A Player Reception Study of Black Myth: Wukong: The Translation of Culturally Specific In-game Items

Abstract

The English and Chinese video game markets are the largest worldwide, resulting in high demand for localization between these languages. In the Chinese-to-English direction, this has traditionally involved highly culture-specific video games based on Chinese history or inspired by Chinese literature, which were often approached through text-only, lower-budget partial localizations. These practices have gained increasing academic attention in recent years. More recently, however, several higher-budget titles have been localized into English and widely publicized on the global stage, the most prominent being Black Myth: Wukong, an action role-playing game (ARPG) inspired by the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West. This study investigates the approaches used to translate culturally specific in-game items with interactive properties and examines how players have received these translations. By integrating elements of corpus design with player reception research, the study demonstrates that foreignizing strategies can enhance a sense of cultural immersion, while domesticating strategies can facilitate a smoother interactive gaming experience. It also shows that attempting to achieve both simultaneously presents significant challenges. Moreover, the strong tendency toward foreignizing approaches challenges the notion that such games have been localized in a traditional sense and instead points to a more hesitant “journey west.”