Devotion: Anti-Fans/Fans in Gaming, Nation-States under Surveillance, and Resistance

February 19th, 2019 was a date many Let's Players on the other side of the Pacific had been looking forward to. Devotion, the second game of Indie Taiwanese game developer Red Candle Games, was to be released globally through the game distribution platform, Steam. Horror game Let's Plays have became a significant genre of entertainment for the current YouTube-viewing generation with well-known examples such as PewDiePie's Amnesia and Markiplier's Five Nights at Freddy’s. Journalists like Madhumita Murgia have written about the influences of Lets Players such as PewDiePie: "With 53 million YouTube subscribers and almost 15 billion video views, PewDiePie is the single most popular individual on the video service; his average daily audience of almost 9 million people is larger than most cable TV networks. Last year, he raked in an estimated $15 million, well above the average salary of a Fortune 500 chief executive." With financial success stories like PewDiePie, despite the controversies, it is only expected that many more would intend to follow such career path of turning a hobby into a full- time job.

To the Let's Players of the Mandarin-speaking sphere, Red Candle Games had proved itself to be a stellar production team with its previous 2D side-scroller horror game, Detention, released in January 2017. The game garnered attention not only for its horror element as a tool for spectacle generation but also for its cultural and political foundations that are rarely found in the medium of video games. Audience outside of Taiwan expressed their appreciation of Detention, citing that the storytelling is resonates to the core, particularly to those from the People's Republic of China (PRC as follows). PRC Players felt the subject of White Terror in Taiwan reflects PRC's emotional history of cultural revolution and is thus relatable through the act of projection. When Devotion, Red Candle Games' new work of 3D horror came out, excitement rippled across the ocean from Taiwan to overseas. However, a week later on February 26th, the game had been taken off the Steam and is unable to be accessed even to today. This paper aims to dissect what happened to the game and the broader geopolitical circumstances surrounding it with considerations to an environment of authoritarian and surveillance state.

Red Candle Games was established in September 2015 in Taipei, Taiwan. An independent game developing company founded by a group of young people, Red Candle Games was established along with the concept of Detention. The background of Detention is the 1960s in Taiwan, during the White Terror period of the Chiang Kai-shek and his subsequent regimes from 1949 to 1987, a total of 38 years. The entire country was under martial law for nearly four decades. Many were massacred or executed without due process, and many more imprisoned, —“mainly the island's intellectual and social elite, for fear that they might be communist sympathizers or resist Nationalist rule." At the core, Detention tells a story about youth, love, mistake, and guilt. While not inherently political in its narrative, the historical background of the game plays a significant role which involves a personal decision that leads to political execution of characters depicted. The atmosphere of crushing dread and skin-prickling paranoia typically found in horror games also reverberates collective memories of a time when snitching on an individual could lead to the military police knocking down the door. On the whole, Detention's underlying think point is one that is critical of the authoritarian government of Taiwan during White Terror and the consequent culture of civil surveillance it fostered.

In the wake of the commercial success that was Detention, Red Candle gathered enough funds and investors to produce its next project, Devotion. Set in 1980s Taiwan, Devotion is comparatively less about the political atmosphere and more about family, superstitious religious practices, and social taboos of its time. However, what made the game so controversial that it is temporarily removed from the public platform has nothing to do with the actual content of the game but an easter egg within.

In 2013, images of PRC president Xi Jinping along with other political leaders like President Obama and Prime Minister Abe began being juxtaposed next to Winnie the Pooh. The humorous meme gained traction online, and the PRC government started to censor the images. Experts analyze this swift governmental action not only as an overreaction but also as a move of self-sabotage: "where some see harmless fun, Beijing sees a serious effort to undermine the dignity of the presidential office and Xi himself. Authoritarian regimes are often touchy, yet the backlash is confusing since the government is effectively squashing [a] potential positive, and organic, public image campaign for Xi." Another journalist reports: "the meme is considered an unlawful criticism of the president and is not allowed in China. References to the meme are scrubbed from Weibo, the country's largest social media network, and have caused Winnie the Pooh to be banned from the country entirely." The easter egg inside Devotion was a reference of Xi Jinping and Winnie the Pooh in the form of a seal stamped onto a Taoist talisman, a minor imagery that is unlikely to be noticed when simply playing through the game. On the same talisman, another facetious phrase that is phonetically similar to "your mother is an idiot" in Mandarin can also be found.

