On St. Patricks Day, I ran into an Irishman at a local Irish pub–Yes, there are Irish pubs in Tokyo–that I frequent who probably had a few too many drinks that day and was in quite the mood for conversation at the time. He described the difficulty he seemed to have in learning to pronounce English loan words in Japanese, many of which he admitted to not particularly paying attention to when taught in class. There was something about the intonation in Japanese that he couldn’t just quite get a hang of, and the fact that he had been drinking certainly wasn’t helping his pronunciation.
I wasn’t about to get into what I assumed was going to be a serious discussion on Japanese linguistics without ordering a drink first.
It was a festive food for the busy pub, which played on TV a live match between bitter English rivals Manchester United and Liverpool (as explained to me by British and Irish fellows there for the evening). Liverpool was dominating Manchester United, a fact the restaurant’s many foreign clientele were enjoying. With the entire establishment decorated in green for the festivities, I was immediately given a large, sparkly green bow tie to wear after sitting down next to another regular. With absolutely no hesitation, I ordered a pint of Guiness and put the bow tie around my head.
Returning to the conversation, we discussed the interesting idea that English “loanwords” are something easily skipped over by a native speaker of English learning Japanese because they assumed “familiarity” with the word, even when pronounced and used within the frame of a completely different language all together. Despite the fact that loanwords are often borrowed in isolated cases, and very rarely do they have the same range of meanings that a word may have in its origin language, the idea is that cognitively, language learners will assume they understand the word without necessarily taking into consideration the system that it has been adapted to.
This reminded me a topic that I’m quite personally vested in: the issue of introducing a game’s mechanics without an audience defaulting to preexisting assumptions regarding the content of the game. For example, if I were to explain that game A is a first person military shooter, there’s a specific idea of what the title may play like with that expression alone. ‘First person shooter’ (FPS) becomes the framework by which we gauge, for better or worse, the new concepts inside a title; someone may view original elements of a game as good relative to their image of FPS or may feel in the end the title is just a FPS with something extra.
While all of us use these frameworks for learning and acquiring new things (in this case, second language learning and consumer awareness), it’s an important step in identifying just how the connotations of key phrases used throughout the gaming community can conflict with a message we want to get out regarding the interesting points of a game. I don’t particularly have an answer to the issue of dealing with assumptions, particularly those regarding a game’s design, I think it’s important to understand that explaining a mechanic in general terms can sometimes be detrimental to a marketing strategy compared to introducing it using a slightly new terminology discussed within a new framework.
In that case, taking the first step in recognizing the pre-existing assumptions becomes the first and most important of any task.