Thank you for this message. One thing I remember from my times reading about Kowloon was that many of the residents loved their city. It wasn’t some terrible place to them, it was their home - outside of whatever government intervention they may/may not have wanted to avoid.

Still makes me mad that people felt the need to get all butthurt about it.

true story: my wife is from Kowloon! she was only a very young child when she lived there, but her memories were not miserable. her family lived there to save money and every day travelled across the bay to Hong Kong island to work.

Japanese-American guy here, the white people putting on kimonos thing was even endorsed by the local Japanese consulate (Boston I believe), and the local Japanese-American community. Still makes me mad that people felt the need to get all butthurt about it.

I do wonder if people would consider it okay to take artistic inspiration from the Wounded Knee mass grave or Auschwitz and completely removed the historical context, keeping only the aesthetics.

This is a key point to me. Kotaku always brings such a US-centric view to this stuff that reeks of navel gazing. When a French studio sets their games in the US there is no eyebrow raising or “grappling” with anything because America is default location with default humans. The English text in the game that is in…

I think you nailed exactly what I was going to type.
As soon as I see the word “appropriation”, I always get this sinking feeling that I am readying poorly researched article by a young intern who hasn’t traveled enough or seen enough of the world to understand the intersections between art and culture.

It’s wrong, but it’s on-brand from the same site that said that using a 1920s animation aesthetic means you need to use it to make a statement about racism, nothing else is acceptable.

Those hats aren’t exclusively for farmers- they’re sun hats. Ostensibly, the robots might wear the hats to prevent overheating. My parents are from China, and my mom has a picture of my brother and I wearing those hats on a visit to China (I was too young to remember taking the picture, but I assume we weren’t doing…

The robots are adopting human aesthetics and behaviors without understanding them: the robots don’t know *why* humans would dream of being farmers, or fishermen, but the robots know that the humans felt such things were important, and so took after them.

What even is your point. Do you think other settings don’t have baggage? If this games setting was the U.S.. Would this game have to educate us on the Native American genocide and slavery? If it was set in Germany would the story have to be about the holocaust. Why do people pretend that the U.S and Europe are the…

I’ll start this by saying that anyone is free to feel insulted by whatever they feel insulted by. But I - an Asian-American living in a third world country - really think this criticism is stretching a bit.

What does “grapple with its history” look like exactly?

I actually don’t think using a real life aesthetic makes you have “a responsibility to grapple with its history.” I see the rice hat idea is being a bit more questionable, but “they didn’t insert a painful history lesson about a real life community (that had nothing to do with the story of their game)“ is... a plus?

Yet this site name is Kotaku. If there is a sense of irony about “appropriation” being ignored here... *shrugged*

I agree with the classic cyberpunk tropes and orientalism especially with the hats (“Get it? These are Asian robots...”), but I’m not so sure the developers had an obligation to explain the history. Sounds like the choice for the location was very much inspired from the perspective of a cat. It’s also a fictional…

This just in! Once again Kotaku nitpicks a game everybody seems to love!

No, the article is misleading, OW1 will evolve into OW2 PvP you’ll keep everything you have and get extra content for being a “veteran player”

No, skins all move over to OW2. They essentially duplicated OW1 and expanded on it for OW2, and the old OW1 skins are already in the OW2 beta.

And?