JC Barnett, a Western developer working in Japan, gives an inside view of gaming's spiritual home

The birth of the modern videogame industry was arguably down to a single Japanese company: Nintendo. In the early years, its name became a synecdoche for the entire medium; Nintendo didn’t just make games, it was games. However, despite the fact that this former playing card manufacturer continues to top the global market – making its inimitable former president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, one of the richest men in Japan – it is becoming increasingly obvious that Japan has fallen behind the West in both sales and technical achievement, and not just to the casual observer. After a long period of silence, increasingly influential figures are lending their perspective, and a clearer picture of the challenges facing the country is emerging.

As videogames become more mainstream, and high profits become more closely linked with high production and marketing budgets, outspoken figures in the Japanese game industry are openly lamenting this widening chasm and experimenting with ways of catching up. Industry giants like Metal Gear Solid’s Hideo Kojima, Resident Evil’s Jun Takeuchi and Square Enix president Yoichi Wada have all publicly voiced their concerns, and their games are anything but small fry. Change is afoot in Japanese game development, for better or worse, but what exactly is it that’s being done differently? What is it about Japanese games – and Western games, for that matter – that is causing such concern in what was once a global development Mecca?

One useful perspective is that of the foreign national – specifically Westerners – working within the Japanese industry. What has long been considered an almost impossible job to acquire, and a secret pipedream for vast numbers of gamers, is actually a growing trend. Over the past several years there has been significant growth in the number of foreigners working for Japanese companies, taking up a diverse array of development roles.

Is hiring more foreigners a sign of change, and a tacit admission of the failing technical standards of Japanese development? “We hire anyone who shows they are good enough, whether they are Western or Japanese,” explains Dylan Cuthbert, president of QGames, the studio behind the PixelJunk series. “I do tend to find the programming skill higher in the West based on the job applications we get, but I also know that other companies have very good, highly skilled Japanese programmers.”

Kees Gajentaan is lead environment artist at Grasshopper Manufacture and has witnessed firsthand the shifting attitude toward recruiting from the West. “When I started at Grasshopper two years ago, I was the only foreigner here,” he explains. “Now, we have a total of eight Westerners in the office, and more are due to join us in the near future. Because it’s quite difficult to find experienced developers here in Japan, most of the foreigners in our office are being hired for their experience.”

Of course, a lack of skilled applicants isn’t the same as a general lack of skill. Japan is a homogenous society, with a lot of drive to study foreign cultures, but very little aptitude in understanding them or learning other languages. As a result, it is isolated when it comes to the job market. Western development studios benefit enormously from a wide choice of candidates from all over the world, but unless a Japanese company is prepared to deal with legal hassles and cultural and linguistic barriers, they are basically limited to Japanese applicants.

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