T w e n t y S i d e d
I wasn’t able to record a Diecast this week due to family engagements. I realize you can’t listen to this blog post during your commute, but I thought I’d cover some of the week’s topics anyway.
Saturday was Issac’s birthday!
Issac edits both the Diecast and our This Dumb Industry videos. He turned 18 on Saturday.
That’s it. The last of my kids has stopped being a kid. I’m now the father of 3 adults.
In addition to editing the shows, he sometimes captures gameplay footage for the videos. A week ago I was trying to figure out why his Borderlands 3 footage was blurry and I realized he was using the super-annoying 16:10 monitor I handed down to him years ago. I forgot all about that dumb thing. His native resolution was 1680 x 1050, which means all of his footage needed to be upscaled, and then cropped / squashed.
So I got him a proper 1080p monitor for his birthday. I don’t have anything against 16:10, except that it’s annoying to have when your job involves creating 1080p content.
Music School
I’ve been dabbling in music production for a few years now, but I’m entirely self-taught. That’s the fun way to learn, but it does leave you with awkward gaps in your knowledge. Now I’m trying to fill in those gaps. I’ve been at this long enough to see that this isn’t something I’m exceptionally skilled at. Programming and writing both came to me pretty naturally. Sure, I had to work hard to get good at them, but I seemed to clear the gap between “clueless newbie” and “producing useful work” fairly quickly. The music production stuff doesn’t come naturally to me and I seem to be stuck in this learning dead zone where I’m not getting better with practice.
I know people don’t follow me for music and I’m never going to make money doing this. I am reminded of the old golfing joke:
That’s pretty much where I’ve been with my music production hobby over the last couple of years. I’m not good at it, but it makes me happy.
Like I mentioned on the podcast last week, I’m taking a one-month music production course taught by Andrew Huang on the website MonthlyThat’s a referral link, BTW. Not that it matters. Enrollment is over so I don’t think you can actually join.. We’re at the end of week 1 now.
The good: I really am learning a lot. A lot of my fellow classmates seem to be in the same boat I am: Technically doing all the right stuff with regards to coming up with good chord progressions and beats, but lacking the fundamental spark that will make people put your track into their playlist.
The Bad: The Monthly website is a bit new and rough around the edges. They’re still working out how their virtual classroom should work. The intent seems to be that the students should all interact with each other to encourage and critique. That’s a good design goal. The problem is that the interface feels like an awkward Twitter knockoff and it’s pretty difficult to have a proper back-and-forth with someone. Most interactions boil down to a few dozen strangers all saying “Great track, love the vibe!” to each other in drive-by comments. Not really useful for sharing knowledge. This system needs to be less like Instagram and more like Reddit. I know Reddit isn’t a sexy website with rounded corners and tons of whitespace, but it’s really good at facilitating information exchangeCompared to the big social media platforms.. I feel like a site focused on education should have a design where utility wins out over aesthetics.
The Other Bad Thing, Except This One is My Fault: The class is supposed to be about 7-10 hours per week. I’m putting in a little more than that because the lectures are good and I want to apply the knowledge right away. I usually have my DAW open as I watch the lectures and I often pause to experiment. That’s good, but I’ve been stealing hours from the blog to do this. I don’t think my next retrospective series will be ready by next Tuesday.
The Blizzard Thing
Ugh. This story. Here is a brief summary:
A week ago the pro Hearthstone player Blitzchung won a tournament. Afterward, he appeared in an interview wearing goggles and a face mask and shouted “Liberate Hong Kong!”, showing solidarity with the Hong Kong protesters. The interviewers ducked behind their desk and laughed, and then the interview was terminated. Two days later, Blitzchung was stripped of his prize money, stripped of his title, removed from the grandmaster league, and banned from Hearthstone competition for a full year. Additionally, the interviewers were also fired, even though they didn’t express any overt support for Hong Kong.
This obviously touches on politics and would normally be a no-go zone on this site due to the no-politics rule. On the other hand, a major theme of this site is bitching and moaning about the behavior of the big publishers, and this is THE big story of corporate chicanery in 2019. Our favorite topic just intersected with our forbidden topic.
I think it makes sense to talk about it. I avoid politics because I don’t want the headaches and responsibility of moderating a flamewar, but I don’t think this is likely to cause a big partisan divide. The vast majority of the Anglosphere is siding with Hong Kong, and thus Blitzchung, and thus coming down in opposition to Blizzard’s heavy-handed response. I think we should be able to talk about this without everyone becoming tribalIf I’m wrong and we DO get people coming in with pro-Blizzard / Pro-China sentiment, then please just let them have their say rather than picking a fight. Blame me for miscalculating. We’re not going to solve this complex geopolitical problem on my blog..
I have a video on the topic tomorrow. I’m really trying to avoid current events in my videos because stories move too fast for us. I prefer to sit on a story, mull things over, look for a fresh angle, and go through many revisions before I post my thoughts. That approach works well when you’re discussing games that came out two years ago, but it doesn’t really work with the rapid churn of the 24 news cycle. By the time we get the video done, the story has evolved and people have moved on. Lots of other people are working on covering same-day news, and I should probably stick to covering topics that have solidified. On the other hand, I really wanted to weigh in here.
I don’t know. We’ll see if this one comes back to bite me.
Let me tackle a related Diecast mailbag question:
Dear Diecast,Blizzard recently banned a pro Hearthstone player for saying a “Liberate Hong Kong” slogan during a post-game interview. The move is widely being seen as bowing to Chinese censors and the internet is very upset, but Blizzard are in an awkward spot. Even without pressure from China, they have a desire to keep politics out of the game because allowing players to say anything is a recipe for conflict. Just imagine if players started using their interviews to shout out controversial stances on the political parties from your country.
Is there a way Blizzard could have enforced a “no politics in our videogame coverage” rule without making the internet hate them for siding with China?Ninety-Three
I agree that they’re in a tough spot. They have fans on both sides of the China vs. HK divide and they need to walk a fine line. I don’t have a problem with their no-politics stance.
If a westerner was being interviewed regarding a recent win and they suddenly shouted a slogan from the American right or left, then I think it’s totally reasonable to expect Blizzard to do something. They could chastise the player in public and encourage them (in private) to issue a sort of “sorry for bringing up politics during gaming funtimes” quasi-apology that tries to make peace without recanting their beliefs”Sorry if you were offended” is the classic template for this sort of unpology.. If they’re not willing to help smooth things over, then maybe suspend them from the league for a couple of weeks and let them know that future deliberate infractions could result in a ban. If this becomes a regular problem, then Blizzard could crank up the punishments until people stop doing it.
I think it’s totally reasonable to want the games to be a neutral space. This is particularly true when there is active daily violence going on between the two sides. This isn’t an academic debate; people really are hurting each other over this and you could argue that telling participants to leave their conflicts at home is just a basic step of safety and security. If the Hearthstone league had been around in 1862, then Blizzard would have needed to insist that the players from the Union and the Confederacy leave their differences at the door in order to avoid violence.
The problem is that their first instinct was ridiculously knee-jerk and over the top. They stripped Blitzchung of his prize money, removed him from the Grandmaster league, and banned him for a year? That’s not how western companies act in response to these sorts of infractions. That’s how China acts and thinks. This weird thinking even extends to Blizzard’s social media presence. Here in the west they issued an announcement in English that sounded like what you’d expect. The Tweet boiled down to “We don’t want politics in our community”. Okay, fair enough. But then on their Chinese feed they said something very different:
“Defend the honor of our countryI’ve seen two different translations of this, and one used “our country” instead of “China”. I have no idea which is more correct. Translation is a tricky and inexact business. at all costs”? Not only is this message obviously siding with the Chinese government, but it’s overtly bellicose about it. This two-faced approach to social media also reflects a very PRCThat is, the government of China, not the people of China. way of thinking. The idea of issuing two contradictory statements in different languages is laughable in the west, because we all know that you can’t get away with this sort of nonsense. People will notice. This behavior reflects the mindset of your typical PRC censor who is used to pretending like the internet doesn’t exist outside of the Great Firewall.
And then there’s Blizzard’s awkward unpology, which apparently doesn’t sound anything like Blizzard president J. Allen Brack. Once again, it sounds like the PRC. (My own pet theory is that the PRC censors are effectively embedded in the company. Still, I think it’s fair to hold Activision-Blizzard accountable for the behavior of Blizzard, and also fair to hold Blizzard accountable for the behavior of the censors that control their social media presence in China. If the PRC is putting words in Blizzard’s mouth, then it’s up to Blizzard to say so in the west.)
So to answer the question: I don’t have a problem with Blizzard wanting to remain neutral. They don’t need to take a side. My problem is that it looks like they have picked a side.
