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The last few days I have teetered back and forth on whether or not I really wanted to make a post on this.  I ask you to read this in its entirety before passing judgement on me personally. There is a fine line to walk between sounding like a corporate apologist and sounding like a xenophobe.  Please note I am by no means an expert in foreign affairs but I do try my best to be a student of current events and of history. I feel like I need to preface this with a brief history lesson.  On Midnight of July 1st in 1997 Hong Kong as a territory moved from British Rule to being governed by the mainland of China. There are numerous sources of information about this change if you are interested.

As part of the agreements from this hand over was the establishment of the Hong Kong Basic Law, that was intended to allow for business to continue as normal in that territory, and for the residents to maintain its legislation as part of a special administrative region (SAR).  This was supposed to extend for a period of 50 years to allow for a peaceful transition from living under the British Commonwealth to whatever the new system of government would be. The ideal being that the citizens of Hong Kong in this SAR would maintain a certain degree of self rule along with the promise of universal suffrage and the ability to elect their own officials.

Certain aspects of this Basic Law never quite were implemented and in the 22 years since the handover of power, a number of these rights have been sufficiently diluted.  This all leads to the situation we have today where protesters have been active on the streets of Hong Kong since March.  Initially this was a protest seeking the withdrawal of an extradition law that would potentially open up Hong Kong residents to the jurisdiction of the Chinese mainland.  As the protests have gone on they have morphed into a huge ball of issues from police brutality to the restoration of some of those rights that have been eroded, to more recently a demand of full universal suffrage.

Now moving forward we have the current situation.  On October 6th during an official Blizzard Hearthstone Grandmasters series stream the player “Blitzchung” aka Ng Wai Chung gave a statement over the broadcast in support of the Hong Kong protestors.  The exact statement translated was “Liberate Hong Kong. Revolution of our age!”. During this the streamers seemingly knew it was coming and ducked down beneath their desks while he was saying it, and immediately went to commercial after that.  

The VOD of this stream was scrubbed and various copies of it have been taken down from YouTube.  Who knows how long the above video will be available but at the time of writing this represents a copy of the sequence.  Following the event Blizzard used a section of the official Hearthstone Grandmaster Competition rules to claw back any earnings from the player that had yet to be collected, and also as a result both of the commentators were fired. Shortly after this, Blizz posted the above questionable response on the official Chinese language only Weibo account.

During a stream on Tuesday night, three collegiate competitors from American University in Washington D.C. held up a sign in solidarity.  The sign above simply says “Free Hong Kong, Boycott Blizz”, and extremely rapidly the camera was cut away from that match leading to some very nervous discussion from the commentators.  Once again the stream has been scrubbed from the official twitch account and is only available through third party sources on YouTube. Most recently as I sit here tonight and write this, signs are pointing that Blizzard is taking action to try and disable players from deleting their account data in protest.

The situation keeps escalating and we still have yet to see a reasonable response from Blizzard on this.  The problem that I keep struggling with is that I can absolutely see how we end up in a situation like this.  The entertainment industry and video games specifically have an addiction to Chinese investment. This situation is escalated by the fact that many Chinese companies have been earning wealth at a frightening pace and have little to no legitimate places to invest that money in mainland China.  

The main way of ensuring wealth for the long term has been in real estate, and there are legitimately ghost towns full of high rise buildings and apartments that will likely never seen tenants.  Those who have the means have been parking that money in as many foreign investments as they can, which only serves to further the “Belt and Road” initiative of the Chinese government.  Along with actual tangible infrastructure, a lot of this money is funneling into supporting video game companies.

One of the first responses that I saw yesterday was from the Destiny community, giving a sign of relief that they are thankful for the move to Steam and away from the Battle.net launcher.  However Bungie has also accepted a large investment from NetEase the same Chinese company that is collaborating with Blizzard on Diablo Immortal. The truth is there really isn’t a large games company on the market right now that does not have at least some significant investment from a company that hails from mainland China.

