2

Console Games

How Regional Lockout Shaped the Video Game Industry

In 2013, Twitter user @lite_agent tweeted at Dan Adelman, then head of Nintendo’s indie development initiative, asking him to help make the company’s handheld 3DS console region-free. Up to that point, the company’s previous handhelds (Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, DS) lacked region codes, but the 3DS bucked that trend and ensured that games purchased in Japan would not play on US consoles—and vice versa. In response, Adelman tweeted, “I too used to live in Japan. Had 2 SNESs—one Japanese, one US. I feel your pain.”1 Although a seemingly innocuous commiseration over a common annoyance among gamers, Adelman’s tweet also served as a complaint about his employer’s distribution policy. As a result, it put him in a bit of hot water. The next year, video game publication Gamasutra posted an article suggesting that Nintendo banned Adelman from tweeting and conducting an interview with the publication due to his comments about regional lockout.2 A few months later, he offered an update on Twitter: “Happy to announce I reached an arrangement w/ @NintendoAmerica whereby I can tweet again. Arrangement includes my not working there anymore.”3 That Nintendo would protect its DRM policy so tightly as to stonewall and ultimately drive out one of its own executives suggests that, in the eyes of the company, regional lockout’s legitimacy cannot be questioned.

Locked Out began with the DVD region code because of how well the technology crystalizes the relationship between digital regulation and global cultural hierarchies. However, regional lockout in video games predates the DVD by a number of years. Regional incompatibility has been an issue since the early days of home gaming on platforms like the Commodore 64 and the Atari 2600, and regional lockout as a way of intentionally controlling distribution dates back to the Nintendo Entertainment System / Famicom in the mid-1980s.4 While the specific technological mechanisms have shifted—from physical impediments on cartridges and consoles to complex arrangements of software and firmware—regional lockout has sustained the console game industry’s particular “Japan-West” geographic dynamic for several decades. It has done so by controlling the flow of games and consoles among the industry’s largest regional markets—North America, Japan, and Western Europe—and enabling the industry to treat each market as a distinct entity.5 Like other forms of regional lockout, this draws lines and sketches hierarchies of geocultural capital in global video game culture, prohibiting or allowing certain types of play in different parts of the world. In the context of a game industry highly concerned with localization, region codes and chips are as much about adapting games to particular markets as they are about intellectual property control and price discrimination. By ensuring that Japanese software could not play on American hardware (and vice versa), regional lockout in the Japan-West nexus allowed game developers to create different versions of games for American and Japanese consumers.6

The existence of these local adaptations resulted in consumers and collectors seeking out different international versions of games. Within transnational gaming cultures, regional lockout provided conditions for the cultivation of “hardcore” gamers, who invest a great deal of time, money, and knowledge on video games.7 That effort results in the accumulation of what Mia Consalvo calls “gaming capital,” or the (sub)cultural capital that comes with insider knowledge of video games, game culture, and the game industry.8 An understanding of regional lockout, and how to bypass it, is one component of gaming capital and a way of demonstrating fluency in video game technology, culture, and institutions. Hardcore gamer identity involves knowledge about the Japan–United States–Europe geographical shape of the game industry: where particular companies and publishers are based, how they divide their markets, which games they make available to which territories, and how to access consoles and games meant for other nations. Regional lockout helps produce global gaming cultures and gamer identity since it shapes people’s gaming experiences and functions as a site where users from around the world gain and share knowledge about games.

Thus, I argue in this chapter that regional lockout was a central force in shaping the geographic parameters and political economies of formal and informal console video game industries as well as the participatory consumer cultures that formed around them. After providing a cultural history of regional lockout in the big-budget, high-profile consoles produced by companies like Atari, Nintendo, Sega, Sony, and Microsoft, I show how regional lockout helped build and sustain subcultures of hardcore gamers by giving them a common annoyance, creating a canon of sought-after rare and imported games, and encouraging hacking and modding activities that became central to the hardcore gamer identity.9 Ironically, then, the ability to circumvent regional lockout and violate preferred distribution paths is part of a constructed (and gendered) “gamer” identity that has been quite beneficial to the game industry. This is in part what makes regional lockout in video games different from DVD region codes and other examples explored throughout the book. While DVD region codes and geoblocked streaming platforms have been important components of global media distribution and exhibition, neither have been quite as central to the consumer culture built around their respective platforms.

Distribution, Regional Lockout, and Console Video Games

The console sits at the center of the game industry and the gaming experience. The major console manufacturers, who operate as an oligopoly, drive the industry by producing the hardware for which most video games are produced.10 On one level, these consoles are simple pieces of technology: collections of wires, circuits, and chips encased within a plastic shell. However, Ben Aslinger argues that the console is also an “[artifact] of modern industrial design” that becomes fetishized through both its technological characteristics and its aesthetic qualities.11 While game development studios and publishers are undoubtedly crucial to building the games we play, players are more likely to identify (and identify with) a particular console than a particular studio.12 However, the console is but one facet of the gaming experience, and the console manufacturer but one player in the game industry. Games still need to attract to users, and the routes they take set the terms for the shape of regional lockout in video games.

In the path from production to consumption, games move through a supply chain run by a number of intermediaries, the different parts of which are summarized by Peter Zackariasson and Timothy Wilson:

Developer => Publisher => Distributor => Retailer => Customer => Consumer13

Distribution—as the process by which a game moves from the zone of production (the developer) to the zone of consumption (the customer and consumer)—can be located within the publisher, distributor, and retailer zones. Publishers handle the release of games on consoles, marketing and promoting these titles to distributors. The top game publishers are mostly multinational companies based in North America and Japan. Distributors then operate as intermediaries or wholesalers that sell these games to retailers. Developers, publishers, and distributors are not always separate entities. Particularly for larger companies, development, publication, and distribution might represent arms or extensions of one corporation. For example, the same conglomerate handled the development, publication, and distribution of the massively popular Grand Theft Auto V. Development studio Rockstar North, an Edinburgh-based subsidiary of Rockstar Games, developed the game initially for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Rockstar Games served as publisher, and Rockstar’s parent company, Take-Two Interactive, distributed the game to retailers often using distribution subsidiaries like the UK-based Exertis Gem.

