Can video games change the World?

Who said video games can’t change the world?That seems to be the fear of the Chinese government, who has banned the video game “Hearts of Iron” for (they claim) “distorting history and damaging China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.” To be honest, I don’t know enough about the video game in question or the specific complaints concerning Chinese history to understand what their specific problems are (and the article is somewhat vague), but, honestly, who could possibly feel threatened that the events in a historical video game could damage a nation’s sovereignty? If one little video game can damage both the sovereignty and territorial integrity of a nation, you have to wonder how strong those things are in the first place.

Source: The Video Game That Broke Apart China

from the comments to that post:

Because China is treated trivially
[…]The Chinese are treated as an almost trivial option of essentially worthless peasant armies who don’t stand a chance against anyone else.
The game is basically a historical strategic wargame where you can play _any_ country in the world at the time. It models rebellions, and if the rebellions go on for too long they will eventually break away from the main state.
The specific complaint in the article is that the geographic areas are not modelled properly. A possibly fair complaint, some areas in the game are done for gameplay as well as historic reasons, but I don’t know if the provinces cited in the article are particularly badly modelled.

Source: comments to The Video Game That Broke Apart China

China has banned a Swedish-made computer game for “distorting history and damaging China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” the Ministry of Culture (MOC) said Friday.

The PC game, “Hearts of Iron”, was accused of distorting historical facts in describing the Fascist regimes of Japan, Germany and Italy during World War II.

Moreover, “Manchuria”, “West Xinjiang”, and “Tibet” appeared as independent sovereign countries in the maps of the game. In addition, it even included China’s Taiwan province as the territory of Japan at the beginning of the game.

Earlier in March this year, the State Press and Publication Administration (SPPA) banned a Norwegian-made computer game, Project IGI2: Covert Strike

>The SPPA in early 2003 banned a US-made computer game, Command and Conquer Generals: Zero Hour Expansion, also for smearing the image of China and the Chinese army.

Source: Swedish computer game banned for harming China’s sovereignty

Today Swedish computer games developer Paradox Entertainment announced that they for some time have been working on a sequel to the award-winning and highly renowned title Hearts of Iron. Hearts of Iron is a grand strategy game depicting World War 2 in a real-time environment. It was celebrated as a pioneer among World War 2 strategy games.

Source: Paradox Entertainment announces Hearts of Iron 2

**Update, 8 June 2004**: BoingBoing mentions how China Cracks down on Video Games