When Bethesda released the slaughter-some-Nazis shooter Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus in 2017, thousands of copies featured an intentional, albeit surprising, omission: Hitler’s mustache. In most versions of the game, players came face to face with Adolf himself, but due to German laws, players from Munich to Hamburg played a game stripped of Nazi iconography — down to the führer’s facial hair.

This is one bristly example of localization, the process of adapting media to appeal to different global markets by modifying the art based on laws, social norms, and cultural preferences.

With this week’s special issue on Polygon, Culture Shock, we want to bring attention to the creativity, controversy, and commercial necessity of localization. And hopefully improve the conversation around the craft, too.

This week on Polygon, we’re looking at how cultural differences affect media in a special issue we’re calling Culture Shock.

Because localization isn’t just translation. Take for example the above paragraph. ChatGPT could translate those two sentences into dozens of languages within seconds. But AI would struggle to elegantly capture the meaning of the........

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