The importance of software sales to the console game industry puts a premium on controlling distribution. Because games do not have secondary windows such as home video or syndication in the film and television industries, initial sales of a game are crucial to the bottom lines of console manufacturers, game developers, and publishers.14 Console manufacturers make little money from the units themselves, which are usually loss leaders.15 Rather, profit comes from money they receive from game sales as well as the license fees paid by publishers.16 In order to release a game on a console, publishers and developers must pay this license fee to the console company and sign contracts agreeing to manufacturers’ quality and technological standards, which usually include lockout and DRM systems. Not all of these are region-based. Many are designed to keep independent game developers and publishers from releasing games without the consent of the console manufacturer. Other agreements, however, required developers and publishers to region-lock games according to the desires of the console manufacturer, though this has changed somewhat over time. While console manufacturers still maintain the greatest amount of control over the games that get played on their systems, including decisions about whether they are region-locked, game developers and publishers have more recently had a say in such matters.

The game industry’s economic rationale for regional lockout extends beyond abstract notions of control and power. Rather, Barry Ip and Gabrielle Jacobs point to two justifications for regional lockout in games: protecting against piracy / parallel imports and maintaining the quality of games and software.17 As Consalvo reminds us, the industry employs regional lockout to ensure that games flow “only along well-marked paths, designed to ensure careful tracking and control.”18 Because the game industry has always been transnational, it has long had to deal with the issues that come with controlling and guiding commodities at a rather vast scale. Given the ever-increasing importance of global markets, console manufacturers and game publishers and distributors have an obvious interest in controlling distribution, particularly among the industry’s three largest regional markets: the United States, Japan, and Europe.19 As with DVDs, part of the reasoning is price discrimination—a strategy that became even more important as the industry globalized. There are other reasons for regional lockout, such as ensuring the ability to control games’ content based on different regions’ ratings systems. When asked why its handheld DSi console was region-locked, Nintendo’s UK general manager David Yarnton argued that because Nintendo UK subscribed to the Pan European Game Information ratings system, it made sense to lock out other territories that have different content restriction guidelines.20 This way, users from regions with stricter restrictions would be barred from importing mature-rated games from the UK. The game industry also often suggests that regional lockout helps it localize games for certain markets and ensures that it can distribute certain versions of games to different territories. However, this is not merely a benign process of giving the people what they want. The ability to control localization helps the major companies like Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft consolidate their power over the localization process by using it to shape content, release dates, and prices according to their desires.

Reterritorializing Games: Regional Lockout’s Origins

In the early days of home console gaming, international restrictions were not intentional forms of DRM as much as they resulted from the same incompatibilities that hampered the international videotape trade. Because consoles like the Atari 2600 connected to analog televisions, they were beholden to the three different analog color standards: PAL, NTSC, and SECAM. Because PAL and NTSC televisions operate using different numbers of scan lines and frames per second, the Atari could not automatically adjust to the television. As a result, different consoles and games had to be developed for each system.21 Systems built for one standard were incompatible with another, which led to an early form of regional disconnect driven not by the profit motives of media companies but by the contingencies of divergent technical standards. Even if the Atari 2600 did not contain any intentional regional lockouts, its technical makeup meant that games and consoles intended for one region were effectively contained to that region.22

DRM systems that would set a template for regional lockout arrived in the next generations of game consoles. In 1983, Japanese toy company Nintendo released an eight-bit home video game console in Japan known as the Famicom, short for Family Computer. Three years later, the company introduced the North American version, called the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The NES (though not the Famicom) included a Checking Integrated Circuit (CIC) lockout chip that ran a program called 10NES wherein the console and the cartridge needed to handshake before a game would run on the system. Although it does not contain regional controls, this form of lockout is functionally comparable to the DVD region codes described in the previous chapter for a few reasons. For one, it relies on an agreement between hardware and software in order to let the software play. In addition, it ensures that certain parties in the game industry maintain control over the production, distribution, and use of the technologies. In this case, the CIC and 10NES were early forms of DRM that placed the console manufacturer (i.e., Nintendo) in the driver’s seat.23 While the chip was installed nominally to prevent the production of counterfeit games, it effectively meant that any company had to get Nintendo’s approval before developing a title. This strict control over games produced for the system was key to Nintendo’s domination of the market in the late 1980s and early 1990s.24

While Nintendo was concerned about controlling game production and development, it also recognized the need to keep distinct its two dominant markets, Japan and the United States. Because both nations use the NTSC system, the company could not rely on disagreeing television standards to keep games from moving between the two. As a result, the Famicom and the NES were region-locked through more overtly physical, material means: the number of pins on the cartridge board and the shape of the cartridge. Whereas the board in a Famicom cartridge contained only sixty pins, the NES cartridge had seventy-two. A handful of early NES cartridges were also built with Famicom boards rather than NES boards, and these contained sixty- to seventy-two-pin converters. This form of regional lockout helped the company maintain a measure of control over its different international markets—a level of market control affirmed by the fact that Nintendo had no major competitors during this era.25 In sum, one reason the company dominated the video game market was because of lockout systems that enabled it to control distribution and kept other companies from producing games for the system without Nintendo’s approval.26

