No cults, no politics, no ghouls: how China censors the video game world

theguardian.com

8 points·baylearn··3 comments

> The Chinese ministry of culture accused the game of “distorting history and damaging China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity”.

Amazing. So the CCP literally said their sovereignty and territorial integrity suffers from one video game showing Tibet as separate nation. Do they realise how weak and insecure they look with that?

And based on the rules laid down in the article it sounds like Dark Souls is definitely not a thing in China. No skeletons, no enemies burying out of the ground...

They understand the importance of controlling the narrative.

The way something is presented and the repetition of it in small but numerous ways influences our views until the repeated view is accepted without question. The 'correct' narrative must become a Pavlovian reflex.

There was a piece recently about the BBC when they removed a section on some children educational content on climate change because that section asked children to come up with potential positive consequences, for instance. This is the same overall process at play.

An intriguingly different story on censorship. HN tends to approach the question through a specific historical framework (itself a political football) and miss out on a lot of the interesting psychological ramifications. worth your time.

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