Politics is everywhere—yes, even in gaming

Oct. 23, 2019 | Written By: Gabbie Puzon

Blizzard Entertainment suspended one of its top gamers, Chung Ng Wai, after he called for Hong Kong’s freedom from China during a gaming livestream last Oct. 6. His prize money from the competition was revoked by Blizzard, much to the ire of netizens. Blizzard’s president, J. Allen Brack, said that Wai was suspended because he “disrupted the broadcast” with “unrelated topics.”

The whole thing is pretty damning knowing that 1) one of the company’s core values is “every voice matters” and 2) Tencent, a Chinese conglomerate, is a stakeholder in Blizzard.

From a public relations standpoint, those are some terrible optics.

Now, politics bleeds into every aspect of business and entertainment—even the seemingly niche world of gaming. It’s easy to fool ourselves into thinking that gaming is purely entertainment without any political slant—after all, video games were made to be recreational above all else. Still, we have to remember that people and companies produce games—and by no means are they neutral at all.

It might be easy to brush this off as a simple “breaking the rule” fiasco, but incidents like this show history repeating itself—especially when we think about what happened to Colin Kaepernick when he knelt during the national anthem.

Blizzard, like all companies, will always subject to the court of public opinion if they do anything that warrants criticism. Even though Blizzard reinstated Wai’s winnings and shortened his suspension, the damage was done—the public is livid, both online and in real life. Twitter users called for a boycott with #BoycottBlizzard, and employees have protested in the company’s headquarters in Irvine, California. Blizzard’s stocks even plummeted 4% last week following Wai’s suspension.

Acting as the cleanup crew after a bad fallout is always a draconian task. At this point, all a company can do is take the reactionary route and hope the public is willing to trust them again. Though like every PR crisis, earning the public’s trust back is never going to be easy—especially when it involves matters of politics.