Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
5 
Report this post
and how do you get something "wrong" in a fictional story i wonder
e: after doing a quick superficial google research, i got a better understanding of the problematic at hand. still open to the debate "should video game developers use internationally established symbols" - bcs a lot of them are registered trademarks in a lot of countries (e.g. the international Star of Life is a registered trademark in germany).
They would be free to use a white cross on green (or the inversion) since that's the symbol defined as official symbol for first aid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_aid
For the trade marks, I do understand their importance. Still in todays world it is really difficult to know what is ok and what has some sort of a rule to it. There is no easy way to check everything, and for example the GDPR is also complicated as hell. So one would have to simply sit all day checking if the icon that was just made does not violate something. I would understand if I used some trademarked logo and use for better selling results from fooling the customers thinking it's the original product. Anyway, thx for the input :) will keep it in mind for future med kit versions.
i find it questionable at best (petty at the most ^^) to see a national symbol in it - since that would be defined by shape, proportions, the correct color code and all that jazz.
clearly, the round shape and the orange-ish hue of the symbol on volcanoid's first aid kits can hardly be mistaken for the square shaped flag with a specifically defined red color, a white greek cross with specific proportions etc.
i did a bit of digging on your admittedly very interesting site and come to suspect there's a hint of ironic(?) swiss national pride somewhere in there when you come to compare donkey kong's heart shaped health bottles to the swiss flag? :D
There are doctors with published papers writing editorials on the subject of Swiss flags misused as medical symbols[pssjournal.biomedcentral.com], by the way, just to tell you that I'm not the only one who finds this funny :)
@Tomas_CZ/EN: Yeah, international copyright is a mess, but the GDPR only concerns the storage, transmission and handling of personal data, so you can at least rest easy on that front. Unless Volcanoids collects or transmits any personal data, you should be fine. If there's telemetry, anonymization should be enough to comply, but since none of the EU member states have made up their mind about what "comply" means and each one has its own legislation, who really knows...
Luckily, simple geometric shapes cannot be copyrighted, so whatever shape you choose for medkits, no one can complain :) The red cross on white, however, is protected by international treaties (not copyrights).
@the_green_one: About the colors, most early flags allow quite a large range of variation for each of their colors, the Swiss flag too. The law only defined a color code starting in 2017, and yeah, the official red is not that orangey-red. The square shape, would indeed be necessary to really be the flag, but the symbol of white cross on red is also the symbol of Switzerland in other shapes (coat of arms, for example, or the rectangular civil ensign in 3:2 ratio).
I do wonder why many designers and developers choose the specific symbol of a cross and so often white on red, ultimately from Christianity and the Holy Roman Empire's war flag, later from the Swiss flag.
The only explanation that I can come up with is that some of them originally intended to use the Red Cross symbol, believing it indicates anything medical and not knowing its true meaning, but through the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ around Prison Architect don't dare to use it anymore. So they invert the colors. One developer that I've e-mailed also told me "our designer just liked the colors better this way", so in that case there isn't even any specific intent.
I'll keep an eye on things and I'm curious how they develop :)
sorry mate, the subtle irony went straight over my head (no native speaker)! :D
as far as i can think back of the video games i played, whenever there's humans involved the color associated with healing/healing items is red. red flasks for health, blue ones for energy/mana seems the go to formula.
the cross seems less represented in general, but again, if there's humans in play you'll come across them more often than if it's about "alien", mechanical, or other non-human "life forms".
there must be a (historical?) connection between human "health" and crosses/the color red (blood? as a representative of life?) that we're not aware of, even if it's just the red cross organization. ^^
@WoogieMonsuta
aren't pretty much all islamic flags adorned with at least one symbol on that green background? i believe the most common being the crescent moon and star?
Oh, I'm absolutely on board with that. The red isn't my issue at all. The real problem starts when actual medical services in the real world start using white crosses on red to represent emergency services and such, like Dr. Stahel explains. Because there are already internationally established symbols for that, if you use anything else for it (Swiss flag or not), you dilute the message and the meaning of a symbol. And that last bit happens even when the symbol is just misused in a video game.
So my frustration is of course more justified when someone tries to design an actual, historical, human medical item and slaps a Swiss cross on it, like in Left 4 Dead or Battlefield 1. But the frustration is still there even when dealing with alien planets :) Look at Mass Effect for example, same mistake.
Well yes, absolutely, but I'd wager it is just the organization. The cross has a connection to medicine in people's minds indirectly because of the Swiss flag: The Red Cross chose its insignia because of Henri Dunant, the Swiss founder of the Red Cross, when they constituted themselves in Geneva, Switzerland, at the first Geneva Convention. They picked an inversion of the Swiss national flag -- also because the colors would stand out well in a battlefield when structures and vehicles are marked with it so they don't get bombed.
You might be right about the blood. There is a theory that the red background of the Swiss flag stands for the blood of the soldiers who fell in battles to defend Switzerland. Can't say how much of that is true, I'm not a historian, just a flag nerd. Red in flags often represents blood, war, courage, valor, etc. but not always. Also, red doesn't have the same meaning in all cultures. in China for example it's a joyous color for celebrations and the like.
Had the Red Cross been founded in a Muslim country, it might have been a Red Crescent from the start. In a Buddhist or Hindu country it might be the Red Swastika or the Red Dharmachakra (you don't see the swastika on flags much since 1945, but the Dharmachakra is e.g. on the flag of India).
Yes, absolutely. In case of a first aid kit mislabeled with a white cross on red, people who know the Swiss flag see the Swiss flag but infer from context that it's not a Swiss product after all but maybe a first aid kit. People who don't know the Swiss flag might see a medical item. Both of this indeed comes entirely from context. Also, if you grew up in a country where the white cross on red is flying everywhere, it's quirky to see it on completely unrelated things.
That's why I (and thankfully a bunch of other Swiss people) find it hilarious when people mislabel things in this way, it rips one symbol completely out of context and uses it on an item where it doesn't belong.
Fun fact (I know it's not fun, but I'm a boring person): If you tried to sell an actual Czech first aid kit that looks like the one from the game in Switzerland, you wouldn't be allowed to. The white cross on red can by law only be on items manufactured mostly in Switzerland. The red cross cannot be used either, unless it's the actual Red Cross organization that manufactures the kit, and even then it wouldn't be allowed to also carry the white cross on red unless manufactured in Switzerland.
Symbols and colors matter! Clearly more to me than to the average person :)
If the developers are still reading this silliness, I believe they are from the Czech Republic, so here is a very badly edited Czech version of the medkits[i.imgur.com] just so you know what it feels like to Swiss people when they look at the current ones :)