Back in January I wrote an article about Activision-Blizzard (parent company) vs. Blizzard (subsidiary) and in that article I had an aside that has aged very poorly:
The difference is that Blizzard’s faults are the result of misjudgement rather than contempt for the consumer. Blizzard is so beloved that it has a convention, which welcomed 40,000 enthusiastic fans last year. If Activision ever tried to host a convention, the only attendees would be protestors.
This is funny because fans are talking about staging a mass protest at the next Blizzcon.
I wonder how much of this can be traced back to the stuff I was talking about in that article. Some Blizzard executives left and there seemed to be a bit of a shift in the company. My guess was that Activision-Blizzard was going to start taking a more hands-on approach to running Blizzard. I didn’t expect that the PRC would be involved.
I’ll have more on this in tomorrow’s video. Sorry if this seems too political or if I brought angering subject matter into your fun video game discussion. I know this is touchy stuff. Please try not to burn the place down in the comments.
Footnotes:
[1] That’s a referral link, BTW. Not that it matters. Enrollment is over so I don’t think you can actually join.
[2] Compared to the big social media platforms.
[3] If I’m wrong and we DO get people coming in with pro-Blizzard / Pro-China sentiment, then please just let them have their say rather than picking a fight. Blame me for miscalculating. We’re not going to solve this complex geopolitical problem on my blog.
[4] ”Sorry if you were offended” is the classic template for this sort of unpology.
[5] I’ve seen two different translations of this, and one used “our country” instead of “China”. I have no idea which is more correct. Translation is a tricky and inexact business.
[6] That is, the government of China, not the people of China.
Spoiler Warning
A video Let's Play series I collaborated on from 2009 to 2017.
Blistering Stupidity of Fallout 3
Yeah, this game is a classic. But the story is idiotic, incoherent, thematically confused, and patronizing.
Free Radical
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
TitleWhat’s Inside Skinner’s Box?
What is a skinner box, how does it interact with neurotransmitters, and what does it have to do with shooting people in the face for rare loot?
Programming Language for Games
Game developer Jon Blow is making a programming language just for games. Why is he doing this, and what will it mean for game development?
I hope you end up playing RDR2 when it comes to PC. That’s a game that seems uniquely suited to your long-form analysis series.
Shamus mentioned in a post elsewhere that he wasn’t super interested in RDR2 because of Rockstar has a history of injecting a mean-spirited, nihilistic tone into the story and world of everything they make. This is a very, very justified position. I haven’t played RDR2 more than once, but I did say somewhere in the comments to that post that I didn’t get that same vibe from the game. Or at least, it was counteracted with enough of a seemingly genuine redemption (ha) arc, and a smattering of truly decent side characters. Rockstar games usually make it a point to make *everyone* you interact with a contemptible person, but RDR2 had characters in it here and there who you actually liked.
There is still the trouble of playing as an overt outlaw, in that no matter how you spin it, Arthur is never going to be mistaken for a “good” person (or at least he shouldn’t be), but I didn’t get the sneering, ugly, hateful vibe from the game that I usually have with GTA or Max Payne or even the first RDR to a degree. If there’s a Rockstar game out there that would, at the very least, bother Shamus less than the others, then RDR2 would be it. Plus it’s just genuinely fun and incredibly packed with detail.
That tone is still in RDR2 but not as blatant as it was in GTA. It just doesn’t seem as bad because for the most part it is all in the main story missions so you don’t spend hours with it being rubbed in your face.
I think Film Crit Hulk’s retrospective on the game (https://www.polygon.com/2019/4/22/18298277/red-dead-redemption-2-review-rdr2-story-design-criticism) covers much of the same ground as Shamus’ analyses, and it’s really damn good from a writing perspective too.
Blizzard probably pines for lesser controversies, like when they expected a crowd of Diablo fans to get excited for a Chinese-shovelware mobile-spinoff.
‘Don’t you people have…’
…shit, I can’t think up an end to that joke that isn’t too political or just not funny. Damn.
I really wonder how much choice Blizzard/NetEase actually had. They might well have been faced with an ultimatum from the CCP: ‘do this or your entire company will face Consequences.’ The sheer scale of the response (firing the hosts as well? Revoking the prize money?) seems a lot like scorched-earth tactics; definitely not something that an even slightly PR-savvy company would want to do.
I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Chinese government approached Blizzard with their response already drawn up. ‘Right. This is what you’re going to do. It would be…regrettable…if the PRC didn’t feel like it could trust you to respect the Chinese people’s views on this matter…’
I got you.
“Don’t you people have products that are ‘Made in China?'”
I wouldn’t be surprised if the government didn’t have to do this because the people involved on Blizzard’s side were from the Chinese division, and therefore mostly Chinese, and acquainted with the relation of media and politics in the PRC. So they instinctively reacted in the “appropriate” way because they were fearing for their own careers.
Now Blizzard has a hard time walking back on that because they can’t openly do so in China without making people there very nervous.
…and they also suck at understanding humans.
For the record the image titled “Hearthstone’s official statement” with the English translation and the Chinese text is actually from NetEase, not Blizzard themselves.
NetEase is Blizzard’s publishing partner for China. China have some pretty tight rules on how foreign companies are allowed to operate in their country and one of them is that you have to have a Chinese partner company to distribute things like TV shows, games and movies.
Hmm… NetEase, that name sounds familiar. Where have I heard that before?
Ah well, I’m sure it’s only a coincidence and they won’t have any massive influence outside of Blizzard.
I’m just some guy on the internet, so don’t feel obligated to believe me, but I know a dev who works at Blizzard and he confirmed that the NetEase statement was released without approval, and Blizzard execs are mad because it’s a big contributor to this controversy.
I very easily believe that (I suspected about as much already), but that whole part of the issue wouldn’t have been an issue if Blizzard had just said that publicly. At the very least, it would’ve been much smaller of an issue, and would’ve tamped down the whole controversy a bit. They can be as mad as they want, but by not saying anything about it, they are letting it speak for them.
I totally get that walking back a statement like that is harder (on many levels) than just not making the statement in the first place, so it’s not like I don’t understand why they didn’t, or why they’re upset. I’m just not sorry for them.
Aside from which, as the saying goes, “If you lie down with dogs you wake up with fleas.”
Blizzard, and many other companies, got into business with some very questionable people. Now they’re seeing the consequences. And no one has much pity for the.
Yeah, but they can’t. They’re acting to preserve their Chinese market, against any moral considerations. They can’t criticise their Chinese publishing partner to appease those who are upset about the breach of contract with the pro gamer, and the attempt to coerce his speech, without risking their Chinese market, which is what they were acting to preserve anyway. Some people have tried tying it to Tencent, but Tencent have invested more in Epic, and Epic issued a response statement which opposes Blizzard’s position. I think at the end of the day, Blizzard made their decision to maximise their possible profit and give themselves the biggest market, and if messing up their own PR events to appease foreign markets is what they’ve gotta do, they’ll do it.
I’m not sorry for them either. They made their decision, and they’ve deliberately put themselves in a position where Netease gets to speak for them to some extent. They could have avoided this if they hadn’t acted so harshly and rashly.
One of my favorite steamers put it well: you can’t blame them for wanting to find entry into the Chinese market, but at the same time you can’t expect their Western audience to just accept it. Most Blizzard apologists I’ve seen have an argument along the lines of “well this is how you go business in China,” but the immediate counter is “yeah but that’s not how you do it in your domestic market.”
“Not only is this message obviously siding with the Chinese government, but it’s overtly bellicose about it. This two-faced approach to social media also reflects a very PRC[5] way of thinking.”
Well, that statement was issued by NetEase, the Chinese wing of Blizzard which is owned by China. That’s not an unexpected stance from them.
But this is what happens when you let your companies get bought up by foreign interests, they begin serving foreign interests (note also Tencent’s just under 5% ownership of Activision).
True, but Tencent owns 40% of Epic, and Epic is currently trying to capitalise by contrasting their position with Blizzard’s.
It’s pretty obviously a more simple motivation: Blizzard cares more about preserving their Chinese market and their profit than not making a PR mess out of one of their own events.
Ah, but what you haven’t considered is that I post almost exclusively on this blog, and so our chances of solving it here are drastically higher than the rest of the world.
So, preliminary question: who is this Hong Kong?
King Kong’s nerdy little brother
Not to be confused with Donkey Kong which is a city-state off the coast of China.
Hong Kong Phooey.
OMG I LOVE THAT SHOW! I thought I was the only one who knew about it…
After reading this comment, I couldn’t help going back and rereading it in Zap Brannigan’s voice.
I think I’m okay with everything except the stripping of prize money for a completed tournament. Looks like they walked that back, which may be legally required. Firing someone is one thing, refusing to give them their last paycheck is another.
I’m really not ok with firing the hosts. What exactly are they supposed to do in that situation? I can’t think of a better way of handling it than they did.
