Game of War: Fire Age is an ambitious mobile game that wants to make that prospect a reality — and, most notably, to enable every player to understand what the others are saying while they play.

The game’s most impressive feature is an instantaneous translation of text-based online chat. If someone writes “MDR” in French (for “mort de rire,” or “dying of laughter”), an English-speaking player sees it as “LOL.”Machine Zone, the company behind the game, says it will release Game of War in Apple’s App Store sometime this month.

Since the 1990s, a single, giant, global game has been the alluring promise of what are called “massively multiplayer” online games. By the middle of the last decade, at the peak of virtual-world fever, Edward Castronova, an economist at Indiana University, warned that we were facing the equivalent of an emigration crisis — the prospect that hundreds of millions of people would be leaving this world for digital ones, where they would spend the vast bulk of their time and money. More.

See: The New York Times

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