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I am all for internationalization and localization of all computer applications, to present as much of the content as possible in a speaker's native language.
The problem is: that isn't enough in a lot of cases. MUDs/MUSHes for example. The key part of the game is in the social communication. Either folks all have to speak/type the same language, or you have to have some realtime translation software (which IMHO doesn't work well yet), or people can't interact. This is what Gromble was talking about. When you get a bunch of people in the same room who need to interact, you have to fall back on a single language. For now, it's English. Maybe in the future, it'll become Chinese.
This reminds me of India. English is not the first language of most, but it is the second language of many. Given that the individual states speak different languages with different character sets, English seems (to this humble observer) to have become the language that glues the country together.
This is not to say there isn't a market for MUDs that only use Chinese. It's just the realization that English right now is one of the best multinational common languages.
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