History and Games This Week
Welcome to the week in history and games, a short collection of links to stories and news that we hope you find interesting.
Big news this week, as Red Candle Games have made their games Detention and Devotion available to purchase online. The Taiwanese developers "drew controversy", as newscasters across the English speaking world like to say, when Steam pulled the game from their store after the discovery of a Winnie the Pooh meme. This was an issue for supposedly spontaneously infuriated Chinese patriots, who demanded the game be taken down in one of several pre-pandemic examples of spineless corporate responses from the NBA to various American airline companies to largely manufactured outrage that was rather conveniently useful to the Chinese Communist Party.
Winnie the Pooh memes, for those wondering, are heavily censored in China because various Chinese people have used the term to mock Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Both games are good, and well worth a look! This might be a spur for us to finally give them the coverage they deserve. Both games are set in pre-democratic Taiwan, Detention during the height of martial law in the 1960s and Devotion during the thawing 1980s.
Speaking of politics in video games, just over two weeks ago a Polygon story on upcoming - and long delayed - game Six Days in Fallujah drew a pretty big reaction around the internet as publisher Victura CEO Peter Tamte argued the game was not seeking to make political commentary. If the name does not give it away, Six Days in Fallujah is set during the Iraq War, more specifically depicting the Battle of Fallujah in 2004. PCGamesN decided to have another go at it, sharing their own conversations with Tamte as well as feedback from Rami Ismail, a prominent indie game developer and a critic of the game. PCGamesN senior writer Ian Boudreau describes the article as a "good faith attempt to understand both what the game wants to be and why people are skeptical." I think it is worth your time.
Charles Games, makers of World War II documentary style Attentat 1942, will be participating in an exciting looking panel coming up on March 24th that looks pretty great!
We mention the Value Foundation a fair bit in these weekly posts, and they have a bulletin of their own. It is a good read and they are doing good work over there.
Finally. We are History Respawned. We love history. And games. Not always video games. Check out Subbuteo - Game of the Day for a very charming celebration of a hobby near and dear to John's heart.
