Things Champ’d Up thinks are uniquely American

Filter US-centric content?

I’ve enjoyed the mixed-bag that are Jackbox Games since… well, since You Don’t Know Jack‘s UK edition!¹ Nowadays they’re better known for the Jackbox Party Pack game series, which can be a real riot of beer-and-pretzels sofa-gaming fun, if you’ve got the right crowd².

One of those games is Champ’d Up, in which you draw-and-name characters who you think will win a particular contest, e.g. “The Champion of Looking Suspicious”. Another player, without seeing the prompt, tries to develop a character who will beat you at that category in a popular vote³.

There’s this checkbox in most of the games that lets you “filter US-centric content”. This aims to remove most cultural references that, if you’re from a part of the Anglophone world outside of the US, you might “not get”.

I check that box as standard because, like many of us from “rest of world” I don’t understand things like pledging allegiance to a flag, being able to buy firearms in a supermarket, pies only being a sweet food and never a savoury one, refusing to use metric measurements at every opportunity, the risk of going bankrupt if you have to go to hospital, and using fractions like “one fourth” even while having a coin called a quarter. These are cultural touchstones that are alien to me. And I figure that toggling that switch to “on” is shielding me from having to learn these unfamiliar concepts, right?

But I found myself wondering: what exactly gets filtered out when I check that box? Because determining what the developers think is US-centric is a more-interesting question than what I think.

What does Champ’d Up think “US-centric” means?

Fortunately, Champ’d Up‘s prompt data files are stored in JSON files (with a slightly-unusual file extension .jet), which means that – once we’ve found them – it’s pretty easy to extract all of the prompts and metadata from them. I’m on a Mac right now, and I found the files in the horrendously-long path ~/Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps/common/The Jackbox Party Pack 7/The Jackbox Party Pack 7.app/Contents/Resources/macos/games/WorldChampions/content.⁵

Let’s see what prompts Champ’d Up marks as being “US-centric”:

I get that I’m coming from the perspective of a British person, and maybe my experience isn’t universal. But many of these seem to be… not as US-centric as they’re made-out to be!

Here’s the full list:

• the Midwest
• High School
• Bachelorette Parties
• Country Music
• Orlando
• Misdemeanors
• Margaritaville
• the Underworld
• Black Friday Shoppers
• Jocks
• Twerps
• Forever Alone
• Porta Potties
• Being Zen
• My Way or the Highway
• “Bless Their Heart”
• Spring Break
• West Coast Livin’
• the Hootenanny
• Tinseltown
• Applebee’s
• Village Idiots
• Looking Lost
• Monster Truck Fans
• Hot Topic
• Having An Estranged Family
• Hogging The Bathroom
• PBS
• Paul Giamatti Roles
• “Burn It With Fire”
• Thanksgiving Dinner
• “Do You Know Who My Dad Is?”
• Being Emotionally Stunted
• Peeing in the Pool
• Going Down in a Blaze of Glory
• the Gap Year

Sure, some of these are uniquely American like spring break, PBS, and Black Friday (although that last one’s been leaking lately).

But do Americans think that the rest of the world doesn’t have gap years or village idiots?⁶ That we don’t have people who pee in pools or hog the bathroom? Or that we can’t translate “bachelorette party”, “high school” or “porta potties” to our local dialect (while simultaneously expecting us to be fine with “theater”, “dive bar”, and “Axe body spray”)?

I note that several things not filtered out by the “filter US-centric content” option include “The Champion of Being $100,000 In Debt”, “The Champion of the Barn Dance”, and “The Champion of Jaywalking!”, all of which clearly do require more translation!⁷

I guess what I can conclude from this is that “US-centric” doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing to people in the US… as it does to those of us in the rest of the world.⁸ Which was an interesting thing to learn from a random thought about a toggle-switch.

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