Are differences between East and West gamers an illusion?

[HiddenCharacter]

If anything, a lot of western games focus on the immersion factor by taking steps to work on very small details while eastern games tend to "represent" a game's various features, letting the player imagine what actually happens rather than seeing what actually happens.

RPG's illustrate this very well. On one hand, you have JRPGS. Aside from the obviously Japanese style character types, we have the traditional elements found in a JRPG, a separate battle screen, the world map not always up to scale (i.e your protagonist becomes bigger than towns) and only having one character, usually the protagonist, representing the entire party travelling. On the other hand, you have a game like Dragon Age. The battle system stays on the same screen, characters travel with you, and rather than having a huge player character crossing the entire continent, travel over large distance is usually illustrated on a map with the party's path being "drawn in."

Now of course, in a JRPG, everyone knows that the hero doesn't turn into a 50 foot giant that traverses the game world (unless there's a story point that actually makes him a 50 foot giant), and that when a battle happens, the participants don't go to a predetermined field to fight it out (unless, again it's a story point). Instead, the player is left to use their imagination to figure out what's actually happening. On the other hand, a typical western RPG will create every small facet of its world. Everything the player sees in a western RPG is what it actually is, rather than what it represents.

TL;DR Eastern games "tell" what's going on, and Western games "show" what's going on.