Cultural Fluency in Game Development: Crafting Universally Engaging Experiences


By Julien Proux, Vice President of Art at Room 8 Group I


have been lucky enough to spend most of my career immersed in cultures different from my own. I still remember my first big meeting at Electronic Arts, the company I’d just joined, in the early 2000s, during my first expat posting in Vancouver, Canada. I was about to present an idea to my bosses—I’d been through my notes a hundred times and felt confident. About 10 minutes in, I saw a cloud roll over the audience. I could tell by the look in their eyes that I had lost them. I was confused. Had I gradually bored them half to sleep? Or did I do something wrong at the 10-minute mark? I’d just started the ‘antithesis’ section of the talk—the devil’s-advocate perspective to my wonderful idea. It’s quite normal to do this in France. It’s how we’re taught in school: Thesis, antithesis, discussion, conclusion. Yes, no, debate, decision. I’d made my PowerPoint slides like…well, like a French guy. But my audience, all North Americans, couldn’t understand why I was destroying my own idea. From my perspective I wasn’t; I was trying to give balance to my argument. But something as simple as how I present ideas was called into question.


28 | MCV/DEVELOP February/March 2024


Since then I’ve managed teams all over the world, from China and Japan to Germany and France, for more than 20 years. Even if we don’t realize it, the way we communicate, and how we interpret the world around us, is almost entirely culturally dependent.


This is especially noteworthy for game developers. Creative


expression, and the way we perceive the most basic of elements like sounds and shapes, is influenced massively by the world in which we were raised. In the West, the color red signals danger, warning; in China, it is associated with happiness and prosperity. In-game calls-to-action like buy item in China are red; in the West, red signifies exit or no. Asian culture, by and large, leans toward using brighter colors: just look at the first Kung-Fu Panda (made primarily for a Western audience) versus Kung-Fu Panda 3 (made with a Chinese audience in mind). When I was Studio Senior Director at Activision, I helped bring Call of Duty Online to the Chinese market. I saw first-hand how different China is to the US and Europe. It made me realize how deeply we ought to consider creative decisions when


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