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The Lawbringer: Where localization meets legal reasoning
Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Running parallel to the games we love and enjoy is a world full of rules, regulations, pitfalls and traps. How about you hang out with us as we discuss some of the more esoteric aspects of the games we love to play? Have you ever been playing one of your favorite games, potentially developed in a foreign land, and felt an "off" feeling of oddness and wonder at word choice, phrasing, or character identity? Something within the core experience feels out of place or foreign, and you just can't put your finger on it? Welcome to the world of game localization. You've all experienced good, bad, and everything in between in terms of game localization quality. Maybe you didn't notice it. Maybe you did. Were you the kind of person taken back when wise and sage Tellah insults Edward in Final Fantasy 2/4 by calling him a "spoony" bard? Who could forget the epic spell casts of Final Fantasy Tactics -- "Life's refreshing breeze, blow in energy! Cure!" And we all remember gaming's great master of unlocking... Localization is more than changing phrases and dubbing voices. The world of localization exists to shape, mold, and conform a game and an experience to a completely new market filled with new and different expectations about the product. You also have a bevy of rules to follow and interpret, using deductive reasoning and precedent to figure out what changes need to be made to a game in order for it to pass the tests of foreign markets. You'd be surprised at the similarities between conforming a product to a foreign set of standards and the research and interpretation needed for legal reasoning.
