Great Cultural Differences, pt3

FPS and Motion Sickness

As someone with severe motion sickness and being of Japanese descent, I can tell you that a majority of Japanese people engage in activities that would have me running for my barf bag in seconds. Reading books on a train sitting backwards, playing PSPs on the subway or in cars, all of these activities known for motion sickness are done by a great portion of Japanese people on a daily basis.

I'm not sure how selective motion sickness is, but I'm sure that these people wouldn't become suddenly ill if given a first person shooter. Granted, there does to be something disorienting about an FPS in ways. Always seeing your character means you can always measure distances between any object around him or her. Even if one doesn't get motion sick from doing so, a first person platforming game just doesn't sound like it would work.

The biggest hurdle that first person games have in Japan is hardware. First Person works really well with a mouse, not so much with a home console controller and even less so on a cell phone or hand held console. What's popular in Japan right now? The DS and PSP for sure. I know that cell phones are cutting edge and capable of pretty good 3D games. I've seen people play a 3D Gundam game on their phones and all. I still can't be sure how popular cell phone gaming really is over here.

The Wii has strong FPS potential but the Wii is a notoriously hard to read market.  Yes, a lot of hardware has moved. No doubt all the publicity about Wii Sports being used to help kids cope with cancer, assist with physical rehab or whatever. There are a few good first person games on Wii. Metroid and Elebits. I quite liked Elebits though I did get a bit woozy after a while. Metroid is pretty smooth.

Motion sickness certainly isn't a really valid reason for first person games not doing well. Make em accessible, make them friendly to the platforms Japan loves(that's a super tall order outside of the Wii.)