With the arrival of sixteen-bit consoles, that would soon change. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the launch of Sega’s Mega Drive console, known as the Genesis in North America, and Nintendo’s Super Famicom / Super Nintendo Entertainment System. These consoles heralded a more concentrated attempt by game companies to develop regional lockout systems that reflected a move beyond the Japan-America axis that up to that point dominated the industry. Sega’s experiments with regional lockouts were, in part, a consequence of the company’s move into a variety of international markets (and Europe in particular).27 Because this meant increased potential for parallel imports, the company’s consoles were produced in several different models and regional variations, requiring a complicated system of regional lockouts. Indeed, the region-locked status of the Genesis depended on which model one owned.28 The first two models of the Genesis used a simple form of physical lockout: Japanese cartridges contained two plastic tabs that kept the cartridge from sliding into American consoles. The third model of the Genesis contained no regional lockouts. However, in a move that later consoles would adopt more regularly, some individual Genesis games contained regional lockout software even though the console itself contained none.29 Because of Sega’s aggressive international expansion, which helped the company overtake Nintendo for a short period, Nintendo likewise focused more energy on markets beyond Japan and the United States. As a result, the SNES employed a physical lockout system similar to the Genesis: two plastic tabs within the console’s cartridge slot that prevented users from inserting Japanese imports into the console. This functioned on top of the PAL/NTSC disagreements that already disallowed American and Japanese systems from playing European games (and vice versa), and together the two systems used a form of regional lockout combining analog measures and incompatibilities.30 During this period, the renewed focus on international markets set off a period of video game globalization that would only heighten the importance of regional lockout to the game industry.

As a form of technological-geographic control, regional lockout reflects Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter’s argument that games characterize the deterritorializing and reterritorializing functions of global capital. Drawn from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, deterritorialization and reterritorialization in this sense do not necessarily refer to actual geographic territories. Rather, deterritorialization is a metaphorical explanation of how capital “conjures up fresh products and practices, breaks down old habits, and throws all bounded domains—‘territories’—of life, geographic, social, and subjective, into upheaval.” It then reterritorializes by “enclosing innovations as property, drawing around them new legal boundaries, and policing access so that new technical machines and cultural creations appear as commodities produced and sold for profit.”31 Regional lockout invites us to take “territory” literally here while still retaining the terms’ metaphorical usefulness. In other words, regional restrictions represent contemporary media’s deterritorializing and reterritorializing functions at the levels of both geography and their relationship to the movements of capital.32 Because console games developed as a transnational enterprise during periods of intensifying media globalization, the experience of gaming was for many users an encounter with media texts and technologies that gestured toward a broader world. At the same time, games were also reterritorialized through regional lockout, which closed off consumers’ ability to symbolically traverse global space through gaming.

Controlling—and Complicating—Compatibility

With the blueprints for controlling global distribution in place, the subsequent adoption of disc-based digital hardware and software helped the game industry implement more complex forms of regional lockout. As discussed in the previous chapter, optical discs enable media industries to implement forms of regional lockout through DRM, which are less visible and detectable than hard-wired forms of lockout like tabs and differently shaped cartridges. The mid-1990s saw the release of the next generation of thirty-two- and sixty-four-bit game consoles from Nintendo, Sega, and a new player on the scene: the major media conglomerate Sony, which released the thirty-two-bit PlayStation console in Japan in 1994 and the United States and Europe in 1995. Using CD-ROM technology, PlayStation software contained one hundred times the maximum capacity of a cartridge yet was cheaper to manufacture.33 Although the PlayStation commanded much of the limelight in the mid-1990s, Sega had released its latest console just before Sony. After several disappointing Genesis add-ons (Sega CD, Sega 32X), the company shifted gears toward developing a new thirty-two-bit system that would become the Sega Saturn. Both the PlayStation and the Saturn ran on region-locked CD-ROM technology. The Nintendo 64 console, released around the same time, stuck with cartridges as a way to maintain control over its proprietary hardware and software. Much like the NES and SNES, it used plastic tabs to region-lock the system’s cartridges.

The general shift to discs resulted in an era of increasing convergence with formats like the CD and the DVD, which would make regional lockouts and incompatibilities more complex. Consoles were now at once more versatile and dependent on the technical specifications and DRM systems embedded on a variety of different formats. This meant that consoles like Sony’s PlayStation 2 (PS2) and Microsoft’s Xbox, which used DVD technology, had to have multiple regional lockout systems installed: the DVD’s CSS/RPC system for playback of movies and any separate regional lockout intended for the games. Regional lockout was thus part of a broader congregation of media convergence, console gaming, and technological incompatibility.34 While console gaming has always been rife with disconnections and frustrations—planned obsolescence, hardware/software disagreements, and malfunctioning cartridges and discs—regional lockout was a kind of intentional incompatibility that the industry used to lock down its systems. In a media environment rife with DRM, “trusted systems,” and “tethered appliances,” this approach to controlling compatibility through lockout became increasingly normal.35 In the eyes of consumers, regional lockout could be considered just another one of those technical hiccups that accompanies the gaming experience. This is all to say that the industrial geography of video game distribution exploited the usual problems of compatibility that plagued game consumers, but in ways that attempted to paper over its profit-driven intentions.

