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Lost in translation? Not these social gamers

(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-04-16 08:25

Last weekend, I attended the 2010 Social Game Summit in Beijing. Dozens of gaming companies were represented, including about 40 from Japan.

Social games include contests played among groups of friends on social networking sites such as Facebook or RenRen, its Chinese clone.

I was surprised to see so many Japanese companies, and to watch the interaction between their principals and their Chinese counterparts.

The Japanese attended mainly to try to forge partnerships with Chinese gaming enterprises. The Chinese are considered leaders at developing online and mobile games content, including the highly popular social farm games.

In Japan, developers have little experience creating games for mobile- and PC-based social networking sites. Thus, a growing number of Japanese firms have been reaching out to the Chinese to build localized games for the Japanese market.

The trend started shortly after the Beijing-based social gaming company Rekoo launched several games on Japanese social networking sites in 2009.

Rekoo's Sunshine Ranch, a virtual farming game, is now the No 1 application on Mixi, the largest social networking site in Japan. Less than two months after its launch, Sunshine Ranch had more than 2 million users.

The company has also launched games on Facebook, following another trend of Chinese gamers working to expand their presence on the Web in the United States (some American gaming companies are also trying to expand to Chinese social websites.)

"I believe this (social gaming) will be a global industry, and these games will be played by everyone," Rekoo CEO Patrick Liu told me at the conference. "And it is one of the first industries where the Chinese can really play locally. The barrier is much lower, and Chinese entrepreneurs are very aggressive."

The trend is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, some point out that China's success in creating the social farm games is a good example of domestic ingenuity. "While many see China as a copycat country, social farm games may be a good example of home-grown innovation," Elliot Ng, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, wrote on VentureBeat.com.

Of further note are the cross-cultural challenges and opportunities global game development entail. Just because a game is successful in China does not mean it will be successful in Japan. It takes a lot to tweak a game to the tastes of the local market, and failing to understand such tastes and adequately incorporate them will probably result in failure for the importer.

Thus, the partnerships developing between the Chinese, Japanese and American game developers are more than simply profit-oriented. Together, different sides work to understand and insert each other's culture into a product.

Cultural exports are often translated, not adapted, for foreign audiences. Gaming is one example where adaptation matters - a lot.

The Chinese gaming executives who are working abroad said their localization research reveals subtle social traits of how different groups interact together online, or essentially how different cultures like to play together.

Such inquiries deserve further discussion as the discoveries could provide clues to understanding how cross-cultural misunderstandings manifest themselves in the real world and how they can be solved.