Turns out, China doesn’t like looking like the bad guys.
Battlefield 4‘s been in the news a lot recently, and not in a good way. First, the rough launch didn’t just irritate players, it also affected EA’s stock price. However, the stockholders didn’t just sit back and take it, they filed a class action lawsuit about it. Now, the Chinese state media accuses the shooter of “demonizing the image of China in a new form of cultural aggression”. It’s all fun and games until someone declares cultural war.
“The use of video games…to discredit one country’s image in the eyes of other countries is a new form of cultural penetration and aggression,” an editorial in the Chinese military newspaper Zhongguo Guofangbao said. “When western countries would make war games in the past, they would settle on Russia if they needed an imaginary enemy, but in recent years, with the boosting of China’s national strength, China threat theories run rampant, and foreign companies are increasingly keen to put the Sino-US conflict in their games as a gimmick to attract attention.”
Ma Zhengang, the vice director for the China Public Diplomacy Association, is quoted, saying that “in order to deal with western preconceptions of China…[Chinese people] need to rise up, share China’s voice…[and] resist video game media that puts China in a bad light”.
Now, the astute reader would notice that the actual villain is a rogue Chinese general, and the player actually works with the Chinese to stop him, but perhaps the China Rising DLC pack tipped the scales there. Personally, I can’t wait until space aliens start to invade modern war shooters. Now that’s an enemy we can all rally against.
Source: South China Morning Post News
