With a little bit of effort, this could still be a useful introduction to the art and craft to translating videogames.
While the memoQ translation environment has been substantially updated since, and it has become hard to play the game now that Flash support has been all but removed from modern browsers, the core concepts still remain valid. This series of videos captured a certain interest, which in turn led to creating the first LocJAM contest, based on this very same game.
Therefore, a few years ago I decided to take the plunge and translate a small flash game, recording and explaining each step in order to build a video tutorial. Most contents are bound by NDA and cannot be shown, and many tools and procedures are obscure even for translators. In addition to a story mode which follows several scripted events that occur within Arstotzka, the game includes an endless mode that challenges the player to process as many immigrants as possible.It's hard to explain what happens behind the scenes of a game translation. The game deals with the issues of keeping up with immigration policy in an ever-changing political environment. In some cases, the player will be presented with moral decisions, such as approving entry of a pleading spouse of a citizen despite the lack of proper paperwork, knowing this will affect their salary. The player is rewarded in their daily salary for how many people they have processed correctly in that day, while also being fined for making mistakes the salary is used to help provide shelter, food and heat for the player's in-game family. As the immigration officer, the player must review each immigrant and return citizen's passports and other supporting paperwork against an ever-growing list of rules using a number of tools and guides, allowing in only those with the proper paperwork while rejecting those without all proper forms, and at times detaining those with falsified information. The game takes place at a migration checkpoint in Grestin, a border city split between Arstotzka and the neighboring country of Kolechia, and a fictional parallel of the Cold War-era division between East and West Berlin. In Papers, Please, the player take on the role of a border-crossing immigration officer in the fictional dystopian Eastern Bloc-like country of Arstotzka, which has been and continues to be at political hostilities with its neighboring countries.
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