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.”
No it did not. Wukong is a bestseller: https://lemmy.ml/post/19657183
I said it in other threads already, but none of the evidence presented about sexism and Game Science were legitimate.
The sexist remarks quoted and shown in articles such as the one by IGN, were proven to be mistranslated and not sexist at all.
And of all anonymous claims of sexism within the company not a single person came forward so none can be proven or hold any ground whatsoever.
The “feminist propaganda” likely refers to the smear campaign IGN and other game journalists did on Game Science mysteriously right after they had refused a $7m extortion from Sweet Baby Inc.
It should be noted here that IGN knows and has commented on the fact that the sexist remarks were mistranslations but they still didn’t edit or retract the article. Instead they gave a non-apology saying it was Game Science’s fault for not responding and denying the allegations, which is just completely unreasonable.
Also, I’ve never heard of any of those streamers mentioned in this article, and not a single one I saw talked about politics of feminist propaganda during the streams. Game journalists are coping about the fact that the game was incredibly successful despite their efforts.
whenever someone mentions sweet baby inc i immediately think of them as that angry thumb screaming PRÖNOUNS because they saw a word in the character creation screen
It was relevant to the story, which is why I mentioned it.
As a Chinese, I could tell you it is not mistranslation. Some alt right user on Twitter use ChatGPT translate these pictures and even make up some translation to prove the “mistranslation”.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m7KGbkKii-o
This other Chinese person disagrees with you.
I can’t help but notice that she isn’t disagreeing with the translation. Just that the intention is somewhat disguised behind cultural barriers.
The infamous “I want to expand my circle and hire more people, get licked until can’t get an erection.” she describes as “crude” meaning it isn’t a completely off base translation (which honestly surprised me). It’s clear she has a bias, and is upfront about it, so I think she’s being more forgiving than a Western audience would be if a Western dev said similarly crude things.
I think a lot of the context is helpful, particularly about Chinese devs using female players as part of their own marketing. So “pandering to female players” is more directly associated with exploiting female players.
Clearly the studio has some statements the West would consider iffy, even with cultural context in mind. So the accusations of sexism don’t seem as cut and dry as either side is making it out to be
It is still a mistranslation if slang isn’t properly localized with the translation.
From what have been said about that specific sentence, “Get licked” is slang for “receiving praise” or something similar, which is why it turns from a sexist comment to as you said crude. It shouldn’t be interpreted as getting your body licked.
Totally agree, I interpret it in the same way as saying that people are blowing/fellating you. Not saying that is/isn’t sexist, but it is crude, especially as a public statement from a company. I’m just trying to get the facts straight
provide sources for all of that and ill bounce and moan on it with you
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ghXtEtk9q-Q
https://www.geeksandgamers.com/ign-used-mistranslated-commnets-from-black-myth-wukong-developer/
As for the anonymous sources claiming sexism, I can’t exactly give proof that they don’t exist, since there is no proof of them existing in the first place. The lack of evidence here is my evidence. Obviously if one of them comes forward to tell their story, the story becomes different, but as of now it is just a bunch of claims from IGN with no proof.
By the way, can we address the fact that people are downvoting your comment because you are asking for proof? Are people proud of being in a community that does this?
your sources are hilarious. i cannot imagine the wrong turn over would have to make in the creepy forest to end up in this hellhole. best of luck to you. i just hope you’re 13 and will grow up to cringe at the memory of this but at least be in a better state of mind.
What’s wrong about them? They are the first ones that show when you search on DDG. They’re the ones that reported on it. IGN wouldn’t report on it because they’d out themselves, and neither would the other common ones since they are owned by IGN.
The lack of evidence here is my evidence.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Lack of evidence is grounds for dismissal. And when making accusations, it is on the accuser to provide evidence, not for the accused to provide evidence of innocence.
Do you even have a gag reflex anymore?
“He’s right, but I don’t like it. He must be gay” - some terminally online lemmy.dbzer0.com user.
