This article first appeared in the Mar/Apr 2012 issue of World Gaming magazine.
To our readers from Hong Kong and Taiwan and others around the world who prefer to read traditional characters.
One of our toughest choices when we founded World Gaming was whether to use simplified or traditional characters for our Chinese text.
About 58 percent of visitors to Macau are from mainland China, but about 32 percent are from Hong Kong and Taiwan, and many overseas based Chinese prefer traditional characters. Traditional characters are understood by many of our readers from Guangdong province, which contributes the most mainland Chinese visitors to Macau. So it was by no means a clear-cut decision.
In our early days, we experimented with both character sets. Our pre-launch issue (affectionately known around the WGM office as “issue 0”) was famously tri-lingual: English, traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese. We didn’t think it would work, and we were right! The magazine looked too cluttered, and we definitely needed to choose one character set over the other. After much discussion, we chose simplified Chinese.
Of course most people who prefer traditional Chinese are perfectly able to read simplified, but we’ve always wanted to provide all our readers with the most comfortable reading experience. That has all changed now that wgm8.com has launched with traditional Chinese as well as simplified. If you prefer to read WGM in traditional, simply visit wgm8.com. Every word of this magazine is waiting for you there in traditional characters.
So far, we’ve just soft-launched wgm8.com. We’re still doing some beta testing and finalising the uploading of our back issues. But the site is still perfectly usable and in the next month or so we’ll celebrate with our final launch. You’ll find visiting the site will provide you with many benefits. Signing up as a member is absolutely free, and you’ll be eligible for giveaways and prizes, get access to special members-only content, and we’ll also comp you a free 12-month subscription to World Gaming magazine. We’ll send it to your street address anywhere in the world!
Check us out now at wgm8.com!
