Playing With Culture: Reframing Video Game Localization Discourse and Issues of Censorship

This thesis sets out to explore the adaptation, or alteration, of unique elements in video games and their localization, questioning their relation and relevance to censorship. While translation studies has addressed issues of censorship within literary works, little attention has been devoted to this topic within localization, and less within video game localization. Due to and industry shift from America to Japan, localization became essential to the industry’s survival, and a kind culture clash often arises when a Japanese video game gets localized for the Western market. This thesis analyzes elements that go beyond the textual or narratological aspects of video games, to include the domain of the ludologi-cal. Some concepts utilized here are from the field of video game studies and are used to elucidate how video game localization works within video game culture. Most importantly, video games are con-sidered cultural products, as exemplified through the dynamic of gameplay, which can be extracted, analysed, and adapted to different locales One controversial issue often brought up by users and critics through video game journalism is the belief that some alterations constitute a form a censorship. A broader video game history and game studies perspective offers localization studies a more nuanced picture of the stated aim of cultural adaptation in localization, while a more complete depiction of standard localization offers an explanatory rationale to video game studies as to how and why certain decisions are made. A useful notion of “social censorship” emerges when analyzing video game locali-zation in the domain of translation studies