Thanks Blizzard: Riot Games Forced To Let Everyone Know They're Allowed To Use Hong Kong's LoL Team's Name

from the riot-riot-riot dept

The fallout from Blizzard's heavy-handed move on a professional Hearthstone player for voicing support for the ongoing Hong Kong protests on a livestream, which included ripping away prize money and issuing a 1 year ban on competing, continues to blaze. But while most of the backlash has been directed solely at Blizzard, the company's actions are having a ripple effect across the eSports landscape.

Depressingly, plenty of folks in the eSports industry are clearly frightened that they might accidentally cross some undefined line with gaming companies and find themselves on the losing end of an international public relations argument. One lovely example of this is Riot Games' League of Legends competitions and streams. There appear to be plenty of folks out there that are self-censoring mentions of Hong Kong to ridiculous levels, including attempts to avoid saying the name of a LoL team, the Hong Kong Attitude.

With all the protests going on in Hong Kong, League of Legends casters appear to be avoiding saying the team name “Hong Kong Attitude” and seem to even be catching themselves when they do. Riot Games, however, says that it has not banned casters from saying “Hong Kong.” Chinese conglomerate Tencent owns Riot and has a stake in Blizzard.

It may be that last detail that has so many streamers spooked. Still, this all reached enough of a fever pitch that Riot Games decided to put out several statements clarifying that its streamers can in fact refer to a League of Legends team and, tangentially, use the name of one of the more populous cities on the planet. The fact that it had to do this at all is fairly crazy, but the detail here really drives that point home.

To make this as explicit as possible, we aren't telling anyone to avoid saying "hong kong." We'd just rather the team be referred to by its full name. There's been some confusion internally about this as well and we're working to correct it. — Ryan Rigney (@RKRigney) October 9, 2019



Again, this is crazy. A sentence that consists of "We aren't telling anyone to avoid saying 'Hong Kong'" shows just how effective Beijing's campaign of weaponized offense-taking has become. The entire point of the Chinese government's actions is to keep the Hong Kong protests out of the mouths of those that might be listened to. For this to morph into some of those people censoring themselves into not even mentioning the city's name for a competition that has an entrant from that city must feel like all of Xi Jinping's birthdays and Christmases came at once.

It is now long, long past time for these gaming companies, regardless of minority ownership stakes, to come out in support for the free expression of their employees and affiliates.

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Filed Under: chilling effects, china, esports, free speech, heathstone, hong kong, hong kong attitude, league of legends

Companies: blizzard, riot games, tencent