Career Opportunities - Work-Life Balance In Neverness To Everness

As Tyler Edwards pointed out in the comments to yesterday's post, there are certain constraints involved in designing a game to be released in China. Or there are if you don't want to fall foul of Fenris Creations - er, sorry, I meant the CCP. Easy mistake!

Until then, it hadn't really occurred to me that Neverness To Everness was a Chinese game. Indeed, it didn't even occur to me then, or not in that exact form. What did occur to me was that I had no idea where the company behind the game I was playing was based other than somewhere in the mysterious East.

I rarely do. Honestly, it might as well be the nineteenth century for all the attention I've been paying to where most of the "imports" I keep picking up and then dropping might be coming from.

This has been going on quite a while now, hasn't it? Forever, really, for as much as that means in the context of online gaming. I remember Mrs Bhagpuss and I playing the beta for some MMORPG from China so long ago I can't even remember what it was called any more. Just that it was one of her favorites for a while.

Whatever it was, I don't believe it ever came out in "the West". I just know it was long before we played Runes of Magic or Zentia although maybe not before I played NeoSteam...

The more I think about it, the more it seems it's always been this way, even if I do have a vague feeling I used to be much clearer on where the games I was playing were made. Final Fantasy XI came from Japan for a start. I always knew that. NeoSteam was Korean. I did have to fact-check that one just then but I was pretty sure. 

Zentia was from China and so was Loong. Or was Loong just set in China? It was published by Gamigo and they're... what are they now? German! I had to look that up even though I see some news item about Gamigo very nearly every day. Loong, it turns out, was developed by DACN out of Shanghai so it was Chinese.

These days, though, I rarely have much of an idea who's behind anything I'm playing, unless it's a company I know already. And sometimes, even when it's one I ought to recognize, I find I don't. 

I'm well aware Neverness To Everness is being developed by Hotta Studios. I've known that from the start. It's an easy-to-remember name. Or you'd think it would be. It can't be that easy to remember, though, because I only just realized this morning, as I was researching this post, that Hotta is the company behind that very successful MMORPG from a few years back, Tower of Fantasy.

At least, I think it was very successful. Wasn't it? For a while I saw a lot of people talking abut it but now I come to think of it, that didn't last long. No-one ever mentions it now. 

I never played it, which seems strange, given I'll play just about anything, so long as it's free and I think I can get a couple of blog posts out of it. As it happens, I know why I didn't play Tower of Fantasy. You won't guess. It's not a rational explanation. Or maybe it's too rational. 

I didn't play Tower of Fantasy because from the moment I saw the name I imagined the entire game was literally in a tower. I thought you'd have to start at the bottom and work your way up and that would be the all you'd ever do, which did not sound like a lot of fun to me, so I passed.  

I'm not completely crazy! There are MMORPGs that have towers like that inside them. It's a popular feature, I believe, although obviously not with me. I thought someone had just decided to make a whole game out of it, the way some developer or other is always trying to make an MMORPG that's all raids or all dungeons, one with no actual world to waste anyone's time.

By the time I'd realized my mistake it was a couple of years too late to jump on the very short-lived ToF bandwagon and so far I've never gotten around to giving it a go. I'm still not saying I won't but I'm guessing that particular bus has left the stop.

Although I feel like I might at least have recognized the name, in one way I'm not surprised I didn't. There doesn't appear to be a great deal of similarity between ToF and NTE. Different setting, different genre, different everything, pretty much. (ToF veterans are welcome to pop into the comments and tell me why that's just so wrong...assuming there's anyone reading who ever played it.)

Less defensible is my complete ignorance of where NTE was made. Is being made. It'd be nice to think country of origin doesn't matter for a video game but that would be a hard case to make. For all the hopes and fears trotted out across the past few decades, all the arguments in favor or against globalization, this is still a world of nation states and nations have cultures all their own.

Only in games, maybe not so much. It's blurry at best. For one thing, publishers with a global reach want to sell to all markets and they don't necessarily want to be running multiple versions to suit local tastes. Even if there is still a surprising amount of that sort of thing going on. 

For another, "globalization", as it applies to entertainment these days, often means "localization". Movies are made with different endings or a different emphasis in the storyline so as to play better in various territories. Games are localized not just by language but by cultural expectations including but not limited to age, dress code and the creatures you have to kill. I have a post brewing about aesthetic fragmentation that might get written one day...

Localization for the "Western" market does, theoretically, make it less obvious what the original intentions of the creators might have been but it's often no more than a thin, surface veneer stretched over a mostly unchanged framework. The innate cultural values and taboos that, consciously or unconsciously, drive the narrative and the aesthetic remain.

Or I assume they do. Except that I have such a shaky understanding of what those values and taboos might be, it's touch and go whether I'd recognize them in the first place. If there's one thing playing more games developed in China has taught me it's that I don't really know what China's like. Modern China, anyway.

Zentia used to be my idea of a "Chinese" game - all pagodas and dragons and people wearing straw hats. Neverness To Everness feels much more like my idea of a Japanese game, all modern technology, skyscrapers and neon. Which, to be fair, would also be my ignorant take on a Korean game, I guess, except I'd expect anything from Japan to be quirkier and cuter...

