Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 265)

Trigger Happy
267
like Lara Croft or Mario is, in these ways,
inexhaustible.
Some say life’s the thing . . .
. . . but I prefer playing videogames. Time to dive
once again into the bleep-ridden throngs of Makuhari,
because it’s not just in terms of character design that
the Japanese industry is instructive. We can also learn
from the esoteric flora and fauna of its videogame
biosphere that never make it to the West. Talking about
them one night after the show in a local sushi bar,
Japanese student Gavin Rees offers this observation:
“The Japanese do not make the distinction between
‘form’ and ‘content’ that we do in the West.”
How so? Teruichi Aono, a professional Shogi (a
board game also known as “Japanese chess”) player,
has written about the Japanese art of flower-arranging
that “the feeling is not so much that this flower or that
is in itself beautiful, but that a world of elegant beauty
is to be found, for example, in the skillful gathering and
arranging of flowers and pampas grass.” In the tea
ceremony, too, the rules for which it can take ten years
to learn, the point is not so much the content (the actual
drink) as the form (the highly traditionalized methods
of preparing it): “The actions performed in