Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Lemonade Stand - Globalizing

I have received a couple comments about using images of US currency in a game that is designed primarily for children outside of the US and that got me thinking about other changes that might make the game more realistic for children.

One thing that I have been thinking about is will the concept of a lemonade stand make sense to children in other countries. The concept of buying and selling goods is pretty universal but do other places have lemonade as a common drink or are there others things that kids might sell to try to make money. I feel like I need to get an idea of where our game would most likely be implemented and what aspects of the game need to be changed to be culturally appropriate. I think for right now though, I am going to focus on the functionality but try to focus the design in a way that text, images, etc. could easily be replaced to apply to various cultures.

I personally don't have much knowledge of any of the places the OLPC program is being implemented so if someone could shed some light on the subject it would be greatly appreciated.

1 comment:

  1. Now you are on the right track! When I was rewriting the game, I made sure that the recipe is not specific to lemonade and the currency is not necessarily the USD. So that should not be as much of an issue with globalization. The only part that needs to be rewritten is the random event system at the moment.

    Keep up the good work!

    ReplyDelete