MMOs spawn a rich constellation of research tools, databases, forums, walk-throughs and guides. Players analyze and document the content and behavior of the worlds, discuss strategies and tactics, and discuss their experiences of other players and the producers of the games. Final Fantasy XI in particular has inspired a wealth of these sites and resources, some of which Rachel has mentioned in her discussion of crafting.
Among the most robust and expansive of these tools is the FFXIclopedia wiki. Though relatively recent compared to sites such as Allkhazam.com (which hosts forums and databases for many MMORPGs) or Killing Ifrit, the focus on producing articles in a Wikipedia format has been enthusiastically taken up by a large number of participants.
Jesse directed me to this article on the Auto-Translate function from the site. While wikis are ultimately collectively authored, the initial layout and concept for this page, and much of its content, seems to have been produced by Eleri, an exceptionally active producer of FFXiclopedia content, who created the page in August of 2006. Not only is it an interesting example of high quality, player-produced documentation, it is also an interesting case study of the wiki page as a form of writing. The page has grown extensively from its origins, and its development was accompanied by some disagreements, controversy and negotiations between contributors.
Wikis have become an object for study in their own right: one commentator created a screencast showing the history of the wikipedia article on the “heavy metal umlaut.” This paper analyzes the history of the wikipedia article on abortion, using a data visualization tool developed by IBM to track the sudden explosions of material, the points of controversy, the edit battles, the acts of vandalism and their resolutions. I’ve used this tool to analyze the Auto-Translate page, but there isn’t much that it reveals that isn’t fairly obvious already: that there are three primary contributers, of which Eleri is by far the most active. There was a small edit war which I’ll address shortly—otherwise, this is a page that developed slowly and constantly over the past several months.
One of the features which distinguish FFXI from World of Warcraft and some other MMORPGs is the design decision to make all servers international. While WoW offers specific servers for North American, European, and Asian players, as well as allowing players to choose from a variety of game experiences (some servers allow for PVP—inter-player combat—and others do not; some encourage roleplaying, others do not), all of the servers in FFXI are, in theory, identical. The player populations on all of them are international: this has the advantage of creating a “follow-the-sun” play environment, by which players can be reasonably sure that a number of other players (without whom advancement is impossible) can always be found online. Of course, this introduces problems of mutual comprehension.
The game was originally released in Japan, and the client software supported Japanese text. When, about one and one-half years later, the game was released to the North American market, a new client was created that does not support the production of Japanese characters (although these still could be read by players.) Language reflected the differences in national player populations, and cultural distinctions between the two player communities surfaced around the language differences.
The Japanese market, arguably, remains the first priority for the producers of the game. While FFXI is, depending on one’s method for reckoning such things, either the 4th or 5th most popular MMORPG globally, it is the most successful such game in Japan, and enjoys considerable exposure (getting referenced in Japanese television just like WoW is referenced by shows like South Park.) Differences in play styles have created tensions between Japanese and American players, although often considerable goodwill also exists. In order to facilitate communication between players, in 2003 the producers introduced the auto-translate feature, which allows players to use tab-completion to input commonly-used phrases in their own language and have it generate a translated version on other players’ screens. Auto-Translated text appears between two colored brackets: an English player might type (Nice to meet you.), which would be seen by Japanese players as (どぞうよろうしこ。)
The Auto-Translator became a toy for some, who would produce amusing, idiosyncratic or idiomatic uses, sometimes using it for risqué humor, or to generate puns—neither of which uses would, of course, be meaningful to audiences seeing the output in their own languages. More interestingly, the translations weren’t always literal, but functional. For example, the English (Nice to meet you.) is translated into a phrase that is only appropriate in Japanese for first meetings, just as “Nice to meet you” usually is. However, in English, this phrase is considered appropriate when ending a first-meeting with a new acquaintance, while the translated text in Japanese is only appropriate at the opening of a conversation. In fact, a more literal translation of the Japanese phrase is “Please be kind to me,” although as a discourse act, it is accurate to translate it as “nice to meet you.”
Other translations are even more fraught with misunderstanding. The English Auto-Translate phrase (Help me out!) is in Japanese translated to something more like “Please come to my immediate aid,” rather than the generalized request for assistance which would be a valid reading of the English text. One edit war erupted in the wiki about the correct translation of a French phrase: the debate included appeals to personal authority (French native ability, Quebecois identity) as well as reference materials.
The problem of communicating across languages is one that vexes Japanese players as well. While many simply choose not to play with players in any language except Japanese, others enthusiastically seek out players from other countries. A specialized phrasebook, called ヴァナ·ヂィール留学ガイド (Literally “Vana’diel study-abroad guide,” but subtitled “Study abroad in Vana’diel”) included all the phrases covered by the Auto-Translator, along with culture notes to explain baffling American player behavior and a guide to the abbreviated text-slang that many American players use: omg u wipe? LOL! u need r2? kk, omw (“Oh my God, did you wipe [Did your entire party die]? Haha! Do you need Raise 2? OK, on my way.”) An appendix, now somewhat dated, even addressed the idiosyncratic use of the Auto-Translator by English-language players, who would generate phrases that were meaningless in any other language, but were amusing in English (such as (May) (bee) for “maybe.”
Afterwards:
What follows is a consequence of letting an article lie fallow on one’s hard drive for months.I began this article before a controversy erupted regarding FFXIclopedia, which has since migrated to Wikia. As a result of the controversy (which I won’t dwell on in this post) Eleri no longer participates in FFXIclopedia, and instead participates in another project, the Blue Garter wiki. Yet another wiki project has been started by the largest of the fan-based sites, Allkhazam. While each of these projects has defined itself as distinct from the original one—BGwiki by focusing on end-game events, Allakhazam’s wikibase by focusing on the fictional and cross-cultural aspects of the game (including a number of documents reporting on the background of the game which have been translated by one Elmer the Pointy, who runs his own professional translation service,) one can’t help but see in these forking projects a dissipation of efforts.
