No, Ukraine, The World Should Not Boycott A Video Game That Looks Kindly On Russian Communism
from the and-neither-should-you dept
As we’re right at the 1 year anniversary of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of its sovereign neighbor, Ukraine, regular readers here will have followed along with all kinds of posts we’ve done on the subject, be it on tech-related items or some of the ways the video game industry has organized to help the country get the funds it needs to survive. Throughout it all, the conflict has, in most cases rightly, been pitched as a conflict between good and evil, democracy vs. authoritarianism, and a free and open society combatting an aggressor with all the hallmarks of a closed, censor-heavy society.
Which makes it particularly annoying that Ukraine is now seeking to ban a video game that is sympathetic to Russian communism, may have some ties to the Russian government, and would like the rest of the world to boycott it as well.
Ukraine’s Digital Ministry has said it will ask Steam, Microsoft, and Sony to remove Atomic Heart from their gaming platforms in Ukraine, and possibly elsewhere, pointing to its retro-Communist aesthetic and reported “Russian roots.”
As reported by the Ukrainian tech news/job site Dev.ua (Google translation), Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation (which also provided a statement in English to PCGamesN) writes that Atomic Heart “has Russian roots and romanticizes communist ideology and the Soviet Union.” The Ministry cites the game’s “toxicity,” “potential data collection of users,” and use of funds from the game “to conduct a war against Ukraine.” The statement asks for an outright ban on the game in Ukraine but calls on other countries to consider “limiting distribution” of the game.
There are several reasons why this is not a good idea. For starters, it is exceptionally unlikely that any significant portion of the world will comply with the request to boycott the game. I highly doubt that the platforms in question will, either, even as some of them have gotten involved in some of the industry action to support Ukraine. After all, the justification for all of this amounts to that the game is sympathetic to Russian communist history. A claim which, well:
Atomic Heart’s gameplay takes place in an alternate history, where the Soviet Union is, as I put it in my first impressions, “not just ascendant, it is literally floating.” The USSR makes the world’s best robots, its citizens live in a utopia where those robots do their menial tasks and labor, and even greater things are just about to happen. If you’ve played the Fallout or BioShock series, you know that a game can lovingly detail a world full of astounding promises, yet take apart that optimism by showing the hypocrisy, the false promises, the ego-driven leaders and actors causing so much pain, and the impact on real people’s lives when it all comes apart.
After playing the game’s early hours and reading more about its broad plot points (and without necessarily spoiling it entirely for everyone), I’ll say that there is, unsurprisingly, more nuance than is mentioned in a call for boycott. The Soviet State in Atomic Heart, and its maniacal leaders, are responsible for the death of untold thousands or millions of citizens at the hands of their own robots. There are plans to foist this death on the rest of the world, rather than win them over with the benefits of collectivist effort. The KGB, for which your protagonist formerly worked, are not the good guys.
So, yeah, not exactly the glowing review of the Russian communist system that Ukraine described. And that becomes a major issue for the Digital Ministry’s credibility. When you’re not just advocating for a ban on a game, or any other piece of media, in one country, but a boycott in other countries, it would be nice to get the actual details of the accusation correct.
The other reason for the boycott, according the ministry, has at least some more legs: that the studio that released the game has some ownership that can be tied back to the Russian government.
The developer, Mundfish, cites Cyprus as its international headquarters but has previously shown off its Russia-based offices in a video tour. AIN.capital, a site focused on Central and Eastern European tech news, cited Mundfish’s Russian store website privacy policy in January as disclosing that user data could be transferred to Russian state authorities, including the tax office and FSB, Russia’s modern state security agency. AIN.capital also cites a legal address in Russia in the policy. Mundfish denied collecting data in a response to GamesRadar, stating that its privacy statement was “outdated and wrong, and should have been removed years ago.” The Russian store has seemingly been removed from Mundfish’s site.
Mundfish’s investors include Tencent, the Chinese gaming giant, and GEM Capital. GEM Capital’s founder, Anatoliy Paliy, formerly served as first deputy general director for a Gazprom division, and GEM is actively involved in the Russian energy market. Like Mundfish, GEM claimed to games journalist Kirk McKeand in January that it was now based in Cyprus and had no Russian investments. You can read more about the hard-to-prove but quite plausible web of connections between GEM, Gazprom, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at PC Gamer’s detailed explainer.
So, yeah, more muddled than the first claim… but so what? Unless Ukraine wants to make some kind of sanctions-based argument, is it really suggesting that the rest of the world ought to be boycotting any video game produced by any publisher that has any ties back to any kind of Russian ownership? For a video game that doesn’t actually reference the current war with Ukraine? A game, mind you, that began development in 2018, long before the current conflict?
This is a small example of how you cede the moral high ground in a war of not only bullets, but of the minds of the world as well. Either Ukraine is for an open and free society… or it isn’t. This is not an example of the former.
Filed Under: atomic heart, boycotts, censorship, communism, free speech, russia, ukraine, video games