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.”
Except they didn’t really pick a side - they got attacked and responded in a way that was bad for PR but honestly kinda predictable. It all got sparked off by them getting a bad review that was mostly positive but penalized the Chinese game heavily inspired by a piece of classic Chinese literature (Journey to the West) for not being diverse enough (aka not featuring many women and no black people), 6/10. What they did since (the rules for streamers seeking a key) has been a (badly chosen) reaction to that.
Unless having a game heavily inspired by a piece of classical literature that doesn’t express the racial and gender diversity of modern LA is itself choosing a side?
There’s a respectful way to do it, and they chose the heavy handed approach, and to act like they have a chip on their shoulder. If they wanted to make that point and head off any politicization, they could have lead with a simple something like “this game is highly committed to its source material, and the creative choices are solely focused on textual authenticity and fun gameplay. We value any feedback about political topics, but we respectfully wish that our game be judged purely on its creative aims”, just as a very rough first draft. There’s no need to take a contentious tone and then demand silence. It’s completely high handed, and practically demands a reaction.
That doesn’t really work either, see pre release coverage for Deliverance: Kingdom Come and aside from a few articles during early crowdfunding about how they were naughty bad people for not having black people in a game set in a few square kilometers of 15th century Bohemia and having a “female character DLC” (the game has a fixed protagonist and the DLC lets you play from the perspective of another character, framed as her telling the MC about how she managed to escape the attack on their village). After the articles about them being racist and sexist for that, there was basically radio silence until it launched and was too big a deal to ignore.
They shouldn’t have taken that lying down, but at some point you do have to hope that people can tell who’s bullshitting. If your work is genuine and you stand by it in the face of criticism, the criticism just gets people talking about you in a positive way - look at how game journalists covered BG3.
People complain like hell when you go the opposite direction and pump up the diversity for its own sake too. That’s what sucks about culture wars, nobody’s on the same page anymore. You can do either thing in a good way, but people can tell when it comes from an ethos and not just corporate interests.
Art in general comes with this struggle. Not even in a video game are you going to be able to be all things to all people without completely diluting your creative work. That’s part of why I really worry about bigger budgets in games, that higher investment comes with a lot of risk averse executives who aren’t going to be as happy with output that doesn’t hit every segment of the market. You have to be willing to take risks to make anything that has value to anyone other than shareholders.