Promoting Cross-Cultural Interaction in Games

I was looking through video game news recently and came across a very surprising fact. In the list of upcoming Xbox 360 titles Star Wars the Old Republic pop up and started an article here on massively .com: http://www.massively.com/2010/03/29/is-the-old-republic-heading-to-xbox-360/. Which got me thinking, how do companies and players deal with PC to Console MMO’s. In the past I was a massive player of FFXI, i started out on PC and later picked up the game on Xbox 360 but it never seemed to have that same immersion. I may have a bias in this case considering I started the game and learned it on the computer so I was used to those controls. But when I played it on the Xbox it never drew me in like it did before, even though the screen was much bigger and prettier than it had been before. Communicating was the largest difficulty I had, alternating between a keyboard (either on screen or in my lap) broke the flow of the game and made playing and typing at the same time rather difficult. Which makes me wonder how will Old Republic over come this same break of immersion that I found FFXI to have. I also wonder if there are any games out there that do this right, that make playing on a console no more of a hassle than playing on the computer since many future releases are promised to come out in both formats.

I am also trying to look into the region locking strategies for both console and computer MMOs since I find region locking a very interesting if inelegant and futile process. Are computer games and console ports region locked the same? Could someone in America play with a console player in the Congo and not one on the PC?  Are the rules for interacting across regions different forreasons such as the good of our children, since by and large consoles have a tendency to be targeted to youths and nearly everyone you meet either owns or has access to a computer. Inter console play offers up a very interesting set of circumstances for region-locking I should ask my friend in the industry and get back to ya’ll.

Good Luck and Good Hunting

-SmilinTanner