Cultural Flow: The Struggles between Global Culture and Local Context on the Online Games in Taiwan

Based on the way online games are woven into webs of cultural meaning, social connection, politics, and economic change, this study explores the cultural flow between localization and globalization on Taiwan game industry. Through the theoretical review, I puts forward three kinds of cultural flow modes, namely, "cultural flow of media imperialism", "transnational cultural flow" and "diachronic cultural flow".
The former has been criticized and the latter two models can serve as a reference structure for thinking about cultural flows. I used the secondary data analysis of government documents, content analysis of game websites, and interviewing with the game companies as the research methods. Then I prescribe the technological, political, and social forces which formulated the online game industry in Taiwan and builds a new model to understand how global culture of online games flows into the local contexts flexibility. As the global culture industry, online games merge the borders of dominant and subordinate nations while most of Taiwan game companies localize foreign games and export self-producing games simultaneously. While game companies export online games, they focus on language localization, gamerbehavior pattern localization, and culture customs localization. The flows of globalization are limited by two gatekeepers which are local regulations and culture proximity.