Archive for February, 2010

Human Nature eh?

What’s interesting about the responses from some of the surveys, is that they often times cite instances involving immature, racist, and d-bag’ish gamers.  When I read these, I often can think back to experiences when I have heard or read similar words of degradation, sometimes these were directed to me personally.  But then I think [ READ MORE ]

Cross-Cultural Interactions

Just a little about me. I’m Ray, a Communication and Chinese Major at Trinity University. Right now, I am looking at question three of our research survey, which asked our participants to elaborate on any cross-cultural experiences they have had in online worlds. Many of the participants talked about their experiences playing Final Fantasy XI, [ READ MORE ]

Region Locking Video

Last year, we created a video discussing one issue in virtual worlds: region-locking. The video summarized region locking and some of the arguments for and against region locking games. We aren’t taking a side here, but we do want to hear from all of you online gamers out there what you think about region locking [ READ MORE ]

Food 4 Thought

As stated in my previous post I’m continuing to elaborate on findings from question four of our survey.There is one response I would like to elaborate on here. There are a lot of difficulties with cultural norms, though. For example, certain behaviors in one culture may be considered normal, while in another culture they are frowned on or even offensive. It’s interesting to discover these things, and I think it encourages people to reflect on their own behavior in ways that they may not have if they were only exposed to their local culture. It also helps to unite the world. Cultures used to be isolated, and communication only happened through politics or business. As the internet becomes cheaper and more pervasive, it shortens the distance between one culture and another. It quite literally brings them closer together so that they can see that the people of another culture are really not very different from the people of their own. It no longer becomes possible to hold biases about those people once you’ve made friends with them. This respondent raises the interesting issues of cultural norms and how there can [ READ MORE ]

Separation of Game and State

Cultural mannerisms, taboos, and languages are going to be some of the most difficult obstacles to overcome. By outsourcing tool development (such as translation tools) to outside companies, it may help solve the age old problem of the language barrier. In addition, we must be careful the "game culture" does not supersede the outside world's cultures, lest it make our initiative irrelevant[ READ MORE ]

Barriers

In reviewing and analyzing the raw data from the survey results, it is becoming apparent that we all notice the barriers that restrict our interactions amongst one another.  Many of the responses were critical of the language barriers within games but also praised new technologies, especially FFXI’s auto-translator and Google’s new aim at providing live [ READ MORE ]

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