I haven’t seen the actual interview so I don’t know enough about the details to say if it’s unreasonable. It sounds like they instinctively reacted by making a joke of a heavy political topic, which might have been the issue. Blitzchung’s just using the platform, but the interviewers are directly representing the company, so it could be reasonable to get other hosts if the company thinks these ones will react badly to repeats in the future.
They looked at each other then hid under the desk. I don’t know what else they could have done on a live broadcast. There is literally nothing they can say that will help Blizzard if they open their mouths. Presumably they don’t have a big switch in front them to pull the plug nor the power to cut the feed. They deliberately did not engage with the protestor. I can’t think of a better PR move than the physical act that represents both humor and “Nope. Not going to touch that one.”
If they couldn’t pull the plug, they could have been more serious about it, they could have tried to interrupt him, and say something to the effect of “We’re happy he won, but it’s not OK to use this tournament as a platform for expressing political views, and we in no way condone that”. What they did was a tongue-in-cheek way of saying “Hell yeah! Stand back, cause this just got real!”
Link for anyone who knows enough chinese to confirm or deny what I’m about to say: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KyxO0Ea1_kM&t=2152&feature=youtu.be
I’m told that at the end the casters say something to the effect of “all right, say what you’re gonna say and then we’ll end this”, suggesting they may not have been entirely blindsided.
I think some of the hate comes from people who disagree with that stance (and I think you should expect some criticism yourself due to agreeing with that stance). Of course, most of the hate comes from their heavy-handed approach to the issue, and for the record, I also think it was overkill.
It definitely wasn’t them upholding their values – it was them taking the wrong side (from a Western perspective) in one of the most controversial current issues.
That Blizzard would want to discourage pro players from using their tournaments as a political platform is understandable for reasonable people.
Beyond the obvious “Westerners sympathize with HK more than with the PRC’s desire to pretend nothing is happening,” I believe that part of the backlash is people’s awareness that the punishment meted out by Blizzard is the least of that player’s problem. It feels very icky to know that this guy decided to speak out knowing full well that the PRC was going to come down on him like a pile of bricks, and that Blizzard’s decision was to add insult to injury, exceptionally harshly, too.
Also, I’m sure it escaped no one that the TOS that the player broke are so vague as to be meaningless. Orwell could not have come up with better language.
“the TOS that the player broke are so vague as to be meaningless”
For Blizzard (and all companies with similar terms of service), that’s a feature; not a bug.
Right. Blizzard has been completely fine with people using their esports platforms to advance political messages on things like LGBT pride, because those messages enjoy widespread support among westerners. To then plea ‘muh no politics rule’ after clotheslining Blitzchung and the casters over what was, let’s face it, a business decision to protect their access to the Chinese market looks like rank hypocrisy.
Yeah the “only ban the people I want you to ban,” vibe that I get from a lot of these complainers is a little rich, to say the least. Just the idea that someone could get really mad about China De-Platforming these people, while not simply ignoring, but outright supporting billion dollar multi-national tech conglomerates openly doing the exact same thing, is so absurd to me I can’t put this to words. People who are getting mad here are 100% against the Chinese Federal Government. There are no principles at play, at all. Period.
Yes. For me, the enforcement inconsistency rankles more than the specifics of the issues being enforced.
Agreed, it’s definitely made it worse.
But also, disqualifying the Blitchung, banning him from competition, even though they’ve reduced it to 6 months, and stripping him of his prize money were just out of order to begin with.
I’d understand a ban from a certain amount of meets and the negotiation of some sort of code of conduct, but stripping him of money he’d already won after the fact for something unrelated to the game, and also banning the presenters (Also for 6 months) is just going to rub people the wrong way. The presenters responded poorly in a split second decision, how is that something they need to reflect on for 6 months? It’s all ridiculous and unfair, and reminds people of the how ridiculous and unfair all those videos of the police teargassing protesters in Hong Kong are.
They could have just sent the guy a reminder of the rules, with maybe a slap on the wrist, and let the issue slide (or not), but regardless of what they did, they should have kept it quiet.
I think the biggest problem with this issue is how the College players doing the same thing as blitzchung never got so much as a warning.
On a much more lively note, happy (belated) birthday Isaac.
I think they didn’t act, because the situation with Blitzchung had already got out of hand. As far as I remember, the case you’re referring to happened after mainstream media had covered the story. If Blizz had banned them as well, then I bet that would have reignited interest from mainstream media, and the case would have stayed in the wider public’s eye for much, much longer.
But then Blizzard issued that statement (the one Shamus linked to), which I’m pretty sure happened after the Collegiate did their thing.
If politics keeps heating up, the only choices for sites are going to be 1) no politics, or 2) pick a side and live with losing the other sides(s). No fun for site managers either way. Commercial or not.
So like, maybe we could try and cool off the political discourse, so that people can disagree without becoming violently angry?
As political violence ramps up that becomes increasingly impossible.
Are there degrees of impossibility?
“You think that’s impossible? Pfft, that’s merely unreasonably difficult. THIS is real impossible.”
This feels like you’ve mixed up the metaphorical chicken and egg here. “Politics is becoming increasingly violent, therefore people cannot discuss it without becoming violently angry.”
I’m not sure what you’re confused about. Protesters are getting shot in HK, it’s pretty hard to stay calm and reasonable in the face of that when discussing the topic.
1) You didn’t actually say that, and were extremely vague with what you were referring to. 2) This is a pretty bad way to try and solve the problem. It’s escalation of hostility based on previous hostility – that’s pretty clearly a positive feedback loop. At some point, somebody needs to take the step of de-escalating the violence, instead of keeping the cycle of violence going. Nobody wants to be the person who has to receive violence without any perceived justice to the purpetrators, but if the other option is to turn the situation into a holy war, the choice seems pretty clear to me.
That was the argument that white liberals made about the Civil Rights movement. I understand what you are trying to say: violence begets violence and we should be trying to de-escalate instead of escalate the violence, but at a certain point that idea falls apart, and we are passed that point with regards to Hong Kong. To quote Ta-Nehisi Coates:
This applies to China because China has been and is continuing to commit violence against those they deem as “other.” Therefore, our rhetoric should ratchet up in response as that continues. It may seem to you as though the violence is increasing, but that just isn’t the case, our rhetoric is just catching up.
I was vague because this also applies to politics outside of China. When Trump raises the idea of shooting people who cross the border we naturally inch closer to violent rhetoric. But the rhetoric is a response to the reality, not the other way around, and suggesting that we should ignore our reality and calm down the rhetoric is, historically speaking, not the path to justice.
Discussion over. This is WAY off topic.
Thanks.
Turns out that when one of the political sides is China and their political stance is “we control the information, we control the people, we control the economy, and we’re going to execute who we want and harvest their organs” then no, no you can’t.
I think that’s a very reasonable analysis of the Blizzard situation. I don’t blame them for wanting to keep real-world politics out of their tournaments, and had they simply stated this and let the guy off with a warning and a brief suspension, I doubt the issue would have blown up like this. The problem is that such an absurdly harsh punishment, together with their pathetically grovelling approach on Chinese social media, made it clear that they were taking China’s side rather than taking a neutral stance. I would have had some sympathy for them for being caught between a rock and a hard place, but they really, really screwed this up, and ironically drew far more attention to Blitzchung’s protest than it would have attracted otherwise.
This happens so often, that it’s starting to get comical. It makes me wonder – do these execs even know how news work? In the digital age, the moment you try to stifle something, that thing gets a mountain of attention comparable to millions of dollars worth of advertising. It gets immortalized, and people talk about it for years to come.
Well, I could certainly believe that the Chinese execs genuinely don’t. The Western ones are a different matter. The things that get me most are the two-faced approach on social media, and the fact that their non-apology seems to have been written by an ESL speaker – they must surely have realised that people would pick up on this. It’s possible they calculated that the PR fallout would still cause them less damage than getting banned in China, but given that they’ve now reversed most of Blitzchung’s punishment, it looks like they got the calculation badly wrong.
Well, thing is-
You remember the times that it caused a backlash. You don’t remember the times that they got away with it. Given how many people Google/Facebook/Twitter have gotten away with banning, and often the current media is willing to be a cheerleader for censorship when it silences people they don’t like, I don’t think it’s too ridiculous to think that they damn well might have gotten away with it. Even now there are still media figures who are attacking Blizzard’s critics, claiming that they don’t really care about Hong Kong, and that they’re just using this as a smokescreen for their secret evil real agenda.
Right. A large portion over the Blizzard fight isn’t about Blizzard. Blizzard might have gotten away with it anyway if they hadn’t done it after the NBA, but since the NBA hasn’t tried to keep politics out of the league, the NBA’s hypocrisy pissed off a lot of people. Then Blizzard stepped in, and many of those same people’s patience with companies trying to “keep politics out of games” was exhausted.
