To Sinicize the Games

Before going to China, I'd never put much thought into what it meant to localize a video game. Now I see why this process would be costly and lengthy. It means, in this context, to subtitle or dub over all the text in a video game. English, German, Spanish, French, Japanese- these languages seem to be prime for localization teams, probably because of the video game playing populaces of nations speaking those languages.

In China, I found that many games were not localized. A game might have a Chinese package, and a Chinese name, but the game itself was entirely in English more often than not. I suspect this is why the majority of video game magazines at the newsagents were of the 'strategy guide' variety, which is fancy way of saying "how to beat this game step by step."

One game which is localized, or Sinicized rather, is World of Warcraft, and it's now a massive source of income for Blizzard (which should be Blizzard Activision now, for budding stock traders). It's probably not a coincidence that it's a game which can't be pirated. It can only be played with an account kept on official servers, so there seems to be no way of getting it for free. Apart from WoW, Chinese gamers are relatively ignored; I'm not even sure if games made within China, such as the recent Splinter Cell game by Ubisoft Shanghai, get Sinicized.

What's interesting though is that Chinese netizens have taken the matter into their own hands, and release 汉化 (han4 hua4, 'Sinicized') versions of the games for free on the internet. It's probably the case that because of the rampant media piracy in China, the software developers/publishers/distributers don't feel it's worth the investment to Sinicize their products. But the lack of official Chinese language software is no doubt part of the problem now, and those in charge would be better off with a carrot rather than a stick approach to solving it.

And on top of that, I'd like to add, that playing video games in Chinese is one of my favourite ways of learning the language. There's nothing like having to solve an interactive puzzle in Chinese. Anyway, enough nerd-speak for now...