Section 2: Experience with PC Games

Section 2, entitled “Experience with PC Games”, sought to gather data about the gamers’ background in the research field as a whole. It is very important in order to evaluate the reliability of the participants’ answers. The first three questions functioned as a whole since they aimed at determining the respondent’s “experience” in video games operated on computers taking into account three parameters: frequency of playing, total numbers of games played, and total number of games played within the last year, the latter aiming at assessing the respondent’s current “level” of gaming, featuring a precise “starting time”, to use the same terminology as Choi and Pak (2005, p. 3).

31 The NAF (nomenclature d’activités françaises) classification may be found here:

https://www.insee.fr/fr/information/2406147 [accessed 04 Sep. 2017].

32 The 2008 revision of the NACE (Nomenclature statistique des activités économiques dans la Communauté européenne) classification may be found here:

http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/ramon/nomenclatures/index.cfm?TargetUrl=LST_NOM_DTL&StrNom=NACE_RE V2&StrLanguageCode=FR&IntPcKey=&StrLayoutCode=&IntCurrentPage=1 [accessed 04 Sep. 2017].

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To get an estimate of someone’s “level”, it is relevant to consider both frequency and quantity of games. Indeed, someone that plays the same game every day will not have a really good overview of games as a whole and someone that has played a lot of different games within the last year might have a good idea of the game and localisation panorama, two sectors that evolve together at a very fast pace. As mentioned earlier, the specification about playing “more than two hours” was added after piloting to make sure that respondents would consider games for which they have at least a good overview and not just a quick glimpse.

Once again, the answers to these questions have been tailored into continuous non-overlapping scales to be exhaustive. Plus, the precise intervals and the “more than two hours”

indication enabled us to get precise answers, thus taking away patent forms of subjectivity that might arise from interpretation since, as Choi and Pak (2005, p. 2) wrote, “Vague words in vague questions encourage vague answers”. Participants’ were therefore defined in terms of gaming frequency and quantity, but were not yet defined in terms of gaming tastes, an element the next question sought to introduce.

The next question focused on games genres played by respondents, and more particularly on the one genre they played most. This aspect is of importance because according to the type of game, there may not be the same amount of text to translate and elements to localise. For instance, O’Hagan and Mangiron (2013, p. 69) identify adventure games and RPGs as “text-heavy” genres. Such questions also allowed the use of statistics on the research, to see if a trend of playing stands out from our sample. The second part of the question (percentage of time) helped assess the diversity of the gamer’s video game landscape in terms of genres. The genre list used was an indicative typology taken from O’Hagan and Mangiron’s Game Localization (2013, p. 68), displayed in section 2.1.1.4. This well-structured classification included 13 different major game categories. Although it was not exhaustive and did not account for hybrid genres, for instance, it was chosen as the basis of the questionnaire because of its consistency and its attempt at combining various scholars’ typologies.

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In order to make sure that respondents knew what the categories stood for, an example was drawn from the same table and added between brackets next to the genre. Examples were selected according to their representativeness of the genre and, when possible, their mental association with computers rather than other gaming device. For this task, an experimented gamer was informally asked for assistance. The person in question was a French man that has been playing video games on computers since he was 8 years old, i.e. for around 15 years. He currently possesses 135 titles in his Steam library and estimates the number of PC games he played to around 500 overall. He has also tried many different genres (13 out of the 13 on O’Hagan and Mangiron’s categorisation) and regularly spends time playing (around 2 hours a day) and on video game dedicated websites (around 15 minutes a day) and, to a much lesser extent, on gaming forums. This player therefore falls into the category of “hardcore gamers”

(something we will come back to in section 5.3.1) and, for that matter, his knowledge of video games and of the gaming community was deemed valuable, particularly when trying to choose appropriate examples of each category.

The aim of this step was to provide participants with famous examples that the gamer community would immediately recognize and would help them comprehend what the genre was about. The usefulness of such exemplification was assessed in the piloting phase, since the indications were found helpful. Based on a suggestion made by one of the pilots, one slight alteration was made though: instead of quoting Tetris as the example for puzzle games, as O’Hagan and Mangiron did (2013, p. 68), the instance given was Portal, another subgenre of puzzle games.

Concerning the gaming language, one of the goals of this unfolding question was to know if the surveyed played in their mother tongue, which would seem natural, as we posited in section 3.3.3. The second goal was to identify the reasons that motivated their choosing such language. Did they think about it before playing or did they naturally opt for their daily language? The last part of the question helped us quantify the importance of the aforementioned language, be it the gamer’s mother tongue or another one.

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The following skippable question was directly linked to the answer given about gaming language since it aimed at determining if and how often participants played a game in a foreign language, in case they played in their own language most of the time. The sub question “why”

further delved into the reasons explaining their playing in a language different from their default choice (their mother tongue).

Finally, this section closed on a question related to games whose original language was French. Its purpose was to enable the researcher to learn more about the players’ linguistic habits in the game environment and to consider to what extent they payed attention to language, especially the one in which the game was designed. After making general inquiries about gamers’ gaming experience, the research moved towards questions that were central to the subject matter: satisfaction about localised video games.