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Aleks Krotoski on Cross-Cultural Prefs

Written By mista sense on Monday, April 30, 2007 | 5:55 AM



The Guardian's Alex Krotoski has done an interesting series of comparisons based on game audience samples from various nations. The aim? To discover, by evaluating gaming preferences, "who's like who."

Today's update focuses on preferences specifically in game design, which found that the games rated highest by the largest number of countries are Dead Rising, DEFCON: Everybody Dies, Loco Roco (which I've yet to play, yet badly want to), Company of Heroes, Gears of War and Twilight Princess. Largely, Krotoski found that game design is less of a culturally-specific factor than the other areas he's examined-- like visual arts, where U.S. liked Splinter Cell while Japan liked Okami, among others on which they agreed. Interestingly, I heard Okami didn't do as well in Japan as it did over here (are they tired of their own mythology?)-- leading one to conclude that looks don't sell games in Japan, perhaps even less than they do here.

The study plans to evaluate cross-cultural similarity across seven categories-- besides game design and visual arts, Krotoski'll examine innovation, audio, writing, technology and character design. The study uses dot-and-line networked graphs called sociograms to show a neat picture of relationships-- already it's emerging that the US and the UK have similar tastes, but not so similar as do the US and Canada.

Check it out-- it'll be interesting to see the complete picture, once Krotoski's published the results for all the different categories.

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