The Escapist on Chinese gaming

Check out the current issue of The Escapist, which explores Chinese gaming.  Includes articles on Chinese piracy, transnational work relationships, and Chinese game design. Great stuff. I especially liked the article by Patrick Dugan on different approaches to cross-cultural textual communication in games.  Excerpt:

A design I’m currently developing utilizes the Celtic alphabet, Ogham
,
as an interface in an Irish magic school, where different letter
combinations evoke spells and simple social cues. I’m divorcing the
alphabet from its original phonetic use and designing my own
alphabetical logic to be consistent with the game’s world and its magic
system. This means that a Chinese person could play it, needing only a
translation of the game’s embedded text to help him learn the interface.No matter what approach is taken to designing the
linguistic elements of a game, remember that human pattern recognition
is more powerful than any AI system yet made. An elegant interface, and
the play it supports, will reverberate as a universal language.

(via How the World Works)