There’s plenty of good reasons to ban people from social media lol. If people are using those platforms to harass, stalk, or even just spam users, they should be banned. If they make money selling supplements on made up news stories, they should be banned. That’s just good website moderation lol. If people spam racial slurs, they should be banned. It’s not hard, it’s basic moderation and it’s vital to keeping the web even borderline useable.
There’s a big difference between that, and advocating for issuing excessive bans and refusing to pay out prize money because somebody would prefer that Hong Kong not be subject to Chinese rule, while Chinese police are currently violently stamping down protesters in Hong Kong who just don’t want to be part of China (Gee, wonder if it’s because of all those jackbooted thugs? Wonder why people might protest hey).
There’s nothing inconsistent about thinking that there are situations where people should be banned, or not given a platform, and thinking that this case, isn’t one of them. There’s nothing inconsistent about understanding that obviously Blizzard don’t want this drama attached to them, and it threatens their profits, and they absolutely have a right to manage the behaviour of people it’s sponsoring the broadcast of, and still thinking that the response was unfair and heavy handed. There’s nothing inconsistent about thinking that a statement associated with opposing the brutality of the police oppressing people who don’t want to become a part of a state they disagree with, one that uses police like this, isn’t offensive to anyone who is not in favour of the police teargassing civilians, which, I’d like to say, is the actually offensive position that Blizzard have implied they will defend.
Appending “lol” to your sentences tells the other person you’re laughing at them. This makes them LESS likely to want to hear your point of view and makes it MORE likely that it will turn into an ugly flamewar where I have to close the comments.
That’s it. While I agree with Blitzchung, I understand why that’s not appropriate for the setting, and why that poses a threat to the event. Blizzard gets a return from the broadcast, and the broadcast is PR for them. Threatening their ability to broadcast to China is a serious problem for them. I understand why they want to avoid this happening again.
But a 6 month ban, and a 6 month ban for the protesters for their reaction, and taking back the prize money already won, for what would in most sports be considered a minor violation punishable by a small fine, and, unlikely, a short match ban. It’s not the way to deal with it and it makes it very clear that Blizzard will aggressively defend it’s Chinese market even if this is what they have to do.
First: I congratulate you on the wisdom of taking some classes for your composing and hope it works out for you, making your music better (if only in your own ears) and maybe even a little bit profitable in the long run. Honestly I heard a few of your compositions, and while they didn’t strike my own taste enough to really enjoy them, I think there might actually be a segment that could really like your style enough to buy it if you can make it more elaborate.
A while ago I wanted to take some speaking lessons via seminars provided by professional speakers but failed to register in time. Now it will take a long time until the same classes will be offered again, so I guess it’s always a good idea to take classes when the opportunity presents itself.
Second: I think you did a good job presenting the politics of the Blizzard-situation and have to agree that both positions have merit. In similar debates on other events (e.g. German soccer debates about players supposedly/allegedly giving support to Turkey’s president Erdogan before elections) I sided with the “no politics”-crowd, while in the given case I’d support Blitzchung, so my position may seem or even be hypocritical in the first place. I still try to figure out if it is, since I generally agree with the positions supporting free speech, thus believing to be consistent on that issue.
Let me try to make sense of this here while apologizing to those who find this excourse boring or unhelpful: The players in question (German national team players Özil and Gündogan), for those who don’t know the situation, are of Turkish origin. During Erdogan’s election campaign last year, when he wasn’t allowed to campaign in Germany (he had abused these events in the past to make divisive statements, appealing to people of Turkish origin to abstain from integration), he had met the players in the UK, where they were employed at the time. During this event, they had posed for pictures together, presenting Erdogan with a signed shirt that declared him “their president”.
Afterwards, they faced critique from people for being in the German national team and thus having become soccer World Cup winners while at the same siding with the (allegedly) authoritarian Turkish president, calling their loyalty into question. Apart from the critique, there were also possibly huge amounts of racist insults towards them, which then served as a kind of smoke screen to hide from their imho justified critics.
Anyways, the situation brought up the question whether they were fit to represent the German people in international competition, as Erdogan has been an at least controversial figure in German politics, while the national team has been a kind of international figurehead in the German collective mind for a long time.
While I think they are totally within their rights to say what they want and support Erdogan if they want, I can agree that it’s highly questionable to have them as representatives and thus prominent embassadors of a kind. If you think this is a small issue: during an internship I learned that there is actual government level diplomacy involved in international sports and a former German soccer referee has a high ranking post in at least one German embassy for just this reason. The players are obviously seen as actual representatives of their nation, and supporting a allegedly authoritarian politician in this manner is a bad look for a country that wants to emphasize its liberal democratic values. I definitely don’t like being represented by people who make statements that are wildly diverging from my own beliefs, so I can definitely see how people are rubbed the wrong way by this.
On the other hand, and that’s where this touches the current case, it’s a bad look to prohibit your representatives from making statements that contradict your public policy line if said policy line contains a commitment to free speech, which is kind of the core of liberal democracy.
Where I think this case diverges is the fact that Blitzchung is a player in a tournament sponsored by Blizzard, but not representing Blizzard. He is there to take part in a professional tournament organized by a private company and I believe his level of play in one of their games does not make him a representative of their company. While they may believe it is a bad look for people to utter political statements at their events, I think it’s far fetched to claim he might damage Blizzard’s reputation with his statement unless they also assume he is taken for an employee of Blizzard. In my opinion, he’s “just some guy” who apparently excels at a game created by Blizzard and in no way should anyone imho hold Blizzard responsible for Blitzchung’s opinions, no matter where they are publicized.
Blizzard though has no specific commitment to free speech, which makes this a tricky situation, considering governments and supranational organizations have increasingly attempted to regulate and legislate social media and big media companies and they might be held accountable for any questionable opinions uttered at their events. They might in a way just be trying to cover themselves to prevent future cases when someone utters way more dangerous statements and they might have created a precedent of allowing political statements, which might then be fielded by someone else against them.
I think my main issue is their handling of the situation, how they first wrote a very vague policy which they themselves then interpreted in the least charitable manner to the effect of creating a precedence instead of publicizing a statement of disagreement with his decision to politicize their gaming event, issuing a less serious punishment (I understand them in general) and a warning for any future attempts at this, which would/might be punished in a harsher manner, as it would be established by then that politics are not asked for by Blizzard at their event.
Note to Shamus:
You’re obviously completely within your right to delete posts as you wish, but now I’m kind of compelled to tell you I feel deleting an answer to my endorsement of free speech, however belligerent and uninformed it may have been, undermines my post.
Nevermind, as I said, it’s your blog and you enforce the rules as you deem fit. Just thought I’d express this thought.
You were replying to a post that I’d already deleted. For whatever reason, this causes chaos. If you delete a root comment, all children break apart and appear at the end and the threading stops working. All child posts are broken so that they can never be a proper reply, nor can they be replied to. Then we get flooded with confusing comments telling me my website is broken and people double-posting, thinking they forgot to hit the “reply” button the first time. You’ll get orphaned replies and have no idea who people are talking to.
I HAD to delete the original comment. I’ll be the first to admit the line is blurry and people sometimes tiptoe over it. But those two comments were WAY out there, and would only invite similar responses.
tldr: Sorry about that. It had nothing to do with the content of your post. I know it was really long and you probably spent a lot of time on it.
I’d poke fun at wordpress, but keeping a comment tree intact when deleting the root comment does seem like a tricky thing, as merely changing the text of the post to “this post was deleted” looks a bit daft and moving all the child posts one level up may also mess with some stuff.
On the other hand, this is how Reddit does it, and it works really well. If a comment is deleted, a placeholder remains indicating that there was a comment, and all replies under that comment remain intact.
Thanks for answering. My issue was not with you deleting my answer. After posting I saw there was no more answer to reply to, so I myself asked you to delete my post to prevent more chaos from emerging. It’s totally fine.
On another issue: Are you saying my own answer was way out there or was there another reply I wasn’t aware of? I didn’t have the impression to have said anything overly belligerent, though I admit some of my positions there were rather controverse themselves. I think it can be a tricky task to argue your point for a principle if you can’t bring up any controverse points on the matter where the principle is challenged at all. I guess it was the right call do delete that post anyways.
Like I said, it had nothing to do with the content of your post.
Okay, I got confused by this:
I don’t know which is/was the second comment you referred to. I guess there was something I never became aware of.
Never mind, though, I don’t need an answer.
The second comment was elsewhere, but by the same poster. Presumably that is what Shamus was referring to.
At some point you even have to ask, what counts as politics? Blizzard are professing pro-LGBT and feminist ethics, which some people consider politics. I guess their reasoning is that human rights shouldn’t count as politics, which is fair. But then considering the atrocities that recently came to light recently perpetrated by the Chinese government, supporting Hong Kong could easily be considered to be a human right thing, not a political partisan thing like supporting the right wing or left wing.
