Saturday, December 8, 2007

International Flavor

I just got back from playing a game of Apples to Apples (the real thing!), and what was interesting was that we had a few international students included, one from India and one from Germany. I think this was a very useful experience for me to have, given that a web-based version is necessarily going to be international. Apples to Apples is by its nature rooted in common ground (I'll get more into that later) and usually involves a good deal of shared cultural understanding, so it was interesting to see the reactions of people who have a different cultural background.

So my question is, how can I set things up to avoid excluding people on the basis of cultural background? I am planning to allow multiple decks in some future version, so I can provide a deck that's essentially the same as normal, but without most of the centrally American references (actors, politicians, etc.). But even still, people tend to be unfamiliar with at least some of the cards no matter what their background, especially if we wind up with ridiculously obscure decks, so I think we need a way to define any arbitrary card. And of course, what's the number one open resource for defining anything you could possibly think of? Wikipedia. So to sum up, I plan on automatically linking to Wikipedia entries for your red cards and green cards. This will also solve the legal issues of copying Apples to Apples' original definitions. since I won't have the original definitions anymore.

1 comment:

BendiStraw said...

They sound like very good ideas. To make the decks culturally relevant on an international level would be a pretty big undertaking though, especially since there are so many cultures out there! You could leave the game open to contributions though...(you might have mentioned that already).
An idea came up that is in a way contrary to what you want to do. But one thing you could do, like in Trivial Pursuit, is to have a "Movie Edition" deck or an American-history related deck that could make things interesting.
Linking to Wikipedia would be awesome, considering how much we all love Wikipedia ;-)
If I don't make sense, please forgive me, for it is 7am and I didn't get much sleep last night! :-P