While the PS2, Dreamcast, and GameCube maintained now well-known, console-determined regional lockout systems, the Xbox signaled an incoming shift in the logics of regional lockout: the console itself (or, more precisely, the console’s DVD-ROM drive that read game discs) was technically region-free. This did not mean that the Xbox offered a fully region-free experience, as game publishers could still region-lock individual games if they desired. However, it represented a change in power from console to publisher, which would become the standard for Microsoft and Sony games in the future. Although its release was roughly concurrent with the three region-locked platforms described above, the Xbox’s quasi-region-free status pointed to a growing expectation within game cultures that the industry was on a progressive path forward and that regional restrictions would be consigned to the past. In late 2005, there were rumblings among game publications that the PlayStation 3 may not include any region locks whatsoever, with one report suggesting that this move would mark a “significant shift” for Sony.36 At the 2006 Game Developer’s Conference, Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios president Phil Harrison announced that the PlayStation 3 would, in fact, be region-free.37 Early reports even suggested that Nintendo, the old stalwart of regional lockout in the game industry, might go region-free with its next console, the Wii.38 Ultimately, however, Nintendo maintained its usual approach to regional lockout, announcing in October 2006 that the Wii would be region-locked along the same lines as the GameCube.

Like the original Xbox console, the PS3 and the Xbox 360 could still block games based on region, but this would be determined by the publishers of individual games rather than the console manufacturer. As with the Xbox, this meant that while the consoles were nominally region-free, tracking the region-coded status of games was more difficult because it had to be done on a game-by-game basis. For example, the Japanese and American versions of the PS3 and Xbox 360 game Persona 4 Arena were each region-locked to their respective countries.39 The reason for this was the US dollar’s weakness against the yen, as the game’s publisher, Atlus, was concerned about cheaper American imports flooding the Japanese market.40 Indeed, with this new, publisher-led form of regional lockout, particular games could be region-locked due to specific dynamics of market or culture. Adding to the complexity was that the same game on different systems could be region-locked according to different guidelines (or not at all). While by all accounts Persona 4 Arena is the first and only PS3 game to include regional lockout, the Xbox 360 platform comprises a large number of region-locked games, some of which are only locked in certain territories. For example, Grand Theft Auto V is region-free on every platform (both PS3 and Xbox 360) except for the Japanese Xbox 360, where it is region-locked to Japan.41 Such convolution led to fan-created resources like wikis that list the region compatibility of hundreds of different games.42

Adding more confusion, once again, were different color television standards used around the world. While ongoing shifts away from standard-definition television to high-definition television have mitigated the NTSC/PAL/SECAM issues somewhat, they still keep nominally region-free systems like the PlayStation 3 from being universally usable. While HDTV eliminated the difference in the number of lines of video between PAL and NTSC, therefore standardizing frame size around the world, it did not eliminate the difference in frame rates: HD televisions in countries that use the NTSC standard still operate at thirty frames per second while those that use the PAL standard operate at twenty-five. Furthermore, the HDTVs for which contemporary consoles are optimized are not common everywhere in the world.43 As a result, most region-based hiccups that occur on the PlayStation 3 are similar to the earliest forms of regional incompatibilities in consoles like the Atari 2600 in that they result from diverging standards rather than DRM. At the same time, regional lockout on the Xbox 360 and other disc-based consoles show how new DRM mechanisms become culturally legible and legitimate through their association with these older forms of regional incompatibility. For example, the three regions that guide the Xbox’s region coding system are GR1: NTSC for North America and South America (i.e., the United States, Canada, Mexico, Chile, and Brazil), GR2: NTSC-J for Asia, and GR3: PAL for Europe, India, Australia, and New Zealand. Seemingly innocuous, this list in fact does some important discursive work. For one, the numerical order indicates a cultural-economic hierarchy in region coding, just like the six-region DVD codes discussed in the previous chapter. Further, while the names of these regions might suggest that the divergent television standards are the cause of any regional incompatibilities, the regional lockout system is in fact buttressed by a separate region code distinct from these standards. To be sure, playing a PAL disc on an NTSC machine and vice versa would produce some compatibility issues, but the disc’s region code is a different technical mechanism only related to the PAL/NTSC standards by name. So, when a user puts a disc into a player from the wrong region and a message appears onscreen suggesting that the disc will not play on the console, it may initially seem like an issue of incompatible television standards. In fact, the user is confronting a form of digital rights management.

This is similar to the conflation of PAL/NTSC and DVD region codes discussed in the previous chapter, and it has the same benefit for the game industry: if consumers think regional lockout is related to a seemingly inevitable technological hurdle, they may be less likely to protest. Indeed, a survey of both consumers and video game industry workers indicates that this conflation seems to be working. While many users think that the PAL/NTSC distinction is a significant factor in why the game industry employs regional lockout, industry workers indicate that it is not a factor at all. One developer even admits that the PAL/NTSC issue is a smokescreen put up to mask publishers and distributors’ control of market rollout. Rather, the developer delivers a master disc to the publisher that has all languages and region codes on it, and the publisher implements the appropriate ones as it sees fit.44 In his hacker instruction manual Gaming Hacks, Simon Carless distinguishes between “regional differences” and “regional lockouts.”45 The former are unintentional incompatibilities over which developers, publishers, and console manufacturers have little control. The latter are intentionally installed DRM systems meant to control the distribution of games. By blurring this distinction, the game industry asks consumers to view regional lockout as a natural outcome of convergence rather than a consciously developed form of control.

