Siddhartha Paul Tiwari
Lindsay D. Grace
Abstract
Discussion of the Asian video game market, particularly when focused on digital gamer production, often focuses on China, Japan, and South Korea. However, communities of South East Asia based game makers are emerging. Drawing from firsthand discussion and interviews with more than 400 game developers, 50 post-secondary academic faculty, and 15 academic organizations and universities, the authors offer perspectives, insights, and expected challenges for the region. The findings indicate that a combination of intellectual and creative energy as well as regional political and economic support have helped develop fertile ground for global attention. Most notably, the researchers observed a regional interest in shifting toward exploring innovative, original content and increasing educational capacities to explore creative practice in game design. These findings coincide with other reflections of the region's digital economy's development.
1 INTRODUCTION
Although reflections on the relationship between the South East Asia (SEA) games market [Newzoo 2020] and its cultural contribution to the wider games community do exist [Chung 2015], the region's more recent developments are mainly examined through a market analysis lens, of which some are critical [Wong 2023]. Instead of contrasting the SEA region to East Asia [Ahn 2021] or others, this work focuses on the characteristics observed in the collective region's self-reported aspirations, expectations, and challenges. This work does not aim to juxtapose, but instead report.
For context, as countries in SEA were resuming their pre-pandemic routines, global headwinds began to blow, threatening to derail a full economic recovery. This is according to the seventh edition of e-Conomy SEA by Google, Temasek, and Bain & Company [e-Conomy SEA 2022]. High inflationary pressures and rising interest rates have also been impacting consumer demand, particularly in the discretionary sectors of the economy. Although macroeconomic headwinds persist, SEA's digital economy reached $200 billion in gross merchandise value (GMV) in 2022. SEA has reached this threshold 3 years earlier than expected, according to the e-Conomy SEA 2016 report.
Currently in SEA, digital adoption rates are on the rise, although at a slower rate than during the height of the pandemic. Digital commerce continues to be dominated by affluent consumers and their young counterparts across primarily urban areas. Following the pandemic, a number of economic factors precipitated by digital strategies have led to the creation of a unique economic climate that facilitates the growth of the game industry in SEA. In turn, SEA has now become the world's fastest-growing mobile game market, which has a significant impact on the gaming industry. SEA has a digital economy that is based on strong social and economic fundamentals, as well as trends that are shifting from offline to online [Ha and Chua 2023]. All of this provides a good foundation for optimism, especially as the region enters the commonly referenced 'digital decade.'
2 OBSERVATIONS AND REFLECTIONS ON THE SEA GAMING INDUSTRY
To compile a detailed summary of perspectives, insights, and challenges in SEA, the authors spent a week in SEA, meeting more than 400 game developers, 50 academics, and 15 academic organizations and universities. As a result of a visit to SEA in the middle of May 2023, the authors had a number of firsthand interactions that contributed to the development of this article. The following are observations and reflections on the gaming industry in SEA, aggregated from those discussions.
2.1 Game Design and Its Significance
In SEA, the gaming industry continues to grow rapidly. This can be attributed largely to the popularity of hyper-casual games with simple gameplay, aggressive ad monetization, and simply to produce content and design. Although game design is a wide field, SEA's market has been strongly shaped by the dominance of hyper-casual games. This is true from both a consumer and producer perspective forming much of the regional game production. The community self-identifies a need to learn and improve in the areas of developer programming, creative user journeys, and visual design. Evidence suggests that many South East Asians present repetitive design elements, traditional badge systems, leaderboards, and avatars. Discussions with the community indicate an interest in departing from these design patterns.
It is apparent that template-based common UX solutions are still being used in SEA. To break the design patterns, the community of game makers expressed interests in evolving from templated user-experiences toward a wider set of novel game mechanics, unique aesthetics, and storytelling. There was clear debate in SEA about whether the focus should be put on UI or UX.
This pragmatic debate seems to be missing a wider sense of the complexity of game design. Further development to widen the games designed includes exploration of unique player goals, dynamics, visual aesthetics, and narrative forms. Even though a Western perspective might champion the value of original content in this context, diversity of gameplay experience designing within the region offers a much more practical financial advantage. If the games developed in the region offer wider, untemplated experiences, the market can remain more resilient to shifting consumer demand. Diverse, original gameplay experiences may help the industry grow more solidly and with more foundation to withstand market shifts.
