Black Myth: Wukong Devs Told Streamers to Avoid Politics in Their Playthroughs. It Backfired

SLVRDRGN@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 356 points –
‘Black Myth: Wukong’ Devs Told Streamers to Avoid Politics in Their Playthroughs. It Backfired
wired.com

The Chinese studio granted early access on the condition that topics like “feminist propaganda” and “Covid-19” go unmentioned. What followed is the Streisand effect in full force.

“I feel that it only served to bring more attention on Game Science’s culture of sexism,” linktothepabst says. “All they had to do was let the game speak for itself, but it came off, to me, like an own goal, effectively stoking the flames between the people who were using this game as weapon against ‘wokeness in games’ and those who can level-headedly either enjoy the game and criticize GS or just ignore the game altogether.”

It’s the Streisand effect in full force: Try to hide something, and it becomes all the more visible. “Nobody was going to bring up Chinese politics unprompted,” Zhong says, “but the topic was there as soon as they released those guidelines.”

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Reading is not voting or aligning

Oh, well, fuckem, why would I consider them?

I don't think about totalitarian states at all, outside of specific conversations about em

Because, that's where the author is from? 😶

That's fair but my original comment in thread was my personal opinion on consuming written content.

I'm not sure you're grasping the weight of the fact that such a work of post-hunanism fiction even made it out of China at all, given the government's centuries-long tradition of heavily-filtering "art" in every form...

(edit: I'm leaving the misspelling in for the stupid pun.)

No, I agree, that's of interest. But my comment was my opinion about how the rest of us can consume written media.

Oh, I didn't know that you were excluding 1.4B people in the general statement. My bad. 😅

Obviously as a western commenter, sharing my own opinion on media consumption, I'm only speaking to the sphere of ... Reality, which I inhabit.

There's so much to unpack there. 😅

Who cares?

Like I didn't think of the Taliban when I wrote it either.

Shared my opinion for the world I live in.