11mo ago

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

www.wired.com

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

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.”

91 comments

China has a weird approach to misogyny. Women are both empowered and belittled, and it's all over the media. Anybody who's read the three body problem trilogy (especially book 3) can attest to this.
- Especially book 3?? I stopped reading after the second because it was too much, it gets worse? wtf
  
  Yes, so much worse, directed at both men for not being manly enough and women for being... well, not manly men.
  
  What gets worse?
- The video series tried so hard to downplay that aspect of the books, but it felt like their overall plan was to plaster over & repaint the stains... until the whole thing was rotted through and the mask just slid right off. 😬
  
  Don't bother with video series.
  Read the content to enjoy what value exists, and criticize what issues exist. Reading is not voting or aligning, it's observing.
- I read the whole series and somehow missed this, I did chalk up a lot of things to "must be a chinese cultural thing", like the whole idea of all nations actually working together or globally banning "escapism" and just suspended my disbelief, so maybe I glossed over that bit as well. Is there a good article that dives into this?
  E: Found this article, that goes into it as well as other issues, well worth a read
I think they're doing this on purpose at this point. Wielding Streisand effect to the fullest of its potential to promote their game.
- It backfired at that with me. I had my guard up when it popped up on my Steam queue, so even though I was curious about the game, it was a let's see that it's about and then move on for me.
  In addition to the ccp stuff, it uses denuvo, so I wouldn't have bought it anyways, so maybe it didn't make that much of a difference. Though who knows, maybe I only noticed that because my guard was up; sometimes I forget to check.
  
  Such a weird move to be like "we've picked a side in the culture wars, by the way don't talk politics about us"
CCP brainrot goes deep
- Looking at your replies in that thread, I suspect that your comment did break rules.
  
  You don't need to suspect you can check for yourself, modlog exists.
- If you have a question about a moderation decision, you can msg any member of the moderation team for review/explanation. I have reviewed the removed comment and found that it was not removed in error. If anything, it should also have been removed for misinformation as well.
  In the future, any comments about individual moderation actions that are not addressed to the mod team through an appropriate channel will be removed. This is to avoid derailing legitimate, topical conversations.
  
  Typical mod on an ego trip.
- If it's the mod I think it is, prepare for a 30d ban ...
  
  Based on their comments in this thread they may have earned that much of a ban
- Oh great mod abuse is happening here as well?
  
  Check the user's modlog and judge for yourself.
  
  Mod abuse is universal. Power corrupts.
  
  Every instance has its bias. Mods squash deviation from their consensus.
  What is the purpose of moderating if not enforcing your personal opinion on everyone
  
  It happens everywhere. Just Jannies doing janny things. Sweep it up, janny!
  Just keep in mind: he does it for free
No it did not. Wukong is a bestseller: https://lemmy.ml/post/19657183
https://steamdb.info/app/2358720/charts/
Yeah. It clearly killed their sales.
I'm sure the Game Science folks are re-evaluating their life choices and wondering where they went wrong.
- When the story broke, my wife and I discussed it a bit, and I mentioned that I hadn't even heard of the game before all this.
  If it was deliberate marketing, it was really well done.
  
  Could be.
  A plan like that would be pretty risky. I suspect they just didn't think it through much. I think their sales are mostly driven by people who didn't care about anything besides a AAA Monkey King game.
  Most people in the US have no idea how much pent up demand there was for this game. Monkey King is an insanely popular character. Imagine if Star Wars was a 500 year old franchise and nobody had ever made a decent video game about it. All your life you grow up with weird foreign characters you've never heard of and then someone comes along and says, "We're going to make it and we're pulling out all the stops on the graphics."
  If the developers did anything short of kicking puppies in public, people would still line up to throw money at them.
- I wonder if Game Science meant avoid politics like "western identity politics" or "critique of the CCP"? Perhaps both?
  
  No idea.
  It's hard to tell what their sales would have been had they left those terms out.
  Most studios can only dream of having their marketing backfire that successfully.
Media Bias Fact Check | bot support
- whenever someone mentions sweet baby inc i immediately think of them as that angry thumb screaming PRÖNOUNS because they saw a word in the character creation screen
- provide sources for all of that and ill bounce and moan on it with you
- As a Chinese, I could tell you it is not mistranslation. Some alt right user on Twitter use ChatGPT translate these pictures and even make up some translation to prove the "mistranslation".
It Backfired
So much, they have 2 million concurrent players.
Someone here is salty because game is successful. I guess this is related to the IGN article
- I don't think this post said anything about 'The Game' backfiring.
  It specifically calls out that streamers spoke about exactly what they didn't want spoken. That's what the Streisand Effect is.
  Congratulations to Game Science for a good game, but it's business as usual for the C-Suite being completely disconnected to how the social world works.
  
  I would have thought that it was a "CCP interests" boilerplate. That is to say, maybe game science were just following what instructions they needed to by the CCP? It just seems so Chinese government to mention COVID-19 when this game has nothing to do with that.
I have yet to watch a video where anything mentioned in this "article" was brought up. The only place I have seen any of this is on Lemmy (and I would assume other social media if I used it), and I saw people questioning if this list of topics even went out to anyone.
This article seems like more "both sides" story telling trying to get clicks from the "woke" pitchfork brigade trying to find more things to clutch their pearls about.
Edit - Just to make my position clear. I 100% believe that the accusations against those in charge at Game Science, and since I do not easily separate the art from the artist I have not bought the game. My comments above were in regards to this click bait article bringing nothing new and taking a "both sides" approach to a topic that was thoroughly covered over a week ago when the game released. As an article like this that is void of details, and adds nothing new to the discourse, is posted for the sole purpose of getting clicks from the upset toxic anti-woke crowd. I have also yet to watch a video where any of this has even gotten a mention beyond an acknowledgement from one creator that there was a "controversy" surrounding the game. I have also not seen a US content creator who got an early access copy, so none of them would have gotten this "do/don't" list to begin with. I have also not read any reporting on if this actually went to everyone from the studio itself, or if whatever PR company was handling each region for release was the one creating/sending out this list.
If anyone actually cares, the IGN article actually covered the issues with this studio and the culture of China as a whole.
- Woke pitchfork brigade
  Nothing you say is ever worth paying attention to if you use phrases like this
  give the document a read yourself
  https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1aKlZvxWxbPOzldSUdc6CaHmoy80Fl7W_wQt-Ex-vl0k/mobilebasic?pli=1
  Published by https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YVuo-oqw2EU
  https://videogames.si.com/news/black-myth-wukong-streamers-feminist-propaganda
  
  Thanks for the additional sources! And for the discipline.
  
  I have read that "document", how does that change anything I said? Have you not seen this toxic "anti-woke" bile that has been popping up for every new game release now? Like we get that they hate woman, are super racist, and think that being gay or trans makes people not human, but I think they are a minority that should go back to living in the swap.
  And my comment getting a -40 makes me sad for the future if that many people are choosing to side with hate and discrimination.

91 comments