BioWare Mythic’s creative director — and the man who has recently become very…closely associated with numerous Ultima-related rumours — Paul Barnett is at GDC China this week, and gave an interesting talk on “how the global reach of games can be stopped in its tracks by local limits.”

And yes, that’s a direct quote from the article, and no, I don’t think I can shorten it any. It’s a bit of an obtuse topic, and a mouthful, but Barnett draws it out rather well:

Language is a good example of a limit of global reach, but so are cultural expectations. Barnett showed a picture of a panda, and a picture of some samurai armor. “The panda is the least racist animal ever. It’s Black, White, and Asian.” But when you put a Panda, which to many is representative of China, in samurai armor, which is representative of Japan, you get serious backlash. This happened to Blizzard not long ago. “They didn’t mean it, they’re just idiots. They didn’t do it on purpose, they’re just stupid,” he said. “Why? Because they hit a local limit with their global reach.”

…

“If the only thing you can see is your culture, you’re convinced your own culture is cutting edge,” Barnett cautioned. “You think everyone else should move to your culture.” As an example, in China, you can’t see Youtube, because they want Youku to succeed. There are countless examples of this, with Facebook and Twitter essentially banned.

This is something to keep in mind when shipping out games to other territories that already have perfectly good games of their own. When you talk about war games for example, in the U.S. people “don’t really care if it’s realistic, as long as America wins,” Barnett says. “Also let’s put all our technology in it, thank you.” But in Germany, a war games means grids, charts, and tanks (ala World of Tanks).

“Your weapon to help you and your company and your games, is to challenge the perception. That’s your number one goal to figuring this out.”

I was actually talking about this concept, in a roundabout sort of way, with Sergorn Dragon quite recently, when the subject of “grinding” in RPGs came up. He pointed out that while Western RPGs have, in large part, done away with grinding to any real extent (a trend which, I would be tempted to argue, began with Ultima 6) outside of some MMORPGs, Japanese games still include bosses that can only be defeated by top-level characters. Grinding is not just still a part of JRPGs…it’s an expected part of them, which the fanbase demands to see included. Announcements that numerous hours of content have been cut from an upcoming Final Fantasy title are usually met with outrage…but it’s not unlikely that the cut content is some of the grind, and it’s likely that the reason it was cut was to make the game have more appeal to Western gamers…or, at least, the ones who are “take it or leave it” where JRPGs are concerned.

And in an era where games are going mobile and distribution is going digital, such considerations are only going to become even more pressing for developers to keep in mind.