Any game with the ability to go online and talk with real people has to have some sort of censorship these days. Making sure no vitriolic or hateful narratives against others is a necessity to make games safer for all parties involved, however, it looks like politics is now also being censored in hit game Genshin Impact.
The new Chinese open-world RPG Genshin Impact has had, well, an impact on the gaming scene recently. The free-to-play title has impressed many players with how well produced it is, and although it takes a lot of inspiration Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, it has its own interesting takes on open-world games that fans are enjoying.
Although many play it single-player, there is also the option for online play with a chat feature. One player has now recorded a video of them attempting to send a message using the words Hong Kong and Taiwan - both of which are censored by asterisks.
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According to Kotaku, there have been sporadic complaints about the game censoring words, including the word 'Tibet' on the Genshin Impact subreddit. Even things like "words" and "enemies" have also been censored at some point it seems, so there is a variety of language that the game picks up as harmful in some way.
Daniel Ahmad has tweeted a theory about why this might be. He says due to MiHoYo being a Mainland China-based developer that they cannot produce games with "anything that threatens China's national unity". Other Chinese developers also censor these words due to the same law.
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This isn't the first time that the mention of Hong Kong has come up as a political topic within games. Last year Blizzard faced massive backlash from fans after stripping the Hearthstone tournament player, Blitzchung, of his winnings when he said 'liberate Hong Kong' on stream. Protestors then made Mei, an Overwatch character, a symbol of Free Hong Kong.
Featured Image Credit: MiHoYoTopics: Genshin Impact