Perfect World, Tencent and NetEase are massive players in a lot of competing game markets.  What is probably more concerning is that I have watched over the last two days and the coverage by the enthusiast press seems fairly anemic at best, and non-existent at worst.  I am seeing a constantly flow of this on my social feeds, but generally speaking the articles have covered only the strict facts with little to no condemnation of the actions. The same entities that have been pouring money into game studios, also represent a significant share of the advertisers willing to take out those massive full page ads.

To deal with one of these Chinese companies is to at least in some way deal with the politics of the Chinese government.  On some level every modern game sold in the Chinese region has made some measure of concessions to appease or placate. This can be something like referring to Taiwan as Chinese Taipei to keep from offending the “One-China Policy”, or it could be removing all bones from games and replacing them with fleshy patches like is in the case of the Chinese World of Warcraft client.  Offending the government means that more than likely your games will be pulled from that region and eventually the source of investment money begins drying up.

All of this said… I absolutely understand why Blizzard did what it did.  It was a knee jerk reaction and in doing so they misjudged how much gamers would care about it.  I can understand why something happens and still consider it to be the wrong call. As I said before there is an addiction to Chinese investment in the entertainment industry.  It isn’t a Video Game problem, but one significantly larger. Ultimately these companies are going to have to make a decision as to whether or not their own corporate values are worth sullying to keep the cash flowing.  They are also going to have to decide just how many existing customers they can alienate in the process.

As I said at the beginning of this, I have been on the fence about how to react to this.  As the day went on today and more examples of this nonsense started flowing out, my mind was made up for me.  Unfortunately my subscription recently renewed so any protest I might make is going to seem a bit weak considering I just paid for 6 months of World of Warcraft subscription last week.  I am also not going to delete my account, because that seems a little extreme at this point because I would only be hurting myself in the process. I am however going to halt progress in World of Warcraft Classic and going to similarly stop writing about it. Equally for the time being I am going to stop buying anything Blizzard related.

The parting thought that I want to leave you with however is that this was a decision made at a corporate level more than likely by investor relations flacks.  The line of business employees just want to keep doing what they love and keep making video games. Please don’t take your anger towards the actions of Blizzard and project it on their employees.  They are good people and do not deserve the shit storm of hatred that is about to be heaped upon them. Be kind and gentle and find ways to express your displeasure in a sane and rational manner. I fully support the boycott of Blizzard products, just don’t make the lives of these good people trying their best to support you into hell.

This morning you are about to suffer through an “Old Man Bel” post, as I complain about something that very few of you will have experienced. Growing up in rural Oklahoma, one of the highlights of our year was the two week run of the Tulsa State Fair. This is not to be confused with the Oklahoma State Fair that happens in Oklahoma City a few weeks prior. It always straddles the border between September and October, and generally speaking Oklahoma starts to get cold at some point during that second weekend. However the first weekend generally is lovely in the high 60s to mid 70s.

I was in a service club called 4-H which was something I had largely been forced into by my mother who had fond memories of it. As such I traditionally had a bunch of exhibits that were entered at the local county fair in woodworking, photography, art or whatever happened to seem reasonable that year. If you won at your local county fair, it trickled up into the nearest State Fair of which ours was Tulsa roughly an hour away from the town I grew up in. As such we would religiously make a trip to the Tulsa State Fair on the second weekend to see how my exhibits had placed in the larger show.

The state fair was magical for a bunch of reasons, but the main one were all of the exhibits. Growing up in rural Oklahoma, you didn’t exactly have a lot of access to things throughout the year. The exhibit halls featured vendors selling pretty much anything imaginable, including merch for all of those bands that I was into as a kid. I remember I got a bunch of metal band patches for my jean jacket at the fair. Even earlier though I remember various booths selling pewter figurines that would serve for years as my first miniatures in various table top gaming sessions.

