A-Infos (en) Britain, AFED, organise magazine: Blizzard Boycott | RBG

You probably haven't heard of Blitzchung but he has just cost Activision Blizzard and 
their subsidiary Blizzard Entertainment billions. ---- Blizzard (as they are commonly 
called) are one of the mega corporations that dominate the gaming market, from Candy Crush 
to Call of Duty, World of Warcraft to Overwatch they are an ever present force in in video 
games and one which the vast majority of gamers buy into regularly with subscriptions and 
micro purchases. They are also (alongside Steam) one of the major investors in the Chinese 
marketplace. Once locked behind the world largest electronic firewall cutting 1.4 billion 
people out of the world wide web (in any meaningful manner), the Chinese government has 
been allowing selected international companies to develop branches of their software and 
platforms in partnership with the state and local corporations in order to capitalise and 
control the new medium. The contracts are worth untold sums, already standing around 13% 
of the global market place. Conservative estimates see that leaping into the dozens in the 
coming years as Steam launch their Chinese-specific platform and home grown game 
developers crop up in plentitude. You just have to keep the CCP happy and comply with 
their censor.

So when last Sunday during a post match interview top Hearthstone player Blitzchung, real 
name Chung Ng Wai, wearing goggles and a face mask said "Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of 
our time", Blizzard Entertainment came down hard to protect their investments, banning him 
from competing for one year and rescinded the $10,000 prize money he won in the recent 
Asia-Pacific Grandmasters tournament.

Then, then they doubled down.

Players took to the forums in a rage, demanding Blizzard take back the judgement and 
reinstate Blitzchung, When they began using the forums to share news and information about 
the protests in Hong Kong. Blizzard, a company whose headquarters feature a statue of an 
Orc with plaques that say "Think Globally" and "Every Voice Matters", implemented wild 
ranging censorship at the start of the week. First, it was noted they had began banning of 
movement-related usernames and controls put in place across their games and websites to 
curtail any Hong Kong related discussion. When they mass deleted comments and threads ( 
Minus one thread which remains a bastion of information and debate) as "trolling" and 
summarily handed of 1000 years bans, the players had had enough. Blizzard's games are 
heavily focused on multiplayer and generally have subscription services which means 
players have spent thousands of hours and in many cases just as many pounds on their 
accounts only to have them wiped out in an instant for sharing their political solidarity 
with Hong Kong and thus taking a position against Activision Blizzard's corporate partners.

By mid-week one of Overwatch's characters, a Chinese climatologist called Mei, become a 
symbol of the movement both online, at gamer events and even on the streets of Hong Kong. 
Now even their own employees have staged walkouts in disgust. Mark Kern, the man who led 
the team who developed World of Warcraft, cancelled his WoW subscription and called for a 
boycott commenting "It's one thing to stay out of politics in games, quite another to take 
harsh, punitive actions designed to appease a government whose values are against what 
Blizzard has traditionally stood for".

Players followed suit. They began mass deleting accounts they had held for in excess of a 
decade. Outside of the gaming community, this may not seem much but this is the equivalent 
of tearing up your season ticket and burning all your shirts. Aside from the financial 
expense in doing this, people were cutting themselves out of sprawling communities they 
had met friends in, worked in, played in and given over so much emotion too. Particularly 
with games like World of Warcraft which have a player base woven into it's very being. The 
stories of heartbreak and deleted account started to pour into Reddit, Imgur and other places.

At time of writing people are noticing that all four methods of account deletion are not 
working with SMS messages never arriving and error notices being the only return, whether 
this is a deliberate attempt to minimise the blood loss or whether Blizzards services are 
overwhelmed is hard to say however the player base seems pretty sure on the matter and 
have instead taken to cancelling their payments on the bank side and have began flooding 
Blizzard with General Data Protection Requirement (GDPR) requests and sharing solidarity 
during live streams, which subsequently got shut down mid-stream in the ongoing attempt to 
police the boycott. Yesterday, Immutable, the Australian start-up who make Hearthstone 
rival God's Unchained, announced they would cover Blitzchungs prize winnings and 
immediately came under cyber attack once again invoking the ire of the gaming community.

While it's true that some of this response has been typically headstrong and near 
sinophobic in its manner, latching on to the United States' currently wave of anti-China 
sentiment during its ongoing economic battle, the vast majority has in fact been of a 
progressive manner. There was a wave of solidarity yesterday during Taiwan Independence 
Day as well as persistent and vocal solidarity with Tibet and the Xinjiang Muslim 
community. There has been little space given to the with nastier elements of anti Chinese 
racism which has been a rather refreshing change of pace from the often rather 
right-leaning gaming community, instead focus very much being on refusing to accept a 
well-loved corporations siding with state censorship and in a broader manner pushing for 
more pressure on China to stand down from their villainous policies of control.

Corporate collusion with governments is a given for most activists, so it's no surprise 
that Activision Blizzard have acted this way, however this has come as a shock to the 
wider gamer community who tend towards being apolitical or centrist, a nasty reminded of 
the nature of corporations. Where the mounting boycott will go is anyone's guess, however 
with players from across the political spectrum united in their disgust at the treatment 
of Blitzchung, the censorship and ridiculous long banning of players themselves this seems 
only to be spiralling upwards.

It's worth taking time to note some of the other corporations so gleefully trading 
renminbi for ethics, here is a list of shitty corporations and the actions. ?

~ Peter Ó Máille

http://organisemagazine.org.uk/2019/10/11/blizzard-boycott-rbg/
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