Anyway if they had just given that guy a slap on the wrist they wouldn’t be in this mess. I can’t imagine their Chinese sponsors are thrilled with the extra positive attention for the people of Hong Kong either.
The thing is, that many people don’t consider (or want to consider) that human rights don’t have… let’s just say, a singular view on what does it means. Starting with concepts of positive/negative rights, and even the basic relation between rights, responsibilities and feelings (and who gets what). It’s really a blur line between these concepts, so different people end up with various answers, from feminists, to traditionalist, etc (my personal views aren’t important, and they don’t align with any of these groups). It’d be an interesting philosophical discussion, on its own, but since we need to live our lives using them, these at heart philosophical differences become very much political, for better or worse.
May be I’m wrong, who knows
It’s politics if it’s contentious to the point that a significant number of people will take action over it. Hardly anyone will boycott Blizzard if they put a LGBT person in a game or put a (Hollywood-defined) strong female in a game. There will be muttering and eye-rolling from certain quarters, but it’s not generally worth worrying about. But they aren’t going to put in a bald caucasian manji enthusiast. That’d get people all riled up big time.
I’m not fluent, but I lived in China a long time. For what it’s worth:
I would translate ??”guó jia” as country . Just as we have nation, state, country, homeland etc and all are used in different registers and shades of meaning, Chinese has many words for this concept as well. ? means kingdom or country and ? means family or home. Together I would translate them as country and many others do as well. I suppose the translators are inserting China here for clarity, but China ?? “Zhong guó” the central nation does not appear in this tweet, except in the twitter handle in the bottom signature.
–edited to display characters correctly, but they still wont display :-p
But other than that, does the rest of the translation check out (because if it does, it still sounds patriotic, rather than neutral)? I’m currently learning Chinese, and I’m a total beginner, and I only understand about 3-4 characters out of the whole tweet :D
I’ve seen three different translations and they’re all basically patriotic, just varying in their precise degree of bootlicking.
I would say so, yes. It’s a pretty good translation in the image. A lot of Chinese official statements have this neutral, almost I would say casual — yet over-the-top — flavor that you get in the tweet like “defending pride and dignity of the country at any cost” which is so egregiously unmerited when discussing statements from an esports tournament. Like the statement should be discussing the issue at level 3, but suddenly its “all knobs to 11.”
They have this type of religious self-sacrifice from the national anthem and all the way down. The US national anthem basically says “after the bombs, our country survived” and the Chinese national anthem basically says ” Take my dead body to build the new wall — We will march into the bullets. ” Whenever I heard that song I would want to cry. Especially when like 5 year olds are singing it.
It’s important to stress that no Chinese people in China speak this way either, unless someone in authority is observing them.
I don’t do much Chinese, but with other writing systems I’ve found that it may be better to look up the character’s Unicode value and insert it as an ampersand code (as in, everything from the ampersand to the semicolon: &#dddd; or &#xhhhh; where dddd is a decimal value, and hhhh is a hexadecimal value. This site will usually let ampersand entities through as appropriate.
The tricky thing there is when the principles that people want to start laying down wind up intersecting with the other current tribal controversies. It is kind of hard to really, really discuss the issue without getting into broader topics of free speech and corporate neutrality.
But I think that what we’re also seeing here is a point where “no politics” may be becoming simply infeasible (for any company that wants to exist in the Chinese market, that is). If the PRC is going to be pushing global censorship by putting pressure on international companies for even producing media that offends them at all, instead of just censoring said media in China, then there really is no “neutral” stance. Do you capitulate or not? A shrinking tolerance for dissent from one party’s set of views is going to, by unavoidable consequence, mean that the potential ground for neutrality is going to shrink as well.
Rather than Hearthstone in 1862, I think we can look at the actual case of the Olympics in 1940 and 1944- they were cancelled on account of WWII. Sometimes, you just run out of neutrality.
These are fantastic points.
Yeah, that’s why I’m in the camp of thinking that Blizzard’s response was unnecessarily harsh and it DOES seem like they’re trying hard to appease/mollify China over maintaining their neutrality. As others have mentioned above, the translation of the Chinese Heartstone statement DOES say “Country” instead of “China”, but the wording and tone of the rest of the statement is more or less accurate. It definitely conveys a tone of harshly condemning Blitzchung’s actions.
There has been a long, long history of people using sporting events to promote/create awareness of political or social issues as well, ranging back to the WWII Olympics as well as the famous “Black Power” salutes. I pretty much agree with Shamus’ view; If Blizzard had just reprimanded Blitzchung for violating the terms of his agreement (I’m sure there MUST be a clause in there somewhere that says “You will refrain from using our platform to promote or proselytize” or something to that effect) and maybe issued a temp ban, the outrage over this incident wouldn’t be as huge as it is.
Worth noting that the PRC’s current stance is definitively not global censorship. Tracer is straight in China, and that’s good enough for them, the West can publish whatever it wants in the West.
To be honest I regard Blizzard’s willingness to treat Tracer’s sexuality as a free-swinging commodity, to be adjusted in the pursuit of profits (in China and Russia), as more despicable than anything they’ve done regarding the Blitzchung situation.
That’s a curious framing. Tracer being lesbian (in the West) didn’t just happen, someone chose to make it so, and they probably thought about things like profits or branding while making the choice.
Well, yeah, that’s why it’s despicable
Well, on the other hand it kind of makes a point I usually make to people on the topic: Why do we even care about a character’s property if there is no in-game (or movie, or book, or…) implication of that property?
I usually don’t. I get neither the people who insist on having some game designer, writer, director etc. tell them that, yes, this or that character IS actually gay or those who can’t stop howling in despair at the prospect of a gay character.
To me the sexuality of a character (or other properties) was and is always irrelevant if it does not affect the proceedings of the plot/game etc. I.e.: If I can’t come to recognize it without word of god, I don’t care about it until the media in question makes it explicit. This may or may not apply to any specific case, but I generally don’t get why people get so worked up about it.
To turn it into a question: Unless there is sexual content in a game, and maybe even IF there is sexual content in a game, depending on how it’s presented, is there any reason BUT marketing to announce a character’s sexuality?
I don’t follow Overwatch at all, never played it, but I am aware that there is media outside of the game associated with it. There’s a slowly evolving storyline, and comics and other stuff. While sexuality may have no impact on the game itself, it does have an impact in those other media, eg are all female characters shown to have husbands / boyfriends, or are some shown to have girlfriends / wives / whatever. I mean sure, if none of the characters are shown to have significant others, fine, but if some are shown, then a careful, considered approach to diversity is not amiss or superfluous.
Yes, you’re right. I wasn’t aware of the outside media, probably because I usually don’t care about them too much for any IP unless the outside media existed first and independently from the game. In the case of games, outside media often strike me as being just a part of the marketing itself, which is of course not necessarily true but only my perception of them.
On another question: What would be the “best” reason? None at all? That’s how I think would be optimal, because if it was inserted without any underlying reason, it would to me signify that it’s totally natural to be part of a medium instead of something people have to actively emphasize instead of just allowing it to be there.
That… seems a little far-fetched?
Blizzard posted their “Tracer is gay” comic in China, and then when China passed their anti-gay-media law, the censors took the comic down. You can still find the Chinese translation online if you look for it, it’s not like they published a different version where she’s dating a guy instead. Same thing for Soldier 76.
This is not always the case. The thing that springs to my mind is mostly the issue of scholars who study China (at universities outside of China) and how they face a lot of pressure to censor how they talk about China in their scholarly work. Here’s an article that talks about that: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/09/04/survey-more-500-china-scholars-provides-data-how-frequently-they-experience-chinese One quote from that article: “Sixty-eight percent of scholars say that self-censorship is a problem for the China studies field.”
China doesn’t seem to really focus on controlling how non-Chinese people talk about things unrelated to China, but they do appear to want to control the dialogue about how the world talks about China.
I think a better parallel, though is the 1936 Olympics, which took place in Berlin. You can look at all of the arguments for and against hosting them there and participating in the event, and you can see all kinds of parallels. (I’m afraid I couldn’t do a good summary here, but the US Holocaust Museum does have a great page, and exhibit, on the matter.)
You can argue that 1936 Germany is not 2019 China, but I think the similarities are discomforting, to say the least.
Yeah, Polish example would be Kozakiewicz at the Moscow Olympics in the 1980 (link to wikipedia), and you can probably find hundreds of examples like this or similar. Sports, especially at international levels, has always been tied to politics, national sentiments and used to manifest both individual and broader political views. In case of individuals the fact that athletes get momentary visibility that gives them both a platform and in some cases a certain degree of protection probably contributes. We probably shouldn’t be surprised that esports goes the same way.
