This past spring I had the pleasure of spending three months living just outside of Nagoya, with my task being to interview game players, buy games, hang out in game centers and stores, and generally soak up the culture (a rough job, I know). During the evenings, I also managed to spend quite a bit of time in my MMOG of choice, Final Fantasy XI. I'd started the game about seven months back, but hadn't had a lot of contact with the Japanese players that formed the initial base for the game. I'd heard talk and read postings about the differences in play styles and attitudes between North American and Japanese players, but now I could get first-hand experience.
Square Enix has done a pretty good job of mixing their servers, so NA and JP players could intermingle in the game, along with the Europeans who showed up later. With the NA release, they added an auto-translator, which is pretty easy to use (going between English and Japanese), but mostly limited to functional phrases rather than more conversational pieces.
I'm still eyeing all the data I've collected, and definitely need to do more analysis and reading on the topic, but some of the differences I found in style of gameplay were intriguing. First off, when forming parties for XP sessions, during the weekday evenings things were pretty regimented. In the game you can create a search comment and put your "flag" up, so everyone doing a search for party members can see you. Almost all JP players use search comments (while almost all NA players don't), and it seemed that people started to appear in early evening, there was a flood, people found groups, and then the seeking period was over.
When I got invited to a group (some NA players have complained they can't get invited to JP groups-- I handily play mages which are in high demand, and I also put some romanized Japanese into my search comment), we'd usually meet at a central point in Jeuno, the main city. Everyone, once assembled, bowed with their avatar, greeted one another and stated "yoroshiku onegaishimasu" (please take care of me--a fairly standard greeting in Japan but one you don't often hear in the States).
Then we'd head out, level for several hours, the leader would thank us for our time, we'd disband, and head home for the night. Contrast that to NA parties-- sometimes parties form in the central city, but more often than not you get a private message (or tell) from someone asking for a replacement member for a party already in progress somewhere. In NA parties, there's much more swapping out of party members, with parties sometimes continuing for many, many hours.
Given the two styles, even quickly its easy to see why certain misunderstandings might arise between the groups-- with Japanese upset with parties that stop and start due to members coming and going, and Westerners upset that good parties expire at some preset time, or if they can't get a party during peak times, they're out of luck.
I'll save for another post a discussion of English-speaking FFXI players that are learning Japanese and the materials that have sprung up to aid inter-cultural communication in the game, but for now I just wanted to close by asking everyone else about cross-cultural differences in play styles in MMOGs. I've looked for literature on the topic and mostly find studies of message boards, rather than gameplay, and which focus on Japan and Korea. Alan Meade's research sounds like what I should be checking out, although I haven't heard his results yet. Anyone?
