Monkey business.
Black Myth: Wukong releases tomorrow and is really rather good. As PCG’s Tyler Colp said on his way to awarding it a handsome 87% in our review, “these animals may not have thumbs, but they sure have hands.”
The game has run into further controversy, however, over an email sent from its marketing team to content creators planning to cover the game at launch. Co-publisher Hero Games is distributing Steam keys to these individuals, which comes with a link to a Google document (verified by both IGN and Forbes) containing some rather wild conditions for coverage.
The text consists of lists of “dos” and “dont’s”, with the former being simply “enjoy the game” before we get to the more questionable stuff. This includes some standard requirements that you’d get with almost any pre-release code, such as not insulting other streamers, offensive language and humour.
Then it veers off completely, saying that streamers playing Black Myth: Wukong must not include “nudity, feminist propaganda, fetishization, and other content that instigates negative discourse.” This will immediately set off alarm bells, because the major controversy over this game has been about a history of sexist remarks from developer GameScience’s leaders, outlined in an IGN report last year. The studio has gone bunker mode about these during the release period, and such attitudes don’t appear to permeate the game, but taking aim at “feminist propaganda” is a terrible look.
Things don’t get better, as the guidelines move onto subjects that are sensitive within China, the home country of Game Science and Hero Games. Streamers are told not to use “trigger words such as ‘quarantine’ or ‘isolation’ or ‘COVID-19′”, a requirement that seems to relate to various theories about the origin of the COVID-19 outbreak. Why any streamers would be doing that in the first place is a mystery, but there you are.
Finally, it gets explicit: “Do NOT discuss content related to China’s game industry policies, opinions, news, etc.” This one is quite weird because Black Myth: Wukong is loosely based on Journey to the West, a classic Chinese novel and arguably the single most popular and influential literary text in Asia.
Talking about Journey to the West without talking about China in some manner almost seems like an exercise in futility, even if the real reason for overbearing guidelines like this is probably that Hero Games doesn’t want streamers using its game as a jumping off point to discuss wider allegations about the Chinese industry. There is an anti-China attitude that permeates some corners of the western internet: though trying to tell westerners what they can and can’t talk about seems an extraordinarily bad way of dealing with it.
For what it’s worth, PC Gamer’s review code came with no restrictions resembling the above, and these requirements seem limited to streamers. The backlash also appears to have Hero Games backpedalling, with the document seemingly withdrawn and questions asked by the community of its veracity. I’ve reached out to Game Science and Hero Games for comment, and will update with any response.
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