Should Video Games be split into Eastern and Western Video Games

I took a look at Media Categories FAQ. It says that the split between Anime & Manga and Western Animation are for these reasons:

• Again, the combination would mean we were lumping categories together which are often very large already.

• Many TV Tropes readers are either extremely interested in anime and manga or not at all interested in them. Separating them out makes it easier for these people to find the examples they're interested in, especially on pages with folders.

The same argument can be made about splitting Video Games into Eastern video games (which includes Japanese video games) and Western video games.

The Video Games section can be very large at times and there are many readers who are either interested in Japanese or Western video games (but not both).

Likewise, in video game tropes, there should be a split between Eastern and Western RPGs as well, given the same reasons as above (and Eastern and Western RPGs are often historically mechanically and thematically different).

The distinction can be made by where the video game (or series) originated from.

For example, Pokémon GO would be considered an Eastern video game (AR-based Eastern RPG to be more specific) as it is part of the Pokémon series, which is Japanese, despite the specific game being created by San Francisco-based Niantic.

Edited by Nen_desharu on Apr 18th 2021 at 10:29:08 AM

Kirby is awesome.

i'm gonna have to disagree. many tropes are common between "western" and "eastern" video games because, from the earliest days of the medium, they had intermingled; Dragon Quest was inspired by Ultima, while Doom was inspired by Pac-Man. the line is very blurry between them when it comes to categorizing them strictly as one or the other. this meme◊ comes to mind; Metal Gear Solid is an eastern game inspired by western tropes, Skullgirls is a western game inspired by eastern tropes.

in contrast, western animation inspired by anime (and vice versa) has only been a recent development. there was a barrier between the two for a long time, and as a result, there are many inherent structural and stylistic differences between the two, enough to warrant separate namespaces. video games, being a very relatively new medium created and popularized when cultural boundaries were becoming blurrier, do not have nearly as much of a degree of separation between them. that's not getting into the oddities of edge cases where a western developer creates something for an eastern series, like you mention with Pokémon GO. it wouldn't be practical in my eyes to try to create a separation between the two.

Edited by NoUsername on Apr 18th 2021 at 10:39:28 AM

And what about Web Games and Indie Games? Would they also need to be split?

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Exactly what said. The reason why Western Animation and Anime are split is because of the clear differences between the two. While both namespaces can cover all sorts of animated works- TV series, theatrical movies, short films- the two have some significant differences between them due to a long period of isolation and cultural differences. Meanwhile, video games grew at an equal rate in both the East and the West, as for the gap that had previously divided animation for decades was gone by The '80s. It's hard to define many clear differences between games produced in the East and games produced in the West, as for the way they rose resulted in little divergence between the two. There's a reason why "anime" and "western animation" are terms commonly used outside this wiki, but "eastern video games" and "western video games" aren't.

Besides, this would be grueling to try to split and move.

Edited by jandn2014 on Apr 18th 2021 at 11:00:31 AM

back lol

I have a similar idea about splitting Eastern and Western RPGs as done in Brutal Bonus Level for example.

Historically, the differences between the two are substantial enough to be considered distinct from one another like Anime vs. Western Animation.

Kirby is awesome.

In what ways? Can you refute the points the others have made? (And also answer my question if possible, seeing as you're so insistent on a split based on apparent differences?)

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Eastern RPG and Western RPG are already their own Video Game Genre subcategories, anyway

Not in the slightest.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Thanks.

Kirby is awesome.

i'd meant to go into more detail about that but didn't want to go on too long about the history between the two and why it's a more significant difference. while it is true that early anime is inspired by early western animation—osamu tezuka famously being inspired by disney—and the two genres have had a lot of cross-influence (Inspector Gadget was supposed to be a Lupin III spinoff), what we categorically call anime, when referring to it as its own "medium" of animation as codified by tezuka, is heavily divergent from its inspiration and steeped in japan's own history and pop culture. many influential works of anime never left japan or did so in butchered form, so the relative lack of crosstalk between them led to major differences in their tropes and ideas. (for example, Nosebleed as an indication of arousal derives from the same idea as Something Else Also Rises, but is basically exclusively seen in anime or anime-influenced media.)

with that statement i'm also referring, in particular, to Animesque works like Teen Titans and Avatar: The Last Airbender that cropped up due to the mid-2000s anime boom, and inversely with 2010s anime like Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt and My Hero Academia that take heavy influence from western media and their visual tropes. this type of cross-cultural influence has always been present, but hasn't become popular until relatively recently. by contrast, video games have always been inspired by each other from across cultural barriers due to how it was imported and exported far more frequently. i'm sorry i didn't elaborate upon that, though.