I like how your comment assumes women can’t exist on the internet
I’m pretty sure I know my own gender
Oh, sweetie. Gargling whatever your owners throw at you doesn’t make you gay, and your sloppy attempt to imply homophobic intent seems on-brand for your flaccid routine here. Do you even know what an original thought is, after having so much of your rhetoric unloaded deep inside you? 🤪
OK, let’s go with this, then. “He’s undeniably right as per my lack of addressing anything he says, but fighting misinformation is obviously something only a slave does. Heh, checkmate <2012 facebook emoji>”
as per
Oh, a literal child. Well, shit. That’s on me, then. 🤷🏽♂️
I would like to thank everyone in this comment thread for making me suicidally depressed. Good job dipshits.
Don’t be such a gay homophobic libtard chud.
I read that entire thread and it looked normal to me.
Also, by the time you read this I will have already dropped a toaster into my bathtub.
Which may, or may not, be related to that totally fine comment thread.
https://steamdb.info/app/2358720/charts/
Yeah. It clearly killed their sales.
I’m sure the Game Science folks are re-evaluating their life choices and wondering where they went wrong.
I wonder if Game Science meant avoid politics like “western identity politics” or “critique of the CCP”? Perhaps both?
No idea.
It’s hard to tell what their sales would have been had they left those terms out.
Most studios can only dream of having their marketing backfire that successfully.
When the story broke, my wife and I discussed it a bit, and I mentioned that I hadn’t even heard of the game before all this.
If it was deliberate marketing, it was really well done.
Could be.
A plan like that would be pretty risky. I suspect they just didn’t think it through much. I think their sales are mostly driven by people who didn’t care about anything besides a AAA Monkey King game.
Most people in the US have no idea how much pent up demand there was for this game. Monkey King is an insanely popular character. Imagine if Star Wars was a 500 year old franchise and nobody had ever made a decent video game about it. All your life you grow up with weird foreign characters you’ve never heard of and then someone comes along and says, “We’re going to make it and we’re pulling out all the stops on the graphics.”
If the developers did anything short of kicking puppies in public, people would still line up to throw money at them.
It Backfired
So much, they have 2 million concurrent players.
Someone here is salty because game is successful. I guess this is related to the IGN article
I don’t think this post said anything about ‘The Game’ backfiring.
It specifically calls out that streamers spoke about exactly what they didn’t want spoken. That’s what the Streisand Effect is.
Congratulations to Game Science for a good game, but it’s business as usual for the C-Suite being completely disconnected to how the social world works.
I would have thought that it was a “CCP interests” boilerplate. That is to say, maybe game science were just following what instructions they needed to by the CCP? It just seems so Chinese government to mention COVID-19 when this game has nothing to do with that.
CCP brainrot goes deep
Wired Magazine - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report)
Information for Wired Magazine:
MBFC: Left-Center - Credibility: High - Factual Reporting: High - United States of America
Wikipedia about this sourceSearch topics on Ground.News
https://www.wired.com/story/black-myth-wukong-streaming-controversy/
I think they’re doing this on purpose at this point. Wielding Streisand effect to the fullest of its potential to promote their game.
It backfired at that with me. I had my guard up when it popped up on my Steam queue, so even though I was curious about the game, it was a let’s see that it’s about and then move on for me.
In addition to the ccp stuff, it uses denuvo, so I wouldn’t have bought it anyways, so maybe it didn’t make that much of a difference. Though who knows, maybe I only noticed that because my guard was up; sometimes I forget to check.
Such a weird move to be like “we’ve picked a side in the culture wars, by the way don’t talk politics about us”
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.
There are two genders: male and political.
To people who want the status quo to exist forever (spoiler alert: it won’t), anything other than strict conformity to the status quo is political. But that conformity, itself, is not a political position, because it is ‘normal’.
They pick a side, then they pretend it’s not even a side at all.
This is the part that annoys me. If you want to avoid politics in a space, not “take sides,” (say, as a business owner) I totally get it. However, if you allow A to be said but somebody engaging with that is “too political” or “rocking the boat” you’re very much picking a side - You’re allowing speech A but censoring speech B. Thats the definition of taking a side lmao.
