Tag: censorship

News

Quote, an upcoming literary RPG about destroying knowledge

Ignorance is bliss, or so the clichés say. It’s true that there’s a certain appeal to that innocence, but we as a society have decided that proverb is mostly bullshit, right? Knowledge, for lack of a better motivational poster, is power, and those who champion the cause of the opposite are generally suspected to have ulterior motives in mind. That’s what makes Fahrenheit 451 (1953) such an enduringly captivating dystopia; that’s why shelves are built down into the ground in the streets of Berlin on the sites of book-burnings; that’s why modern-day arguments of censorship carry so much weight. We like knowing…
News

The Westport Independent plans to pick up where Papers, Please left off

Digging through game jam games is hard work, so thanks to those who mined The Westport Independent from the veritable pile of games that Ludum Dare consistently produces. Instantly visually and thematically similar to Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please and his earlier title The Republica Times, The Westport Independent proposes to take us a step further, setting the game inside the borders of a totalitarian state that has set out to dissolve any independent entities—and, especially, your publication. As you are sent articles each day, you choose what will or won’t be censored from the each week’s issue, your choices gathering either loyalist suspicion or rebel…
News

There will be no hanky-panky in Chinese console games, apparently

It seems Russia is not the only regime making moralistic demands on videogames that seem outrageous to our modern Western lifestyles. According to the gaijin-centric Rocket News 24, China too is getting in on the censorship train, issuing statements to Japanese developers saying that characters wearing shorts, bikinis, and exposing outfits are not allowed. Also completely prohibited: bodily touching between males and females. Seriously. The blog trail runs cold into the Japanese language barrier, and doesn’t reveal which publishers received the letters, but one possible explanation is that they were specifically directed at devs known for hyper-sexualized depictions of anime,…
News

China issues list of censored content for console games; basically, no Persona

When we heard that China was loosening its reigns and allowing gaming consoles in the country, we figured there would be some stipulations, with everything we know about the extreme censorship behind the so-called Great Firewall. Well, we were right.  The Shanghai government has released some guidelines for game makers hoping to release games in the Asian state. It turns out there is a 20-day approval process in which game are submitted to Shanghai’s culture department, during which they are filtered for content not approved by the state.  There is a lot of forbidden fruit. The ban on racist content…