Upon the discovery of said imagery, a wave of criticism against Red Candle Games started rolling in not only on social media but also on Steam, changing the score from "overwhelmingly positive" 95% to "mostly negative", though it has since bounced up to "mixed" at 49%. According to some reports, the reviews were left by PRC users who purchase the game and return it within the 2-hour period. The review-bombing is evident as most negative reviews do not discuss the game content but the only easter egg. Many of these negative reviews deem the easter egg as a hidden message of Taiwanese independence. The meme itself is not related to the political autonomy of Taiwan since Xi Jinping as Winnie the Pooh had already been widely distributed on PRC Internet by PRC users before the full censorship. The conflation of perceived mockery against the PRC political leader with the support of Taiwanese independence can be seen as a manifestation of how the idea of Taiwan is abstracted into a missing puzzle piece to the entirety of Xi's authority; after all, it was Xi who had made annexation of Taiwan a significant goal of his regime now without term limits. To the PRC netizens who negotiate with and against state surveillance and censorship on a daily basis, anything originated from Taiwanese freedom of speech that references Xi with perceived disrespect becomes a direct confrontation to his authority, and by extension, confrontation against the entire nation-state of PRC.

Some suspects that the comments spreading across Red Candle Game's Facebook page and on the Steam platform are the doings of the so-called Chinese troll army, also known as 50 Cent Party, a paid labor force that is dedicated to manipulations of online discourses on controversial issues. However, according to recent research the characteristics of the comments do not fit the profile of 50 Cent Party writings, "as most of these posts involve cheerleading for China, the revolutionary history of the Communist Party, or other symbols of the regime." They are also characterized as actively avoiding "arguing with skeptics of the party and the government, and to not even discuss controversial issues." The scathing insults of users that engage in back and forth arguments with other users on social media such as Facebook and Weibo are therefore unlikely the product of the paid troll army.

Another line of popular query is whether these comments are at least partially motivated by the desire to boost one's social credit. The general outside perception of the social credit system is a skeptical and wary one, as explained by journalist Simina Mistreanu: "[A]uthorities employ extensive surveillance methods and big data analysis to essentially limit people’s freedom of movement and expression." However, in execution, the PRC social credit system is largely used against citizens with records of failure to pay debts, and the effect of the scores is mostly seen in transportation limitations. While this does not discount the potential for this system to be further abused by the authoritarian state, the drive behind the negative commentary and reviews against Devotion does not appear to have a corresponding relationship to social credits or the desire to raise it through pro-government writings.

There are many possibilities behind the negative online reactions in the case of the Devotion controversy. I posit that there are several factors including the fear of Steam being taken down entirely due to one game, and the unbridled demonstration of overt nationalism cultivated through state education and indoctrination of values.

Prior to the launch of Steam China, International Steam had been a platform for PRC users to access a variety of single-player games. After the announcements from Valve and Perfect World, a PRC game publisher, journalist Josh Ye reports the situation as follows:

Gamers worry that not only will Steam China be a heavily censored platform with a much smaller lineup of titles; worse yet, it might also be the trigger for the government to ban the global version of Steam.

Right now, the global version Steam is in a weird position in China. It’s not officially approved for the country, and yet it’s there -- despite the fact that China has blocked thousands of websites ranging from Facebook, Google to Twitch, Steam somehow remains accessible.

But Steam hasn’t been immune to China’s censorship, either. Chinese regulators have blocked Steam’s community feature and applied pressure on Valve to ensure the storefront is as compliant as it can be. (Ye)


Under this consideration, the anger and criticism behind the establishment of Steam China to replace International Steam stem from dissatisfaction with overt government regulations and censorships. As one PRC Steam user comments with references to how the color of blood has been changed from red to green in order to fit the government's requirement of video games to be nonviolent: "No matter what you play, I will not use Steam China! [....] Nobody wants to play software that is mediated by the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television. Those cannot be called games! I will not play [a game that has] no red blood, violence, and gore. I am not against Steam China; I am against the brainless policy of the country!” This largely anti-state and anti-censorship sentiment, however, is reversed when Devotion is found to be politically controversial. As opposed to placing the blame against unreasonable government regulations, netizens points to the foreign game developers with accusations of attempts to sabotage the Steam platform and its precarious position as regulated media in PRC. The indoctrination of state value that leads some PRC netizens to believe that its government has to right to censor cultural works originated from the cultural industry of a foreign government with its own sets of laws. While one might claim that Taiwan is contested territory and therefore the laws it follows should be regulated by the PRC government, the fact is that Taiwan, as a state of Rule of Law, is contested only in the sense that PRC claims it has sovereignty over it; in actual execution the Taiwanese government functions independently of foreign influences to the extent that most countries do. The conflation of Taiwan as a part of PRC and thus should be blamed for threatening the existence of International Steam on the PRC market serves to remove the PRC government of its responsibility as a state that practices surveillance and censorship on its citizens in order to secure its authoritarian regime.

As of today, April 13th, 2019, Devotion is still not available on Steam globally. Red Candle Games had claimed that the game has been taken off Steam for quality assurance checks, and will be back once the controversy has died down.