Australia-made game Whore of the Orient slammed as racist and a disgrace to Chinese culture

The Australian video game studio that created L.A. Noire is running into a racially-charged controversy with its next major project, a game titled Whore of the Orient. The game has received funding to the tune of $200,000 from Screen New South Wales, a government agency, but now the Australian-Chinese community is voicing outrage at public funds being ploughed into a game with a title perceived as racist.

It’s an “attempt to disgrace Chinese culture, history and traditions,” says Jieh-Yung Lo, a City of Monash councillor who takes offense at both the words “whore” and “Orient” in the upcoming game’s title. He tells The Age:

The O-word is very similar to the N-word for African-American communities. It’s a 19th century racial-colonial conception and it’s especially painful for older people in the communities. That was a very bad time in China, and people don’t want or need to have that dragged up.

That tricky title comes from a nickname for Shanghai, where the game is set. By the 1930s, Shanghai had become – fuelled by global trade and the horrific peddling of opium by British merchants for nearly a century earlier – one of the world’s most talked about cities. Aside from supposedly being the “whore of the Orient”, Shanghai was also dubbed the Pearl of the Orient, or the Paris of the East. Lonely Planet explains:

No other commodity [as opium] became so uniquely associated with all of Shanghai’s spectacular peaks and troughs. Opium became the driving force behind the city’s unstoppable rise, and its descent into debauchery: from Shanghai’s affluent taipans and lucrative hongs, its piercing inequalities, its wanton netherworld of prostitution and vice, violent criminal gangs, corrupt police forces, and the city’s cartographic constitution of concessions, settlements, and Chinese districts.

First footage of Whore of the Orient

But Mr. Lo says that public funds are being mis-spent in the investment in the game. The Age notes that he will take his complaint to the Human Rights Commission on grounds of racial vilification. “The best outcome,” he said, “would be a change of title.” Lo insists he’s not being anti-gaming, and says he enjoyed playing L.A. Noire, the previous game from the troubled Team Bondi studio that was published by Rockstar Games.

VideoGamer unearthed first footage of the game – if it survives production and gets published – which is embedded above.

As is often the case with controversies of this nature, it might help drum up excitement among gamers about Whore of the Orient. But with its launch as long as one or two years away and no publisher on board with the gaming studio, the title’s future is far from assured.

(Source: The Age)

(Editing by Anh-Minh Do, Paul Bischoff)