New DRM Debates

Contemporary debates over region-locked consoles have at once shifted into new technological terrain (specifically, region-locked portable consoles and digital distribution systems) and recalled some of the earliest public invocations of regional lockout through new protests against Nintendo. The tendency for some recent consoles to reject regional lockout allayed public concerns about geographic restrictions somewhat, but not before some contentious back-and-forth between the two largest console manufacturers. Industry and public discussions about regional lockout in Microsoft’s Xbox One and Sony’s PlayStation 4 (both rolled out throughout 2013 and 2014) were part of a broader series of controversies in mid-2013 about DRM in the two consoles. In spring of that year, Microsoft announced that the Xbox One would contain a number of strict DRM measures, including limits on how often you could share a disc-based game as well as a requirement that the console would need to connect to the internet once every twenty-four hours in order to authenticate the system and keep its DRM updated and in place.46 In addition, the company announced that the console would feature region locks due to “country-specific regulatory guidelines.”47 This brought about a good deal of anger from game consumers and gaming publications. At the time, Microsoft also indicated that the console’s initial launch would only include twenty-one countries, leaving out Japan and parts of Europe (in addition to territories across the Global South that the major console industries generally did not bother with anyway).48 Because the console was to be region-locked, this would effectively preclude these territories from purchasing consoles and games from one of the launch regions. This resulted in public backlash against Microsoft, to which Sony responded by quickly announcing that the PlayStation 4 would not incorporate similar DRM systems. Although it was initially unclear whether this would include region coding, Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony Worldwide Studios, eventually confirmed that the console would be region-free.49 In response to Sony’s announcement as well as consumer anger, Microsoft reversed course and announced that the Xbox One would no longer contain the announced DRM measures.50 The introduction of Nintendo’s Wii U system would only inflame these debates over corporate and consumer control. While Sony and Microsoft were tussling over DRM, Nintendo announced that its console would be region-locked along the same lines as its predecessor, the Wii. Hinting at the company’s long history of proprietary control and the fact that regional lockout had become standard industrial practice by that point, Nintendo executives also suggested that that the Wii U would be region-locked in part because Nintendo had traditionally engaged in the practice.51

Much of the public ire directed at Microsoft and Nintendo relied on the premise that new technologies should fix the problems of “old” media. As one video game writer puts it, regional lockout is now an “unwanted relic from gaming’s past.”52 Another writer points out that due to the region-free nature of the PS4 and the Xbox One, the “tide is turning” toward a video game culture that cedes more control to consumers.53 These arguments suggest that the internet should make regional lockout obsolete. But this is a two-way street. While many consumers feel that digitally connected consoles are fundamentally incompatible with the idea of regional lockout, console companies’ ability to connect and communicate with consoles through the internet can make top-down control even easier. Manufacturers’ ability to update a console’s functions quickly through online updates to software stored in read-only memory (otherwise known as firmware) was the centerpiece of a recent coordinated protest against regional lockout. In the wake of Nintendo’s announcement that the Wii U would be region-locked, users started campaigns on social media as well as in the Miiverse, the Wii U’s own social networking and communication service, attempting to convince Nintendo to reverse its stance.54 A post on gaming forum NeoGaf outlines a massive and comprehensive overview of this consumer-driven push, including instructions on how to contact Nintendo; links to dozens of Miiverse posts, news articles, YouTube videos, and Reddit threads calling for an end to regional lockout; and a call to post protests using the hashtag #EndRegionLocking.55 One user even started a Change.org petition asking Nintendo to release firmware updates for the Wii U and the portable 3DS (which, unlike earlier portable consoles, was region-locked) in order to make them region-free.56 By attempting to convince Nintendo to eliminate regional lockout through firmware updates, users tried to take a form of technological control and instead use it to open up the console.57 At the same time, fighting regional lockout via petition represents a more formal attempt at lockout circumvention than the more illicit and unauthorized approaches (e.g., hacking) I will discuss below. It also indicates that regional lockout through firmware could be a more effective form of control for the console industries due to the difficulty of altering such firmware. Despite all this, the Wii U remained region-locked, though Nintendo eventually abandoned regional lockout in its most recent console, the Switch.

As consoles continue to intersect with different networked media technologies, the question of whether they are or are not region-locked becomes increasingly difficult to answer. The next chapter will dive more deeply into how regional lockout changed with the popularization of high-speed internet and streaming media, but a recent shift in the game industry toward digital distribution and online game purchases through services like the PlayStation Store, the Xbox Games Store, and the Nintendo eShop added another layer to the regional lockout question. Namely, online distribution has allowed platform owners to install a two-step form of regional lockout, where platforms are both geoblocked from the network (i.e., blocked in certain areas based on the user’s IP address) and require a credit card from the accepted region. At the same time, the rise of online distribution has intensified talk about the archaic nature of regional lockout. In 2009, Kotaku asked its readers if they believed digitally distributed games should be region-locked. Responses ranged mostly from mild annoyance at the practice to rather passionate anger.58 Following the perhaps overly simplistic futurism described above, the question rests on an assumption that online distribution should be freer from the shackles of regional lockout. As more of the gaming experience takes place online, users associate regional lockout with the supposed inadequacies of more obviously physical media like discs and cartridges. Regional lockout in digital distribution indicates that the console companies are still trying to figure out a balance between excluding players from prohibited regions and easing headaches for users who live in increasingly interconnected environments. Part of this involves a growing recognition of the industrial construction of the “casual” gamer, or quite simply the idea that not all video game consumers represent the archetype of the hardcore gamer. When discussing the reasoning behind the Xbox One’s regional flexibility for digital downloads, Microsoft’s Albert Penello pointed to a rather banal tendency of everyday life: “Lots of people in Europe specifically travel, move, and visit family.”59 However, even if the game industry began to see cross-border travel—whether literal or metaphorical through internet connections—as a recent phenomenon, video game consumers traveled before the release of the Xbox One. More to the matter at hand, importing games from around the world has always been a major part of video game consumption, at least for the medium’s most ardent devotees.

