I decided to let nostalgia take the reigns and I dug up some old assignments from college and high school. This turbid look into my old self will hopefully motivate me to continue changing, hopefully for the better.

Class: Video Games and Virtual Identity, March 5th, 2009

Bomberman’s Diseases

Living in Sapporo, Japan for one year revealed some interesting cultural nuances I had never considered to be strictly Hokkaido wa dekaido; this terms literally means, “Hokkaido is gigantic.” The stigma there is roughly synonymous to how the continental United States views Canada, or maybe Alaska. Hokkaido, to most Japanese, is its own country apart from Japan, full of mystery and “in the boonies.” That attitude resonates throughout Hokkaido, including its largest city, Sapporo. As a result, anything that comes from Hokkaido with some cultural impact generates pride in its people. A few years ago, the Sapporo Ham Fighters won the Japanese championships in baseball. The party following the victory lasted over a month. Stores were shut down and schools were delayed in lieu of the celebration. As for famous companies, few come from Hokkaido. However, one successful video game did come from Sapporo. Hudson Soft, a small computer software developer based in Sapporo, created a game in the early eighties called Bomberman. The success of this game may still be witnessed throughout Japan, but is largely popular in Sapporo. Because the pride of this character in Sapporo holds strong, I had no choice but to purchase my own copy of the game for my Wii through its online marketplace. Bomberman has dozens of quirky cultural references, but one in particular reveals itself as truly Japanese, and more specifically Hokkaido-esque. The disease power-up in the game, represented by a flashing skull, reveals meaning in a formal, cultural, and experiential way to further develop a system of communication between the developers and the players.

Bomberman is an action game which follows the story of Bomberman, a cute cyborg wishing to escape the bonds of industry at the bomb factory. Violence permeates throughout the goal of the game as the only method of escape is by using bombs to destroy the other bombermen. Strategies include trapping the enemy using bombs and the environment; some walls are bombable, while others are not. Each player receives standard bombs from the beginning, which are weak and limited to one (the player must wait until the bomb explodes before laying another). However, several power-ups emerge from wrecked walls which provide increased fire range, kicking ability, extra bombs, and a multiple bomb placement ability. There is one power-up which is not a power-up at all, but rather a “disease,” represented as a flashing skull. This symbol holds particular meaning to the game.

The skull disease is the only item which generates a random outcome. The player may receive reversed controls, slow speed, downgraded bombs, or the frightening hyper speed. If one player touches another, the disease is spread; that is, the disease is not passed on, but remains both in the original player and the touched player. Only time will heal the infected. When the disease infects a player, a terrible bass-synth noise interrupts the otherwise upbeat, ongoing music. On a formal level of meaning, the symbol obviously represents a dangerous quality. Unlike the other power-ups, this symbol flashes and lacks color. It is also the only symbol whose sound effect is in a minor scale, thus prompting a worried response from the participant. As a skull is a universal symbol for danger, death, or poison, it is no question that the player should automatically avoid this power-up in order to succeed. In this way, the developers provide a discernable meaning to the symbol.

Culturally, the symbol, in its representation, is largely universal. A skull, by most standards, denotes danger. However, the subsequent outcome of obtaining the disease is highly cultural. The reversed controls, for instance, is a product of non-linear design rising from cultural issues in Japan during the early eighties. Just as the story of Bomberman highlights a struggle against corporate life and the need for escape, so too does this altered state of controls reflect the idea of changing the mundane. It is also important to realize that the diseases spread and not passed. In Japan, it is considered customary to wear a mask if one is ill, even with a common cold. Everyone carries his own tissues (used often as toilet paper) and holds a high regard for public sanitation. In Bomberman, these values emanate from the spreading of the disease; interaction between players becomes a struggle for survival based on avoidance rather than blatant confrontation. Although the violence of bombing one another seems radically overt, the strategy by which this is achieved often rewards those whose approach is subversive, manipulative, and non-confrontational. Therefore, the cultural meaning of the symbol is not in the shape, but rather its outcome.

On an experiential level, the symbol is a direct representation of the designer/player interaction. Even though the game may be challenging enough, the disease offers an extra level of difficulty and strategy. The outcome of these diseases reveals both the curiosity and the laziness of the designers. The curiosity comes from the reversed controls disease. This stretches the imagination of the code used in the game, and probably was added as an experiment with the game physics, as programmed by the designers. An interesting bit of laziness also comes from the code, though. When a computer-controlled enemy obtains the hyper speed disease, it becomes impossible to win. The speed does not accommodate for the Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). Instead, the computer completes the actions it was originally programmed to do, but now at ten times the speed. So, any human player would be incredibly disadvantaged at getting the hyper speed disease, but also if a computer player got the disease as well. The outcome of this symbol, in an experiential sense, reveals much of the interaction between the player and the original developers.

Although Bomberman represents only a small portion of Japan, the game has enjoyed success throughout its history. The farther from Hokkaido the game travels, the less the symbols in the game mean to the players. However, in its formal sense, the symbols remain intact and generate meaning contextually. On a cultural level, the symbols bear more meaning in Hokkaido, less in Japan, and even lesser in the United States. The experiential level of meaning shines in the intended meaning of the symbols created by the developers and the subsequent, non-intentional meanings extrapolated by the participants. By playing Bomberman, perhaps one could see true meaning in, “Hokkaido wa dekaido.”

I was a bit off the mark on a few of these statements, but it is interesting that this essay ever existed.