In a brief swing through China recently I saw young people playing hearthstone everywhere, I cannot stress this enough, _everywhere_ I went.
Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments
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Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments
#662So we are at the point where American video game developers are banning people from e-sports competitions for their comments over a domestic issue in a foreign country? Because the Chinese government probably didn't like his comments, that counts as 'public disrepute'? This is just wild to me.
It's part of the new push by corporations and organizations to subvert the law to appease their own ideologies. Despite there being no legal precendence or requirement for things to happen, those in authority positions are more than happy to silence those that disagree with their expectations. It is a direct result of cancel culture and deplatforming - if everyone assumed the best of intentions until explicit circums…
It’s not a “new push”. Hippies for example have never been tolerated in business, outside Vermont.
It’s just that some ideas that were considered normal in the corporate world are being questioned for the first time in a long time.
The idea that “everyone used to be able to say whatever they wanted without consequences!” is a little absurd if you think about it for a minute.
Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments
#663Interesting how an incidence in gaming garner more eye balls on the topic of Hong Kong politics than whole month combined. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... Good for the people of Hong Kong. The topic of Hong Kong didn't struck me as sensational/desperate as it deserves until a Hong Kong friend send me this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yXTHODE24Q Am moved by the clip, especial…
I don't understand why that YouTube video requires age verification. As far as I know that prevents it from being played to anyone not logged in, including embeds, and severely limits people from seeing it. Social media flagging is censorship. More and more people are calling on videos to be flagged, taken down, etc — then we run into instances like this one where we wish the mechanism wasn't in place at all. I hope…
I believe the age verification kicks in because there are scenes of violence in the video itself, not because of the topic.
Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments
#664We're increasingly at the mercy of private companies for what used to be considered civil liberties. I'm sure I'll get someone arguing about private v.s. public oppression, but at the end of the day being a professional video game player in someone's walled garden is no less of a specialized or acquired skill than say being an expert cabinet maker. So we're increasingly ending up in situations where people's hobbies…
He’s not exiled from professional gaming.
Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments
#665As I recall, Blizzard decided to remove skeletons and some other things from World of Warcraft years ago in order to enter the Chinese market.
Nothing wrong with that. You might laugh at skeletons being where they choose to draw the line, but we have rules as well about what can happen in a video game. There are no kids in Grand Theft Auto for a reason.
Also, Blizzard only removed them from the game in china
What would be more disturbing is if they had to rewrite some orc-politics story so it wouldn't offend chinese sensibilities, and US consumers got the rewritten version as well.
The movie Red Dawn(2012) was a remake of a 1984 action film where a communist army invades the US. They updated the invader from the USSR to China, come to "repossess" the US after we defaulted on national debt. This offended the chinese, so the producers had to spend $1M editing every reference to china in the film and making it a North Korean invasion instead. This was the version US consumers were sold.
Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments
#666What actually happened in the interview? Is there somewhere we can watch it?
Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments
#667Interesting how an incidence in gaming garner more eye balls on the topic of Hong Kong politics than whole month combined. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... Good for the people of Hong Kong. The topic of Hong Kong didn't struck me as sensational/desperate as it deserves until a Hong Kong friend send me this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yXTHODE24Q Am moved by the clip, especial…
> Interesting how an incidence in gaming garner more eye balls on the topic of Hong Kong politics than whole month combined.
That's crap. There's a Hong Kong-related story on the front page every couple days for a while now. Perhaps you didn't notice the pagination buttons at the bottom when sorting by date?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments
#668Earlier quoted context omitted.
> China is co-opting modern liberal censorship in the West to do it's own political censorship No, it’s using good old greater-pile-of-money diplomacy. SJWs aren’t running around rooting for Xi. This is a company with major economic exposure to China bowing to censors’ wills.
"SJWs" dont have to root for China for this to be an effective strategy... I think you're missing the point.
> “SJWs" dont have to root for China for this to be an effective strategy
The point was that “ China is co-opting modern liberal censorship” to advance its agenda.
That’s simply not the case. One is driven by mass outrage—bottom up. The other by central diktat—top down. They’re separate and unconnected vectors.
Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments
#669Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we're going to repeat the same cycle with Vietnam and India, we'd do well to encourage democracy this go-around. If we elevate authoritarian countries to our level, democracy may be in for a rough future. We should be learning a lot from the China situation. Modern China proves that authoritarian capitalism works and that you don't need freedom or liberty for your citizens. And that's incredibly scary. Imagine if…
Be careful. We don’t have a great track record “encouraging democracy” with Iraq and Afghanistan.
Or with Afghanistan the first time around, or Iran, or South Vietnam, or Cuba, or Nicaragua, or...
Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments
#670Earlier quoted context omitted.
People forget the context of the uproar and protests against Brendan. Indeed he was the lover of freedom that sent in political donations to take freedom away from others - namely, those not like him. It's interesting to see how people, especially champions of freedom of expression, can compartmentalize that mentality so easily and justify it to oneself. Those people deserve to be called out. Calling them out is also…
By a careful examination of Hinduism, Christianity, Islam and atheism I can tell that a large number of people are spreading damaging mistruths about some of the most important aspects of life. Much more damaging than being wrong about gay marriage. We have to be able to compartmentalise what people are wrong about that affects their work and what they are wrong about that does not. It is distasteful to support someo…
If you want to be a leader of hundreds of people, different standards apply.