Also straight and political, white and political, etc.
I have yet to watch a video where anything mentioned in this “article” was brought up. The only place I have seen any of this is on Lemmy (and I would assume other social media if I used it), and I saw people questioning if this list of topics even went out to anyone.
This article seems like more “both sides” story telling trying to get clicks from the “woke” pitchfork brigade trying to find more things to clutch their pearls about.
Woke pitchfork brigade
Nothing you say is ever worth paying attention to if you use phrases like this
give the document a read yourself
Published by https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YVuo-oqw2EU
https://videogames.si.com/news/black-myth-wukong-streamers-feminist-propaganda
I have read that “document”, how does that change anything I said? Have you not seen this toxic “anti-woke” bile that has been popping up for every new game release now? Like we get that they hate woman, are super racist, and think that being gay or trans makes people not human, but I think they are a minority that should go back to living in the swap.
And my comment getting a -40 makes me sad for the future if that many people are choosing to side with hate and discrimination.
Have you not seen this toxic “anti-woke” bile that has been popping up for every new game release now? Like we get that they hate woman, are super racist, and think that being gay or trans makes people not human, but I think they are a minority that should go back to living in the swap.
They might be a statistical minority where you live, but that doesn’t mean they can’t assert political power and discriminate against scapegoated outgroups.
Thanks for the additional sources! And for the discipline.
China has a weird approach to misogyny. Women are both empowered and belittled, and it’s all over the media. Anybody who’s read the three body problem trilogy (especially book 3) can attest to this.
I read the whole series and somehow missed this, I did chalk up a lot of things to “must be a chinese cultural thing”, like the whole idea of all nations actually working together or globally banning “escapism” and just suspended my disbelief, so maybe I glossed over that bit as well. Is there a good article that dives into this?
The video series tried so hard to downplay that aspect of the books, but it felt like their overall plan was to plaster over & repaint the stains… until the whole thing was rotted through and the mask just slid right off. 😬
Don’t bother with video series.
Read the content to enjoy what value exists, and criticize what issues exist. Reading is not voting or aligning, it’s observing.
I agree, but with a caveat. Pirate things from people who publicly espouse shitty views. Purchasing it is justifying it. JK Rowling has explicitly said she feels more empowered to be awful because people keep buying Harry Potter stuff.
Arr matey.
Fandom is endorsement; the HP IP has become a huge anti-trans flag.
Every time people invoke it, they wave that flag some more, and mark it as an acceptable thing to stand under.
Let it die, both financially and culturally.
We’re talking about pirating books? Nah, go to a library. They need the numbers to get funding.
All of what you said is true, and I mildly regret giving the video series a chance, NGL. Also, that last bit doesn’t really jive with totalitarian states like PRC’s China. 😶
Huh? What do you mean about the last bit
Reading is not voting or aligning
Oh, well, fuckem, why would I consider them?
I don’t think about totalitarian states at all, outside of specific conversations about em
Because, that’s where the author is from? 😶
Especially book 3?? I stopped reading after the second because it was too much, it gets worse? wtf
What gets worse?
The start of this very short thread is:
China has a weird approach to misogyny.
I assume that’s what gets worse.
Yes, so much worse, directed at both men for not being manly enough and women for being… well, not manly men.
I wrote off the novel when the author said that the Chinese people weren’t ready for democracy
To the mod who removed my comment.
There was absolutely 0 sexism in that comment. You deleted it, stating sexism and that it broke rule 1, which it absolutely did not. I was very civil in disproving the claims the article presents, meanwhile I still have comments responding to my comment implying that I’m gay and a slave for saying it, but those don’t break rule 1?
You’ve used your moderation to help the spread of misinformation, which is against rule 8.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
If you have a question about a moderation decision, you can msg any member of the moderation team for review/explanation. I have reviewed the removed comment and found that it was not removed in error. If anything, it should also have been removed for misinformation as well.
