A Brief History of Video Games

While the older, primitive video game titles were basic pastimes, today they incorporate complex narratives, require strategizing and encourage co-operation (Bernal-Merino, 2015, p. 18). It is important to note that older video games did not have many elements that could be of interest from a translation standpoint since they did not possess strong narrative elements, if any (Bernal-Merino, 2015, p. 18). The improvement of technologies on data storage and graphics areas allowed video games to have rich stories that are conveyed in written form or by human voice. This rendered the video games an interesting area in the scope of translation.

Initial examples of video games were seen in as early as the 1950s. Those software required a dedicated hardware for each game, meaning a computer needed to be built specifically for only one game, and all of them were very simple in nature, as expected.

The very first computer game known to be written is a chess simulator named Turochamp (Kasparov versus Turing, 2012, p. 1), which was developed by Alan

Turing in 1948, who is known as the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. However, this game was never implemented on a computer. Bertie the Brain (Bateman, 2014, p. 1), a tic-tac-toe game developed by Josef Kates in 1950, is generally viewed as the first playable computer game.

With the implementation of technological advances of the Space Race in the 1950s and the 60s into our daily life, the 1970s saw huge developments in the video game industry with the rise of the arcade saloons and home video game consoles, which are game dedicated computers.

The second generation of consoles started in 1976 with the release of Fairchild Video Entertainment System (VES) (Fairchild Channel F, n.d., p. 1), which was the first console to support the use of cartridges. This meant that the video game consoles no longer had only one game programmed into them, instead the video games were programmed into the cartridges and those cartridges could be used on any console that supported them.

In 1983, Nintendo released the Family Computer (Famicom) (Famicom, n.d., p.

1), starting the third generation of video game consoles. The most widely known video game character in the world, Mario (Funk, 2010, p. 1), after 1981’s Donkey Kong, finally had the chance to be in his own video game, Super Mario Bros., which was released on this console.

The fifth generation was a turning point in the history of video games. CD-ROMs started to become the main type of medium in releasing the video games. Two of the three console systems, which still dominate the industry today, were released in this generation. Those are Sony’s Playstation (PlayStation, n.d., p. 1), released in 1994 and Nintendo’s Nintendo 64 (Nintendo 64, n.d., p. 1), released in 1996. Game Boy: Tetris, the handheld console that helped Tetris to become the most played game in the world, was also released in this generation (Sparkes, 2014, p. 1).

The eighth generation is the current generation of video game consoles.

Technological advances such as the implementation of life-like graphics, the

standardization of motion capture technologies in the making of video games and professional voice acting are some of the features of this generation. The three consoles of this era are Nintendo Wii U (Ashcraft, 2011, p. 1), Microsoft XBOX One (Warren, 2013, p. 1) and Sony Playstation 4 (Johnson, 2013, p. 1), released in 2012, 2013 and 2013 respectively. This generation also saw the rise of online distribution thanks to the advances in technology and internet speeds.

Those state of the art consoles represent the current pinnacle of video game technology along with the PC, the development timeline of which is not divided into generations, but is parallel to that of the consoles regarding the video game technology.

1.2. TYPES OF TEXTUAL ELEMENTS IN VIDEO GAMES AND THEIR TRANSLATION : DIEGETIC OR NON-DIEGETIC

A video game, thanks to its multichannel nature, houses many different types of textual and non-textual elements (O’Hagan, 2009, p. 149). These elements require different translation strategies, and a significant portion of them is included in a video game translator’s job description.

This section focuses on the textual elements of video games within the scope of translation and differentiates between diegetic and non-diegetic elements, since it is important to make this distinction for the purpose of this research, which is to study foreignization and domestication strategies in the translation of video games. Foreignization and domestication strategies are almost completely confined to the diegetic elements of video games and are not employed in non-diegetic textual elements of video games, such as technical ones, which aim to be as clear and neutral as possible.

At this point, it is important to make the distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic elements clear. At its simplest definition, a non-diegetic element is an element that exists in the fictional world and contributes to the story, such as the speech of a character from a novel, a dialogue from a film or a legend told by a character from a video game (Van Oers, 2014, p. 130). For instance, a dialogue

between the player and another character in the game is a diegetic element since it is located in the “in-game world” (O’Hagan and Mangiron, 2013, p. 153), while the menu of the video game software is non-diegetic since it is located outside the game universe.

Diegetic elements are interesting research material from a translation standpoint since they contain a narrative (Van Oers, 2014, p. 130). Translation strategies such as foreignization and domestication are employed on diegetic texts as opposed to technical texts such as user interfaces or menus since the latter type of texts are generally translated through predefined guidelines (Van Oers, 2014, p. 130).

In light of this information, it is necessary to make an analysis of the textual elements in video games. The following section is an analysis of different types of texts that are encountered in video games within the scope of translation.

The text types are also categorized as informative, expressive and operative according to Reiss’s classification (2004, p. 168-179). The analysis is based on that of Bernal-Merino’s (2015, p. 110-138), with some minor modifications.