The other aspect of the fair was that it ended up showing off whatever trends were about to hit the mainstream. Given its place in early October it sort of set the pace for whatever would be the hot new thing for that Christmas, and often was the first time I encountered a bunch of new things. I remember I saw my very first Robotech figures at the Tulsa State Fair, or the year that the Micro RC cars were super popular… there were a dozen or so booths that had them in the early 2000s. In part seeing what was about to be a big deal was a huge part of the fair experience.

We have not be regular attendees of the fair, and it had probably been six or seven years since we last went. Last year my wife decided she wanted to go, and then we were ultimately turned away by the mess that was parking. So this year I wanted to make sure we made it, so that she didn’t have regrets. As such we got up and out the door fairly early and were parked and waiting for about twenty minutes for them to open the doors. The problem is… the State Fair ain’t quite what it used to be for a bunch of reasons.

Firstly the whole trend setting aspect has fallen apart thanks to the internet. I now know the various things that might interest me, months ahead of them actually being available. The thing this year seemed to be them trying to sell bootleg Nintendo Classic consoles or the bigger Pandora’s Box Arcade console in a fighting stick systems. The first seemed like it was maybe a few years too late to really cash in on the craze of the Nintendo Classic. The second seems like it is too expensive to really be the sort of thing that fair goers purchase as an impulse buy as they retail around $150-$200. Both of which I have seen various incarnations of available on Chinese import sites.

Everything else seemed to be the same things that we have seen for years. During the 80s and 90s it seemed like every trip to the fair promised some new innovation of home care. Now we just see recycled versions of the same items that came from that era. I saw no less than five booths trying to sell the same sticky gel lint roller product that I first saw in the mid 80s… but this time the color is green instead of purple or orange and has some sort of a pet attachment. I am not going to roll that thing on my cat, no matter how safe you tell me it is.

The other thing that became clear is that the livestock barns have ultimately pushed out what was exhibitor space. Originally there was the main building, a long skinny row of five buildings called the Exchange Center that spanned the vertical length of the fairgrounds map, and a larger building roughly where the Exchange Center is marked on the map above that housed a theater and exhibit space behind it. We spent some time trying to figure out if it was just that we had gotten older… or if the fair itself was much smaller. Long gone is Bell’s Amusement park, and replaced is an area full of Kiddie Rides.

The midway area itself seemed to be significantly smaller than it used to. I remember during my childhood there would be multiple versions of the same ride, all in the hopes of trying to catch the attention of folks as they walked between buildings. While I couldn’t find a great picture of it, we were completely unable to find any of what was my personal favorite “game of chance” the Coin Pusher. Generally speaking during the 90’s when we were regularly playing it, there would be three or four different kiosks set up with the same coin pusher game each with different prizes. Everything just felt downsized from the splendor that the fair used to be.

Honestly the most impressive thing at the fair was something I tweeted out on Saturday. We have this large statue called the Golden Driller at the fairgrounds. The Tulsa Pop group created a Lego Mini-figure looking version of it. The only disappointing thing is that there was no Lego-ized Oil Derrick to go along with it. There were folks sculpting sand and others sculpting cheese… but honestly after seeing a cheese or butter sculpture at every State Fair since the 80s… it loses some of its novelty. Basically it is a little depressing to see the magic gone from this experience. Again I may just be old and jaded at this point, but the Tulsa State fair aint what it used to be.

The other aspect that made the day frustrating is that generally speaking in September we are as I said before in the high 60s to mid 70s. On Saturday was had a heat index in the 100s with an actual temperature in the 90s. I am not sure about you but when I am hot and sweaty, the last thing I want to partake of us fair food. So we passed up the cheese curds, the spiral potato and the red velvet funnel cakes and didn’t end up buying anything while we were there. We made our way through the booths and then decided to just head home because it was fairly miserable on a large concrete lot with a ton of people. Octoberfest will have a lot of the same vendors, so I figure if we are still craving fair food we can go there in a few weeks.

As far as the State Fair… I think we are good for another six or seven years until we get the urge to go again.