Why are so many games set in the US?

Soo, here I am super tired, but regardless of my lack sleep I have this Question that needs answering: just why are so many games set in the US? I mean there’s more to the world then the USA you know.

What are your thoughts on this everyone?

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Well some of the readers amd the majority live here. It just makes it easier to relate too. But I’m not speaking for everyone. Some live in new York or Tennessee of California or Florida. It makes it easy to base areas off where you are currently living

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Because they are…whisper Borg! Resistance is futile! Dun Dun Dun!

:sweat_smile:

Hum…

Dunno . Familiar setting? easier? Sound like a movie ?

I think writers should be encouraged to widen their horizon . Not just write about that part of the world when you dig out medieval crap…

But it isn’t easy to write about others country . You can research it, but…it isnt the same as living there .

Maybe it just setting everyone is familiar with…easy to paint anything you want .

You should get some snooze though :wink:

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it might be harder to market games set outside the US to US Americans, who are… if we’re honest, likely the majority of readers. i’ve debated whether to set my own project in my home country, Denmark, for that exact reason :confused:

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I wish, I got school today (it’s Monday here in the Southern Hemisphere) and I need to stay up for that!

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then limit your activity, so you don’t burn the tiny energy you are running on . Trust me, speaking from experience . And when you can, hit the pillow and recharge .

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Because…most of the writers are American? It’s not a massive conspiracy. You write what you know, and if you live in America you know America. I could set a story somewhere else, but I would have to do a ton of research and odds are it would still come off disingenuous to people who know the country more intimately than a non-resident ever could. Plus, America buys about as many of these stories as all the other countries combined. One would ignore that fact at their marketability-related peril.

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To add to what @hustlertwo said, I also think the US is just a safe and easy option for non-US citizens due to how much the rest of the world is exposed to North American culture through various kinds of media. Sure, you might still get some details wrong because talk shows and movies and whatnot exaggerate things sometimes, but you do get a decent feel of what the country and its people are like.

Personally, I’m not from the US, nor have I ever been there, but it doesn’t feel as foreign as other foreign countries, including the ones that distance wise are right next door compared to the US. So I imagine, in addition to American authors simply writing what they know, non-Americans probably turn to a US setting as well because it feels familiar enough to write about.

That’s just my opinion though.

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B- but many games are set in fictional fantasy…

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I write all my stories in the U.S. because that’s where I live. My experience here will make my writing sound more genuine than it would if I researched a country and wrote about it.

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This probably isn’t helpful, given it’s entirely anecdotal, but I’m an American (living in Colombia), and I’d absolutely love to play CoG or Hosted games set in other countries, especially if they were present-day stories. It’d be like virtual tourism, and that’s a huge draw for me.

Yeah, it might be easier to get into if the option existed to choose your character’s country of origin, but I’d be fine without that? Mostly I’d just enjoy walking around a place that someone else knows and loves, getting to live in a part of the world that really exists but that I’ll probably never have the chance to exist in. The CoG version of Google Street View.

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Well, my first game Tokyo Wizard was set in, well, Tokyo. Second, Highway Wars was set in Spain (mad Max kind of seeing though). The Nebula is in space… But my new superhero game is set in New York. Somehow it fits the theme?

About why so many other games are in the USA… The majority of writers are from the USA? (Not all, but it is a significant proportion?)

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Looking at just COGs, I count 26 titles that seem to be set in the US, out of 101 titles overall. I probably missed a few, so I imagine they’re around 30% of the library. Considering Choice of Games is an American company producing English language games, that seems like a reasonable proportion to me.

Though to be fair, most of the games that don’t take place in made-up worlds take place in the US. Closely followed by England, especially London, England.

