Unlike Japanese consumer-electronic successes, notes Matt Alt, author of “Pure Invention”, a book on Japanese culture, games represented not just efficient manufacturing but “a triumph of ideas”.
More American children recognised Mario than Mickey Mouse. The university’s Centre for Game Studies, stacked with 10,000 video games and 150 pieces of hardware, shows how Japan led the gaming market by the 1990s, with Nintendo, Sega and later Sony dominant. Japan’s anime cartoons had a niche following, but gaming was the cultural export “that would really monetise and become an influential cultural phenomenon,” says Nakamura Akinori of Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. Japan conquered Western living rooms in the 1980s when Atari, an American game pioneer, collapsed and Nintendo saw an opening. And unlike movies, in which America remains the world’s only superpower, the contest in gaming is wide open. As games take up a bigger share of people’s time, they become a weapon in the battle of ideas. A new soft power is now on the rise: Super Mario diplomacy.
Every movie reel exported was an American ambassador, he said, dubbing this “Donald Duck diplomacy”. In 1950 Walter Wanger, an American producer, said film exports were more important “than the H bomb”. Popular culture’s “soft power” has been evident ever since Hollywood began.
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