Video Games are a new Frontier in Digital Rights

Article content By Avi Asher-Schapiro

NEW YORK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) 30 July 2018 - Video games are becoming an "new political platform" as critical digital rights battles over privacy and privacy are being fought, experts and insiders said on Thursday.

Video games seen becoming the new frontier of digital rights. Back to video

With the industry poised to double its revenue per year to $300 billion by 2025, concerns about how video game operators, designers and governments deal with sensitive issues take on added urgency, said participants at RightsCon, a virtual conference on digital rights.

Article content

Article content In the last few months, an Hong Kong activist staged a protest against Beijing's rule inside a popular social simulator game called Animal Crossing, and a member of the U.S. Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, campaigned in the game too.

The game Minecraft has been utilized to circumvent censorship with groups using it to build digital libraries and smuggle banned materials into oppressive countries.

"Video games have become this new political arena," said Micaela Mantegna, founder of GeekyLegal which is an Argentinian group that focuses on tech policy.

Also, game designers have been dealing with sensitive topics through games that deal with issues like refugees or mental illness.

"Video games are a powerful tool for starting conversations about difficult topics in real life," Stephanie Zucarelli, a board member at Women in Games Argentina, which is a non-profit organization.

Article content User rights could be violated, according to Kurt Opsah (an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation), a digital rights group.

He added that law enforcement can ask game companies for their users' personal data, operating companies can censor users and governments can pressure game operators and makers to remove the content.

He gave an instance of the U.S. military deleting critical remarks posted on recruitment channels hosted on Twitch, a popular streaming platform.

He said, "They didn’t want people to have an anti-military view in their recruitment channels."

He also said that governments can put pressure on videogame companies. This is evident in the case of Activision Blizzard Entertainment, which last year suspended a player from a competition for making political comments regarding Hong Kong in an interview.

Blizzard is partly owned by Chinese gaming giant Tencent Holdings.

(Reporting by Avi Asher-Schapiro, Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst. Please give credit to the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers the lives of people across the world who strive to live a life of freedom and fairness. Visit http://news.trust.org)