📰 THE NEW YORK TIMES

Censoring Games – The New York Times

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Marvel Rivals is one of the biggest video games in the world. Since its launch in December, more than 40 million people have signed up to fight one another as comic book heroes like Iron Man and Wolverine.

But when players used the game’s text chat to talk with teammates and opponents, they noticed something: Certain phrases, including “free Hong Kong” and “Tiananmen Square,” were not allowed.

While Marvel Rivals is based on an iconic American franchise, it was developed by a Chinese company, NetEase Games. It has become the latest example of Chinese censorship creeping into media that Americans consume.

You can’t type “free Tibet,” “free Xinjiang,” “Uyghur camps,” “Taiwan is a country” or “1989” (the year of the Tiananmen Square massacre) in the chat. You can type “America is a dictatorship” but not “China is a dictatorship.” Even memes aren’t spared. “Winnie the Pooh” is banned, because people have compared China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to the cartoon bear.

The restrictions are largely confined to China-related topics. You can type “free Palestine,” “free Kashmir” and “free Crimea.”

Why does all of this matter? Video games are not just sources of entertainment; they are also social platforms. Every day, hundreds of millions of children and adults log on to games like Fortnite, World of Warcraft and, yes, Marvel Rivals to play together and hang out. For many young people, these games are as social as Facebook or X.

China’s video game industry is growing. As it does, the country’s authoritarian leaders are setting the terms of how these social platforms work.

China’s market, with hundreds of millions of potential customers, has long enticed game developers. But companies have to play by China’s rules to get in, and that means accepting censorship. (Other industries, including movies and sports, have faced similar challenges.)

Until recently, this censorship mostly appeared in the Chinese versions of Western-made games. China deemed the military shooter PUBG too violent, so its developers reworked it. When someone shoots and kills another player in the Chinese version, the victim doesn’t exactly die; he kneels and waves goodbye before vanishing.

As China’s game developers have grown and gone international, however, they’ve also exported their style of censorship.

Last year, the Chinese developer Game Science released Black Myth: Wukong. It was a hit with Western audiences, and it became the first Chinese-made game to be nominated for game of the year at the Game Awards, the industry’s equivalent to best picture at the Oscars. But before the game’s release, a company affiliated with Game Science told people streaming the game that they should avoid talking about certain topics, including “feminist propaganda” and Covid.

The problem stands to get worse. As China’s economy grows, Western developers will have greater incentives to release games there. China’s game industry is taking off and will continue to export games. Chinese publishers, such as the conglomerate Tencent, have also bought Western developers, and the Chinese government could push them to censor their games, too.

In some cases, consumers have pushed back against censorship. In 2019, the American developer Blizzard suspended a player from Hong Kong and revoked his prize money after he said, “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times,” at a competitive event.

Many fans saw the punishment as Blizzard bowing to censorship so it could continue to sell games in China. The fans started a boycott and canceled subscriptions to Blizzard games. Members of Congress spoke out. Blizzard eventually reduced the player’s punishment and returned his prize money.

Chinese developers are insulated from this kind of public criticism. But Western companies like Blizzard aren’t. With Marvel Rivals, Disney licensed its intellectual property for the game. Microsoft allows the game on its Xbox consoles. The Valve Corporation, based in Bellevue, Wash., hosts the game on Steam, the biggest marketplace for computer games.

In that sense, the responsibility for censorship is shared by China’s leaders and the Western companies that play along.

Related: I recommend reading The Times’s exploration of Metroidvanias, a video game genre that leverages mysterious, mazelike settings to evoke feelings of discovery and progression.

  • Germany is holding national elections today. Polls show the Christian Democratic Union, a center-right party, with a comfortable lead. Read what to know.

  • The nationalist, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party could finish second. A surge in youth support has helped elevate it.

  • Measles outbreaks in Texas and New Mexico have sickened nearly 100 people. Most of the cases are in an area with low vaccination rates.

  • A police officer was killed while responding to a shooting involving a gunman who had taken staff members hostage at a hospital in York County, Pa.

  • The authorities have linked a series of violent confrontations across the United States, which have left at least six people dead, to a fringe group known as the Zizians.

  • MSNBC’s new president is changing the lineup. Joy Reid’s evening news show is being canceled.

It can be hard to keep up with the deluge of news from the White House. The Times has created a page to track the Trump administration — including its major executive orders, memos, lawsuits and social media posts. Here are some from the past week:

  • D.E.I.: The Education Department said schools had two weeks to end race-based programs.