Yeah, I find “no politics” basically impossible for similar reasons. Using the Civil War example (since Shamus brought it up), if some Southern person started recounting the uses of their slaves (which they considered life blogging), you can BET that Northern people (and abolitionists and all minorities basically) would find that INCREDIBLY political. Even if the person never brought up the war or either government or the concept of “state’s rights” or secession or etc.
The idea of “no politics” is essentially baloney because it privileges the status quo, which is picking a side and then pretending to be neutral. For another example much less emotionally charged than the one above, let’s say everyone here liked talking about straws. People who are using that as a way to get going on pro-environmental issues would feel it’s pretty incorrect to allow chatting about how great and useful straws are, but it’s suddenly breaking the “no politics” rule to point out the problems with them?
There’s some equivocation going on here. It “supports” the status quo only to the degree that it essentially says “I don’t think opposition to the status quo is important enough to supercede what we’re doing right now.” That contains a wide range of stances from support to mild opposition, or even significant opposition tempered by the realization that political causes will take over your entire life if you let them.
It does take a certain amount of comfort with your current situation to be able to draw this kind of boundary, but I think anyone who finds this to be a problem surely has better things to do than post about videogames on the Internet. After all, the exact same logic that says you shouldn’t be able to take a break from politics just because someone else has it worse says that you shouldn’t be buying video games when you could be donating that same money to charitable causes.
I find that “defending the status quo” argument to always be a bit off. Mostly, people who are saying things like “No politics” aren’t saying that those aren’t important issues or that the issues don’t need to or shouldn’t be discussed, or even that they think everything’s fine. Mostly, they’re saying either that those discussions aren’t appropriate in this place and/or at this time, or else that they’re sick of talking about them and want some kind of respite from the constant discussions. As an example, I think it’s reasonable for Shamus to say that his blog is supposed to be about gaming and he doesn’t want to have to deal with the political discussions except insofar as they are directly related to games and to ask everyone else to at least not antagonize everyone else by drifting from that. That doesn’t mean that he supports any side in the matter, status quo or not.
And note that the more antagonistic these discussions become in the typical case, the more places and people are going to take the line of “Don’t want it/sick of it” and go to some form of “No politics”.
Quite. To sit and play a video game is itself an endorsement of the status quo, given all the other potential ways one might better spend that time to repudiate it and redress its many injustices.
But a certain amount of refuge from the political helps one to get through the day, even if, yes, that’s not a privilege everyone enjoys. If that refuge can extend to being allowed the leisure of playing a game, I don’t see why it can’t also extend to the discussion thereof, should all parties be amenable.
The problem with the “saying nothing is supporting the status quo” argument is that it leaves no room for actually supporting the status quo. If Blitzchung had come into his interview and said “The Chinese government is doing everything right, Hong Kong separatists go home” that would’ve been an endorsement of the status quo (and plausibly would’ve gotten him in trouble, though of course we can’t know what Blizzard would’ve done). Whatever saying nothing is, it’s way less endorsey than that.
Or to bring it back to a related talking point: “Everything is political”, but some things are more political than others.
The idea of “no politics” is the idea of focusing on what unites the people in the area instead of what divides them. If you focus on divisions you’ll keep finding them until it’s you individually against the world.
About three paragraphs in, this article gets to the heart of the problem of criticizing the Chinese government versus the Chinese citizenry. The CCP has taken great pains to mold the minds of the citizens to believe that the government IS the country. The rest of the article sets a pretty dire tone, but it does go in to a lot of specifics outside of gaming.
Could you not link a right-wing propaganda site as though it’s an objective source?
They cite a few different sources, though. If those aren’t misrepresented then the article is just as valid as it would be were it posted elsewhere.
Not wanting right-wing propaganda is more a matter of not wanting to give them the views. If it’s an actual story, a legitimate news outlet will cover it.
Of course, the trouble then is getting people to agree on which news outlets are “legitimate.”
Could you not treat a reasonable, totally valid writing outlet as a source of “far-right propaganda”?
This is totally obnoxious.
Sure, I’ll continue not doing that.
Hoo boy. I can tell this is a pointless argument that will go nowhere good.
Thread closed.
The “Brack’s statement was written by China” thing is reaching _really_ hard. Like, read the Twitter thread.
Rhetorical questions and indentation? Seriously? It goes on to complain about his use of “When we think about” instead of “Thinking about” but that’s a phrase Brack has used before!
While I’m taking down conspiracy theories, I should probably address the “published in China” thing. The statement went up at about 8 PM EST on Oct 11, but the date on it said Oct 12. Given that it was Oct 12 in China, people leapt to “They’re posting it from China, PRC shills confirmed!” There’s a much simpler explanation: It was also Oct 12 in GMT. All Blizzard’s posts there are datestamped in GMT, this is a verifiable pattern.
In the statement they use the phrase “We now believe he should receive his prizing.” which to me sounds really really wrong. English is my second language but prizing rather than prize sounds extremely engrish.
Same for me. Prizing comes out as very wrong.
That’s definitely not intentional mainstream English. There are other possibilities – an autocorrect of a misspelling of ‘prizes’ comes to mind – so I wouldn’t hail this as proof of a PRC post, just a hurried one. But it doesn’t disprove anything either.
Agreed. I’m not suggesting Xi Jinping personally dictated the statement or anything, but the phrase ‘his prizing’ is definitely not one a native English speaker would ever say, let alone write as part of a formal apology. And if there’s one situation where you’d expect Blizzard’s PR team to be as careful as possible with their wording, it’s this one.
Yeah, that phrase reads more like they have plans to do nasty things to his fingernails, than anything else.
I didn’t blink at ‘prizing’, but this line as a whole felt wrong to me. Specifically the mid-line switching between hyphen breaks and comma breaks, and using ‘and this is’ instead of ‘which is’.
Adding some insider knowledge, the public statement was bascially just a transcript of an internal video where Jay did “explain” the situation to Blizzard employes. Which was delayed citing the appearance of “new informations” that were never shared.
It’s still a horrible take, but I never got the feeling that the whole statement was pre-written. He did go through some clearly “PR speak” talking points though.
Congrulations Issac! Enjoy the liberties of adulthood!
Good luck with your music lessons Shamus. I hope they bring you lots of joy. When I started piano lessons 3 years ago after a long period of figuring it out on my own I made big leaps. This has enabled me to play all sorts of pieces I never thought to be in reach for me. I hope you have a similar or better experience.
I don’t know how much overlap there is in the Venn Diagram of Hearthstone fans and NBA fans, but it’s worth mentioning that this happened at basically the same exact time as this.
My pet theory of the blizzard fiasco is that it happened, they cut the feed, and then asked tencent (who has a 8% share in actiblizz) how they can avoid any problems with the chinese government. They make a lot of money in china, just traded in their PC playerbase for the chinese mobile yuans with diablo immortal, so they don’t want to lose the chinese market. Tencent told them that doing this punishment would make china happy. So they rolled it out quickly.
Occam’s razor would suggest that this is likely the direction that the true story is in. But we’ll never really find out I suppose. Even if the real answer is out there, it won’t be heard over the shouting.
I see the Tencent puppetmaster theory a lot and I don’t think I agree with it. Tencent’s share in Activision (which I thought was closer to around 5%) isn’t nearly big enough to exercise that level of control. Besides, Epic has publicly stated they won’t silence anyone for speaking out their opinions on this subject, and Tencent controls almost half of their stock.
Most likely explanation is that this is all on Activision-Blizzard. They issued out the punishment figuring it would appease the Chinese market, and thought they could sweep it under the rug in the West. Which they clearly failed to. Time and time again Blizzard has proven they have no idea how to properly judge their Western fanbase’s reaction.
That’s why i say that I think blizzard asked tencent, not that tencent forced it on them. Blizzard wants the market, they want to know how to appease the chinese government, so they reach out to their chinese contacts and they tell them this is how they can get in good graces.
I was going to reply about Epic to Evileeyore above but saw that you already made the same point. I’ve seen people speculate that it’s the difference between a Western company trying to do business in China (Blizzard through NetEase) and Chinese company making a foothold in the Western market (Tencent through the various companies it has shares in). On the other hand it is Sweeney we’re talking about, he likes to paint himself as the sole saviour of PC gaming and we won’t know if he’ll put his money where his mouth is until push comes to shove.
Epic has said a lot of things for PR they rescinded shortly afterword. I wouldn’t trust that promise until it had been successfully put to the test.
Epic is still a private company with Sweeney holding the majority share. Activision-Blizzard are publicly traded and have a fiduciary responsibility to do what’s best for their share-holders. In this case that means placating the CCP, who control Tencent and are the gatekeepers to the massive growing Chinese gaming market. That point is hit about 9:26 in this video. Some stuff might have evolved since it was posted on the 10th, but the whole thing is worth a watch.
Congratulations for the birthday, hope the new monitor works out!
