Leksema: Jurnal Bahasa dan Sastra
Vol. 10 No. 1 (2025)

LOOKIN’ GOOD: LUDIC LOCALIZATION QUALITY ASSESSMENT FOR VIDEO GAMES

Luthfie Arguby Purnomo ((Scopus ID: 57198420112), UIN Raden Mas Said Surakarta)



Article Info

Publish Date
05 Jun 2025

Abstract

Localization quality assessment (LQA) for video games tends to be discriminated in a sense that the assessment rubrics are not solely designed to address the issues of video game localization – the rubrics are generally employed for software or apps in common. Addressing this issue, I constructed an LQA that I called ludic LQA. Five steps were taken in constructing the LQA with participant-oriented research by Saldanha and O’Brien (2014) and participant observation by Spradley (2016) as the research frameworks. First, I investigated cases of LQA from a corpus of games to enlist common problems of localization that influence its quality. Second, employing the theories of schematic network by Tuggy (2006), Baconian perspectives of bias by Walton (1999), prosthetic communication in games by Purnomo et al. (2019), and diegetic and nondiegetic strategies in game localization by Purnomo and Purnama (2019), I constructed the parameters and their parametric weights. Third, I held a focus group discussion (FGD) with a game studio to reveal the applicability of the parameters. Fourth, I implemented the constructed LQA in video game localization (VGL) class to uncover practical issues with real localization problems as the objects of assessment. Fifth, practical issues found in the implementation were implemented in the final design of ludic LQA. Through these steps, ludic LQA was constructed. This LQA has linguistic meanings, cultural references, and spatial constraints. Since this LQA was solely designed for video games, game developers and localization specialists can employ the LQA to generate a thorough and comprehensive quality assessment.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

leksema

Publisher

Subject

Humanities Languange, Linguistic, Communication & Media

Description

Leksema: Jurnal Bahasa dan Sastra (Leksema: Language and Literature Journal) is a double-blind peer-reviewed scholarly journal focusing on disseminating research results and conceptual works from language and literature fields of study by publishing them into scientific articles. The linguistic ...