@tds418: It is more complicated than that, of course, since all governments act badly in one way or another at basically all times.
The difference here is the scope of what exactly is going on right now (the wholesale repression and stripping of rights of 7.5 million people, which is more than the entire population of Norway or Finland) and the way that China handles propaganda by doing things like shutting down newspapers and tightly controlling all media and the like. It's why @shindig's "it's just a car game, bro, who cares, bro?" attitude plays directly into the image they want to project.
As someone who lived through 9/11 in New York City I am very personally aware of what it's like to have media portray your traumatized city while the trauma is still fresh and in some ways ongoing. Obviously a lot of media had to grapple very quickly with how to deal with 9/11 in NYC, and some did it better than others, but the ones that just shrugged and went on with frivolous fun a week after we had been breathing in the ashes from the collapsed towers and the bodies that burned or were vaporized on impact were pretty crappy.
How far is too far when ignoring a tragedy? Would it be appropriate to set a fun dancing game in Damascus without acknowledging what has happened and continues to happen in Syria? How about a funky dating sim set in India in 2021 that ignores Covid? At a certain point it's just plain gross to set a game in the midst of an unfolding tragedy without any acknowledgement of it.
And it's especially gross when the nature of that tragedy involves an authoritarian government covering up what's going on and trying to project exactly the image of the city that your game does.
@bybeach: China has absolutely no problem with rampant consumption, especially in its rich autonomous regions like Macao and Hong Kong. At this point it's not so much a communist country as it is authoritarian crony capitalism, even if it calls itself communist.
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