  • Military spending: The defense secretary told the Pentagon to plan to cut 8 percent from the defense budget over each of the next five years.

  • Layoffs: The I.R.S. fired about 6,700 employees — more than 5,000 of whom worked for teams that handle auditing and collections.

  • Rehiring: The Department of Agriculture moved to rehire some recently fired employees involved in the government’s bird flu response.

  • Military leadership: Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the country’s senior military officer. Officials said Trump was upset about a video the chairman made in 2020 about George Floyd’s killing.

See the full list here.

Some scholars say the U.S. is already in a constitutional crisis. Who bears responsibility?

Trump. Behind a curtain of culture war distractions, the president is consolidating power. “Trump has unconstitutionally usurped control over the steering wheel of democracy, shoved the gear into reverse and slammed on the gas all while making sure you have enough going on to not look up from your iPad in the backseat.” Aidan Cummins writes for The Daily Cardinal.

Congress. Thirty years of congressional dysfunction brought us to this point, and their continuing inaction enables Trump to do as he wishes. “Members of Congress are not helpless cogs in a political machine they cannot control. Individually, collectively, they have agency, responsibility and power,” Steven Pearlstein writes for Roll Call.

Lives Lived: Carlos Diegues was a film director who highlighted Brazil’s ethnic richness and its social turbulence. He died at 84.

“Dream State,” by Eric Puchner: Weddings gone wrong have long been fictional catnip, but Eric Puchner puts a fresh spin on the plot in his second novel, “Dream State,” which Oprah Winfrey just selected as her 111th book club pick. The trouble starts when Cece, a bright-eyed bride-to-be, arrives in Montana to finalize the details of her wedding alongside her husband-to-be’s depressed best friend, who is (to her chagrin) performing the ceremony. The pair develop an unexpected rapport. Then norovirus disrupts the nuptials, setting in motion a chain of events that spans 50 years, two generations and an ever-worsening climate crisis that leads to respirator masks and a death cult. If this sounds like a bit of a bait and switch — a romantic romp turned dystopian — well, it might be. But it’s also a thoughtful meditation on the seismic impact of small decisions on human and earthly conditions. It couldn’t be more timely.

  • Our reviewer described “Dream State” as “a coming-of-old-age story, beginning after the traditional bildungsroman would end and running to the final chapter of life.”

  • A new book by the journalist Katherine Stewart finds a far-right movement steeped in resentment, suspicious of reason and determined to dominate.

This week’s subject for The Interview is the best-selling science writer Ed Yong, who talked about how engaging with nature helped him combat feelings of professional burnout.

When you’re watching birds — and this could apply to the natural world writ large — there is so much going on beyond our comprehension. Because of our sensory capabilities as human beings, we are condemned to having only an ankle-deep understanding of what it is to be alive on Earth. To me, that’s humbling and mind-blowing. What do you think?

I fully agree. I mean, that is a beautiful précis of basically my entire body of work.

Nailed it!

[Laughs.] I can go home now, right? All of it is about the idea that much of the world is hidden from us, that we don’t perceive it and don’t understand it, and that it is worth understanding and it is necessary to understand.

I have a curmudgeonly question. Developing an awareness of the magic that’s happening all around us at any given moment, and understanding that there’s this vast cosmic dance playing out — in the abstract, I can see how internalizing those perspectives might change one’s perspective. But did your understanding of the bigger existential stuff you were writing about actually help you when you were struggling?

I can say that thinking about these ideas constantly really helped me. It felt like a salve to all of that moral injury and despair that I was feeling. It doesn’t cure it, but it fills my life with wonder and joy, and that acts as a buffer against all the other existential dread and fear that we have to grapple with. There is a kind of implosive effect of the modern world, and the science and nature writing that I’m prioritizing, and the birding that I do, are all counters to that.

Read more of the interview here.

Click the cover image above to read this week’s magazine.

Turn store-bought rotisserie chicken into a healthy dinner.

Emily Weinstein’s favorite recipes to make at home aren’t the most elaborate — they’re simple, with a single technique or ingredient that makes the dish distinctive. In this week’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter, Emily suggests meals that feature what she terms “lightbulb moments” including roasted chicken thighs with hot honey and lime, and blistered broccoli pasta with walnuts, pecorino and mint.


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