Have gamers there developed lingo the way they have in the U.S.?
Yes. Unfortunately, I don't know much of it. Japanese seems to have less slang than English, in general; but, at the same time, they have to take English for lots of new concepts and make up a word for it. That word usually starts like the English word but then it gets slangified. For example a "thread" in a forum was "suredo," but, now, it's just "sure" (suu-ray). That's the only one that comes to mind. I need to start reading more 2chan.
DEVELOPERS
Can you compare Japanese development to the American approach some more?
Well, it's quickly changing, but, for example, you can read a good description in the latest Game Dev mag. The Resident Evil 4 postmortem. They talk about their old system where to see the art in the game, a programmer was required. In other words, the artist could not check out something in the game without giving their data to a programmer and waiting for an hour or so for him to compile it into the game. My division at Sega was this way when I got there. I fixed that for them.
Yeah, I read your gamasutra article about that.
It's still that way to some degree. They are just not very tool-oriented. Things like the Half-Life 2 engine, and now especially the Unreal 3 Engine. I don't mean just the engine, but the entire development environment, that's kind of turning them on to better processes, but it's still got a ways to go.
Many of the programmers are very stubborn and want to do everything their own way even if it means they have no tools and have to do everything by hand. I'm not sure where that attitude comes from. I can only guess different things like
1) Japanese colleges don't teach that much programming. A programming major may actually graduate without having ever programmed.
2) Also, generally, Japanese employees have that whole "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down" thing; so speaking up about a better way might be slightly harder to do than in the West.
As far as the no programming in college thing. I'm sure that's not always the case; but from what I've gathered, it's not uncommon, or at least used to be not uncommon, for it to go like this: You cram your ass off in junior high school/high school to get into a respected college in your chosen major. You then party at college for a couple of years, because having gotten into your college of choice in your major or choice, guarantees you'll get a good job. You then get your job, which you expect to keep for life. The company takes you untrained, but with the piece of paper (diploma) that says that you worked really hard to get into your college; therefore, you'll work really hard for them learning how to do what they teach you. They then assign you to someone, your sempaii, to train you. And so, that's how you learn your skill, not at college. That also means they can pay you complete shit, because you come with no skills.
Well, I haven't noticed too many shortcomings in Japanese games. What do they bring to the process that allows them to make such good games?
Perfectionism. It's surprising all the little details they concentrate on that an American developer would just ship with. That's not to say they are implemented in a well-designed and flexible way from a code point of view, but from an end user point of view, they are very polished.
What about from a design perspective? I've noticed that Japanese games seem to take good care of you as you play them.
