The Politics of Video Games

[davidgillon]

Fascinating Guardian Long Read article about the perils of getting video games past the Chinese censors - no blood, no bones, no ghouls rising from the ground, no comparing Xi Jinping to Winnie the Pooh*, no Tibet as an independent nation (even historically), no time travel, and definitely no options for choosing to run your galactic empire as a religious death cult**, a criminal enterprise, or, Mao forbid, a democracy.

* Apparently this is a thing.

** I've been meaning to mention Stellaris's Necroids to yhlee,as a mechanic allowing you to torture sacrifice parts of your population for special powers seems positively Hexarchate-inspired.

Comments

[yhlee]

Ha, sacrificing people for (presumed) special powers is just human history, David. :]

[davidgillon]

This is true.

But it's odd when it works!

[vass]

Thank you for the link.

I followed it to one of the articles it linked to, about my own country's censorship of computer games. I am so unsurprised, and so tired.