Seems Blizzard is going to have to walk a tight rope from here on out… can’t blame how they punished the player… he DID signed a pretty binding contract with them. And I agree with some of the comments, it ‘s going to be harderd and harderd to maintain “corporate neutrality”… nowadays you can’t pull the “I just want to make money, where is the harm in that?” card, specially if what you do has any kind of media coverage.
Just wanted to point out that “signed” should be “sign” and “harderd” should be “harder”.
I think the issue is that, while you CAN just pursue profits, there are a lot of profits to be made by appealing to political groups.
Binding contract? You can’t have unconscionable terms in a contract. Given that Blizzard’s own employees staged a walkout on moral grounds, it fits the definition. Also as a contract of adhesion, they are more likely to be found unenforceable based on these sorts of terms.
It bothers me how many people believe that because something is written in a contract it is automatically binding. It’s not.
A workable rule for Blizzard might have been, “No political statements during broadcasts x, y, and z. If a player wants to make personal statements during times a, b, and c, they will be allowed to do that.” The rule they’re actually relying on says instead that, “We can decide that any behavior is against the rules at any time. If we decide that, we can then steal away fairly earned prize money.” So they could legitimately use that rule to say that wearing an Adidas jacket was going to ruin their image as a company and rob someone’s prize money. I understand that they want a morality clause of some kind (to be able to punish behavior that’s not strictly illegal but is widely considered socially unacceptable), but clauses of this nature aren’t normally exercised in this way, and RARELY so publicly.
I can see some reasoning behind broad rules, a frequent problem is people who ruleslawyer their way through community rules along the lines “you said no pictures of dead people but you didn’t say dead animals”, and when you add dead animals to the list they’re like “but you didn’t say wounded people!” and this goes on until you just throw your hands up in frustration and write down something like “pictures of anything that causes people discomfort”, which opens another can of worms.
Of course in this case it is exactly as you say, Blizzard is just overeager to please China, they certainly don’t NEED to steal players’ prize money to make their profit margin and the rule is vague enough that virtually any behaviour could cause offense. If was, say, on a team from LA and said that “LA has the best fans in the world” it could be argued that the public from NY could take offense to that.
Chinese here. “??” literally means “country”, but in this case, it is clearly referring to China… so both translations are correct.
Edit: Oh. Apparently we can’t display Chinese characters here? But you guys can still take my word for it.
The interesting bit in the English translation is “our” – in the context of a Blizzard issued press-statement it’s weird that an American company would seemingly refer to China as “our country”, which I think is why people are wondering if it’s a translation error.
But others have said in the tread that it’s actually a statement from a Chinese publishing partner of Blizzard, which makes more sense.
The tweet does not actually include the element “our” (in “defend the honor of the country”, anyway; there’s plenty of first-person reference outside that bit). There is a common word that Chinese people use to refer to China, ?? w? guó, which literally means “our [or my] country”, so it’s a little odd that “our country” was chosen to translate a different phrase, but only a little.
As Fon says, both translations are correct, since there’s only one country they can possibly be referring to.
Glossing the final sentence word-by-word without the normal syntactic bits that good translation must fill in, it’s this:
WE ALSO WILL AS-ALWAYS MANNER-INDICATOR RESOLUTE DEFEND COUNTRY HONOR.
(The manner-indicator is saying that “just like always” is the manner in which we will defend the country’s honor. It’s more or less equivalent to the English -ly suffix you’d expect to see on the end of RESOLUTE.)
I note that this appears to be a common expression in China; one of the examples listed in the Pleco dictionary for wéihù [“defend; preserve; uphold”] is the phrase wéihù mínzú z?nyán, “defend the national honor”. This just substitutes guóji?, the country, for mínzú, the people.
To be fair, they didn’t literally say “our”. The last sentence is something like “At the same time, we’ll defend the country’s dignity absolutely as always.” … But this “country” in the sentence is definitely China. Sometimes we (Chinese speakers) simply omit the word “our” when it’s very clear whatever we’re referring to is ours.
In short, even though the translations might not be literally correct in the most literal manner, the translators pretty much got the intent right. So whoever issued this Chinese statement IS saying that China is their country and they’ll defend its dignity and in a strong absolute manner.
But the others are also on to something, even though I would not be so generous to say it’s Blizzard’s “Chinese publishing partner” who made this statement. It says @Blizzard China below, indicating this statement is made the China branch of Blizzard (or maybe @ is their version of #? What does @ mean?)… The account name is simply Hearthstone in Chinese, but I suppose that simply means this is the Official Hearthstone… account… for China. (Since, you know, the statement in made in Simplified Chinese, whereas both Hong Kong and Taiwan uses Traditional Chinese. Singapore and many other Chinese-speakers scattered around the world also uses Simplified Chinese, but in the case, the context is quite clear this account is made by someone from China and for China.)
The smart move for Activlizzard would have been to humbly ask competitors and fans to respect the company’s non-interest in a matter outside their purview. Something like, “Rules against conduct like BlitzChung’s are meant to protect everyone’s ability to enjoy Activlizzard’s products together. We ask that everyone please let Activlizzard-owned communication channels remain dedicated to Activlizzard-relevant topics.” Play themselves as a mildly wounded party acting quite reasonably for everyone’s betterment. No need to impose any penalties for this first violation. To the Americans, they could point out how they’re not going to punish a young person for speaking up once on a subject he was passionate about just because he did it in an inappropriate venue. To the Chinese, they could point out how they are a foreign company, and it is not their place to comment on domestic issues that don’t involve them. It’s pure corporate doublespeak, but at least it would have had enough truth undergirding it to withstand minimal scrutiny.
However, such a move would have required an understanding of what “humility” and “respect for others” are, so there’s probably no chance Activlizzard could have pulled it off. They probably just made guesses at how much money they’d lose pissing off the West or the Chinese, and took the cheaper option.
Well said.
Interesting that big companies (Google comes to mind) have started censoring speech on cultural and political matters. I realize this isn’t anything fundamentally new, there’s always been a corporate “party line” with similar pedestrian expectations. But it feels like there’s a difference between having your own people watch what they say, and expecting everyone else to do the same. In that respect, there’s no difference of kind between Blizzard and this blog, just a difference of degree. Or, there’s a difference in that Blizzard isn’t really offering a platform for discussion, and so perhaps doesn’t feel that it’s their responsibility to consistently enforce rules for discussion. Whereas this blog ostensibly does offer a discussion platform, and is therefore under a stricter onus to delineate that discussion with an even hand.
I guess what I’m saying is that Blizzard should hire Shamus to manage their PR and consumer relations.
Why do you think that would make sense to the Chinese? It’s a perfectly normal American response, but I don’t see why the Chinese would care what Americans think is normal. As far as I can see, China has an orthodoxy on the subject, and of course it’s everyone’s place to affirm the orthodoxy.
Heck, Americans are given to the same thing; look at the “Taylor Swift’s Silence” issue.
No-politics rules are, by their very nature, limited.
I appreciate it here, mind you, but there are moments where it’s problematic.
Your own example of 1862 is interesting, and another obvious one would be 1944. Do we really feel “neutral” means “yes, they’re gassing millions of people, but we don’t want to offend them”? “We won’t be releasing Wolfenstein 2D because this might offend”?
My take is that it’s okay to say “this is not the time and place to discuss it”.
But, yeah, if your “neutrality” means “we have to be nice and not offend mass murderers” . . . no.
I wanted to ask your take on the Blizzard controversy but I felt I wouldn’t be respecting your no politics rule by doing so. Just saying, I appreciate that you decided to write this.
Happy birthday Issac! Now you can be tried as an adult! And, accrue your own debts! And, um, more easily get a minimum wage job!
Sheesh, what’s good about turning 18?
He can also be drafted, don’t forget that!
You can enroll yourself in… oh wait, that’s twenty four.
You can drink yourself into… no, that’s twenty one.
You can have sex with everything that… no wait, that was sixteen actually.
You can… wait seven years and then run for Congress?
You already said he can f*** everybody at sixteen. Why are you repeating yourself?
hehehe
I have to say, I really liked your analysis, and it felt like something that was seriously missing from the general discourse around the whole Blizzard / HK scandal. I also really like the quality of debate in these comments, and I’m looking forward to your next video on the subject.
Oh, and congrats for being an old person, I guess.
My translation of the statement from NetEase:
We express our strong outrage and condemnation [the Chinese does not mention “disappointment”] of the incident at the Hearthstone Asia Grand Competition last weekend, and firmly oppose the spreading of personal political ideas in _any_ contest. The player involved will be disqualified, [and] the announcers involved will be immediately terminated from any official role. Furthermore, we will also — as we always have — staunchly defend the honor of the country. [The Chinese contains nothing analogous to “at all costs”.]
I’ve translated the same adverb two different ways in “firmly oppose” and “staunchly defend”.