2.2 Components of Game Design Used in a Hotchpotch Manner
After talking with several game developers, the authors discovered that different components of game design, such as the game loop, level design, game economy, and narrative design, were often functionally confused by developers. These distinctions were often less than apparent to developers and some of their educators, admittedly resulting from a need for foundational education in game design. This also includes some education in game studies, including the cultural and social relationship between games and society. Educators responsible for teaching game development and design in the region tend to come from game-adjacent disciplines like human computer interaction and computer science. There was limited evidence of creative enterprise education in the domain, although adjacent topics like graphic design and entrepreneurship did inform some formal and information educational opportunities.
In addition, there is a lack of meaningful play that has been noticed in some of the SEA games. It is an essential part of a game that the user can go on to learn and explore content or ideas in an engaging way, all the while having fun and enjoying the process. A meaningful play experience is intended to be activity or action driven with an emphasis on the experience rather than the artifact or game, and its application will prove highly beneficial in SEA.
2.3 Localization Challenges
In terms of linguistic diversity, SEA is one of the most diverse areas on earth, and it is of equal importance to the gaming industry itself since it is a cluster of countries, ranging from Myanmar to Timor-Leste, which together make up SEA. SEA's diversity results in high linguistic diversity, easily contrasted with other markets where one or two languages become unifying design constraints and shape target markets (e.g., English or Mandarin).
The fact that there are many languages spoken in SEA makes it a valuable area for study because they can reveal the historical influences that shaped the region and how these influences have been localized, which is one of the reasons for the region's success. A few of the main languages spoken in SEA are Lao, Thai, Burmese, Khmer, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Malay, and Bahasa, as well as a few Chinese dialects. In the gaming industry, localization is a major challenge because all of these languages are derived from distinct sources and possess distinctive cultural characteristics. As a result, they pose a serious challenge when it comes to their localization. In terms of domestic users and the economy, translation and localization of SEA games remain a challenge.
One of the obvious opportunities in designing games within the region is moving toward symbolic or pictographic language systems. Using interface elements that are illustrative may help broaden markets, but these also are subject to language and cultural constraints. They are also shaped by fundamentals of UI and UX that may not be as well developed in some communities.
2.4 Gaming as Part of Formal Academic Curricula
Most schools and universities in SEA do not teach any official game design courses or courses related to gaming. This makes it very difficult to find good game design expertise in the academic and non-profit space. There is often game design expertise clustered around commercial game makers located in the region, subject to the kinds of game designs developed by the region's companies.
Despite this, the gaming industry continues to grow at the fastest rate in the world, with much of the growth attributed to hyper-casual, single-mechanic games with simple gameplay, aggressive ad monetization, and low quality. Lacking the forces that drive innovation, some community members expressed concern about a cycle of copying former success. The impetus for wider innovation is not often initiated locally, but instead from outside forces.
Unfortunately, the games created under this cycle of copying prior success produce experiences targeting vulnerable groups of users, such as children. These okayers are prone to accidentally clicking advertisements, which often violate regional laws in regard to online advertising and intellectual property infringement. The fact that most developers can still make quite a bit of money through this method makes it difficult to convince them to choose a more challenging path toward original design. It is, as the prevailing logic offers, easier to create a clone to emulate a popular game than to pursue a higher quality and compete against other developers. This knock-off effect is clearly not a product of potential as much as a product of fiscal conservativism. As a new market, these patterns are not far from the flood of clones that followed Atari's Pong in the U.S. markets of the late 1970s. Fortunately, there is historical precedence for breaking such cycles.
3 CONCLUSION
The gaming industry in SEA has played a significant role in the rise of the local gaming industry, and it is likely to continue to be a source of both new consumers and fresh paradigms of how gaming should be experienced in the future. There is a possibility that rising interest rates and macro headwinds will have a significant impact on the gaming industry in SEA for the foreseeable future in 2024. Nevertheless, innovation is a never-ending process. The SEA region is open to innovation and open to learning from subject matter experts overseas, so it is only a matter of time before innovation and excellence kick into the gaming industry in SEA.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A special thanks to Ian Yip and Alison Bassi from the U.S. Embassy in Singapore. They helped arrange introductions and meetings with academics and industry professionals in SEA.
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Cross Ref
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Index Terms
- Observations and Reflections on the Gaming Landscape in South East Asia
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