This post is out there a bit, but humor me.
An interesting man named Tom Edwards stopped by Google today to give a talk about “Geocultural Intelligence and Global Business”. A geographer and designer by training, he spent thirteen years at Microsoft as a Geopolitical Strategist, vetting products before they launched to be sure that they would not raise any ill feelings — or outright outrage — among foreign governments or other constituencies. He’s since gone on to found Englobe, a consultancy that expands his work to a broader platform.
To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, I’ll give you a few examples that he shared with us. Did you know, for example, that Windows 95 was temporarily prevented from being sold in India because the borders of the Kashmir region were not drawn to the government’s liking in the time zone settings (yes, that tiny 1.5×4″ map!)? Or that several video games have been recalled from, delayed, or outright canceled in some countries because their soundtracks included chanted prayers from the Qu’ran, or because they featured radioactive two-headed Brahman cows that were… edible during gameplay? Or that Turkey blocks a majority of YouTube traffic in its borders because of videos critical of Ataturk?
At Englobe, Tom’s adapted the idea of “geopolitical” to “geocultural“, and for good reason. Samuel Huntington proposed back in the 1990s that the powderkegs of the post-Cold War era would not explode primarily over traditional political or military disputes, but rather over cultural and religious conflicts. It’s certainly hard to argue that this hypothesis is not well on its way to proving true. This shifting dynamic is not limited to the realm of geopolitics, however. In the business world, too, we increasingly see the importance of national boundaries fading as so many diverse markets begin to merge into a truly global one. While governments will still often be the official agents for expressing concern or taking action regarding geocultural issues, the issue goes much beyond the political realm.
I don’t want to rehash Tom’s talk or dive too deep into the details, but I wanted to toss out a thought, which I also posed to him in a question at the end of the talk. To many people — and especially to developers themselves — video games are not just products. To them (and me), video games are also an art. Those who develop the elaborate narratives, painstakingly model the characters, precisely design the environments, labor over how the characters will move and how the user will interact with and feel a part of the virtual world they create — these people, to a certain extent, are artists.
Yes, video games form a mammoth entertainment industry. But unlike musicians or writers or painters, video game developers can’t just set up a studio in their garage to achieve the pinnacle of their art. They require complicated tools and training to reach the levels they want, and those things cost money. Furthermore, the distribution of their work is tightly controlled by the console manufacturers, since video games require access to console APIs (remember this post?) to work at all. Among the media of art, theirs is perhaps one of the most constrained in terms of access and resources.
Continue reading ‘Geocultural Sensitivity and The Art of Video Games’
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