Gameology 2.0

Review Of

Kohler, Chris. Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life. Indianapolis, IN: Brady Games, 2005.

• Tagged
• XML
• BibTex
• Google Scholar

I read Kohler's Power Up on my way up to my new job at Minnesota. I found it to be a very uneven book. The first few chapters are thoroughly engrossing and enlightening, but other chapters seem more like filler and a few are even tedious. This is a book that would have mightily benefited from some selective editorial cuts. I suppose one explanation for this problem is Kohler's effort to appeal to such a broad audience, whereas readers like me demand more in-depth treatments and less material that is irrelevant for the purpose of learning about Japanese videogames.

Let me give some examples of what I'm writing about. Chapter 7 is a sort of "shopping guide" for American tourists in Japan. It describes some popular shops and how to find good deals on used games. I found this section out-of-place. I'd much rather have had another chapter about Japanese videogame development or even a more thorough treatment of the Japanese video game culture in general. Another problematic section is in Chapter 5, where Kohler decides to give us a comprehensive annotated list of every Japanese CD released containing music or musical variations from Final Fantasy games. Why? Kohler, skip the boring lists; I'd rather read more discussion of Japanese game music composition and perhaps a better look at some of the key composers. I could list other examples of sections that really seemed tossed in as filler. There is a chapter about the development of Star Fox that I could've lived without. In short, I could've cut about 75-100 or so pages from this book easily.

Kohler's strongest sections are those in which he describes video game history and Japan's weighty influence on it. His key thesis is that we can thank Japan for the cinematic elements that are so prevalent in games today. Pac-Man was the first to feature cinematic sequences, and Donkey Kong was the first game to tell a story from beginning to end. Other games introduced other innovations, like the curtain rising and falling in Mario. Kohler also describes the importance of Japanese comics (manga) on Japanese video game development. I am unfortunately quite ignorant of manga, and I'm thankful to Kohler for giving me a good overview here and definitely increasing my interest in the subject. Manga even played a role in Donkey Kong; the four-screen gameplay was inspired by the four-panel presentation of so many manga comics.

There are other gems sprinkled throughout Power Up—in particular the intriguing quotes from so many prominent Japanese developers. I'll share one quote here with you from Shigeru Miyamato:

Another really excellent chapter (and fascinating subject in general) is Chapter 8, which discusses issues of translation (both in language and culture). Of particular interest here is a Miyamato game that never made it to the US—an early maze game called Devil World. Japanese has only a small Christian minority, so they apparently have a much different taken on Christian symbolism and themes than we might in the US. Devil World was full of Christian symbolism that Nintendo feared would be condemned as blasphemy in the US (they were undoubted right!). It's also interesting how much other stuff did and still does get cut or warped as it makes the journey from East to West. Apparently some episodes of Pokemon are full of sexual humor and innuendo that the Japanese consider fine for their own children, but would never make it the US. This is really fascinating stuff!

With the exception of the FF album list, I appreciated Kohler's discussion of Japanese videogame music. One of the key themes here is that the reason the Japanese made such good game music is that they "began with ones and zeroes, not ended with them" (136). This is a thesis I defended in my game audio article for Armchair Arcade. My argument matches Kohler's—if you want to make good game audio, you have to work directly with the hardware, not create music elsewhere and try to simulate it on the hardware.

In short, while Power Up is not an entirely satisfying read, it does have its good points. Kohler is obviously still learning his trade as an author of book-length works. He admits to being a journalist, not a scholar—an admission potential buyers of this book should take seriously. At its best, this book will inspire scholarly research, but does not pretend to provide it. Still, it is a work that addresses a part of videogame culture that remains mostly unexplored by Western scholars, and for that reason I am thankful to Kohler.