Creating and Selling Gamer Culture through Circumvention

In order to track regional compatibility and bypass DRM systems, users need to know a great deal about video game distribution and technology. And although regional lockout has assuredly frustrated many users around the world, it has also engendered a robust community of lockout circumventors as well as a cottage industry of products that cater to them. Informal economies specializing in unauthorized copies of games exist across the Global South, for instance, while all over the world gamers exert some measure of control over game production and distribution through practices like hacking lockout systems and playing versions of imported games on unauthorized desktop emulators.60 Methods of lockout circumvention often reflect a great deal of ingenuity, ranging from altering code to physically manipulating the hardware and software by soldering wires, removing tabs that keep unauthorized cartridges from fitting into consoles, and literally cutting, shaving, and sanding cartridges to get them to fit into consoles for which they were not intended. One online tutorial on playing Famicom game cartridges on NES consoles instructs the user to pry open the plastic cartridge, melt plastic tabs inside the NES cartridge case using a screwdriver warmed up with a butane torch, and switch out the boards from one cartridge to another.61 Another helps users track down sixty- to seventy-two-pin converter boards by listing which games have been known to contain these boards and outlining how to determine whether certain copies will include them based on the cartridge’s weight as well as the number and position of the screws on the back.62 These methods exemplify what Saugata Bhaduri calls “creative and subversive appropriation” in game cultures, as they represent a measure of user agency over the technology. They also illustrate high quantities of gaming capital, since they require knowledge and literacy of video game practices, subcultures, and technologies.63 Regional lockout represents one way the transnationalism of game culture might be foreclosed, but it also opens up moments when users might, to coin an admittedly cumbersome term, “re-deterritorialize” games by circumventing regional lockout and violating the industry’s trade routes. In other words, circumvention enables gamers to take technologies that video game corporations have artificially territorialized and travel past the geographic borders implanted in them.

Such practices inspired an industry built on helping gamers get past regional lockout. As Consalvo has shown, the game industry is surrounded by a variety of ancillary industries geared toward the circulation of gaming capital—industries comprising what Matthew Payne refers to as “companies that seek to profit from selling the information that gamers value.”64 Regarding regional lockout, this has manifested over the years in message boards, blogs, books, magazines, and mail-order catalogs that instruct users on workarounds for lockout systems and sell products like modchips and imported games. Books such as Carless’s Gaming Hacks and websites like Games X, Racket Boy, and Modchip Central explain and sell the tools users need to circumvent various forms of DRM. For instance, this industry has long produced “passthrough converters” for cartridge-based consoles, where the cartridge is placed in one end of an adapter, and the other end is placed in the console. Additionally, it is now possible to purchase unauthorized clones of older consoles like the Famicom, which will play imported games.65 As Consalvo argues, paratextual industries like these help users experience games in ways that do not always align with the desires of developers or console companies, “daring players to ask who should control what legitimately purchased games they can play on their own videogame console.”66 Since they operate outside dominant, sanctioned modes of practice, these shadow industries of lockout circumvention are, of course, generally frowned on by mainstream game institutions.

Because these informal economies undermine the goal of controlling distribution, the game industry has sought to punish users who engage in circumvention practices. One such measure has been to lobby legislatures to pass anti-circumvention laws, as in the example of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act discussed in the previous chapter. At the individual level, however, console companies dissuade users from circumventing lockout systems by prohibiting them from using certain services. For instance, tampering with a console, as in modding it in order to disable a lockout system, voids its warranty. Additionally, modded consoles are often automatically barred from supplementary services such as the online Xbox Live platform. While Microsoft implemented these measures primarily to keep users from cheating while using the service, it has the effect of banning users who mod their consoles to play games from other regions.67 This strategy of using consoles’ online marketplaces and social networks to track modded consoles engendered new fears of surveillance that previous circumventors did not need to worry about. One Xbox magazine ran a feature called “The Myths of Modding,” investigating the belief that “If you play Xbox Live with a modded Xbox, the FBI will bust down your door and arrest you with a warm controller still in your hand.”68 The subversive thrill of engaging in activities that invoke fears of the FBI (even in the context of debunking those fears) is assuredly part of the appeal for some. Lockout circumvention is in some ways part of the standard gamer practice of breaking rules, as there are ludic elements in not only gameplay but also the hacking of a console itself. As Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter suggest, game hacking cultures embody “an audacity that sees repurposing code as just another dimension of play.”69 In this sense, we can think of regional lockout itself as an extratextual rule meant to be followed in order to play games properly. If the rules of a game are contained within the game’s code, the “rule” of regional lockout is likewise part of the code of the game or console.70 Consalvo notes that gamers can take three positions in relation to rules: following them, explicitly rejecting them, or “secretly not abiding by [them] . . . and thus cheating.”71 User responses to regional lockout follow in line with these three positions, with many players rejecting these rules and choosing to “cheat” regional lockout systems.

Just as cheating helps gamers succeed within a game, hacking regional lockout helps gamers achieve greater gaming capital outside of it. Thus, like the circumvention practices described above, it would be overly simplistic to see these paratextual industries and circumvention cultures as purely antagonistic to normative gaming. After all, they represent ways users can further immerse themselves in video game culture. Indeed, purveyors of informal circumvention technologies pitch their products to an imagined gamer with a great deal of gaming capital and a willingness to bend the rules. This is just one part of how regional lockout and regional circumvention have helped shape the self-identities and subjectivities of what Dyer-Witheford, de Peuter, and others have called the “hardcore gamer.” Mikolaj Dymek describes this demographic as a “dedicated gamer” who is “technologically savvy, willing to pay for gaming hardware/software, plays many and long sessions, is part of the gaming community (online and offline) and is interested in the latest information and news from the video game industry.”72 The hardcore gamer acquires gaming capital through knowledge of how game consoles work, the contours of the game industry’s distribution practices, lists of import games, and the means to circumvent regional lockout. In Gaming Hacks, Carless draws an explicit link between circumvention and this consumer group when he writes, “I can see it in your eyes. You’re hardcore. Not only will you wait no longer than necessary for your games, you want the best versions available, without censorship or missing features. You also want to play the games that you could only dream about as a child—Japan-exclusive titles that never made it to the NES or Genesis.”73 Those who have the knowledge to seek out and practice circumvention techniques embody gaming capital through their expressed expertise over the machine. After all, using the technology in ways counter to the intentions of console corporations expresses a greater amount of knowledge about the system than even the company that made it.

