Jun. 2024 Poyuan
"The Forsaken," a playable race in the game "World of Warcraft," is an undead race with self-awareness and intelligence. In the game's lore, they were killed by a tyrannical ruler and resurrected as part of the undead Scourge. However, they broke free from the ruler's iron-fisted control. Although this newfound freedom initially seemed like a blessing, the undead, who were once human, are tormented by memories of being mindless minions of the Scourge. These memories are indescribably terrifying. In the game world, they hold a special status, being severely disadvantaged in Azeroth (the game world), ostracized and distrusted by their allies, and no longer accepted by their past loved ones.
"Remember the meaning of the Forsaken: we are neither living nor dead, forgotten by both the living and the dead. We have returned to the world we once left, but we can never return to the days when we were alive, nor to the side of those we once loved. We exist as both existence and curse, thus we forget the past and are forgotten by the past."
The Forsaken, also known as the Undead, is a character model that players can choose to play in "World of Warcraft." This model is widely recognized among Chinese players as a symbol of Chinese censorship, where the originally decayed, ruined, and exposed limbs and bones are completely covered up, turning into merely pale humans. In the game, all models, scenes related to death, skeletons, corpses, and gore have been censored and replaced with various "harmless" models.
Nowadays, many "overseas" online games are filled with Chinese players. This large-scale phenomenon can be traced back to events in the Chinese and Taiwanese servers of "World of Warcraft." Starting in 2008, over four years, due to numerous reasons involving the Chinese agent company The9, Chinese government censorship, and more, many Chinese players crossed the ocean, climbed over the Great Firewall, and came to Taiwan, causing Taiwanese servers to be overcrowded. Agents had to constantly open new servers to cope. When The9 opened new expansions or passed censorship, all those mainland players left overnight, leading Taiwanese players to call them locusts. A whole swarm suddenly arrived, causing chaos, and then suddenly left, leaving behind desolate servers.
Due to various complex and intertwined reasons involving agents, The9, NetEase, Blizzard, Chinese government cultural ministry censorship, and publication censorship, Chinese players migrated back and forth, symbolizing the control of the censorship system over them—the Forsaken. In the game world, they were also forced to act under complex political, commercial, and regional political influences. The Forsaken represent forgotten people and things. The undead (Undead), the Scourge, and the Forsaken describe the same group of people and things in different states: characters and objects covered by censorship, Chinese players, NPCs left on deserted servers, and data of Taiwanese and Chinese players mutually forgotten.
Once, while leveling up and completing quests with a Chinese player in the game, we undertook a quest to find a missing soldier. We could only find the soldier's remains, a bloodied and mangled corpse devoured by monsters. The Chinese player told me, "So this is what this quest originally looked like; I could never really see it before." In the past gaming memories of Chinese players, the soldier's corpse was just a rock, and the real soldier was left inside the censored model, forever unable to be found.
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