Titles

A Wise Use of Time, Broadway 1849, Choice of Robots, Choice of the Rockstar, Choice of the Vampire, Choice of the Vampire: The Fall of Memphis, Choice of Zombies, Congresswolf, Drag Star!, Gilded Rails, Heroes Rise, HeroFall, Hollywood Visionary, NOLA Is Burning, Open Season, Psy High, Ratings War, Redemption Season, Showdown at Willow Creek, Sixth Grade Detective, Slammed!, The Fielder’s Choice, The Hero Project, The Hero Unmasked!, Undercover Agent, Werewolves: Haven Rising

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Freebrum superiority,
A.K.A the power of Merica

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I live in England but chose to set UnNatural in the USA this was a choice I made because when I first joined the forums the majority of readers happened to be American and that seemed to make the most sense for me at the time. (I also made the decision to use US English for spellings too which is a bit tricky sometimes when you write with UK English everywhere else.

I do intend to do a game set in England too at some point.

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yeah give us some of that Jack the ripper vibe :wink:

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Because it’s probably the most familiar thing to most of the authors. As much as it would be great to write about other places outside of the US, most people may not have had too many chances to travel to such places with their own two feet. And while research could theoretically close the gap and give ideas on what it’s like in a place outside the US, it can potentially still lack the sort of intimacy(?) of being in that place and exploring it yourself. Not that it makes the writing bad; it’s just having that experience of being there can have the extra ‘oomph’.

There’s a reason that creators of any type often go out to explore and broaden their horizons with the experience as well as the research.

Granted, everyone takes in the world around them in different, so there could be a number of other factors that come into play in why most of the stories take place in the US.

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300 Million English speakers live in the US. 60 million in the UK. 30 million in Canada. 20 million in Australia. 5 million in Ireland. And while 0% of the world’s population in countries who’s official language is English live in the US because English isn’t actually the official language of the US…
Well, the other English speaking countries added together make up about a third of the US’ population.

That’s why the majority of choice script games are set in the US. It’s no more surprising than choicescript was a native Chinese scripting language, and it turned out that there were many fewer Koreans or Japanese using it than Chinese. Or it being native Spanish, and being used by more Latin Americans than Spaniards. Or Portuguese and being used by more Brazilians than, well, you get the picture.

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It’s kind of hard to judge this, because while English may not be the official language in many countries beyond the US & UK, it is almost certainly the most commonly studied foreign language in the world. There are a lot more people, internationally, who are literate in English than Americans probably believe.

I don’t know if there’s been an official survey of the demographics, but if I recall correctly there should be at least 300 million English literates if you take India, Pakistan and the South East Asian countries combined.

That might be the case for CoG and HG writers - I don’t really know - but I’m pretty sure there’s a significant number of non-American readers. Considering that a great many places in the world has better internet infrastructure than the US, it’s actually likely that representation on the Internet could be more internationally balanced than most would assume.

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I’ve seta few games in countries which I’ve never been to. I hope they’re ok. I haven’t had too many requests for corrections so I assume they’re probably not too badly set out. Actually I don’t think any of my games have been specifically set in the US (although two are pretty open ended and you can assume it’s set where ever you want to, and in another it’s pretty subtle and you could just assume the Bunyip was on holidays in the US if you wanted to.)

I’d actually be interested in knowing that. I used to think almost everyone was from the US but of late I’ve been less sure that’s actually the case.

Edit: I have a feeling a lot of the time it is just familiarity on a broad scale. I mean everyone’s likely seen movies set in the US, know approximately where the major cities are, landmarks and slang, but when you get outside of the major city of many other countries in the world, things become less clear to a lot of people and need more explanation/info dumping and potentially confusion. I actually changed a number of things in Wizardry because I kept getting feedback that people didn’t understand what the terms I was using meant (which was accidental since they’re in common use here and I didn’t even think about it when I first started writing here.) So you either need to take them out or start using glossaries. Another example- say you set something in America. Most people know where places like New York, Washington, San Fransisco, LA etc are, but if you set it in Australia: Most people would know Sydney or Uluru. But other capital cities/landmarks? Many people would have no idea where places like Canberra, Hobart and Adelaide are or what’s located there and you’d need to explain it.

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