Games fail at soft power & the moral duty to support Japanese Anime
While both China and the United States use each other's cultural imports with great suspicion, the one pop media category where this doesn't seem to arouse the same suspicion is games. Yet, for all the concern that companies like TikTok bring in the United States, no one seems to be sweating the infiltration of 5-star Genshin characters in the States. The only ticket items to have even raised an eyebrow, far worse than TikTok's data scandal, are kernel-level anti-cheat common in nearly every Chinese game and even in American-based subsidiaries like Riot. The reason for gaming's limp soft power is that it fails to effectively communicate social norms in the same way that film and TV do. While China's censorship level is on another scale, the fall of the Great Firewall from a Politburo that called games the "spiritual opium […]
