Cultural Fluency in Game Development: Crafting Universally Engaging Experiences

In the West, in-game calls to action that are positive—like buy, yes, or accept—tend to be green. In China, they are red.

Why?

We don’t realize it, but even the way we communicate, and how we interpret the world around us, is almost entirely culturally dependent. This has huge implications not only for managing culturally diverse teams, but for game development itself.

How do we manage creativity—which is at the core of the games industry—while being cognizant of cultural bias? Moreover, how do we make games for a global audience so varied in how it interprets them?

Few people have more experience answering these questions than our Chief Development Officer, Julien Proux. He’s managed teams all over the world, from China and Japan to Germany and France, for more than 20 years.

He wrote the cover story for MCV/DEVELOP about this very topic. For insights into how to craft universally engaging game experiences, read it here (on page 28).