Over the course of the last three decades the entertainment software industry has become a multibillion dollar industry and a worldwide phenomenon. The United States and Japan have traditionally been the main players in this industry, which owes part of its global success to internationalisation and the associated localisation processes. Due to the cultural distance between Japan and Western countries, Japanese games often undergo extensive cultural adaptation in order to market them successfully in those territories. This paper analyses the localisation of Japanese console games. After presenting a brief overview of the history of the localisation of Japanese games it describes the main internationalisation strategies adopted by Japanese developers and publishers. It also explores the main localisation strategies applied to Japanese games, i.e. domesticating or exoticising, exploring the cultural adaptation processes to which some Japanese games have been subject, and examines how ...

Unlike other designed artefacts, video games are not commonly considered in relation to the cultural context of their creation. This lack of attention means that the impacts of these games, as embodiments of particular cultural ideas on the people who play them outside their country of origin, have not been investigated. Responding to this absence of scholarship, the following thesis uses a design history based analysis of Japanese video game producer Nintendo to illustrate the depth and degree to which games can embody and communicate cultural ideas. From this perspective, a number of Nintendo’s games can be seen as responding to their cultural surroundings as they are informed by, and provide a means to compensate for, several different forms of Japanese longing. Firstly, the Super Mario games respond to a desire to engage with the childlike, providing a means to satisfy a yearning for a playful and light-hearted encounter, made largely unavailable in Japan due to the pressures of education and adulthood. Secondly, the Legend of Zelda games build upon a longing to connect to a pre-modern environment, using a tactile connection with nature and a sense of community to enable a feeling of closeness to a past world separate from stressful contemporary urban Japanese lifestyles. Thirdly, the MOTHER/Earthbound games respond to a desire for authenticity, creating an unconventional reality to stimulate a genuine emotional connection that is more fulfilling than those typically experienced in contemporary Japan, where mediated and artificial relationships abound. Finally, the Metroid games satisfy a longing to connect with a stable and understandable future, in response to a number of fears uniquely pertinent to modern Japan. The impact of these embedded Japanese needs on the people who play them cross-culturally can be recognised by looking at the nostalgic culture which surrounds these games in the West. With the development of this sentimental retrospective view, a link has been created to the games’ inherent Japanese cultural qualities, causing these aspects to shape individuals’ nostalgic interactions. As the culture of video game nostalgia has been formed around the practice of crafting artefacts that borrow from the past but reconfigure it as part of a creative design process, through analysing the form and character of the objects which result, it is possible to see the way that they have been informed by the sentiments of Japanese longing central to the games. Through this examination it becomes clear that these Japanese cultural ideas have been internalised and then subsequently utilised by individuals in the West to fulfill their own desires. Combining case studies of Nintendo’s four most significant game series, an examination of Nintendo’s historical development, and an investigation into fan-created nostalgic works, this thesis uses a design history based analysis to illustrate how video games can exist as a reaction to their cultural surroundings and how this nature has an enduring impact on the people who play them.

Since their humble beginnings, video games have undergone huge technological advances, becoming a significant global industry today and highlighting the role played by translation and localization. Despite the continuing localization activities undertaken in the industry, translation studies (TS) have not paid much attention to video games as a research domain. Drawing on the author’s previous work on the Japanese Role Playing Game (RPG) Final Fantasy titles, this paper attempts to demonstrate the ample research scope that this domain presents for TS scholars. In particular, it discusses the unique localization model used by Final Fantasy’s Japanese publisher, illustrating how the games’ new digital platform allows the (re)creation of a new gameplaying pleasure directly through the localization process itself. In this model, the original game merely sets off a chain of improvements through localization. In turn, understanding the different pleasures drawn from different localized ve...

