The global culture and local context of online games in Taiwan

Online games are interlaced with cultural meaning, social connection, politics, and economic change. Based on a secondary data analysis of government documents, content analyses of game Web sites, and interviews with gaming companies, we describe the technological, political, and social forces that formulate the online gaming industry in Taiwan and construct a novel model to understand how the global culture of online gaming interacts with local contexts. As a global-culture industry, online gaming merges the borders of dominant and subordinate nations. Most Taiwanese game companies simultaneously localize foreign games and export self-producing games. Although game companies export online games, they focus on language localization, gamer-behavior pattern localization, and cultural customs localization. The flows of globalization are limited by 2 obstacles: local regulations and cultural proximity.