Culturalization or Deculturalization? Looking at Smash Brother Franchise from a Fandom Perspective

Abstract

Culturalization in video games has been inspected under academic principles as the gaming industry grows more aware of the possible impact of cultural distinctiveness on market reception and thus on the production pipeline. Issues with culturalization in video games could range from personal level, meaning how individual player relates himself/herself to the game play, to political or religious level, meaning whether the in-game content is appropriate under a certain regime. However, the concept of culture, when discussed under this current interest in culturalizing video games, is commonly pointed towards races, nationalities, or religions, which all originate from a structural-functional view. In this paper, we provide a literature review on the definition of culture, and how fandom under the new definition of culture could shed insight into the current state of culturalization of video games. After performing a case study of the Super Smash Bros franchise using fandom as the key cultural element, we suggest that instead of treating culture as a fixed structural-functional concept, developers should view culture as a constant changing flow of intra-group/inter-group interaction when approaching culturalization during their game production cycle.