The following abstract is aimed to put into question how both the Japanese and Western gaming industries have differentiated themselves so much today, offering game systems and narratives that vary widely from each other. In the history of the medium, this differentiation was initially established because some semiotic and mechanic elements were identified to identifiable Japanese or American market tastes. Most of the time, the reasons that have been made to explain this difference within the medium have relied on either essential cultural differences or market determinism based on historical preferences. However, this paper argues that these differences aren't just formed due to specific cultural images or economic reasons, but mainly because of the formation of an identity discourse on the industry that has ghettoized specific formulas of player engagement to some cultural regions or supposedly minority groups. In the case of Japanese video games, we argue that several design conventions on the part of Japanese game designers have led to a paradigm that is unique to their cultural context. This paradigm can be distinguished from the one prevalent in the West because it has usually favored games that rely more heavily on the use of what we call “explicit narratives” to contextualize their rules, which have been solidified into several known “game genres” like the JRPG (Japanese Role Playing Game), the “Visual Novel” and others. This paradigm was also highly influential in creating other genres that are ubiquitous in the medium today, specially during the era of the Japanese industrial dominance of the 80's and 90's. This model also encompass semiotic elements that are either textually related to other forms of Japanese media or have been used almost exclusively on Japanese video games. However, its presence has been reduced significantly today, to the point that it has become representative of games developed exclusively by the Japanese video game industry, even though it might be found outside that region. More so than that, it has been integrated within a bigger cultural discourse that identifies several forms of cultural artifacts as extensions of Japan into Western popular culture. Throughout this paper, we will explore the main elements that characterize this paradigm, including the concept of explicit narratives, and their manifestation on specific games. Finally, we will analyze its current influence on the development of the modern image of Japan, both in gamer consumer culture and the overall gaming industry today.

Video games contain representations, and these can have effects on players, for example on the ways they understand certain concepts or see certain places. The purpose of this thesis is to delve into how Japan is represented in video games. With that target in mind, the video game Ôkami (Clover Studio, 2008) for Nintendo's Wii console has been analyzed as a case study, and the potential effects of its representations have been reflected on. In order to carry out this work, the context of the Japanese popular culture industry has been considered, while the particular perspective of a Japanophile has been adopted. The first concept refers to the combination of enterprises responsible of popularizing Japanese culture internationally through products (with manga, anime and video games as leaders) since the last years of the 20th century. Regarding Japanophiles, they are understood in this thesis as the most avid (non-Japanese) consumers of those products who, carried by a 'Japan...

Despite the increasing globalization of the digital games market, differences in the way games are selected, experienced and evaluated exist across cultural borders, appearing most salient between East Asian and Western countries. This paper reports the results of a case study, aimed at examining how localized Japanese games are received by German players. Using think-aloud protocol, we gathered and analyzed more than 25 hours of commented gameplay footage, by two German participants across four games. We identify and discuss game elements, that affected the participants' player experience.

What does it actually mean to localize a Japanese video game into a European language? Through the investigation of some cases of cultural localization, this essay will explore the potential of video game customization and the multifaceted work of the localizer.

Despite frequent reference in academic and fan work to the video game genre known as JRPG (Japanese role-playing game), little critical scholarship has been dedicated to understanding how to conceptualize the genre. Frequently, JRPGs are framed as a cultural curiosity, with the “J” operating as a cultural appendix to established and well-defined genre of RPGs. The coordination between government and industry central to soft power, however, offers insight into the construction of the genre by highlighting the role the market plays in promoting culture. Drawing from representations of and discourse about gender in the MEXT’s Cool Japan campaign, this paper argues that JRPGs should be framed as one elemental part of a larger creative ecology that comes to define Japan and its culture overseas.

In this paper we present the first results of an ongoing research project, focused on examining the European reception of Japanese video games, and comparing it with the reception in Japan. We hope to contribute towards a better understanding of how players’ perception and evaluation of a game are influenced by their cultural background. Applying a grounded theory approach, we conducted a qualitative content analysis of articles from German video game websites, user comments, written in response to these articles, as well as Japanese and German user reviews from the respective Amazon online stores and Steam. Focusing on the reception of three Japanese RPGs, our findings show that considerable differences exist in how various elements of the games are perceived. We also briefly discuss certain lexical differences in the way players write about games, indicating fundamental differences in how Japanese and German players talk (and think) about games.