Edited by NoUsername on Apr 18th 2021 at 11:29:39 AM

I cannot support this idea if only because it would take so much work that other necessary cleanups and site functions would be delayed. I also don't agree with it, but that's a separate matter.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

"western animation inspired by anime (and vice versa) has only been a recent development" Now it's true.

I agree that there doesn't need to be an Eastern video game namespace for the reasons NoUsername gave and because it'd be too much work. I do believe "Western RPG" and "Eastern RPG" should generally be separate folders on pages for Video Game Tropes; some already have this.

Keet cleanup

Indexes can be useful but they can also be confusing. I dislike having to double check if a certain work is namespaced in Web Video, Web Original or Web Animation. The core difference between Western Animation and Anime & Manga came down to the distinct fan bases, but the further you divide up what is technically the same medium the organization only gets sloppier because editors may have different opinions on where an example should go. Video games in particular tend to be magnets for having folders with all types of genres, many of which are only 2-3 examples deep anyway.

If TV Tropes had greater foresight we might have been able to curtail some small issues (Examples of Animated Films are still typically namespaced as general Western Animation), but it is what it is.

Edited by EmeraldSource on Apr 18th 2021 at 11:34:04 AM

Do you not know that in the service one must always choose the lesser of two weevils!

Your argument acts as if Japan is somehow more special than Holland, Germany, and Brazil. As if the cartoons from Argentina and Mexico were almost indistinguishable from British animation. You essentially argue that the original The World of David the Gnome is just as influenced with American pop culture as it is with Spanish history, and having the same art style as Bulgarian cartoons.

I find the notion ridiculous, because there are people writing theses for their college degrees based on connecting the similarities from superficially dissimilar works. There is merit in genre splits, but creating a "medium" division based on assumptions of hemisphere-based nationalism is not a good idea at all.

Genres are at least tied together by their common storytelling elements, which can come from specific cultures. But nothing stops a creator from using an Indian art style to tell a traditional Venezuelan story to a French audience. Culture is a terrible way to divide artistic mediums and the division of Anime/Animation/WesternAnimation was a mistake to begin with.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

i don't disagree with your points at all, with regards to anime still being influenced by outside media and vice versa, enough to make a strong case for merging them into just "animation". the only real reason aside from practicality would be because "that's just the way it's done". i think i was trying to get into the headset of why they were split off to begin with, aside from the listed reasons that "people are interested in them separately and they're already large categories".

i don't necessarily agree with the notion that japan is more "special" than other regions of the world producing their own output, but i think it's a fact of the matter that there is an outside cultural interest in japanese animation because of its initial separation from the rest of the world leading to a cultural difference in its themes and tropes, and outside cultures then took an interest in those tropes once they began to proliferate through the rest of the world's pop culture. influence still existed, but there were still greater cultural boundaries owing to a lack of technology to connect the world and a lack of interest or demand.

it isn't necessarily that "japanese animation is special and western animation is all the same"; you could argue that each region of the world has their own specific cultural tropes as a result of their own history and pop culture that are only ignored because, admittedly, a lot of people (and a lot of tropers) are exclusively interested in japanese animation by an objectively wide margin. that's not something i can account for in an unbiased manner.

regardless, i was meaning to make a point of comparing that to video games, where, aside from how there aren't many tropers who are separately interested in "western" video games versus "eastern" video games anyway, there was less of a cultural divide between them as games influenced by one another spread across the world regardless of boundaries. whereas it's common, if not necessarily correct, to consider japanese animation "separate" from western animation, nobody realistically considers most genres of video games separate from each other based on regional tropes, with anime being an exceptional case due to historical precedent.

being honest, i think an anime/western animation merger into just "animation" would be a good idea, keeping in mind we have a fairly superfluous "asian animation" namespace due to it not being covered by either.

