Translating Player Experience : A heuristic evaluation of Trine 3: Artifacts of Power

In a matter of mere decades, video games have become a multibillion industry that rivals other entertainment industries in revenue generated. Although video games owe their popularity in large part to localization, the practices in the industry have developed without insight from translation studies. As a result, translators often have to work without access to suitable context information to facilitate decision-making, which may lead to errors in translation. Furthermore, video game subtitling has been shown to deviate from the norms of subtitling in other audiovisual media. Thus, although the aim of video game localization is to transfer the player experience of the original to those playing the localized version, this objective is not always fulfilled. This paper approaches the subject matter at hand from the point of view of user-centered translation. Its objective is to determine whether there are usability problems in the Finnish localization of Frozenbyte’s Trine 3: Artifacts of Power (2013), how severe these problems are, and whether the game’s subtitles adhere to subtitling guidelines established in other media. The focus is on how potential problems of usability affect the player experience. The method used in this paper is heuristic evaluation. My analysis revealed several usability problems. Most importantly, Finnish was not selectable in the game’s launch window, although the other Nordic languages were, and the language of the game’s narrative text exhibited several instances of source-language interference. Furthermore, the subtitles deviated from subtitling norms in several respects. There was little reduction of content, which caused the subtitles to repeatedly exceed the maximum amount of characters allowed in subtitling for traditional media. The duration of the subtitles was also often too short, and syntactic-semantic considerations were not taken into account in the segmentation of text across lines. The effect of these problems on the player experience varied. Strictly usability-related problems were likely to either make it more difficult to begin gameplay or to follow the game’s story, while some problems, such as the game’s language, were more likely to purely affect the enjoyment received from playing the game. Furthermore, a player’s language skills are affected by the quality of language encountered in everyday life, and the language of video games should reflect this. Guidelines for video game subtitling that take into account usability in general and the special nature of video games are needed. The players’ ability to read subtitles depends on how much of their attention is focused on gameplay, and further research is needed to determine how large of an effect this has on a player’s reading speed. Furthermore, subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing should be included as an option for video game subtitles