but they represent the collective imagination of the consumer. Of course, the ad industry has always understood the importance of brand loyalty and targeting set demographics, but I am not sure that these things are entirely the same as 'affinity totems'. Affinity Totems are about capturing a collective imagination. In this respect one of the most successful brand totems in the West has been Apple. Its products have a near cult-like following and even the hint of a potential new development whips the faithful into a frenzy of speculation and cross-forum posting. But 'affinity' on its own is not a guarantee of product success as the somewhat mixed reception of the iPad suggests. Totems need a strong utilitarian foundation. When there is uncertainty regarding product placement or its functionality, as some commentators began to suggest with the iPad, the totem loses some of its power to rally.

In the world of Japanese co-operative RPG, the release of a new Dragon Quest game draws similar mass attention to the release of a new Apple product in the West. Whenever video game developers hint at the reason for a game's success, they always seem to mention innovation, evolved AI, and storytelling as the integral to successful 'game play'. However, none of these aspects account for the success of Dragon Quest which has world-wide sales of over 51 million to date. Similarly, whilst CAPCOM's recent American/Europe releases of Street fighter 4 shows that there is still a comfort in familiar brands and formats despite comparative low opening sales in Japan, they have been unable to re-create the success of the Monster Hunter series outside of the domestic market.

Capturing a collective imagination

Capturing a collective imagination remains the Holy Grail of product design. Whilst it embraces and binds together those within its influences, it simultaneously excludes those who sit outside. Commonality therefore represents both similarity and difference; we define ourselves by what we are and what we are not. Of course, this is the principle that underpins the exclusivity of many brands, where consumers are driven by the desire to be different – or separate - yet simultaneously united in that difference.

As any successful brand manager knows, success in this sort of market requires careful product manipulation and placement to ensure they control access to the symbolic boundary that surrounds its client community. Provide too much access and the product's exclusivity – that which makes it different – is eroded. But make the product too difficult to obtain and it becomes too inaccessible to provide the complex network of ties that underpins the exclusive identity required by the customer -since there is little social capital in owning a productor playing a game that no one has heard of. As one marketing director explains it to me, "the line between 'geek' and 'cool' is very very fine indeed" Totems, then, are about being

'cool' – particularly where the market is made up of young people. Perhaps Monster Hunter's problem in its transition from Eastern to Western modes of play was that there were different understandings of what constituted 'cool' behaviour.

Crossing from East to West

To their credit, CAPCOM are re-designing Monster Hunter Tri prior to its March 2010 American/European release. Producer Ryozo Tsujimoto was quick to recognise that the totems of Western play were subtly different from those of the domestic market. We are told that aspects of the narrative have been re-jigged to embrace the more resistive and individual modes seen in the West, but perhaps more importantly CAPCOM appear to be directly addressing the behaviour that lies behind the totem itself. In a recent interview Tsujimotoargues that social behaviour remains key to the titles' appeal. The Western release will feature monsters that are driven by lifelike behavioural rules rather than simple design patterns. "You don't see the monsters' health, so it's very hard to tell when a monster is ever going to die. You get people talking to each other because you're like, 'Is he going to die?' 'Oh, I don't know!' You really get people talking. So, in that sense, having it realistic in that analog sense gets people more together, and that's a good thing."

Only time will tell if this is enough to capture the collective imagination of the West. Perhaps we have simply moved beyond killing monsters to the Hi-Tec joys of 'Modern Warfare 2'("MW2"). MW2 developer, Infinity Ward, put all its bullets into the online game basket offering a rich multi-player experience at the expense of the single gamer. It is not hard to seewhy in a post 9/11 West, MW2 with its 'hip hop' approach to warfare might offer more affinity; it is like playing through a live news report from Afghanistan. To an audience well-schooled by media reports as to the collective dimension to world conflict, it is little surprise that team-based play should move to the fore. Narratives that encompass collectiveimaginations will of course be popular. But just maybe Tsujimoto has it right and our totems were not ones of narrative but of analogue modes of play. Perhaps he can make it cool toteam up and kill monsters in the same way that Infinity Ward made community warfare cool. As every good hunter knows, there is more than one way to slay the monster.

A version of this article appeared in Canvas 8 (www.canvas8.com)