Cultural Context
There are many cultural aspects that game developers need to be aware of while creating and planning their game. Cultural aspects can affect what the game developer takes into account while creating the game, but will also affect the post production of the game such as the marketing and how it is sold to different countries.
Many countries have different rules and regulations about what is allow to be shown in video games and entertainment. These regulations can cause games to have to adapt - e.g. making kills less bloody or changing the colour of the blood to look more like goo for countries where blood is not allowed to be shown, or can mean a scene from a game have to be omitted or that a game cannot be released in that country.
When deciding on character battle animations, cultural context should be taken into account and decisions should be made on which rules and regulations will be taken into account. Games don't need to follow all the rules and regulations of every country, but developers should be aware of them and should make decisions that will be best for the game, and be aware of what steps they would need to take for good marketing and what push-back the game might get after release.
An example of a place to take into account is Germany. Germany is infamous for its strict laws against video games, and has banned over 50 games as a result and many games don't try to release in Germany as they predict it being banned there. Games can be banned in Germany for a variety of reasons, including the use of Nazi imagery (though this law has been lifted as of 2018), violence, depiction of sexual acts, and any acts that could be seen as injuring human dignity ("German Criminal Code, Section 131 Representation of Violence"(Lumpus.org, 2018). They are more relaxed about what is allowed to be depicted in other art forms, but "the German government doesn't recognize games as art, and thus doesn't offer it the same protections as other mediums". (Dorkly, 2018)
Here are examples of games that was adapted for a German audience.
The images below are from a game called 10 second ninja, and in the first image you can see that the enemy is a Nazi robot, and there is a big swastika in the background. To make it safe to market in Germany, they redesigned the enemy to plain robots and changed the swastika to a cross instead.
As Germany have strict rules against human on human violence depicted in video games, many games change the look of their characters from human to robots - and have them spurt oil when hit instead of blood. Team Fortress 2 is a good example of a game that has done this. On the left you can see the characters from Team Fortress 2 and on the right you can see the edited robot versions for release in Germany.
It is also important to take into account how a country will respond to anything in your game that might mirror something that has cultural importance to that country, such as plane attacks on skyscrapers in america, or nuclear attacks in Japan. Fallout 3 was changed for Japan due to cultural worry about nuclear bombs. "The biggest change involves the elimination of the "Power of the Atom" side-quest, about a nuclear bomb in the middle of a town, with players having the option to detonate the device or not. Also removed is Mr. Burke, an NPC who invites the player to detonate the town.Another change relates to the name of a weapon. Although not mentioned in the announcement, I'm guessing it refers to the "Fat Man" mini-nuke launcher." (Wired, 2018)
In this unit, I am creating a battle arena with 2 players - a main character and an NPC enemy character. If I was going to release this as part of a game, I would have to think about the cultural impact of the character design, the arena, the attacks, the animations, the elements in the level and how the narrative could be perceived by different communities.
The main character is a female warrior in armour, and the NPC enemy is a male assassin wearing a gas mask - the mask looks more futuristic than world war 2 -esque - but I would have to take into account that it could be possibly perceived that way. There is going to be no blood when characters are hit or killed - only body language, so the use of blood isn't something that I would have to worry about, although there is still human on human violence, so it might still not be acceptable in some countries - for these countries, the characters could be re-skinned as robots. The arena is going to be quite plain looking - maybe just a few stone pillars to hide behind. There are no sexual acts or depravity in my planned arena - just violence, so it is unlikely that this level would be hit too hard by restrictions.
References
Dorkly. (2018). 5 Weird Ways Germany Has Censored Video Games. [online] Available at: http://www.dorkly.com/post/80945/germany-censorship [Accessed 12 Dec. 2018].
Iuscomp.org. (2018). Criminal Code (Strafgesetzbuch, StGB). [online] Available at: http://www.iuscomp.org/gla/statutes/StGB.htm#131 [Accessed 12 Dec. 2018].
Snow, J., Snow, J., Watercutter, A., Parham, J., Watercutter, A., McMillan, G., McMillan, G. and Galaxy, G. (2018). Fallout 3 Pulls Nuke References for Japan. [online] WIRED. Available at: https://www.wired.com/2008/11/japanese-fallou/ [Accessed 12 Dec. 2018].