Does your culture affect your game design?

[zoombapup]

I gave a lecture this week about how culture informs game design.

Inspired by an article on gamasutra:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1922/the_philosophy_of_a_ninja_.php

Anyway, coming from a background where I worked on games you could readily identify as "british". It got me wondering wether anyone else feels that somehow our uniqueness is getting eroded by the global marketplace and is losing any chance of ever really being original because of it (ok, its an easy target, but look at the deliberate banality of cake mania as an example).

Is it a worthwhile goal to try and retain your cultural identity when it comes to your game designs?

How do you actually identify a unique identity if like in britain, it is under constant attack by american media dross?

Are we destined to be another annex in the global world market?

Is anyone even bothering about things like this???

[Jack Norton]

It happened to me several times in the beginning, mostly for sexhual references. The difference between most european countries (if not all) and the USA was astonishing for me :p
I had some warning from my USA-based betatesters for several games, mostly related to "sexual references" (was enough a drawings of a female with tight clothes) or women discrimination (simple different statistics for my rpg Magic Stones during character creation!).

[Roman Budzowski]

My own culture not, but USA does :D

[Dan MacDonald]

Yeah Jack, it's a bit of a double standard, after all it was americans who made leisure suit larry, and it's also americans who create the most violent and contraversial games. So on one hand americans like cute casual games with empowerd and equal women in loose clothing, and on the other hand they like Leisure Suit Larry and Manhunt.

[cliffski]

Americans often tell me I can't spell.
grrrr.

[papillon]

America's a very big country. It doesn't have just one culture. :)

But there's no contradiction between wanting games that are NOT full of sexual suggestion and also wanting games that ARE full of sexual suggestion... some people just think these things should be kept in their proper place and not mixed in unexpectedly. :) People would also be confused if your puzzle game suddenly started rambling about religion - it's out of place.

(The amount of shock and outrage expressed over nipples still confuses me, though, and I am American.)


Americans often tell me I can't spell.


I grew up reading a lot of British authors and my spelling has always been betwixt and between, which meant a few fights about it in school...

[moose6912]

It does affect me to a certain extent. Being based in Singapore where I am readily exposed to Japanese video games of all sorts, even hentai video games and yet growing up being exposed to American pop culture by watching Battlestar Galactica(The old version with the bulky cylons) etc, a lot of my game ideas are a mish-mash of both worlds.

[tagged]

Hmm, I don't ever recall being able to spot a game that was made in Australia.
Doesn't help that there's so few games that do come out of here.. I guess the most popular one would have to be Dark Reign or possibly Powerslide.

As for spelling, when I was using MS Office I always had a hard time getting the damn spell checker to stay on Australian!! I also rarely see our correct spelling of gaol these days.

[Artinum]

Americans often tell me I can't spell.
grrrr.

It causes me some dilemmas as well. When I proofread, do I spell things correctly or "Americanize" them? Sometimes the customer asks for American spelling (presumably for the benefit of the American market) and I have to curb my natural tendencies to use 'S' and 'U' in the appropriate places.

(The way American words are spelt, surely "USA" should be "ZA"?)

[lennard]

I've often thought that there is a business to be had in taking good looking indie games - usually shooting for the hardcore market - and cleaning up the text and storylines. I feel like I've seen a lot of good looking games over the years that just lost me when I started reading the butchered English about how we got to this post-apocalyptic state and how it's my time to shine.

Most of these titles could be helped a ton by having an English major spend a day or three on all of the marketing text and then the games themselves.

[ChrisP]

Well, there are indie proofreading services already. (Just look two posts up!) Perhaps they just need to be more proactive in seeking out work. :) Find an otherwise good game with bad English, make them an offer. Rinse and repeat.

The US/non-US spelling issue irks me as well. I can't bring myself to "Americanize" all my text, but I worry slightly that potential customers are turned off by what looks like a misspelling to them.