In the future, any comments about individual moderation actions that are not addressed to the mod team through an appropriate channel will be removed. This is to avoid derailing legitimate, topical conversations.
Typical mod on an ego trip.
Oh great mod abuse is happening here as well?
Mod abuse is universal. Power corrupts.
Check the user’s modlog and judge for yourself.
I’m not afraid to show it. I firmly believe nothing I said broke any rules, and I’ve provided sources of the arguments in the subcomments too.
Every instance has its bias. Mods squash deviation from their consensus.
What is the purpose of moderating if not enforcing your personal opinion on everyone
It happens everywhere. Just Jannies doing janny things. Sweep it up, janny!
Just keep in mind: he does it for free
That makes it worse
That’s the point
How could it not happen anywhere where mods are? It is in the nature of the thing.
Looking at your replies in that thread, I suspect that your comment did break rules.
You don’t need to suspect you can check for yourself, modlog exists.
Just checked it myself. Turned out to be a load of Gamergate bullshit. Not surprised it got removed.
What horseshit. Not a single thing I’ve said has been gatekeeping games. If you truly believe the post being removed, or any of the bans I have were justified, you probably only saw the mod messages without reading my posts. Every single post in that mod log is me calling out misinformation.
Do you know what gamer gate refers to? It doesn’t have anything to do with gatekeeping is why I mention it.
It refers to a movement that tried to gatekeep women out of games. It happened because a female game developer allegedly slept with a reputable game journalist in order to market her game. It very much is about gatekeeping. That’s why it is called Gamergate in the first place, though it was mostly harassment.
Criticising game journalists who spread misinformation does not make me a gamergater.
That was a false allegation made by her ex boyfriend as revenge.
No, it’s called gamer gate because every major scandal is just called blah gate after watergate. It was not called gamer gate because of gatekeeping.
It was called Gamergate because of The Watergate Scandal. It was a fad for almost 40 years in US media to add “gate” to the end of whatever scandal was going on. Any gatekeeping meaning was added well after the fact
Dumb question: how do you check the modlog?
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&userId=545695
Here you go. You’re free to judge for yourself.
You comments are probably not sexist, but they are likely misinformation. The comments in IGN are likely not mis-translation, since the Mandarin-spwaking community also had pretty big reactions to the comments and histories of game science. See: https://m.douban.com/note/776087909/ and https://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/710811.html?amp (you can try to use google translate to read the article).
The screenshot in the IGN article, to the best of my knowledge, correctly translated. The comments listed has as much sexual implication as the translation.
I use both Mandarin and English on a daily bases, and can translate between them pretty well. It would be great for me and others, if you can be more specific on which parts of the developer’s posts are mistranslated.
So to your best knowledge, “getting licked” is literal, and not figuratively “recieving praise”? Just want to confirm this, because this is what changes the meaning from something sexist to just something unprofessional. It is the basis of my entire argument because this is what my sources all say. I’m not saying the developers weren’t unprofessional. I’m saying they weren’t sexist.
It is in between, getting licked is the figurative speech for “unjust praises” with a hint of submission in the tone.
English also have a similar expression like “licking one’s boots”, but in Chinese it is more sexual, as it typically refers to licking something else. An alternative is “跪舔”, which means “kneel and lick”.
That is a good question, I know where the button is for the website (it’s in the sidebar, in my UI it’s green) but the app im using doesn’t have an obvious button
If it’s the mod I think it is, prepare for a 30d ban …
Based on their comments in this thread they may have earned that much of a ban
Could you clarify what comments I made that broke any rules, or were even slightly unpleasant?
Easiest to list which ones weren’t. You’re escalated replies aren’t helping you either
You’re dodging. Just say one then.
All of them then. Amazing you haven’t been banned for how uncivil you are
You didn’t even read them, did you?
I haven’t been banned as of this comment, but that sounds like a lovely person.
I get people downvoting. It contradicted lot of beliefs, but removal was not justified.
I did get banned from PleasantPolitics@slrpnk.net by their bot that bans purely based on how many downvotes you have.