Is this racist? Maybe. I think it's more likely just ignorant. And lazy. I'd hold my hand up to both of those. 

Does it matter in the context of playing a video game? I guess not, so long as it leads to unconsidered assumptions being challenged and changed. And that does happen, quite a lot.

For example, unrelated to Tyler's comment and how it got me thinking about who was behind NTE and what they were trying to tell me, I'd already been wondering why there was such a huge focus on work in the game. It's a major theme. Possibly the major theme.

All the characters talk about their work all the time. It might be an even bigger obsession with many of them than food. All of them have jobs that they seem to take very seriously but despite their career goals, most of them also seem to have some kind of side-hustle going on. How they find time to sleep, let alone fit in any kind of social or private life, beats the hell out of me.

I'm not even talking about hand-wavy game mechanics, like the way they can all somehow pop up to fight my battles for me any time, anywhere. Or how the same characters can work for me, 24/7,  staffing the ever-increasing number of cafes that make up my growing business empire. No, I'm talking about proper, in-game second jobs the characters hold in character, usually menial, entry-level, gig economy deals like handing out leaflets in the street or doing courier work.

More worrying is the way no-one seems to have any kind of employment rights. The subject of overtime comes up constantly, always with characters dreading it but glumly accepting it as an inevitability of employment. And everyone appears to be on-call all the time. Having an official day off in no way prevents anyone from getting an urgent call telling them to come back to work. 

They all complain about it but none of them questions it. Work comes first seems to be a universally acknowledged maxim. Someone literally says it in one of the quests I did yesterday although I failed to get a screencap. As someone who's spent their entire life doing their best to avoid as much work as possible, I find it exhausting just to watch! I want the characters to kick back against the system that exploits them - organize, unionize, withdraw their labor - anything other than just complaining about it in private but doing it anyway.

I guess that's why my favorite character in the game so far is Hitori, the boss of Eidon Antiques. Hitori seems to do as little work as possible. She sleeps a lot, drinks a lot more, and mostly sends other people to do the jobs she can't be bothered with, which is all of them. As we see in the Main Story sequence, she's extremely capable when she needs to be but she doesn't feel the need to waste any energy proving herself to anyone. Mint, for one, could learn plenty from her example. 

The whole milieu reeks of double standards, hypocrisy and compromise, anyway, and Hitori is management so she can afford to delegate. She's not in any position to set an example. Half her staff is children! 

Granted, it's hard to tell exactly how old anyone's meant to be in NTE, what with the ever-rejuvenating anime art style, but Nanali, Edgar and Sakiri are specifically referred to as "kids" on multiple occasions, not least by Hitori herself. And Eidon isn't an isolated example of child labor. Illica and Haniel from Sterry Express seem to be much the same age, give or take a year or two.

What are the rules in Hetherau about employing children? Aren't they supposed to be in full-time education? There are certainly schools because one of the side quests takes you inside one but I don't see the slightest hint that any of the teenage cast is enrolled anywhere. 

Maybe being an Esper takes you out of the classroom? I could buy that if they were all transferred into some government program for potential assets in the Anomaly Wars but how would it square with them all ending up in the back room of an antique shop owned by an alcoholic, spending their time watching TV, bickering and pretending to run a junior version of the mob? 

But then the ordinary rules don't seem to apply to characters destined to become playable some day. It's different for Hethereau's regular citizenry. They don't get to sit around watching shows all day long.

Still, it is true that most of the people Flora meets seem to be reasonably happy in their work. All those hucksters outside stores and the sales people behind the counter inside. If you talk to them at length, though - and you often can because there's a lot of incidental, non-storyline dialog in NTE - it's often possible to sense an underlying dissatisfaction or ennui; workers for the same company getting a better deal, other branches offering a better quality of life... The grass is always greener ten blocks over.

Perhaps the most overtly subversive conversation I've enjoyed so far was with an unnamed "Slacking Citizen", who gleefully informed Flora that "slacking off is the essence of work". That's the attitude! She was still very concerned Flora not tell her boss, mind you, so i don't think she's going to be doing any organizing anytime soon

Maybe I'm reading more into all of this than I should but I can't help feeling the writers are telling us something about the society they live in. I get the feeling they may not disagree with the ethics of the way work is where they're from but they find the execution just a little hard to manage. Yes, work is great and of course we all need to do our best all the time but wouldn't it be nice to have a goddam day off, once in a while?

I imagine, if you're sufficiently attuned to it, you'd be able to sense specific cultural nuances within all the games that would clue you in to which specific countries the developers - or maybe just the writers - came from, without needing to look up the street address of the company to be sure. It's probably all there, embedded in assumptions about family, responsibility, work and individualism, themes that seem to come up in dialog over and over again.

For an ignorant westerner like me, though, what it mostly does is reinforce a pre-existing idea that life is more regimented in the East, wherever the East might be. And for me, the whole idea of taking what you do for a living in any way seriously seems almost distasteful. That's how I was raised.

I mean, it's only a job, isn't it? It's not like it's anything important...