If you remember, the early days of Hogwarts Legacy for sale were especially controversial because a very small part of users decided to take the famous song by JKRowling –and some allegedly transphobic statements– to try to make it not succeed, I came to burst the streams live they talked about the game and besiege in social networks any post favorable to Warner’s title. Now, with nuances, something similar happens with Atomic Heart.
background communism
Go ahead, in this article we are not going to enter into debates about ideologies because, among other things, we are not here to talk about those things (luckily) so we’ll stick to the factsand it is that since it was put up for sale Atomic Heart has been accused of being part of the Russian propaganda strategy by converting a regime like the communist one, which in many countries was “repressive, dictatorial and murderous”, into a kind of retrofuturist ideal of which we are an active part in the game and which is practically a representation of heaven on earth.
It’s obvious to you that Atomic Heart uses all the Soviet imagery to give coherence to his storyto symbols that in many eastern countries of our continent have been prohibited and that the European Union itself has publicly condemned through resolutions such as that of “the importance of European historical memory for the future of Europe”, which condemns It specifies the crimes of both Nazism and Communism.
Our hero in the game is an agent of a USSR who, due to circumstances from a dystopian past, was able to develop an amazing technology that has served to make it practically the hegemonic regime of the world and that in Atomic Heart it is evident that it appears as a kind of orderly, prosperous and ideal society that, obviously, had nothing to do with the reality that tens of millions of people lived in the 20th century.
The cancellation of video games
For diametrically different reasons, these two games have been pilloried by a part of the users. For one, the reasons for canceling were of a different nature, but in all cases, there are those who believe that both should be eliminated from the stores or, at least, try to prevent them from succeeding by asserting the criticisms of the approach –almost always political– that they think they see behind. This has been declared in the case of Atomic Heart including members of the Ukrainian government, who They have formally requested that it stop selling in stores from Sony, Microsoft and Steam.
We are entering areas that are especially complicated because political issues go hand in hand and there are very different sensitivities depending on what each one has seen or experienced, but do you think that both requests for cancellation are well founded, both in the case of Hogwarts Legacy as in the of Atomic Heart? Do you think that these attempts to cancel certain groups and organizations are legitimate or, on the contrary, do you think that all artistic activity –and video games are an art– should be left out of this type of debate?
Here your opinion is important.