GDC China: BioWare Mythic Creative Director Barnett Talks Cultural Limitations

Paul Barnett is senior creative director at BioWare Mythic, which in his words, "means I tell lies for a living, and I take all the credit when it works, and blame the coders when it doesn't." In a GDC China talk, Barnett highlighted how the global reach of games can be stopped in its tracks by local limits. "I'm actually from a faded empire, it's Britain," he joked. "They used to make computer games years ago, when I was a kid. They were cool! But as a computer empire, it finished. So now I work for a new empire, America!" "When I was a kid, the idea of traveling 500 miles was madness," he said. "The idea of talking to someone from another country was madness. And that might be because I'm English and we don't like anyone." But now, you can fly off to China and give a talk at the drop of a hat, and games travel even further and faster through digital distribution. Barnett got into making games because he loved making them, which is critically different from loving to play them. "If you're really just in love with playing them, and then you found out how they're made, you'll just be very sad," he said. "It's like going to watch how sausages are made, or how laws are passed." In the olden days, you made a product, and you were done with it. You knew what the platform was, where it would be sold, and how it would be purchased. But now it's more about the people, he says, adding, "most importantly it's about how people talk." 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." "Of course it's not all one way," he said. "Americans giggle every time they see this," as he showed a picture of Tomahawk from Street Fighter on his presentation screen. As another example, in Germany, blood's got to be green. "The big thing is, you can't show them blood, because if you do, the Germans get ideas," he joked. "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," he says. "But just because you're aware there are cultural challenges doesn't mean anyone will believe you, and doesn't mean you won't run into the same problems."