If I could be bothered, I'd have US English and Australian English as separate "languages" (perhaps with one "inheriting" from the other, so that one only has to re-specify the phrases which are different in each dialect), and autodetect which one to use based on the OS locale settings. However, that does seem a lot of work for what I suspect is not a very important issue.

[Nikos Beck]

The US/non-US spelling issue irks me as well. I can't bring myself to "Americanize" all my text, but I worry slightly that potential customers are turned off by what looks like a misspelling to them.

Given that a top American TV show right now is "Are you smarter than a fifth grader", what proportion of the population will even notice misspelled words? I suspect that incorrect grammar will stand out moreso than spelling.

[Jesse Hopkins]

Americans often tell me I can't spell.
grrrr.


What's your favourite colour?

[walkal]

It's natural to assume our own way of spelling is correct, but there is a risk of just being narrow-minded.

I'm also Australian, and it's common for people here to condemn the ize ending as American. But actually, the Oxford Dictionary gives ize as its first spelling and ise as an alternative. In some cases, "American" spellings are actually the original spelling - for example curb for the edge of a footpath, rather than the British (and Australian) kerb.

These issues generate some intense feelings on my forum (http://lexigame.com/forum/index.php/board,3.0.html), where people question words that are accepted in my word games, and in particular, words that are labelled as "common" that people from some countries have never heard of.

[Jesse Hopkins]

It's natural to assume our own way of spelling is correct, but there is a risk of just being narrow-minded.

I'm also Australian, and it's common for people here to condemn the ize ending as American. But actually, the Oxford Dictionary gives ize as its first spelling and ise as an alternative. In some cases, "American" spellings are actually the original spelling - for example curb for the edge of a footpath, rather than the British (and Australian) kerb.

These issues generate some intense feelings on my forum (http://lexigame.com/forum/index.php/board,3.0.html), where people question words that are accepted in my word games, and in particular, words that are labelled as "common" that people from some countries have never heard of.

Is the Larry David show "Kerb Your Enthusiasm" in UK and AU?

All's fair in my scrabble games with buddies. We've often guessed at a word such as "bint" and then looked it up to see if it was a real word.

Wow, I just made that one up right now, but sure enough:

bint n woman, in the loosest sense of the word. One step short of a prostitute, a bint is a bird with less class, less selectivity, more makeup and even more skin. Blokes don't talk to bints unless they've had at least eight pints of beer, which is why bints turn up in free-for-students nightclubs at 2:45am with their faked student ID and dance around their Moschino rucksacks. The word derives from the Arabic for "daughter of".

[ChrisP]

Is the Larry David show "Kerb Your Enthusiasm" in UK and AU?

I've never seen it, but that doesn't mean anything; I don't watch much TV.

We would also spell it "curb" in this case, however. The "kerb" spelling applies only to road edges (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kerb).

[Artinum]

Well, there are indie proofreading services already. (Just look two posts up!) Perhaps they just need to be more proactive in seeking out work. :) Find an otherwise good game with bad English, make them an offer. Rinse and repeat.

Coo, people are noticing my sig. Always nice to know that!

If anyone wants to go this "fixer-upper" route, making a regular income through acquisition and salvage, I'm happy to work on either a flat fee or royalty basis...

[Mark Sheeky]

If I could be bothered, I'd have US English and Australian English as separate "languages" (perhaps with one "inheriting" from the other, so that one only has to re-specify the phrases which are different in each dialect), and autodetect which one to use based on the OS locale settings. However, that does seem a lot of work for what I suspect is not a very important issue.

I did exactly that in Flatspace II! I've got "UK/Aus" vs. "USA". It's not hard work actually and transparent to users, and 99.9% of words are the same. The reason was "Armor" and "Armour", it just annoyed me too much. Besides, Canada, Jamaica, Australia... just about every English speaking country except USA uses British spellings so it makes sense for only a small amount of work (depending on your text functions).

Mark