That language about “the player involved will be disqualified” probably explains why the first draft of the punishment included confiscating his winnings, which seemed bizarre to me. Looks like NetEase wanted to view this as similar to cheating.
Oh no, in 2018 a team got caught cheating (stream-sniping), their punishment was being kicked out of the tournament with no ban. This was a harsher punishment than cheating.
Did they have any winnings at the point when they were caught?
The “no politics” is absolute bollocks.
Not only do they let american players speak of politics quite a bit, but they also did talk about politically charged topics, like lgbt rights.
Also, an american player straight up said “Liberate Hong Kong” in a post-match interview and he wasn’t punished at all.
What makes me laugh are all the companies saying they support free speech (we all know they’d be the first to censor things to get chinese money), especially Epic, who’s 40% owned by Tencent (chinese company).
What i think happened is that the PRC realized all the bad press china was getting (which would make censoring western stuff harder) and told everyone to chill.
Blizzard is basically taking the hit, tho i blame them for how poorly they handled it.
Blizzard has been handling things badly since quite a while. Remember when they presented a mobile only mmo spin off to a predominantly PC userbase starved for sequels?
Details? Preferably link to VOD?
I’m searching for them, it was said in the hearthstone subreddit, but it was drowned out by other posts.
You know Shamus, every time you name one of these Diecast replacement posts “This Week I Played…” I have this momentary reaction that we’re doing that thing where we all talk about what we’ve played recently like we did in the forums and, the lively and interesting discussion aside, I can’t help but be a bit disappointed.
It’s Skyrim.
I don’t know who’s idea it was to make horses drastically better at climbing mountains than a person, but I badly miss Morrowind’s Jump boosts. And Speed boosts. Stat boosts in general really.
But there’s something enormously satisfying about an enemy running away from you, then hitting them with Chain Lightning and blasting them backward to hurtle past your head at high velocity.
Jump boosts are fun, but one of the things I most like in Morrowind is the ability to fly.
Firing the interviewers is certainly indefensible.
I’d have to know more about Chinese culture than I do to understand exactly what the tweet meant- there is no single English sentence that can explain the meaning across cultures, and trying to interpret it using only a cultural context very different from the one in which it was made will not work.
Also, it looks like Blizzard is acknowledging that it overstepped the bounds of good sense and is walking back much of their decision.
They aren’t though. They aren’t walking back the decision. They are walking back the severity of the punishment. Which just makes them incompetent in addition to hypocritical.
I will admit at this point they did put themselves in a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation, on the other hand it’s of their own making.
So personally I subscribe to the theory that Blizzard probably decided to pre-empt potential backlash in China and did this on their own. And now that this got media traction, for many people Blitzchung became a sort of face or proxy for the entire Hong Kong protests, I wouldn’t be surprised if a bunch of people actually heard about the protests for the first time during this whole thing, and actual politicians are getting involved (albeit non-commitally) it seems to me they’re desperately hoping to placate both sides and praying that they can be both “see? we punished him!” to China and “see? we only punished him a little and we listen to you!” to the West. I really, really wouldn’t want to be the guy trying to put out this fire before someone decides to seriously shove this thing into big table poltics.
By the way, what of the two casters they fired? Everywhere I’ve seen they decided to give the guy his prize money back and cut his ban but don’t recall hearing anything about those two.
From the unpology link above. Everyone involved gets a six-month suspension.
Blizzard is and has always been pretty ban happy. I remember times from a decade ago when they banned players for “exploits” which where their own mistakes. Like in Diablo. The first guy who ever defeated Diablo on perma-death hard mode got his account permanently closed. The reasoning was ridiculous. I don’t remember exactly why because it made no sense. That player had to go out and buy another copy of of the game. That’s criminal IMO. Blizzard defrauded him out of his product.
In WoW, the first group of players to ever make it to a boss used bombs against him. This destroyed the terrain. They didn’t know the mechanics and didn’t know what was supposed to happen. Nobody did because they were the first. This bugged out the fight in a way that benefited the players. Everyone got banned. Because they used an “exploit.” No Blizzard, you twats! Players found a bug and you punished them unfairly.
Or another time in WoW a player got a DM item by accident. He used it to one shot all the bosses in a raid. Most of the raid didn’t know what was going on or why. Just confusion. Everyone in the raid got banned. *That one player* should have been been banned. The others should have had the raid reversed. The other people who didn’t know were victims.
Blizzard has a long history of screwing over people without anything close to fairness. Blizzard have always acted as authoritarian tyrants.
Just to get some clarification here:
If the player got a DM item by accident why should they be banned? If they cheated or exploited to get the item then sure, but if not, why a ban?
One can argue that USING the item at least counts as cheating(or exploiting). It should have been pretty clear to him that one shotting bosses isn’t something players are supposed to be able to do.
So long as he didn’t hack the game code, steal data, mess with the computers of other users, login to an account that wasn’t his, etc. then NO. He shouldn’t have to “know” anything. If Blizzard doesn’t want him to have the item, just use the GM powers to take it back. Then block whatever the mistake or exploit was. Using in-game behavior that takes advantage of the GAME and not other players should basically NEVER be a bannable offense. If you ban users for that, you’re saying “Hey, we expect you to not find any bugs or mistakes in our work, based on the Honors system!” It’s what a pathetic moron would say, instead of doing their job correctly.
I agree with you in most cases. In this case, no.
It was an item that was clearly labelled as a “cheat” item. The specific text was that did the following:
“Use: Kills all enemies in a 30 yard radius. Cheater.”
It was labelled as a cheat item. It was for a slot that couldn’t have items with abilities. It was an artifact at a time where artifacts of that color did not exist. He should not have been banned for receiving it, nor for using it once or twice. He should have been punished for deliberately taking it into a raid where it would cause the most problems.
Terrible car analogy: You are still liable in the real world if if a valet gives you the wrong keys and you decide to take that car anyway.
Okay, so it was clearly a dev item. I maintain, so long as he didn’t do any of those TOS breaking things, he should in no way be penalized for using it. If he used it to, for example, do a World’s First Raid clear or break a speed running record, those titles should be vacated, but he shouldn’t be banned for it. “He should have been punished for deliberately taking it into a raid where it would cause the most problems.” What is this sentence? Problems for who? For the dev? They deserve problems for their bad security or code or whatever caused it (AGAIN, presuming this wasn’t done through a stolen account or straight up hacking). Problems in what way? Did it destablize a server such that the game crashed for thousands of people? Even in that EXTREME case, that’s a case of unacceptably bad PROGRAMMING, not something the player did. If your dev tools can crash the server in that way, then a dev could have done it just as easily and it was irresponsible to code the item in that way. Which is STILL not the player’s fault.
If you’re going to get this mad about it, you should probably read WoW’s TOS first.
“Defend the honor of our country[5] at all costs”?
The translation issue probably came up because IIRC the Chinese word for “China” *literally* translates as “Our Land”, much like “Ohio” means “good river” in Iroquois.
I hate to touch on such a controversial subject, I know there’s a lot of strong opinions out there and some people cannot discuss it without getting angry. However, I can’t, in good faith, remain silent on this issue.
16:10 is a fantastic aspect ratio and should have become the widescreen standard.
Oh god yes. Looking at a 16:9 is like peeking through a letterbox. 16:10 you were too beautiful for this world.
*SCREEEEEEEEE*
https://imgur.com/isgA9cE
Just joking ;)
Your 1862 example is actually kinda horrific. “Yes, leave the politics at the door. Of slavery. Ignore the slavery and thus perpetuate it”
I think the fundamental issue is that you can’t NOT do politics. By refusing to acknowledge any politics, you are supporting the status quo, and that status quo is not good for everyone. It is easy to support a status quo and clutch pearls about big scary politics when the status quo is in your favor. But if you’re the one the bootheel is stomping, you can’t afford to pretend there are no politics.
They’re already fighting a WAR. It’s not saying ignore slavery. It’s just saying DON’T FIGHT HERE.
If we take your argument to its logical extreme, then we’re all obligated to fight about everything, everywhere, all the time. If we’re not allowed to set aside our differences without being accused of championing the status quo, then there’s nothing left to do but fight.
The slavery example is rough because… yeah you might actually have the moral responsiblity to fight EVERYWHERE that might help stop that practice. Being like “this is a safe space for people who aren’t currently slaves to just chill out” isn’t morally defensible. However, I get that this analogy was intended for a specific purpose and you weren’t really trying to make a moral argument out of it, so don’t take this as a condemnation or anything. There are other, less charged arguments (like the plastic straw thing I believe I mentioned in this thread) where being like “we’re not gonna talk about that here, in this specific place,” would be a more reasonable thing to do.
There is slavery going on right now. Human beings are trafficked to be sex slaves. Why are you spending time here, today?
If you can’t hold a Chess tournament without being compelled to kill all the pro-slavers that attend, how is that even different from slavery.