Right but this would be something. The issue is in the public space now, people are talking about it, between Blizz and the NBA incident.
I’m all for the public exercising the power of their dollar to force some small concession toward freedom and human rights. Even if in the grand scheme it’s meaningless, like Blizzard’s video games have zero impact on what’s happening in Hong Kong and China, but they’re a vector to raise public awareness. The thing China, and all authoritarians, fear most is free thought and non-compliance.
They will try to do the “no politics allowed” thing as a fig leaf for bowing to them again. When that happens, and it will, I will scream even louder. I hope others will, too.
Personally I’d count that as a very minor win in redressing the poor handling of a specific incident, but to the larger issues of HK, China’s influence, and handling protests and political expressions from a gaming/esports platform, it wouldn’t resolve anything.
But it’s also much more difficult for me to define what a “win” is in those arenas. Defending HK protestors is arguably less controversial than wearing a MAGA hat to a lot of the US, whereas a participant wearing a Rockets jersey might still be identified as unacceptable to China. I don’t know where you draw lines respectfully—and I don’t mean “in deference to China”, I just mean how do you respectfully balance how to avoid political controversy in esports (a not unreasonable goal) with not being draconian about what people can say/wear/etc.
I think noise has to be made, or perhaps in a day in the future when hosts and ISPs and bandwidth providers are chasing Chinese markets, we don’t have to worry about this forum being wiped because of threads like this. Chinese extraterritoriality needs to be nipped in the bud right now.
At that point the penalty for political speech will have been clearly laid-out, and the perpetrator will have chosen to do it anyway. I don’t think it’ll make a big splash.
A win for me would be for Blizzard to unban, give his money back, apologize and end the statement with “And if this happens again in the future, we will do nothing about it and shut the fuck up.”
That’s not—in theory—an unreasonable stance. They don’t owe anyone the use of their platform to promote political causes no matter how united we all are here in them being a just cause. I just can’t imagine how to actually enforce that.
They absolutely do not owe anyone anything. I am saying that if they choose- which is, again, their choice- to punish someone for saying, say “stop the murder of the uighur people”, I will likewise choose not to patronize them.
Oh, I misread your response earlier. I was responding not to what you actually said, I was thinking you were talking about fixing this specific instance but then trying to say “but no more politics in the future”. Sorry!
My son was telling me that European players are organising to make GDPR requests from Blizzard. Those are laborious and have to be complied to by law.I do pity the low level employees who will do the complying though.
Blizzard is assessing the situation for now, a spokesperson told Engadget. The studio hasn’t otherwise spoken up about the issue since posting its decision to ban Chung on October 8th.
