These are some very good points made. Localization ought to be very carefully done. I appreciate the interest taken to make a game relevant to another culture. But if a game is originally SET IN a specific culture, changing or removing that culture that the game is based upon can actually do more harm than what is feared by keeping in the original cultural elements.
One of my first introductions to what localization IS was in an issue of the late-Nintendo Power magazine when Ken Griffey Jr’s game came to the SNES. Baseball is originally an American game. But over in Japan, there are many cultural traditions that were added – such as the big giant lanterns and traditional drums – but nothing about the game was lost. That kind of localization isn’t so bad. But if it affected the actual game of baseball, then we’d have a problem.
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October 11, 2014
These are some very good points made. Localization ought to be very carefully done. I appreciate the interest taken to make a game relevant to another culture. But if a game is originally SET IN a specific culture, changing or removing that culture that the game is based upon can actually do more harm than what is feared by keeping in the original cultural elements.
One of my first introductions to what localization IS was in an issue of the late-Nintendo Power magazine when Ken Griffey Jr’s game came to the SNES. Baseball is originally an American game. But over in Japan, there are many cultural traditions that were added – such as the big giant lanterns and traditional drums – but nothing about the game was lost. That kind of localization isn’t so bad. But if it affected the actual game of baseball, then we’d have a problem.
October 12, 2014
Thanks for posting, I really enjoy these.