Edited by NoUsername on Apr 19th 2021 at 6:15:55 AM

Isn't the thing with anime and manga being grouped together that many anime are direct adaptations of manga, much more than any other medium? I'd hardly group manga with other animation.

SoundCloud

yes that's also true, but you could make the same case with many films being adaptations of books, yet they aren't grouped as "film and literature". i could see manga realistically being merged with comic books if anime is merged with western animation

Sure, but to compare Literature getting Film adaptations to Manga getting Anime adaptations, it's an entirely different ballpark. If you compare how many films aren't adaptations, compared to how many anime shows aren't, I'm sure the difference is astronomical. I can't think of many animes that weren't adapted from some manga.

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 19th 2021 at 6:24:16 AM

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

True, but as far as I know, the frequency isn't even close to the level of manga>anime.

This conversation has definitelt shifted from its original point, though.

SoundCloud

there is the Anime First index for works that're not adaptations. i think it's becoming more common than people think, and inversely a lot more films are adaptations than people would think, especially recently

regardless though yeah this has strayed from the original point of "eastern and western video games" to a more general discussion of namespaces in general. i think we should probably focus on narrowing in our number of namespaces rather than dividing them further. this stemmed from a similar discussion on how the "let's play" namespace should just be merged into "web video"

Edited by NoUsername on Apr 19th 2021 at 6:31:50 AM

Should we just make a general thread for namespace issues?

My personal take is that if I were starting this site from scratch, I would not split anime and western animation, or manga and comics, but at this point fusing them just isn't worth the trouble.

We have such a topic already.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I didn't think about before reading this thread, but I think I can illustrate why the site puts Anime & Manga in its own section, but can't do such a split for video games.

It is about adaptations, but it's also about tropes.

Film adaptations of books notoriously butcher the source material. Even if it wasn't for the infamous egos that often outright admit they wanted to make their own spin on the source material, the differences in medium make it impossible to do a completely direct adaptation. Things will be different, and those differences will cascade.

On the other hand, from what I know at least, a good lot of anime adaptations of manga (and light novels), is one-to-one. Differences in medium still lead to some changes, but significantly less. The anime and manga of a series are going to share around 90% of the same tropes.

In that case, there's little point in making a different work page for both the anime and manga (contrary to films very often being a separate page than the book they're based on). Even having a separate folder or category for the places they're different is often sort of pointless, and only pointed out in the trope example itself.

Thus, on a trope page, you want those things to be grouped together, otherwise you'd have confusion (like some other categories still have). Take One Piece for example. It is both a extremely well selling manga and a ubiquitously popular anime. If you were to look for it on a trope page or add a new example, would you go to Comics or Animation?

Any tropes relating to Filler should go on Animation, not Comics, but what about anything else? It's an accurate enough adaptation (to the point of literally adapting one manga chapter to one episode for a good chunk of its run) that most tropes will apply equally to both versions.

For video games, this is completely different. It's not about adaptations at all. While it's true that country of origin historically resulted in some cultural distinction of tropes being used despite immense overlap, that just results in genre distinctions, something that work categories don't need to concern themselves with at all. JRPGs were referred to like that for years because the specific set of tropes were popularized in Japan, but ultimately it's considered a genre, not a different kind of work, and thus trope-wise there isn't any reason we need to distinguish it from or associate it with anything else in the folders.

EDIT: I just want to note that I don't think this concept is an innate property of Anime & Manga, though, it's just a long running enough one to be relevant to the site. In other words, if most anime became original stories that aren't adapted from anything or a lot of adaptations just started taking massive liberties over a long enough period of time, then grouping them together and distinct from other categories would become an artifact we would need to address.

Edited by Jokubas on Apr 21st 2021 at 12:56:26 PM