Cultural Bias in Design

#1

My visit to Korea, and chats with insightful Korean designers, really opened my eyes to the deep cultural bias built into most games. Some examples:

Assumptions about the spaces in which play occurs. If your game is designed for four people sitting around a table in the privacy of someone’s house, that’s at least three assumptions that may be wrong and probably are.

Assumptions about signifiers (the Korean translator of Mouse guard, Hana (@WfootSwallow) explained to me that there’s no Korean equivalent of wolverine, and that weasels have a totally different symbolic affect in Korea, and “weasel words” makes no sense but “fox words” does the job).

And the biggest category by far…

Assumptions about social interactions surrounding play. For example, if your game encourages player-facing spontaneous lay-ons, like “You encounter a charcoal-burner with a strange appearance, what’s noteworthy about her?”, that’s a point of tension in cultures (like, in my limited understanding, Korean) where putting someone on the spot like that has all sorts of potential awkwardness. The “Hot Seat” in Microscope is this, amplified. This list, in particular, seems endless.

I’m not an expert in any of this, and I’m not suggesting that every point of cultural bias need be or even can be remedied, but as a designer it is totally worth understanding and considering how people will engage with your work across the globe.

If you are a designer in a culture outside the default bias, I guess I’d encourage you to think about crafting games and game mechanics that work well within your own culture, whatever that means. And I also think this very likely applies to subcultures, and marginalized groups who code-switch, for example. Personally I think things developed with cultural specificity in mind will tend toward fruitful innovation that can be generalized, and I’m eager to learn from you.

Let’s talk about cultural bias. If you’ve run into systems or rules that caused a lot of friction because of this, I’d love to hear about it - particularly if you found ways to fix it.

24 Likes
#2

It might have changed a bit recently, as I haven’t been in Poland in few years, but I will pass what I found over the years.

In Poland, there is a quite big, modal divide between tabletop RPGs and LARPs when it comes to performative space. I had trouble getting people to play some games that blend the two (e.g Society of Dreamers, Skeletons). Even if people play both RPGs and LARPs, some of them will be unwilling to play a game that blends the two.

I think it happens because RPGs are usually played in one’s home, while LARPs are played in a public setting, and people might be more inclined to let loose of their inhibitions more when there are numerous others doing the same. The more intimate setting of RPGs, combined with the fact that you usually play with people who you know quite well seems to be the factor in this.

I still find it quite fascinating that my friends with whom I played both RPGs and LARPs, seen the games that blend the two as “acting silly.”

9 Likes
#3

For a designer from a non-English speaking background such as myself, the most mysterious and strange cultural environment to understand for the purposes of game design is the American one.

I ran face first into this when we ran our Nordic-style Vampire larp End of the Line in New Orleans a few years ago. It was a real crash course in how cultural differences affect design, but fortunately we had plenty of American friends to help us navigate it!

5 Likes
#4

What did you learn from End of the Line?

2 Likes
#5

A lot of it was about communication, what kind of things need to be explained and how to do it. We had very motivated participants and I think many of them had signed up because of curiosity towards this style of larp. It was a question of giving them all the tools they needed.

A key problem was that I think something is obvious so it doesn’t need to be explained. However, it turns out that this obvious thing is actually just a feature of my specific play culture, and indeed must be explained.

An example of this is action and motivation -based design vs. plot-based design. End of the Line doesn’t have plots at all, but it does have a lot of actions you can do and it gives you reasons to do them. It just requires a change in mindset to move into that space.

I also learned a staggering amount about U.S. larp during that trip, so it was definitely a two-way exchange!

If I wanted to make rule based on that experience, it would be: “To design for culture X, you must listen to people from culture X.”

11 Likes
#6

I think this is the crux of cultural bias. Any one of us will have many such assumptions that something is an obvious and, for lack of a better word, default approach to a situation. However it is only default in a given culture and pretty much invisible to us. It reminds me of the quote: “We Don’t Know Who Discovered Water, But We Know It Wasn’t a Fish”

This topic makes me wish that some anthropologists would go around the world and produce ethnographies of different cultures around all kinds of play.

2 Likes