The irony is that the game industry created and catered to the demographic of the hardcore gamer even as this group undermined the industry by pirating games and hacking regional lockouts. These users have an ambivalent relationship to the institutions that create the media texts and technologies they want to consume—an attitude that characterizes much of the frustration with regional lockout across media. On the one hand, anti-regional-lockout discourse expresses irritation at massive corporations for controlling gaming culture in ways that do not always seem just to users. On the other hand, this frustration is premised on the disappointment that these users cannot consume as many of the corporation’s products as they would like. Because many users attempting to circumvent lockout are interested in buying more games from legitimate, “formal” businesses, the act of purchasing import games still contributes capital to developers, publishers, distributors, and console companies (particularly from those users who seek out multiple international versions of the same game). Thus, circumvention is not always a form of protest positioned in direct opposition to these corporations, despite its expression of irritation at them. Likewise, while anger at regional lockout is often expressed in terms of internet freedom or free speech, it blends these with discourses of consumer rights and access to commodities. As one editorial opposing regional lockout in the Wii U suggests, “The anti–region locking argument is ultimately about consumer choice . . . Being region free leaves gamers to play whatever they want, and gives that choice.”74 This particular kind of “choice” promoted here and elsewhere is wrapped up in a complicated mix of anti-corporate free speech activism and a will steeped in ideologies of free enterprise capitalism to buy and consume whatever we desire.

That circumvention blends dominant and resistant cultural politics is also apparent in its expressions of gender. Gaming capital is often unevenly distributed across different genders, and those who most visibly take part in and promote the practices of lockout circumvention reflect a commonly circulated vision of gamer identity: male, and with a great deal of technological knowledge and acumen. As Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter put it, “Hardcore players identify with a specific subject position: the man of action.”75 “Man” points overtly to the long-held idea that gaming is a predominately masculine space, and “action” implies masculinized tropes of agency and control over complex technologies that have long characterized hacking cultures.76 Indeed, many of the vloggers and bloggers illustrating circumvention tactics are young men, and several of the tutorials discussed above involve activities often coded as masculine (whether these are manipulating physical hardware like torches, pliers, and soldering irons or manipulating software by messing with code). Furthermore, all eighteen contributors of game mods and hacks in Carless’s Gaming Hacks appear to be men. Taken together, this indicates that the formal game industry’s overwhelming masculinity, which is in part rooted in the presumption that to work in the business it helps if you are a stereotypical “gamer,” extends to the informal paratextual industries that sell lockout circumvention tools.77 It also draws lines around the industry- and consumer-constructed category of the “casual” gamer (often gendered female) and the “real” gamer, who is part of a subculture bound by gaming capital and oppositional practices (hacking, piracy, modding, and so forth).78 By co-opting discourses of nondominant cultural practices, the game industry uses subcultural cachet to construct and attract an ideal consumer.

Beyond the construction of the gamer as an industrial imaginary, the gendering of lockout circumvention follows deeper-seated cultural meanings of masculinity and technological control. Within cultures of lockout circumvention, the gaming capital represented by access to global games and knowledge about game culture commingles with ideas of global travel and the transcendence of geographic space that are often gendered male. As Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter argue, the nomadic subjectivity embodied in gamers engaging in piracy, hacking, and modding is one that is “imbued with masculine techno-expertise.”79 Insofar as hardcore gaming culture incorporates the circumvention of regional lockouts, the intersections between hardcore gamers and masculinity point to a broader coalescence of technological control, mobility, and mastery over geographic space. As David Morley points out, traditional understandings of private and public spaces have privileged masculine mobility over feminine privacy and domesticity.80 By promoting a kind of gaming practice where users—whom, again, the game industry works to discursively construct as predominately male—can metaphorically transgress global spaces, hardcore gaming culture continues this cultural association between the global and the masculine. The “man of action” has agency not only to best the technology, but also to do so in order to traverse physical, geographical borders.

Circumvention, Access, and Global Difference

To the degree that lockout circumvention is a resistant practice, it offers gamers a chance to recognize and reject the potentially unfair consequences of the game industry’s logics of capitalist accumulation and geographic control. In this way, it exemplifies what Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter characterize as a Deleuzian “nomadic” community that engages in “mobile, subversive uses of technology” like piracy, modding, and other uses that violate the preferred practices of dominant gaming industries.81 Like deterritorialization and reterritorialization, nomadism can be literalized in the context of regional lockout, as users transgress the geographic boundaries inscribed in the industry’s preferred circulation routes. This is not to suggest that circumvention necessarily represents taking up arms against the “planetary, militarized hypercapitalism” represented by the global game industry.82 Rather, it is usually a more banal case of users simply trying to play the games they want to play. At the same time, if we understand regional lockout as a phenomenon that affects global spatial and cultural flows and hierarchies of geographic value, the iterations of gaming capital expressed in challenges against regional lockout often manifest as anger at the large corporations that shape them.

