“The Marvelous Snail”, are you playing games which censor your speech?

Hong Kong Echo

#NetizenVoice

(24 Jul) Recently a new game “The Marvelous Snail” was launched on Taiwan region Google Play and App Store. As soon as it was announced, along with advertorials from internet figures and tremendous advertisements, the game has secured the top position in both online stores.

After briefly playing this game, I found that this game does has sufficient playability, along with cute graphics and humorous content…However, how much “freedom” are you willing to sacrifice in order to play this game?

From the introduction in the login page, tutorial and announcement, the game consists of many mainland Chinese terms. As you play, you would find out any words “China doesn’t like” cannot be typed in the chat room.

Some may say politics should not be discussed in games. However the banned political terms are only those “China doesn’t like”. Many players now report if they mention terms like anti-ELAB protests, KMT and CCP, revolution, Carrie Lam, Liberate Hong Kong, Taiwan Independence, Wuhan Pneumonia, 4th June, “6*4=24”[1], freedom of speech, Winnie the Pooh, Xi Jinping, Xi Winnie, little pinks, the characters would display as *** or the player would be muted. Some players received a chat restriction of 15-30 days for typing “Tsai Ing-wen”, “Democratic Progressive Party” (current ruling party in Taiwan) and “Taiwan”.

However nothing happened when I type “long live China”, “long live CCP”, so are these 2 sentences not political?

Screenshots and evidences of the situations above can be found on gaming sites like forum.gamer.com and the ratings of the app. You can try it yourself in the game. Chat restriction is no new element in pro-Beijing games, there is no need to accuse me for spreading rumors.

How much can you compromise against freedom?

Of course we can simply be an ordinary player, like many would say separating politics from games. It’s ok to spend money on Chinese games occasionally, even with the result of half of Taiwan’s top 20 games are Chinese and get them on news headlines. It’s fine if you pour all your money to China.

However I saw some players being restricted for typing “official”. There are items named “universal key” and “independent declaration” in the game. Trust me, typing these items would also result in ***.

If you can’t even type the name of in-game items, how do you know there would not be a day the in self-censorship in game would censor words the CCP doesn’t want people to mention and display words like “suicide”, “making money” in Putonghua Romanization like Tiktok?[2]

Anyway, I can’t stand a game exercising censorships in a so-called Taiwan server like how it did in China. I have deleted it.

Going back to the Chinese condolence on 4 April, tons of games followed the event. It was until that time many players realized they are playing a pro-China game. Afterwards a player in “劍俠情緣參” got chat restricted for 10 years for saying “Okay, China Wuhan Pneumonia”. As a result, the Taiwan distributor Wanin ended its distribution in order to protect freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech is something would gradually disappear if you don’t defend it.I hope everyone can play games without the worry of being chat restricted because of any kind of censorship. (Those who conduct personal attacks and humiliations deserve being prosecuted but not chat restricted)

[1] In Chinese 4th June is read as “六四”, “6*4=24” is commonly read as “六四二十四” and the first 2 characters match the 4th June massacre’s name.

[2] In TikTok the word suicide 自殺(Zi Sha) has to be typed as 自S，the word making money 賺錢(zhuan qian) has to be typed as 賺Q

Editor’s note: This game was developed by a Chinese company Qcplay Limited and published by LTGames Global, a Hong Kong company. LTGames is a sub-company of another Chinese company G-bits Network Technology (Xiamen) Co. Ltd. So the so-called “Hong Kong company” is just a camouflage. Then onits official site we can see the game "不思議迷宮" listed, which was developed by the same team who developed "The Marvelous Snail".

Source: Yanwu's Facebook

“The Marvelous Snail”, are you playing games which censor your speech?

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