Grand Theft Auto’s wildly popular online multiplayer game has become the latest venue for Hong Kong pro-democracy supporters and Chinese nationalists to wage their ideological battles, with protests now breaking out in the virtual world.
Over the past two weeks message boards and social media platforms used by gamers have been filled with videos and chatter of the virtual clashes, as well as insults and recriminations on both sides of the ideological divide.
Grand Theft Auto Online is an open world game that allows dozens of players to explore and fight each other through the streets of a sprawling, fictional US city.
After a recent expansion pack was released earlier this month, gamers in Hong Kong noticed they could now dress their avatars in the clothing of their movement, which is pushing for greater democratic freedoms and police accountability.
They donned black clothes, gas masks and yellow helmets, and went about throwing gasoline bombs, trashing subway stations and attacking police — a virtual re-enactment of the protests that have upended the territory.
Their antics soon caught the attention of gamers in mainland China, who subsequently dressed their characters up as police and battled the Hong Kongers.
In a video clip posted on China’s Sina Weibo platform on Monday, gamers posted footage of the fight titled: “Compilation of players slaughtering cockroaches.”
Cockroach is a term routinely used by Hong Kong’s police and government supporters to describe protesters.
The video had more than 175,000 views by Tuesday afternoon.
“Our dignity can’t be trampled,” one message on the video read. “As a Chinese player ... we must fight!”
However, in an illustration of the censorship people in China face, the creators of the video blurred out some of the pro-democracy slogans written by Hong Kong players.
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
Prime ministers, presidents and royalty on Saturday descended on Cairo to attend the spectacle-laden inauguration of a sprawling new museum built near the pyramids to house one of the world’s richest collections of antiquities. The inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum, or GEM, marks the end of a two-decade construction effort hampered by the Arab Spring uprisings, the COVID-19 pandemic and wars in neighboring countries. “We’ve all dreamed of this project and whether it would really come true,” Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly told a news conference, calling the museum a “gift from Egypt to the whole world from a
RSS