Even still, while gaming culture is rich with modding, hacking, cheating, and collective intelligence about regional lockout, the degree to which video game consumers are likely to think or care that much about such issues will vary widely. Many people (especially in privileged markets like Japan and the United States) never know about regional lockout. Quite simply, they buy the games accessible in their area and do not think twice about what might be available elsewhere. However, while the video game industry has made inroads in recent years throughout the Global South, gamers in these territories can still find it difficult to access desired games and consoles in formal markets. In Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia, or territories with less geocultural capital within global video game flows, regional lockout’s consequences strike consumers as more consistently frustrating and baldly discriminatory. As in user discourse about DVDs discussed in the previous chapter, these frustrations often invoke familiar global hierarchies. For instance, the British blog RegionFreeGamer carries the subtitle “Because Europe Shouldn’t Be a 3rd Class Gaming Region.” And if the UK is still a privileged market compared to parts of the Global South, elsewhere we can see frustrations borne out of long histories of neglect by dominant media industries. For example, the above-cited poster on IGN’s community blogs suggests that region codes put a particular burden on users across the Global South: “I have to provide a voice for those often forgotten gamers found elsewhere. Gamers in Latin America, Australia, and every other place that isn’t part of the big three regions I’ve mentioned have more reason to complain than any of us and would benefit most from a region free world.”83

Such statements illustrate geocultural capital in their irritation at how geographic territories are placed within a hierarchy of value based on media access. In one example of this, a blogger named Rashed Mokdad, who goes by the name the Arab Gamer, voices his frustrations in a YouTube video called “The Wrath of Region Codes.”84 In the video, he laments that the Middle East is “lumped in with Europe” as a video game market and discusses the irritations of regional lockout for gamers in the region (even dramatizing and acting out the experience of bringing a region-locked game home and finding out that it doesn’t work). Invoking the complex intermingling of formal and informal industries in the region, he also mentions that many shops in the Middle East ignore staggered release dates and sell parallel imports of American copies of games anyway—a practice that becomes problematic for gamers in the region because of their consoles’ regional lockouts. The video has a certain homemade quality that places the Arab Gamer firmly within participatory culture, existing partway between the consumer/amateur and the producer/expert. At the same time, his gaming expertise and not-insignificant number of followers and viewers ensure that his populist appeals to players in the Global South also reflect a great deal of gaming capital.

By articulating these frustrations to the broader concerns of a globally marginalized community, the Arab Gamer and others remind us that in order to comprehend the cultural impact of regional lockout, we need to be clear about its directional flows. That is to say, the vectors of its cultural and political power will operate differently depending on geopolitical context. Regional lockout means something different to users in the United States than it does to users living in Yemen, for instance. In American and European gaming markets, importing games from different regions usually manifests as part of a niche fandom of Japanese media—an American rendition of the otaku cultures embodied by diverse, transnational, intense engagement with Japanese popular culture like anime, manga, and video games.85 Ranging from sincere engagement to Orientalist fetishism (and often including complex shades of both), these fandoms have always been marked by particularly strong forms of participatory culture, which digital media have only exacerbated.86 In its gamer-culture iterations, otaku’s participatory culture and collective intelligence manifest as a shared fandom for the Japanese games that regional lockout attempts to keep from these regions. Online resources like Kotaku’s reader-created “A Beginner’s Guide to Importing Games” offer overviews of the region-locked (or region-free) status of consoles as well as suggestions on where and how to purchase Japanese games, and fans regularly share information on importing and playing Japanese titles.87 While Koichi Iwabuchi argues that video games are not “culturally odorous” Japanese exports, in that they bear few obvious traces of their Japanese provenance, this is not the case for gamers who seek out international consoles and software (whether these are otaku fandoms in the United States seeking out Japanese games or gamers in the Global South searching for American games).88 In other words, the “Japanese-ness” of video games for some American gamers is central to their enjoyment—an attitude that grew as NES, Genesis, and SNES consumers sought out titles from across the Pacific.89

Whether Middle Eastern gamers pushing back against decades of media industry neglect or American fans of Japanese games trying to collect them all, these practices all confront the realities of geography getting in the way of media accessibility. Beyond simply putting knowledge about gaming culture to use, circumvention is also about recognizing one’s place within global hierarchies of media access. Here, we can see how different kinds of capital—subcultural, gaming, financial, and geocultural—are all layered on top of one another. The Arab Gamer’s video points to the gulf between gaming capital and geocultural capital. It shows that while people can have a great deal of knowledge and competency regarding video games, for many in certain parts of the world this does not translate to an ability to access the games they want. While for US-based gamers frustration may come out of an uncharacteristic inability to access whatever, wherever, whenever, users in the Global South express anger at once again being ignored or shortchanged by the shepherds of global media distribution. North American and Japanese consumers who have ready and early access to a wealth of consoles and games live in places with much geocultural capital. Not so for consumers in the Middle East and Latin America, who have to contend with regional lockout more regularly. For these users, circumventing regional lockout represents a way of resisting this structure of power and capital.

Figure 2.1. “The Arab Gamer” performs his anger at regional lockout. Screenshot: Rashy, “Arab Gamer Episode 3.”

Tracing these dynamics becomes increasingly difficult as many parts of the world transition into an era marked by online media access. With the DVD region code, one could look at the map, with its hierarchically ordered regions, and deduce rather easily which territories the media industries valued more highly. Furthermore, because this was a centralized form of control, DVD consumers around the world were all subject to the same regulatory system. As is clear from the sketch above, navigating regional lockout in video game culture requires users to keep track of which consoles and games are locked out where, and how such dynamics change with the new generation of hardware. Furthermore, consoles’ increasingly convergent incorporation of other media formats and streaming capabilities made this even more complicated. Given the ways its histories have incorporated DVD, Blu-ray, and streaming platforms, regional lockout in console games serves as a bridge between the first chapter and the third. The next chapter, on geoblocking and video-on-demand platforms, engages these unequal levels of access as well as how they reveal different vectors of cultural politics in the global VOD environment. The move toward online video via platforms like Netflix and the BBC iPlayer raised new questions and problems regarding the logistics and appropriateness of regional lockout. As I will show, the debates over regional lockout continued well after what many perceived to be a shift away from “physical” media and toward a supposedly—but not actually—borderless medium.