Yes, I agree, I have even written several articles about this, mainly this one, but here are some more. I also teach a university course about using games as a tool for language teaching. 🙂 I haven’t played many games in Chinese recently, though, and haven’t looked around on Steam a lot. I’ve played Rimworld way too much, though, but it only has Chinese text and is not very language-heavy. 🙂

Another tip for gaming in Chinese: you can search on Steam based on language, although annoyingly you can’t search on whether the game has audio in Chinese (as opposed to the interface/subtitles), but if you look at the bar on the right it will tell you which languages the game has audio. But if the audio isn’t critical to the game it’s still good reading practice.

I do actually think that certain games can be very useful for practicing Chinese. For example, simulator games can be great as they often have a lot of useful vocab and content, you can play them at your own pace. and it can be a fun challenge trying to decode what you’re supposed to do. City builders are great, and recently I’ve been playing Airport CEO which has lots of interested airport/travel related content. I’ve also spent a lot of time playing Dyson Sphere Program, which is actually a Chinese game – had a great time although the content was a bit irrelevant but I do plan to consume more scifi in Chinese, so perhaps not totally useless.

Eventually new content (i.e. new Chinese sentences you haven’t read before) become less common and you stop reading, and that’s probably a good time to find a new game. I do plan to play some RPGs and strategy games like Civ VI; I haven’t gotten around to it yet but I assume they’ll also be good practice and probably will keep presenting new content for longer.

Very interesting and illustrative examples! I actually played Pokémon Go in Chinese for a while, so I can empathise with the names there. Digital games tend to combine the worst of possible worlds in that they often have lots of names and are also different in Mainland/Hong Kong/Taiwan. I was pretty into StarCraft 2 for a while, which has fully translated versions, including audio, for Mainland/Taiwan, where the names are of course different. Very confusing!

Place names are where I’ve seen this problem the most. I was chatting to a Chinese friend a while back who had just taken a trip to Newcastle (a city north of Sydney). I referred to it as 新城堡, which she found at first confusing and then hilarious once she figured out what I meant. Apparently it’s actually called 纽卡斯尔. The third friend who was with us hadn’t even heard of Newcastle though. I’ve also had the opposite problem when I refer to Australian cities or states by their Chinese names but the person I’m speaking to only knows the English name. Thankfully most of these are pretty obvious.

And of course there was the time I almost missed my flight from Taipei to Sydney early last year because I hadn’t realised that Taiwan has a different name for Sydney (雪梨/悉尼) and couldn’t find my flight on the board.

Don’t get me started on League of Legend heroes or Pokemon…

Something that can help is that Xinhua publishes a standardised way of transliterating foreign names that don’t have an established Chinese translation (世界人名翻译大辞典). This isn’t always the name a Chinese person will use but they’ll likely understand it if they’ve read about the person and you can rely on this being the name used in mainland media most of the time.