This is The Guardian.

The Guardian Archive Longread.

Hello, my name's Oliver Holmes. I'm the author of No Colts, No Politics, No Gauls,

How China Censors the Video Game World, which was published as a Guardian article for the Long Read

section in 2021. This story was a look at the impact of China's extremely restrictive controls on

culture,

and how those restrictions could affect artistic freedom in the world's largest entertainment

industry. I wanted to write about video games, which I absolutely adore, but I felt that

their impact on society was often overlooked by the mainstream press, which focuses on books,

TV, film, and the wider arts.

That means as journalists we are missing the biggest cultural stories of our age.

Now, China is the world's largest market for video games. Today, the number of Chinese

gamers is twice the population of the US. But China is not a fully open society. Its government is

highly repressive. So how does that come up against the hugely creative and artistic industry?

There's a tension there. When people are listening to this, I'd love for them to think about how

culture impacts your worldview, depending on where you grew up. If you watched Top Gun or played

Call of Duty games, what worldview did that give you? How do you think about the US military,

and maybe more importantly, how do you view Russians or Arabs? This is the power of culture.

So people should consider how Chinese people will have an entirely different

world view. Secondly, I want people to think about how censorship is not always top down. In fact,

it works best when people self-censor, and the video game companies do self-censor to get into

the markets they want to sell in, including in China and the US.

...